This volume's ambitious aim, as well as major challenge, is to reconstruct the history of Brazilian cinema by means of an intermedial method: that is, by focusing on the ways in which it has commingled with other arts and media from its early stages to today. We argue that artists and practices from theatre, opera, dance, music, circus, radio, television and the plastic arts left a distinctive mark on the country's cinematic production, which can be observed, for example, in ventures that combined the theatre stage, screen programmes, radio shows and the trends of the phonographic industry between the 1920s and 1930s (Chapters 10 and 11); in the chanchada musical comedies produced on an industrial scale in Rio between the 1940s and 1960s, drawing on radio, theatre and carnival hits (Chapters 6 and 14); in the Tropicália, Cinema Novo and Cinema Marginal outputs from the 1960s onwards, which emerged from and ‘cannibalised’ other cultural and artistic forms (Chapters 3 and 19); in the highly popular films of Os Trapalhões (The Goofies), a television troupe relying on circus acrobatics and slapstick stunts, in the 1980s (Chapter 12); in the music documentaries and fiction films that boomed from the 1990s onwards (Chapter 9); in contemporary experimental films crossing borders with the visual arts (Chapters 2 and 5); and in other representative cases in focus here. This book proposes that these intermedial encounters entail the blurring of boundaries between local and imported traditions, high and popular cultures, and avant-garde and commercial practices, thus constituting a democratic space par excellence for artistic and social expression. The intermedial method allows us, moreover, to move away from chronological or hierarchical approaches to these phenomena, framing them instead as comparable and interrelated creative practices.

In his influential book, Historiografia clássica do cinema brasileiro (Classical Historiography of Brazilian Cinema, 1995), Jean-Claude Bernardet questions the pride of place usually given to processes of production to the detriment of exhibition and distribution. More emphatically, he challenges the ‘myth of origin’ in film historical accounts for ascribing a subaltern position to non-mainstream cinemas of the world. In this book, we have attempted to offer an advantageous substitute for this model by embracing a non-chronological approach to the history of Brazilian cinema, whilst extending Bernardet's challenge of primacies to the film medium itself.