Abstract
The film Cantos de Trabalho (“work songs”), from 1955, is one of the short films of the Brasilianas series directed by Humberto Mauro at the National Institute of Educational Cinema (Ince) between 1945 and 1956. Analyzing it within the theoretical assumptions of the Sociology of Art and Cinema, it was possible to establish relations between the visual construction and the values of that time, in which Brazil still sought its identity as a nation. In the film, populated by simple men and women, mostly Afro-descendants, it is possible to notice a nation being drawn, with a certain valorization of the patriarchal and slaver past.
Keywords
Educational cinema; Humberto Mauro (1897-1983); National Institute of Educational Cinema; nation; sociology of cinema