Amateur filmmaking in the history of Brazilian cinema

Abstract

As in many national cinemas, the history of Brazilian amateur film is still in its early stages of investigation. In addition to this historiographical deficit, there are many ways in which amateur cinema is a small and less visible production: films shot in 16mm, 9.5mm and Super 8 are dispensable and Brazilian film archives and cinemateques only started cataloguing these materials in recent years. In the following paper we wish to establish a set of theoretic and historical guidelines to analyse amateur films that express different forms of amateur production. Through the collection of home movies from Alves de Lima family deposited at Cinemateca Brasileira (São Paulo), the amateur fictional films from Cinemateca Capitólio (Porto Alegre) and Raymond Chauvin's  experimental films belonging to Hipólito José da Costa Communications Museum (Porto Alegre) we want to give visibility to films that are not yet part of Brazilian cinema history.