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

Appendix 6: “Love and Cinema,” by Lima Barreto

Appendix 6 “Love and Cinema,” by Lima Barreto I have a great respect for the legal, administrative and police actions that have attempted, directly and indirectly, to civilize our society. We have seen how this worked with gambling. Its censure by our present and past laws has nevertheless not impeded the fact that virtuous and gentlemanly players have managed to make a living from it for half a century. They have educated their sons and daughters from it, have provided well for them and married them off to the most socially prestigious individuals, all of them rightly deserving respect from even the most exemplary families, from everyone. Everything in this world must be a success and people are ready to admire the most enterprising successes. These reflections are not directly related to the topic dealt with here; they merely illustrate that police action is always effective when dealing with questions of moral behavior. Until now this action had not focused on the cinema; this has been left to the League of Morality, which has its own secret police, with its own particular moral stance, that judges films that are exhibited in our movie theaters. I cannot lend a hand to this policing, because I stopped going to the movies a long time ago. I cannot stand those awful American women: those Ketties, Thedas, or whatever their names are, and their respective gentlemen, the Johns, Hamiltons, and so on. These women have skin that looks like plaster or artificial marble and hard angular features. The men, with their great eyes, act in the most pathetic way against the miserable Sioux Indians. And all of these American movies depict stupid stories of kidnappings with horsemen, ignoble fantasies that reveal such a pitiful lack of invention, or they are idiotic melodramas that would have made maids cry years ago. Watching these movies has spurned lots of illicit love affairs. Police records frequently and faithfully document such details: “I met him at the 197 Appendix 6 movies,” says a young kidnapped girl. “He accompanied me, until . . . ” Of course, the girl always fails to mention that this action took place before he accompanied her. This action has a nautical name . . . The other day, at the police investigation of the passionate tragedy that took place on Rua Juparaná, it came to light that the accused wife had met her seducer at the cinema. Love, it seems, is born in darkness, like the world itself. The cinema cannot operate in the light of day or in electric light; nor can it operate in the light of that old romantic era that was so useful for those long gone Elviras, Gracielas and other women. ...