Shifting Horizons

Drawing on the challenges of urban expansion and increasing population density facing contemporary Brazil, Shifting Horizons is an interdisciplinary investigation of the treatment of social difference in documentary film and photography and its potential to effect social and political change.

• Explores the Brazilian documentary tradition of conscientização, alongside new movements such as inclusão visual, introducing the voices of a range of innovative and highly contemporary artists, filmmakers, and cultural commentators
• Discusses traditionally marginalized urban spaces using the concepts of inequality, segregation, integration, and relationality
• Bridges the domains of film and photography and brings greater awareness to Brazilian cultural output
• Highlights new ways in which today’s social documentary practice and production can inspire social and cultural transformation, in Brazil and around the world

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Documentary Film, Conscientização and ‘Socially Concerned’ Production
Cinema Novo and the ‘Socially Concerned’ Precedent
Back to the Future
Thinking about Documentary
Documentary Photography and Photojournalism
Photography as a Vehicle for Social Change
A Common Dynamic
Drawing Boundaries
CHAPTER 1–Wasteland
Introduction
Modernism,Waste Materials and an Aesthetic of the Fragment
‘Jardim Gramacho’
Contemplating your Rubbish’s Home away from Home
(In)visible Labour
Nature and the Apocalyptic Landscape
Estamira
Dynamic Marginality
The Body as a Battleground
Lixo extraordinário
Establishing Perspective and Identification
Fertile Images: a Productive Revelation
CHAPTER 2–The Human Warehouse
Introduction
The Prison in Cultural Production
O prisioneiro da grade de ferro: auto-retratos
Exercising Control
Inside Out/Outside In: Perspective and Connectivity
Inverting Myths
‘Imprisoned Spaces’
Access, Territory and Control
Visible Absence/Invisible Presence
Juízo
Interchangeable Bodies: Authenticity and Performance
Carceral Cycles: Caught in the Motions
CHAPTER 3–Zones of Contestation
Introduction
Avenida Brasília Formosa
Where Bodies Meet Machines
Mapping the Neighbourhood
São Paulo: Occupying the Centre
‘911’
‘Morar’
‘O muro’
CHAPTER 4–Shifting Perspectives on/from the Morro
Introduction
‘Rio–Entre morros’
Inapprehensible Landscapes
An Anti-cartography: or Where Am I?
Babilônia 2000
Imagens do Povo
Upside Down Inside Out, or ‘Stretching Limits’
Resisting the Gaze
Horizons Old and New
Conclusion
References
Filmography Online Photography Collections

Alice Allen is a specialist in contemporary Brazilian visual culture with a background in Modern European languages, and a documentary Producer. She has worked in the British broadcasting industry since 2013 on domestic and international productions for the BBC and Channel 4, including BAFTA-winning My Son the Jihadi and Stacey Dooley’s Sex in Strange Places: Brazil. She is a founding member of Watersprite Film Festival in Cambridge, which she co-directed in 2011, celebrating the best of international student short film.

With large-scale urban expansion and population density a challenge for cities within Brazil and globally, how we deal with socio-economic and cultural differences is of increasing concern for those aspiring towards durable cohabitations of urban space in the twenty-first century. Shifting Horizons is an interdisciplinary investigation of the treatment of social difference in documentary and its potential to impact change. The documentary realm has historically provided a forum for the representation and interrogation of socio-economic inequalities. But nowadays the desire for change embedded in the documentary tradition of conscientização collides continually with a widespread disbelief in the power of such imagery to effect social or political change.

Shifting Horizons examines this collision through the lens of recent Brazilian works portraying traditionally “marginalised” urban spaces. The book bridges the domains of film and still photography to introduce a range of innovative and highly contemporary artists, filmmakers, and cultural commentators, exploring their engagement with concepts of segregation, integration and relationality. Ultimately asking: how can we think about transformation in social documentary practice and production today?