#6 - Politics of Film Colour in Brazil

Drawing on De Luna Freire’s research into the structure of local film laboratories in the 1950s and 1960s and rare film material from Brazilian archives, this lecture will explore the political dimensions of colour in Brazilian cinema.

During the 1950s and 1960s, limited access to colour film technology meant that Brazil was mostly depicted in colour through international productions or co-productions, giving these portrayals a distinctly foreign perspective. For the colour films that were produced in Brazil, Rafael de Luna Freire will discuss the ideological and aesthetic significance of their use of colour. He will focus on the period up until the 1970s, when colour film became the norm and was no longer the exception.

The session will be moderated by Jamil Fiorino-Habib, researcher and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.

Guest

Rafael de Luna Freire is a film scholar and audiovisual archivist. He is a professor at the Federal Fluminense University, in Niterói, Brazil, where he is director of the University Laboratory of Audiovisual Preservation (LUPA). He contributed to the edited collection Global Film Color: The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury (2024).