This paper intends to examine a specific type of relationship between cinema and popular music, whose historical trajectory can be located between the 1930s and 1950s, and which expressed the attempt to build a popular type of film that was the expression of a Brazilian national identity. In many films of this period, popular music not only played a functional or ornamental role in the narrative, but it was also themed as a "representation" of social, aesthetic and ideological dilemmas connected with "Brazilianness", as seen by the political left, especially the left connected with the Brazilian Communist Party. This view was condensed in the film Rio, Zona Norte(1957) by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, in which the similarities and differences between the black composer from the shantytown and the white classical musician can be seen as an expression of the dilemmas and contradictions of this cultural project.
film and popular music in Brazil; musical films; culture and politics in Brazil
