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| ISBN-13: | 9780520964884 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 08/21/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 310 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Early Cinema and National Identity in Brazil
Mapping Out a Space of Analysis
While Brazil's contribution to film history has attracted considerable critical attention since the 1960s, the country's early cinema remains largely obscure in Anglo-American literature. Overlooked by European and North American scholars, the period tends to be disregarded, appearing (if at all) as an embryonic footnote to works focusing on subsequent national developments. The absence of Brazil's film history from Anglo-American studies is symptomatic of the lack of scholarly work dealing with early cinema in the region as a whole. Ana M. López observes that "the early years of the silent cinema in Latin America, roughly 1896–1920, are the least discussed. ... The period was overshadowed by wars and other cataclysmic political and social events and, subsequently, its significance was eclipsed by the introduction of other media — the Golden Ages of sound cinema and radio in the 1940s and 1950s, television in the 1960s and 1970s." Critical inattention to Latin America's early cinema is far from surprising, since documentation and analysis of the historical era encounter practical difficulties. As López writes, "Studying this period is made ... daunting by the paucity of available material; most of the films produced in Latin America between 1896 and 1920 have disappeared, victims of the inevitable ravages of time (and fires) and the official neglect of cultural preservation." In the specific case of Brazil, fires at the country's principal archives in 1957, 1969, and 1982, together with a lack of funds for preservation, have had a drastic effect on remnants from this period. Only an extremely small number of shorts and feature films produced before the 1920s have survived destruction and loss, and much of what is available today exists only in fragments. In 2008, the Cinemateca Brasileira generously estimated that only 7 percent of films known to have been made during the silent period exist today, corresponding to merely 210 hours of screening time.
Early Brazilian film production has thus been lost to the historical archive, and the field of Brazil's silent cinema is marked by what Giuliana Bruno describes as an absence "whose texture is larger than the remnance of complete texts." While specific, this loss is similar to that encountered elsewhere in the field of early cinema. Bruno notes that "although the cinema has been in existence for only a century, one faces the prevalence and dissemination of voids, gaps and lacunae" in dealing with the silent period. The lack of Brazilian films made before the 1920s certainly corresponds to this lost landscape of early cinema. In Brazil, however, the absence of extant texts has been met with (and covered up by) an overwhelming presence of historical studies. In fact, though early Brazilian cinema may have received scant attention from European and North American scholars, in Brazil it has been the subject of extensive scholarly documentation.
Documentation of Brazil's early film history began in the 1950s and formed part of the emergence of new intellectual discourses and practices that sought to map a national film history. This endeavor gave rise to what Jean-Claude Bernardet calls Brazil's "classical film historiography." Between the 1950s and 1970s a number of books were published that outlined the history of Brazilian cinema, paying close attention to its initial development. Critics like Alex Viany, Adhemar Gonzaga, and Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes produced historical accounts of the evolution of Brazilian cinema that included chapters dealing with what they called os primórdios or "the beginnings." These historical accounts were accompanied by the appearance of studies that focused exclusively on the silent period. The most notable were Vicente de Paula Araújo's A bela época de cinema brasileiro (The belle epoque of Brazilian cinema, 1966), Gomes's Humberto Mauro: Cataguases. Cinearte (1974), and Ismail Xavier's Sétima arte: Um culto moderno (The seventh art: A modern cult, 1978). These studies examined the contours of Brazil's film production before the 1920s, providing an in-depth examination of the birth of a national film culture. Together the works conspired to put Brazil's silent cinema on the cultural map, and in the process they constructed it as a field of knowledge, to draw from Pierre Bourdieu.
Given the status of early films, however, this field was constructed from a panorama marked by the absence of primary texts. Confronted with this absence, Brazil's film historians adopted an archaeological-forensic approach: they turned to secondary materials — press coverage, advertisements, literary references, memoirs — in order to uncover and piece together evidence of early Brazilian film production. As Bernardet points out, this approach was central to laying the foundations of the country's classical film historiography; it also gave birth to an archive of early Brazilian cinema, housed at the Cinemateca Brasileira, which stored, organized, and systematically classified an extensive collection of secondary materials that became a substitute or prosthesis for the absent body of film texts.
