Brazilian cinema

As early as 1898, the Italian Alfonso Segreto supposedly filmed the Guanabara Bay from the ship Brésil on a return journey from Europe, though some researchers question the veracity of this event as no copy of the film remains. He would go on to make documentaries with his brother Paschoal Segreto. An add of a May 1987 issue of Gazeta de Petrópolis, as shown in 1995 by Jorge Vittorio Capellaro and Paulo Roberto Ferreira, was introduced as the new "birth certificate" of Brazilian cinema, as three short films were advertised: Chegada do Trem em Petrópolis, Bailado de Crenças no Colégio de Andarahy and Ponto Terminal da Linha dos Bondes de Botafogo, Vendo-se os Passageiros Subir e Descer.

Mário Peixoto's Limite (1930) was poorly received by audiences but eventually regarded as masterpiece of the silent film era, along with Humberto Mauro's Ganga Bruta (1933). Cinédia was founded by Adhemar Gonzaga in 1930 and was dedicated to the production of popular dramas and burlesque musical comedies, a genre which was negatively referred to as chanchada. The chanchada would often include satires of Hollywood movies. The Cinematográfica Vera Cruz is a production company founded during the forties and most notable for its output during the following decade. It is in this period that Lima Barreto's classic O Cangaceiro is produced. The movement was named after a large production studio. American genre films were popular in Brazil and filmmakers began emulating them. The western and the detective film were particularly popular.

The desire to create American-esque films led to the creation of large scale Hollywood style studios. These films were highly commercialized, which led some directors to begin experimenting with independent cinema. This movement away from commercialized Vera Cruz style films came to be called Cinema Novo, or New Cinema. Vera Cruz eventually bankrupted and closed.

The Italian Neorealism followed later in the sixties by the French New Wave (or Nouvelle Vague) fueled a new kind of modernistic and experimental cinema across the globe. In Brazil, this tendency was carried out by its own new wave movement, the Cinema Novo. Glauber Rocha, a very political filmmaker from Bahia, quickly became the most notable director, often held as "leader" of the movement. His work possesses many allegorical elements, strong political critique and an impeccable mise-en-scène that were readily embraced by intellectuals.

Rocha often spoke of his films as being a departure from what he considered to be the colonizer's view, to whom poverty was an exotic and distant reality, as well as the colonized who regarded their third world status as shameful. He sought to portray misery, hunger and the violence they generate and thus suggest the need for a revolution. Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol and Terra em Transe are some of his most famous works. Since the 1970s, the quantity of film theaters declined heavily. During the 90's, it became common for small theaters to close while most of the market became concentrated around multiplex theaters, usually found in shopping centers. In the last decades, the accessibility of televisions, now sold at lower prices, combined with Rede Globo's success in making telenovelas of high production quality made cinema less attractive to lower income audiences. In addition, ticket prices increased more than 10 times in a time span of 20 years.

While in the early 1990s Brazilian film production fell into a crisis due to Collor's laissez-faire policy, creating a shock in an area that had always depended on protectionist measures, the retomada allowed Brazilian film to peak again, though not to the same numbers it had once seen before. A significant increase in audience was recorded, however, from 2000 to 2002, with 7 million viewers, to 2003, when 22 million viewers came to theaters to watch national films. Because these films were made possible thanks to incentive laws introduced in the 90's and that the number of viewers drawn in from year to year can fluctuate significantly, it is often questioned whether film production has in fact reached a certain amount of stability and whether or not it could in the future succumb to any governmental whims.