I’m thrilled to join Dana Khromov, Valeria Meiller, Sebastián Figueroa, and Ashley Brock in a series of articles called “Reframing Humans, Animals and Land in Contemporary Brazilian and Argentinan Cinema,” published at the website of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. My piece explores the use of landscape in the 2017 film Ava Yvy Vera […]
Brazilian Cinema
An evening with André Novais Oliveira at NYU
On Friday, the cycle on Latin American cinema at NYU will wrap with a screening of three short films by André Novais Oliveira, one of the greatest Brazilian filmmakers to start working in the past decade. His first short film, Fantasmas (Ghosts, 2009) is one of my very favorite films, and I’m happy more people will get […]
Long Way Home (Temporada, 2018), André Novais
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS Microdrama There are many striking, remarkable moments in André Novais’ second feature, the beautiful Temporada (Long Way Home, 2018), which had its US premiere last night, at New Directors/New Films. In the film, such beauty may come from a variety of different places: the intricate musicality of Novais’ dialogues; the extreme attention […]
Two days with Paula Gaitán in NYC
We are thrilled to be holding Attraction-Reaction: Sound and Image in Paula Gaitán’s Cinema, a masterclass by the great Colombian-Brazilian filmmaker Paula Gaitán at NYU tomorrow. The event is being organized by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature, and the Department of Cinema Studies, and it is free and open to all […]
Decree our extinction and bury us all
I’m happy to be a part of this panel at Hunter College tonight, revisiting two terrific movies, and mediating the conversation between Wewito Ashaninka, Amalia Cordova, and John Collins. RSVP here.
The words and the others
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS 1. Writing about film is an exercise of translation. It aspires to put into words an experience that doesn’t happen exclusively on a textual level. In attempt to deal with an apparent shift in filmic conventions that started in the post-war period and that has since proliferated in the arthouse circuit, critics […]
Film language
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS This past Wednesday, the Center for Culture, Media and History and the department of Cinema Studies at NYU held the event Béture Collective: Kayapó Filmmaking in the Amazon. The program included an introduction by Robert Stam, a conversation between filmmaker Bepkadjoiti Kayapó, the Béture collective director Simone Giovine, curator Amalia Cordova, and […]
Cat Skin (Couro de Gato, 1962), Joaquim Pedro de Andrade
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS |Class Carnival| In the introduction to the screening of The Priest and the Girl (O Padre e a Moça, 1966) last week at NYU, Robert Stam pointed out an ambivalence, or perhaps even a contradiction, in how Joaquim Pedro de Andrade understood Oswald de Andrade’s concept of “anthropophagy” – the Modernist embrace […]
The Priest and the Girl (O Padre e a Moça, 1966), Joaquim Pedro de Andrade
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS The precision of uncertainty There was a running joke among the Cinema Novo filmmakers that Joaquim Pedro de Andrade could never quite figure out what the 180-degree rule was all about. In classical Hollywood cinema and beyond, the 180-degree rule – also known as “the line” – is a basic convention to […]
“The Priest and the Girl” at NYU
Last year, Kino Lorber released the blu-ray boxset The Films of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. The collection features the restored versions of every film made by the great Brazilian director better-known for the classic Macunaíma (1969), as well as an essay by me. On Wednesday, one of his very best films, The Priest and the Girl (1965), will be screened at […]