Jaime Ginzburg is a professor of Brazilian Literature at the University of São Paulo and a researcher, level 1B, at CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development). In his academic career, he developed works related to the relationship between culture and violence, with an emphasis on productions related to authoritarian regimes in Brazil. His publications include studies on Brazilian literature, theory of literature, teaching of literature, Frankfurt School, cinema, violence, contemporary culture, and social exclusion. 

He is currently developing a research project, with the support of the CNPq, with the title "Literature and cinema in the contemporary Brazil - second phase". This project deals with recent Brazilian literary texts and films, with an emphasis on the period between 2010 and the present, taking as its horizon the reflection on the relationships between themes, forms, and contexts. Its objective is to relate literary and cinematographic productions with historical and social elements, paying attention mainly to the images of bodies. It is planned to study, in the selected corpus, the following topics: violence, phantasmagoria, social diversity, social antagonisms, exclusion, repression, and memory, among others.

Research project as a fellow of CALAS

Title: Representations of violence in the cinema of Brazil and Mexico

Abstract: The main objective of this project is to make a comparison between Brazilian and Mexican films, studying the configurations of violent scenes. Specifically, the priority of the concluding thoughts is to analyze the images of the bodies. The main hypothesis of this research is that it would be possible to think about an underground history of Latin America through cinema. This proposal integrates two conceptions of work: b) a series of concluding thoughts supported by the knowledge of history, philosophy, sociology, and related areas, which allows us to perceive, within the films, the mediations between violence and peace. Film production in Latin America is very heterogeneous, in its themes, forms, and artistic quality. Within this diversity, it is possible to observe how some films are handled, articulating complex themes with formal creative constructions, to critically explore perceptions of social conflicts. In the cinema, underground stories can be written that address these conflicts in an original way, using resources to the alienation and the shock of the audience. The study of cinema can have a double formation: in a first perspective, it is justified by the need to give visibility to the memory of cultural productions, finding recurring patterns and singularities in the cinema, distinguishing mimesis from anti-mimesis, and reflecting on the different ways in which art and reality interact; In a second perspective, going beyond the specific academic field of cinematographic studies, it opens as a process of knowledge and a sphere of debate of one's own social and political history, which manifests itself in clues, in diffuse traces, pointing to silenced stories, or little known to society.