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

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. For Mário da Silva Brito modernism, in particular, its appearance in Brazilian literary and cultural life with the Semana de Arte Moderna in 1922, marks the coronation of the movement, not its advent. Aracy Amaral also sees the movement as the culmination of various previous cultural and artistic manifestations that encompassed architecture, the decorative and fine arts, and literature. 2. Ismail Xavier’s study A sétima arte examines Brazil’s reception and dissemination of foreign theories regarding the cinema as a modern art form. For an analysis of how these ideas interacted with literary discourses of the time, see his chapter 9, “Modernismo e cinema.” 3. Xavier emphasizes film’s initial “social meaning” in Brazil, prior to discussions concerning the medium’s artistic potential: “its social receptivity, linked to different interests and questions posed by the various social classes, is an extremely important element, not only for the trajectory of the cinema, but also for the development of its use and appropriation in our era” (22). 4. See Nicolau Sevcenko, “A capital irradiante,” for a fuller discussion of how changes during these years were part and parcel of global transformations. Emília Viotti da Costa also discusses the transitional period as a reaction to wider international changes. 5. Gilberto Freyre emphasizes the emergence of a new public life with the transition from patriarchal to modern society in Brazil at the turn of the century , a form of public life that was promoted by new spatial configurations, the emergence of new urban centers, and the advent of mass culture and consumer goods. See The Mansions and the Shanties. 6. Brito stresses the filmic style of Oswald de Andrade’s novel Os condenados (The Condemned, 1922) in his introduction to the novel, and Haroldo de Campos and Neil Larsen emphasize the cinematic style of Andrade’s 1924 novel, Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar (The Sentimental Memoirs of João Miramar). 200 Notes to the Introduction 7. It was Siegfried Kracauer who first apprehended film as a social practice in his 1920s writing. See From Caligari to Hitler. 8. As Richard Abel writes, historiography dealing with the early years of film has long held the notion that the cinema really began with Hollywood and in particular with the work of D.W. Griffiths, specifically the development of a narrative film form (from 1917 on), with production and exhibition strategies prior to these years merely progressing to this coming-of-age. This coming-ofage has, Abel notes, commonly been held as a point of rupture with the past, which occurred around 1908, a rupture concomitant with the modernization of film. See Abel’s introduction 1–18. 9. Thomas Elsaesser in particular stresses the need for what he calls a cultural archaeology of mass media at the turn of the century in which the cinema serves as a crucial media intertext. Tom Gunning too has examined a different periodization within the previously homogenized notion of silent film and challenges the very idea of rupture. 10. An exception here is the work of Vicente de Paula Araújo, who has focused on early cinema in the context of Rio’s prosperous Belle Époque. See A bela época do cinema brasileiro (The Belle Époque of Brazilian Cinema). 11. The cinematic census carried out by Brazil’s Film Institute, the Cinemateca Brasileira, estimates that only 3 percent of Brazilian films produced between 1897 and 1925 have been preserved. 12. See Jean-Claude Bernardet, Historiografia clássica do cinema brasileiro (Classic History of Brazilian Cinema), for a more detailed overview and analysis of film historiography in Brazil. 13. Bernardet, for example, notes that Salles Gomes’s overview of early Brazilian film highlights how later cinematic trajectories were present in the early days, and he attempts to construct a historical continuity that defined Brazilian cinema in its entirety with little concern for different social and historical contexts. See Bernardet’s Historiografia clássica do cinema brasileiro for more concerning this critique of Salles Gomes’s work, especially the chapter “Acreditam os brasileiros nos seus mitos?” (Do Brazilians Believe Their Own Myths?), 13–49. While Bernardet raises a number of crucial points against Salles Gomes’s work, the validity of Bernardet’s critical study is the assertion of a need to move away from grand narratives and general overviews of the early days of Brazilian cinema toward a closer understanding of early film and filmmakers in their temporal and spatial specificity, which includes points...