Carnaval, mistério e gangsters: o filme policial no Brasil (1915-1951)

Abstract

This thesis uses the concept of film genre refusing traditional transhistorical, transcultural, essentialists and textualist approaches, but choosing to understand the genre as a discursive category socially and historically determined and located in a specific cultural context. Discussing the film genre in relation to Brazilian cinema, the applied methodology valorizes the reception for the understanding of the genre, investigating the different discourses that result from the circulation of both foreign and national films in Brazil, and focusing on the genrification process as exemplified with the chanchada genre. Having the crime film in Brazilian cinema as main object of analysis, this thesis attests the term s polissemic and variable character and the continuous presence of others contestant generic terms. Therefore, this study of the crime film in Brazil between 1915 and 1951 comprises the silent cinema serials, the gangster films and underworld pictures of the beginning of the talkies, the fashion of the crime genre in Brazilian literature and radio dramaturgy, and the emergence of suspense melodramas and semi-documentary crime films many of them now known as examples of the film noir in the context of the realism of postwar cinema.