Consuming Visions: Cinema, Writing, and Modernity in Rio de Janeiro

4. Women, Rio’s Modernity, and Film’s Visual Pleasures: Benjamin Costallat’s Mademoiselle Cinema

4 Women, Rio’s Modernity, and Film’s Visual Pleasures Benjamin Costallat’s Mademoiselle Cinema There is an important body of modern writing, often by the most serious writers, that sounds a great deal like advertising copy. This writing sees the whole spiritual adventure of modernity incarnated in the latest fashion. —Marshall Berman, “Baudelaire and Modernism in the Streets” In the evenings, along the Avenida Central, the beautiful ladies parade, Their breasts carefully hidden, but still heaving Their modest legs, and God knows what disturbing lines their rhythms create . . . —Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “Passeiam as belas” The postwar years saw a new development in Brazilian writers’ encounter with film. Authors had previously engaged with the medium in nonliterary texts, documenting the movies impact on society in journalistic works or penning movie scripts. Rarely if ever did they allow their fascination with the cinema to enter into their literary endeavors. Indeed, Brazilian novels of the early 1900s were devoid of any direct reference to the medium’s influence on everyday modern life. This situation began to change in the 1920s when an increasing number of writers began to mention the movies in their literary works. It was then that novels by authors such as Léo Vaz, Mme Chrystanthéme, Théo Filho, and Benjamin Costallat all featured references to the movies. This inclusion of film in Brazilian literature testifies to what Ismail Xavier highlights as changing attitudes to the cinema that occurred following World War I. The discussion of film as a “Seventh Art,” witnessed in France, Italy, and the Soviet Union, had a significant effect on the use values and meanings of the cinema in Brazil. These discussions prompted the emergence of new venues in Brazil that specialized in the critique of the cinema as a modern art form. After 1917 magazines 126 Alternative Visions of Rio de Janeiro such as Palcos e telas, Rio jornal, Scena muda, and Para todos included regular columns dedicated to film criticism. Their popularity led to the founding of the country’s first movie magazine, Cinearte (1926–42), which was dedicated to discussing all aspects of film production. It was after the war too that new kinds of intellectual engagements with the movies began in Brazil. In 1927 the writers Otávio de Fária and Plínio Süssekind Rocha founded the Chaplin Club, whose explicit intention was to foment “the study of the cinema as an art form, ” an intention that was formalized through their journal, O fan (1928–30). Flora Süssekind writes that this redefinition of film as an art form in Brazil made it “seemingly more common and more acceptable for writers to include the cinema in their serious literary endeavors” (Cinematograph 26). However, a brief glance at references to the movies that appeared in novels of this time provides another dimension of the medium’s novelistic value. In Léo Vaz’s O professor Jeremias (The Professor Jeremias, 1920), for instance, it is the narrator’s mother who brings the movies into the novel. Leaving her son, Jeremias, at home to go to the movies, she tells him, “We were about to go to the movies; I observed that you, my son, being too young, would only sleep there, as usual, and so it would be more convenient to leave you at home” (250). In Mme Chrysanthème’s 1922 novel, As enervadas (The Innervated Women), it is the female narrator’s “modern memoirs” that includes “delicious promenades to the movies, in order to hear warm music and the rhythm of tangos” (119). Théo Filho’s A grande felicidade (The Grand Happiness, 1922) too references the movies by way of the young girl Zulmira who is “overtaken by a wild passion for the cinema” (20). Rather than an artistic form, therefore, these novels still referred to the medium as a popular activity and one, moreover, that was associated with the everyday habits, lifestyles, and practices of Brazilian women. These texts point to a redefnition not so much of film as of the novel, which after World War I began to engage with a cinematic world that was seen as feminine. The relationship between women and film is registered in the very title of Benjamin Costallat’s first novel, Mademoiselle Cinema (1923), which is explored in this chapter. Described as “a novel of everyday life,” the book chronicles the adventures of a young Carioca, Rosalina Pontes , whose life is likened to “the cinematic screen,” thereby earning her...