Sinfonias urbanas e suas reverberações contemporâneas

Abstract

This thesis analyses the genre city symphonies, from the historic moment when the first productions related to the tradition of this genre and the characteristics that are seen as typical from it emerge, to then question if, somehow, it is possible to see repercussions of this genre in contemporaneity. The city symphony from the 1920s are especially important when discussing the relation between cinema and modernity, because in them there is a certain praise, either of the cinema, as of the city. The new film art was seen as the best way to express the cities typical movement, at an avant-garde cinema with a rhythmic and experimental editing. In the symphonies, the city and its everyday life are the main theme, and the fragmented editing shows them as a kaleidoscope of feelings. However, this point of view loses its strength in the context of post-World War II, in which there are the ruins of great metropolis that were destroyed. Besides, there are also the changes in film language from that time, which were happening, in particular, given the emergency of talkies. Hence, city symphonies are often thought as a phenomenon associated exclusively to the interwar period. Nonetheless, it is possible to note symphonies repercussions, brought by and analyzed in this thesis, either given its semantic structures (the city thematic and its rhythm), or in its syntactic structures (the narrative structure of the day going by, the rhythmic and associative editing). As an excerpt for this study, some Brazilian movies were catalogued and analyzed from the perspective of “Brazilian Film Revival” (in Portuguese, “Cinema da Retomada”, name given to contemporary Brazilian filmmaking, that began around 1993-1994), which can be associated to the genre city symphonies, minding its tendencies and ways, and how the city space is represented in the selected movies.