This dissertation on Brazilian cinema dialogues with theories about the role of corporeality and sensation in film experience, but relocates the discussion from cinema's moment of reception to the moment of production. This relocation reflects not just the need to reevaluate the place of the body in film theory-in the wake of works by Stephen Shaviro, Linda Williams, Vivian Sobchack, and others, which emphasize viewership-but also addresses a tendency specific to Brazilian cinema. Starting roughly in 1974, with Bodansky and Senna's Iracema: uma transa amazônica, and becoming more pronounced since the 1990s, this tendency is characterized by a shift in emphasis from the finished product, intended to affect the viewer in a belated scene of viewing, to the physicality of encounters and interactions between bodies and audiovisual technologies that unfold in the here-and-now of filming. The films resulting from this change in emphasis are still works of cinema in the sense that they are completed works, released in theaters and circulated as DVDs or digital files. Yet this dissertation argues that these films' thrust lies less in their attributes as finished pieces than in the experiential events enabled by their making. Through key examples by directors like Bodansky and Senna, Andrea Tonacci, João Moreira Salles, Cao Guimarães, and especially Eduardo Coutinho, this study details this turn from film as product to film as process and draws out its aesthetic and political implications. In order to better delineate the practices that emerge from this shift, as well as to distinguish them from the "representational" approaches that prevail in most cinemas, this dissertation proposes the notion of "the cinema of experience"-a category whose critical value exceeds the present work.