Tiago's brain dump

With the progressive abolition of slavery in the New World from the early 1800s, governments of all American countries started to encourage immigration from Europe and Asia so as to supply their expanding economies with labor cheaper than that of the newly freed slaves. The general public, who, at first, more or less tolerated that practice, had become extremely averse to it by the early 20th century, as labor was no longer in short supply and the fear of having jobs taken by immigrants was widespread. Moreover, the then growing Social Darwinist movement, which considered all immigrants to be inferior to the dominant white race and, because of that, predisposed to crime and vice, disseminated the idea that miscegenation would ultimately lead to anarchy, further contributing to the ostracism of immigrants by the societies they had helped to build. As a consequence, those "outsiders" were eventually forbidden by law to marry outside of their race, being either segregated t...

Filmmaking is a collective enterprise, and it has been so almost since its inception. As every new storytelling tool demands additional crew members to oversee it, and since the cinematic grammar never stops evolving, movie production has unfolded into an endeavor that nowadays comprises  thousands  of people. Even though, as a consequence, the responsibilities delegated to each role in such massive crews can become considerably fuzzy, it is still  widely accepted  that a movie as a whole is (and has always been) the result of the creative vision of its director above everyone else: swap the producer, replace the editor or have the script altered during filming, and the ensuing movie will arguably still be the same overall; change its director, however, and you risk having an artistically fragmented mess of an outcome. That is, unless the true auteur behind that film is not its director, but in fact its  producer , something that was quite com...

With most of its factories destroyed and a great deal of its able-bodied population wiped out, the years following the end of World War I  were marked by great economical instability in Europe. With exception of the  Weimar Republic , where  UFA -sponsored cinema  was seen  as a tool to restore its people's morale after having lost the war, little to no money was being invested in the European entertainment industry as a whole. Correspondingly, most domestic film companies opted to avoid altogether the risks inherent to movie production, by concentrating their activities in the more stable motion picture distribution business instead. As a consequence, film production came to an all time low in Europe in the early 1920s, whose home market was then flooded by Hollywood. Seeing themselves unable to compete with the powerful US film industry given their meager budgets, a group of French directors decided to take an orthogonal approach, striving to dif...

It was in 1954 that  François Truffaut  published his Une certaine tendance du cinéma français  in the influential film magazine  Cahiers du Cinéma , which was followed by  André Bazin 's  De la politique des auteurs  a year later, key essays among several in which their contemporary French cinema was being criticized in that periodical for producing "soulless", commercial films, put together by directors who were satisfied in being mere  metteurs-en-sc ène  (stage-setters) instead of true  auteurs , due to their shooting movies without imprinting any personal style to their work. Despite actually being a reaction to the way French government allocated funds for film financing, prioritizing directors with a track record of box office hits in detriment of newcomers, the idea that a film is the reflection of the creative vision of its director would be formalized by Andrew Sarris in his 1962 essay  Notes on the Auteur Theory...

In a 1973 interview , when asked what was the thing that frightened him the most,  Alfred Hitchcock  replied he was "scared stiff of anything having to do with the law". The slightest idea of being accused of a crime he didn't commit and all the implications that would come of it, he said, were enough to send a chill down his spine. His fear was, he himself   admitted , rooted in an episode of his childhood, in which he was locked in a prison cell by the local constable at his father's request, as a punishment for having been naughty. This "unjust incarceration" would come to play a big role in his life, whose entire filmography can be seen as a means of coming to terms with that experience: in virtually all his movies, innocent people are discredited and/or wrongly accused, being thus put in a position where they have to prove their innocence to authority figures too obtuse to track the real culprit themselves. Believing suspense to be not a ...