In Translation: Otávio de Faria: Lost Futures: Otávio de Faria and the Beginnings of Film Theory in Brazil

Silent film theory from Brazil is very little known within anglophone film studies. The translation of the essay “O Scenario e o Futuro do Cinema” (“The Scenario and the Future of the Cinema”), written by Otávio de Faria (1908–1980), will hopefully contribute to changing this situation.¹ The essay was published in three installments in the first three issues of the journal O Fan (1928–1929), followed by a screenplay titled Reincidência in which Faria “applied” his theory, published in the following four issues of O Fan (1929–1930).² The essay translated here is a valuable document not only because it is the first major work of film theory in Brazil but also because it shows the place of the medium within the local elite in the early twentieth century. In addition, it offers a privileged window into the theories and films that circulated then in the country.³ The text was republished in 1952, in the anthology Significação do Far-West (Signification of the Far West), more than two decades after the author had abandoned film criticism and theory in 1930.⁴ In order to read the essay in a critical way, we need to place it in both the overall context of Faria’s later work and the emerging film culture in Brazil.

Born to a wealthy, white, Catholic family of Rio de Janeiro—then the capital of Brazil—and raised among the city’s affluent intellectual and political elite, Faria was a Brazilian journalist, essayist, and literary writer. Faria’s intellectual trajectory saw several shifts: from film criticism and theory (1928–1930) to political thought (1931–1937) and finally to his most famous activity as a novelist, when he would fully embrace the Catholic metaphysics that were latent in his previous works. Despite these seemingly abrupt generic shifts, all of his work is connected by his search for a response to what he saw as a crisis of modernity in the political, economic, and moral spheres. His film theory envisions a response to this crisis in the cinematic form and the experience it produces.

The journal O Fan, which published Faria’s essays, had a very short life: nine issues, from August 1928 to December 1930. The journal was published by the Chaplin Club in Rio de Janeiro, a small film society founded in June 1928 by Faria and his intellectual peers, Plínio Süssekind Rocha, Almir Castro, and Claudio Mello. Unlike other popular and long-running publications such as Cinearte (561 issues; 1926–1942) and A Scena Muda (1,755 issues; 1921–1955), which promoted Hollywood mass film culture in Brazil, the Chaplin Club devised O Fan as a small elite platform dedicated to discussing and theorizing cinema as art. Faria was the intellectual leader of this initiative in his defense of silent cinema against the talkies. Although O Fan might have played a minor role in its time, since its readership was restricted to Rio de Janeiro’s intellectual elite, it has an important place in the history of film in Brazil: its members were among the first to debate Soviet film theory in Brazil, and the group left at least one widely recognized historical mark in organizing the first screening of Mário Peixoto’s Limite (Limit) (1931), on May 17, 1931, for a group of invited guests in Rio de Janeiro’s Cine Capitólio.⁵

“O Scenario e o Futuro do Cinema” was among the first of the theoretical essays on film that Faria published in the pages of O Fan. It proposes a spectator-centered ontological program for the future of the medium, which was then undergoing a significant transformation with the rise of synchronized sound.⁶ Faria’s main claim is that the future of the cinema must be purely “cinematic”: silent, with no intertitles or editing and centralized in the hands of auteurs. Such a claim, however, did not stem only from a formalist aesthetic preference. Pressed by the imminent demise of silent...