Gustavo Furtado
Gustavo Procopio Furtado is assistant professor of Romance Studies and Arts of the Moving Image at Duke University. His research and teaching interests include media, space and territoriality; film and media theory; questions of modernity and modernism in the Global South; Latin American literature and cinema; travel writing; documentary film studies; indigeneity and indigenous film and video. His articles have appeared in several venues including The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, and in the anthology Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millennium (Palgrave, 2016). He is the author of Documentary Filmmaking in Contemporary Brazil: Cinematic Archives of the Present (Oxford University Press, 2019). Gustavo is currently working on several projects including a book-length manuscript provisionally titled “Mapping the Amazonian Moving Image: Media, Territoriality, and the Senses.” With attention to cultural distinctions in spatial practices and understandings of tropical nature among groups as diverse as nation states, settler colonists, and indigenous people, this project examines the relationship between territoriality and audiovisual production in film, video, television, and new media in the Amazon from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first centuries.
Interests
media, space and territoriality; film and media theory; questions of modernity and modernism in the Global South; Latin American literature and cinema; travel writing; documentary film studies; indigeneity and indigenous film and video
Publications and Exhibitions
BOOKS
Documentary Filmmaking in Contemporary Brazil: Cinematic Archives of the Present, Oxford University Press, January 2019
Reviews: Journal of Lusophone Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, (June 2019): 325-27; Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 57 (September 2019): 55; and Film Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 2: 100-05.
ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS
“Introduction: Justice and the Law in the Latin American Documentary.” Revista Cine Documental no. 20 (2019): 4-13. (Co-authored with Maria Guadalupe Arenillas. Published in Spanish)
“Observing the Law: The Cinema of Maria Augusta Ramos.” Revista Cine Documental no. 20 (2019): 95-120. (Published in Spanish)
“Where are the People? The Politics of the Virtual and the Ordinary in Contemporary Brazilian Documentaries,” in Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millennium, edited by Michael Lazzara and María Lupe Arenillas, 115-131. Palgrave Press, 2016.
“Remembering Objects in the Essay Film: Andrés di Tella as Collector, Heir, and Archeologist.” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 13.2 (2015): 123-138.
“A Living Cinema: Notes on Eduardo Coutinho (1933-2014).” Invited contribution to Panoramas, online journal of the Center for Latin American Studies of the University
of Pittsburgh, February 25th, 2014, http://www.panoramas.pitt.edu/content/living-cinema-notes-eduardo-coutinho-1933-2014.
“The Borders of Sense: Revisiting Iracema: Uma transa amazônica (1974)”Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 22.4 (2013): 399-415
CURATORIAL WORK
Guest curator of the 2018 edition of the Latin American Film Festival of the Duke/UNC Consortium for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, October 3 - November 12, 2018. https://jhfc.duke.edu/latinamericauncduke/2018-nc-latin-american-film-festival/