Sources for scientific research on educational cinema in Brazil (1910-1939)

Abstract

This article is about the results of a research that investigated the sources available in the Digital Collection of the National Library, that present news related to the Brazilian educational cinema theme, especially from 1910 to 1939. In fixing this period, we mapped the sources whose search process ocurred from the following keywords: educational cinema, instructive cinema, school cinema, recreational cinema, cinematic censorship, cinema and censorchip, immoral films, cinema supervision, immoral cinema, immoral videotapes, bad films, religious education and cinema, cinema and catholic advertisings. Thus, 123 sources were identified: among them, newspapers and magazines that indicated the cinema as a strategy to educate Brazilians in the first three decades of the 20th century. From the documents examined, it was found that this action was reinforced throughout the national territory by the church, the police, the press and the school as collaborators in the practice of cinema. The analysis of the news, present in the sources investigated, made possible the understanding about the cinema from the following perspectives: I) as a teaching facilitator resource; (II) as a strategy for disseminating civic and religious values; (III) as a material indispensable to the dissemination of moral content; (IV) as an advantageous resource to be in religious and educational practices; (V) as controlled and supervised production by entities linked to governmental interests.