Remaking Brazil: National Identity in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema
This review examines Tatiana S. Heise's Remaking Brazil: Contested National Identities in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema (University of Wales Press, 2012), which analyzes how ethnicity, race, and national identity are represented in Brazilian films released between 1995 and 2010. Heise frames her discussion around the concept of brasilidade — the national consciousness of Brazilians — and organizes her analysis through four categories: celebratory, reformist, oppositional, and alternative. The review assesses the book's contributions to scholarship on the retomada (Brazilian cinema renaissance), its accessibility to English-language readers, and its significance for film students, cinema scholars, and general audiences interested in Brazil's diverse and thriving film culture.
- Overview and Main Arguments: Heise's thesis on brasilidade and Brazilian film diversity
- Perspective and Analytical Framework: Analytical categories and transnational framing of the retomada
- Significance for Readers and Scholars: Book's accessibility and value for varied audiences
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What makes this paper effective
- The review clearly identifies Heise's central theoretical framework — brasilidade as imagined community — before evaluating its application, giving readers an immediate anchor for the analysis.
- Specific film titles (City of God, Elite Squad, Central Station) are cited to ground abstract claims about the book's scope in concrete, recognizable examples.
- The review addresses the book's audience directly, distinguishing between academic readers, film scholars, and general audiences, which makes the recommendation credible and useful.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The review employs evaluative summarization: it does not simply describe the book's contents but assesses the novelty of Heise's categorical framework (celebratory, reformist, oppositional, alternative) and anticipates its impact on film lexicons. This positions the reviewer as an active critic rather than a passive summarizer.
Structure breakdown
The review is organized into three sections. The first introduces the book's thesis and situates it within the retomada corpus. The second evaluates Heise's analytical framework and its relationship to prior Brazilian cinema theory. The third assesses the book's accessibility and its value for different readerships. The structure moves logically from content description to critical evaluation to audience recommendation.
Overview and Main Arguments
Heise, Tatiana S. Remaking Brazil: Contested National Identities in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012.
Brazil is a deeply diverse society with dozens of ethnic and racial groups represented in its citizenry. Many of these ethnic and racial influences have been present in contemporary Brazilian cinema, yet there has been a dearth of academic research on these highly diverse films, filmmakers, stories, themes, and actors. Heise frames her discussion by presenting the concept of Brazil as an imagined community. Through this framework, she considers how the dominant constructs of brasilidade are represented on screen.
Brasilidade is the popular term for the national consciousness of people living in Brazil. The application of brasilidade in contemporary fiction films and documentaries enables an examination of the way ethnic and racial influences are dramatized, supported, attacked, or deconstructed. Moreover, Remaking Brazil takes its place among the growing bibliographic corpus on films made during the retomada — the renaissance of Brazilian cinema — which is generally marked as having begun in the mid-1990s.
Perspective and Analytical Framework
A robust film industry has existed in Brazil for decades, with the popularity of Brazilian cinema growing across the globe and essentially reaching world-class status. Popular films such as City of God and Central Station received international accolades and industry acclaim. Heise uses Remaking Brazil as a vehicle to examine the particular attributes and messages of films released in Brazil between 1995 and 2010. Notable films from this contemporary period include Elite Squad, Orfeu, The Trespasser, and Almost Brothers — all of which address issues of ethnicity, national identity, and race in ways that echo earlier Brazilian films.
Heise employs the concept of brasilidade as it is commonly applied — as an expression of national belonging — but organizes her analysis around fresher categories that better capture its complexity: celebratory, reformist, oppositional, and alternative. These categories are likely to appeal to cinema scholars and screenwriters to such a degree that they may become established currency in film theory lexicons. Heise moves beyond canonical theories to discuss the resilience of the Brazilian people and to situate her perspective within the significance of the transnational era and the broader transitions of the Brazilian cinematic renaissance.
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