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Para uma história enredada do cinema: os Filmogramas de Silvino Santos e Agesilau de Araújo (1927-1929)

Publication . Sampaio, Sofia

Este artigo discute as práticas cinematográficas de cariz familiar e doméstico de inícios do século xx à luz da colecção Filmogramas (1927-1929), atribuída ao cinegrafista luso-brasileiro Silvino Santos (1886-1970). Os filmes desta série oferecem um registo da passagem por Lisboa da família de Agesilau de Araújo (1888-1976), radicada em Manaus. Com base em visionamentos realizados nas cinematecas Portuguesa e Brasileira, recorro a métodos de análise fílmica, entrevistas e pesquisa de arquivo para examinar o lugar que estas imagens – e as práticas sociais a elas associadas – ocuparam quer no percurso profissional de Santos quer no seio da família Araújo.

2025Journal article

Open access

Portuguese cinema and its discontents: a view from the film archive

Publication . Sampaio, Sofia

The article revisits the main arguments and underlying premises of the protracted debate on ‘national art cinema’ that has shaped Portuguese film studies for many decades. Drawing on international scholarly work on national cinemas and on my own experience as a researcher in the National Archive of the Moving Images (ANIM) of the Portuguese Cinematheque (Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema), I argue for a definition of ‘Portuguese cinema’ that takes into account the vast collections of non-fiction films that have been excluded from this debate. My proposal entails a shift away from prescriptive to descriptive understandings of Portuguese cinema, thus recognising its diversity, in the past as well as in the present. I therefore endorse a conception of national cinema that takes heed of wider and deeper historical processes, international ‘constellations’ and other (often contested or unacknowledged) traditions and practices. The argument builds on the analysis of Adriano Ramos Pinto – Vinho do Porto (attributed title), a short non-fiction utility film made in the late 1930s that belongs to ANIM’s holdings.

2024Journal article

Restricted access

Brandos Costumes (1975): Oppositional Filmmaking Meets the National Archive in Revolutionary Portugal

Publication . Sampaio, Sofia

The article analyzes the use of archival footage in the Portuguese film Brandos Costumes (Mild Manners, 1975), directed by Alberto Seixas Santos (1936–2016). The film was shot in 1972–73, in the wake of the political opening that followed António de Oliveira Salazar’s retirement, a period known as Marcelismo (1968–1974); however, it did not premier until September 1975, that is, several months after the military coup that put an end to the regime in April 1974. I identify the archival material and examine how it was incorporated into the film. Drawing on contemporaneous and more recent sources, I then discuss the film’s dissonant reception and political equivocations.

2022Journal article

Restricted access

Generic overlap as a mode of (social) production in Portuguese silent non-fiction film: the case of a Covilhã industrial, pitoresca e seus arredores (1921)

Publication . Sampaio, Sofia

The article offers a contribution to the international debate on nonfiction film genres in the silent period by proposing a historically and socially informed analysis of ‘generic overlap’ in the Portuguese documentary A Covilhã Industrial, Pitoresca e Seus Arredores (1921) [Industrial and Picturesque Covilhã, and Its Outskirts]. Made by Artur Costa de Macedo (1894–1966) for Invicta Film, a short-lived but prolific production company based in the North of Portugal, the film is a composite of different genres, such as the travelogue, the scenic view, the actuality, the industrial process film, and the local film. While in keeping with well-established international film practices, this kind of generic overlap also reflects the specific set of constraints and opportunities that the filmmaker encountered (and, respectively, sought to overcome and take advantage of) when he took on this film commission. Local newspaper research, though selective and incomplete, was crucial for gaining a deeper knowledge of this film’s local and regional underpinnings. The article also discusses the film’s 2002 restoration in light of its generic overlap, considering how genre-bound and genre-blind decisions resulted in a ‘new version’ and a ‘new original’ that sought to address a new set of concerns and scale configuration. It concludes that filmic genre has played (and continues to play) an active role in creating and sustaining social goals and relations in both silent filmmaking and film restoration projects.

2024Journal article

Restricted access

Film cultures of conquest and domesticity: The family films of Silvino Santos and Agesilau de Araújo (1927-1929)

Publication . Sampaio, Sofia

The article analyses Silvino Santos’s Filmogramas, a collection of hitherto neglected domestic films the Portuguese-Brazilian filmmaker (1886-1970) made in the late 1920s while accompanying his employer’s family, the Araújos, in Portugal. Combining archival research, interviews, and film analysis, I reconnect the Amazonian and European experiences of (colonial) conquest and domesticity that Santos’s life trajectory and film production depict and embody. The aim is to move beyond regional and hagiographic historiographies and build a more critical and anthropologically informed entangled history of a figure and an epochal milieu that continue to permeate and shape contemporary understandings of the past.

2025Journal article

Open access