A review of Portugal’s Global Cinema : Industry, History and Culture, edited by Mariana Liz

Abstract

At the heart of Portugal’s Global Cinema: Industry, History and Culture—edited by Mariana Liz, published by I.B. Tauris in the series ‘Tauris World Cinema’, and totaling 283 pages— lies a (rather recent) tendency to look at other cinematic cartographies, in particular the socalled “cinema of small nations”, as opposed to the more conventional, Hollywood-adjacent productions. Noticing the ‘obvious gap in literature’, 1 the editor sets out to explore ‘the international meaning of contemporary Portuguese film’ and, indeed, Liz, along with the other contributors, achieve more than that.2 The introduction begins with a broad overview of the last four decades of Portuguese cinema, in which the editor explores its national cinema within a global context and a transnational framework. As part of a growing interest in Portuguese cinema, Portugal’s Global Cinema, written in English, is instrumental in moving towards a better understanding of the struggles, the context, and, at the same time, the possible solutions that national cinemas have adopted in order to survive. The volume achieves this by balancing the analysis of a more political and auteur cinema with more popular and mainstream productions, providing the reader with a wide range of topics.