Passages on Brazilian scientific cinema.

The article examines the conditions of production and recognition of scientific cinema in Brazil by comparing three distinct moments and contexts: the first moment takes place in the nineteenth century, and it is related to the contribution of a Brazilian astronomer otherwise little known to Brazilian film scholars, the second addresses Benedito Junqueira Duarte's voluminous mid-twentieth-century filmography, and the third moment documents recent scientific film experiences within ultra high resolution movies transmitted over photonic networks. Future trajectories for aesthetic concerns and practical issues such as the archiving of ultra high definition cinema are usefully informed by these histories of scientific cinema, even as a current generation of multidisciplinary teams including scientists, filmmakers, computer scientists, and network engineers reinvent, rediscover, and necessarily expand the scientific cinema toward concerns of real time collaboration and teaching.