As part of this archiving mission, Brazil's critics brought to life a number of films produced before the 1920s, a treasure trove they dubbed the belle epoque of Brazilian cinema. The cinematic period of the belle epoque (as the histories tell us) roughly spans the years between 1906 and 1912 and constitutes a brief period of intense filmmaking activity in Brazil, when domestic movies were more popular than foreign cinematic products. According to Viany, during these few years "Brazilian movies outdid anything from abroad." Classical film historiography attributes Brazilian cinema's domination of the domestic market to a vertically integrated system of production, distribution, and exhibition, which allowed filmmakers to produce movies that drew on local events and cultural forms. For Gomes and others, this link with the domestic scene gave rise to "authentically" Brazilian films and the production of national genres. These included the filmes policiais, based on real-life crime stories; the filmes de revista, musical revues related to Brazil's vaudeville tradition known as the teatro de revista; and the carnavalescos, documentaries of the carnival celebrations.
The production of these quintessentially Brazilian films ended abruptly in 1912, the year that saw the arrival of Hollywood subsidiaries in Brazil and the development of a strong distribution/exhibition sector geared to imports. These factors precluded national production from prospering commercially in the country and, by blocking local films' access to screens, cut short Brazilian cinema's dialogue with the domestic scene. US dominance of the Brazilian market marginalized homegrown films, alienating spectators from their own cinematic projections and forcing filmmakers to imitate imported productions in an attempt to "face up to Hollywood." The year 1912 thus marks the decline of Brazilian cinema's belle epoque; it also signals the start of Hollywood's ubiquitous hold on the home market, which was organized to fulfill the interests of foreign, mainly US, imports. For Gomes, "The belle epoque ended as Brazilian films were forced off the screens by North American products. It was at that moment that the foreign film became the standard by which Brazilian cinema was to be judged."
Existing prior to Hollywood's ascendancy over the domestic market, the belle epoque has been historically constituted and written as a utopian era, during which national cinema was free from the difficulties that would later plague Brazilian filmmakers as they attempted to compete commercially with Hollywood. If, after 1912, domestic production had to contend with North American cinema's dominant presence in Brazil, classical histories carefully point out that this was not the case in the early years of the twentieth century, which saw the development of "authentic" national films that were untainted by foreign influences. It is because of this uncorrupted and essentially national dimension that historians dubbed the earlier years a belle epoque or "golden age" of Brazilian cinema — for Gomes, "a valid description compared to the following frustrating decades."
The utopian period of the belle epoque has come to occupy a key place in Brazil's classical film historiography, where it enjoys pride of place in accounts of the development of national cinematic practices. The period, moreover, is central to contemporary scholarship. A new generation of Brazilian film scholars, such as Jurandyr Noronha, Roberto Moura, Carlos Roberto de Souza, and Paulo Roberto Ferreira, have reiterated the utopian discourse of the belle epoque, which by the very force of its repetition has assumed the value of a truth. Many of these new scholars were students of the older generation of film historians and were trained at the same institutions, so that the prolongation of discourses concerning Brazil's cinematic past cannot be seen as coincidental. As Michel Foucault shows when speaking of discursive "remanence," it remains in existence by virtue of the support of an apparatus, which includes institutions of knowledge. These reiterations have not been restricted to Brazil. Anglo-American scholars, including Randal Johnson, Robert Stam, Ana M. López, Lisa Shaw, and Stephanie Dennison, have taken part in the same utopian discourse, helping to further spread and cement its veracity. Brazil's classical film historiography has, therefore, not only defined and shaped the field of knowledge of Brazil's early cinema but also set the discursive parameters for the historical criticism of Brazilian film in general.
Nevertheless, while the belle epoque speaks of a specific history of Brazilian cinema, it is important to remember that its unearthing and writing is itself situated in a particular history. Indeed, the utopianism of the belle epoque bears the hallmarks of the cultural ideologies and politics prevalent in 1950s to 1970s Brazil. During these years, what Antonio Candido calls "a consciousness of underdevelopment" took hold of Brazil. This consciousness was linked to broader national(ist) politics that encompassed an ambitious plan of industrial development, known as developmentalism. Intellectuals turned their attention to what they saw as a continuation of Brazil's colonial relations, which they deemed an impediment to the country's development, understood as an absolute value and an unquestionable end to be achieved. Ideas of national development went hand in hand with notions of liberation and revolution. In this context, nationalism assumed the shape of opposition and resistance to colonialism, and national culture took the dialectics of affirming what was authentic to the nation and repudiating what was alien to the nation as an essential aspect of the broader struggle for autonomy and development. The work produced by the ISEB (Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros; Superior Institute of Brazilian Studies), especially Roland Corbisier's Formação e problema da cultura brasileira (The formation and problem of Brazilian culture), took on this pattern, as it argued for an authentic, national critical consciousness to overcome Brazil's underdevelopment and its causes.
