O que pode uma cena?: Censura e resistência no teatro e cinema brasileiros

Abstract

This monograph investigates the tensions between artistic production and censorship mechanisms in Brazil, understanding art as a field of struggle for the “distribution of the sensible.” The study employs theater and cinema as primary lenses to understand how art organizes itself as a form of political and symbolic resistance, generating shifts, tensions, and new ways of imagining the country. The research is structured in three acts: the first establishes the theoretical foundations of the debate, engaging with Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Rancière to examine censorship not merely as an administrative cut, but as a mechanism for world configuration. The second act reconstructs the experience of the military dictatorship (1964–1985), observing how movements such as Cinema Novo, Cinema Marginal, Teatro de Arena, and Teatro Oficina transformed repression into a creative engine, developing aesthetic strategies capable of challenging the police order. The third act addresses the present, analyzing the contemporary update of this debate, particularly during the authoritarian escalation intensified since 2017, marked by diffuse censorship, attacks on cultural production, and disputes over the national narrative. The research demonstrates that, while censorship attempts to fix Brazil into a single and disciplined image, its power is always incomplete. It is precisely in this escaping excess that art finds its strength by reconfiguring the sensible, contesting memory, and insisting that other worlds are possible.