Saudade in Brazilian Cinema

Saudade has received much attention, at times celebratory and at times more critical, from artists and other intellectuals. As a powerful ‘sister emotion’ of nostalgia, the affective structure of the sentiment can be best understood as a tripartite ‘feeling blend’, bringing together the two emotional components of love and grief, mediated through the element of memory. Saudade in Brazilian Cinema: The History of an Emotion on Film aims to develop an analytical framework of the field of emotion studies. It places insights on saudade as presented on screen in dialogue with studies of emotion and affect with respect to ideology, hegemony and subalternity. This theoretical background is applied in detail to representations of saudade in twentieth and twenty-first century Brazilian cinema.