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...

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...

It is no secret that, by the second half of the 1960s, director  Stanley Kubrick  took a deep interest in making a biography of  Napoleon Bonaparte , going to  inhumane levels of effort  during pre-production to ensure he could perfectly recreate the atmosphere of 18th century Europe. Unfortunately, by that time, as the post World War II baby boomers  started reaching adulthood, a counterculture was created that centered around values like contemporary relevance and a revisionist attitude toward history, in a rebellion against the way the older generation saw the world. Correspondingly, general interest in period dramas, up to then extremely popular, had started to decline. As a result, Kubrick's producers, already apprehensive due to his gigantic budget estimations given the unfavorable cultural context, finally decided to abandon the project altogether once  Sergey Bondarchuk 's thematically similar  Waterloo  (1970) turned out to be a ...

If someone asked me what was, in my opinion, one of the most damaging things to have ever happened to the movie industry, I would have replied, with no margin for doubt, the creation of the  Hays Code  in the US, in 1930, which laid out rules to which movies had to abide in order to be deemed "acceptable". In any other point in history, this code would have been quickly dismissed as the Puritan daydream it was; right after the Great Depression, however, movie executives were much more inclined to accept it, fearing boycotts to all "unacceptable" movies organized by e.g. the National Legion of Decency . As a result, during the 30 years that followed, movies in the US were required to uphold the sanctity of marriage, the rightness of the law and the sanctity of religion, aiming thus at "rebuilding human beings exhausted with the realities of life". There was no crime without punishment, nor a good deed without reward, and anything that could be construe...