Film was inserted into this agenda. Hollywood's ubiquity became a symbol of the legacy of colonialism. Critics of its dominance saw the cinematic apparatus as central in promoting a capitalist ideology and thus in helping to construct Brazilian spectators as Western subjects. Consequently US cinema's normative practices were to be rejected in favor of a national specificity. This rejection marked a stark departure from the imitation of Hollywood's commercial and industrial model that had shaped Brazilian cinema from 1912 onwards. Seeking to gain a foothold in their own market, Brazilian filmmakers established elaborate US-styled filmmaking studios in an attempt to produce international quality movies that could compete with Hollywood.
The Hollywood dream was central to Companhia Vera Cruz, which was established in 1949. Built entirely on the US model, the company went bankrupt in the mid-1950s after producing only eighteen feature films. Vera Cruz's failure was taken as a sign of the impossibility of constructing a First-World cinema in Brazil and contributed to debates concerning the need for an alternative national film industry that was more suitable for the country's social and economic conditions and could help forge a Brazilian identity. These debates were central to the national film bodies and cultural agencies that proliferated during these years. Among them were the Comisão Nacional de Cinema (National Film Commission, 1951); the Grupo de Estudos da Indústria Cinematográfica (Film Industry Study Group, 1956); the Instituto Nacional do Cinema (National Film Institute, 1966); Embrafilme (1966); and the Conselho Nacional de Cinema (National Film Council, 1976). Discussions and conferences held by these state-led agencies led to proposals aimed at promoting a national film industry that would differ from the "antinational" model of Vera Cruz. The proposals encompassed exhibition and distribution laws. They also included ideas for a new kind of cinema, one that was independent and could incorporate a pedagogical function, helping to raise people's consciousness by educating Brazilians against colonialism.
All of this underlay the practices of Cinema Novo, the New Cinema movement, whose "aesthetics of hunger" expressed an aggressive denial of Hollywood's polished production values. Leaving behind industrial dreams and acknowledging Brazil's material disadvantages, Cinema Novo asserted its cultural value and ideological strength by recovering local cultural traditions and seeking to turn scarcity of means into an aesthetic that would make audiences aware of the country's underdevelopment. This rupture with Hollywood's style, typical of modern cinema, was linked to social criticism, and films were part of broader debates regarding politics and aesthetics, articulating the belief that the cinema could participate in developing a new national order.
It was not only filmmakers that sought out alternative avenues of film's development in Brazil. Critics too engaged in debates to define the contours of a "Brazilian cinema." Scholars and historians took on an eminently political function and assumed a key role in shaping official policies regarding filmmaking, highlighting what Bourdieu would call their symbolic power. The various film commissions established during these years counted on the participation of the country's film historians, most notably Viany and Gomes. Their histories were guided by a diagnostic aim of explaining the cinema's difficult or "under-" development in Brazil. Perhaps the best example of this is Gomes's study Cinema: Trajetória no subdesenvolvimento (Cinema: A trajectory within underdevelopment), which, as the title suggests, discussed the historical evolution of Brazilian film within a context of underdevelopment, characterized by a tension between colonizers and the colonized. As Bernardet notes, this tension guided Brazil's classical film historiography, which sought to uncover the remnants of a national cinema that had been displaced and obscured by Hollywood. In doing so, it challenged what Xavier refers to as an "amnesia" concerning Brazilian film. That amnesia was linked to the belief that cinema was a foreign medium that had never been successfully implanted in the country, a belief reinforced by the failure of Vera Cruz, and it was exemplified in 1944 when the poet Vinicíus de Moraes, then a film critic for the journal A Manhã, emphatically announced that he was not a Brazilian film historian because Brazil had no history of filmmaking. Critics set out to counter these dominant ideas by retrieving a national cinematic past that had been not just physically lost to the historical archive but also erased from memory. Brazil's classical film historiography was therefore part of and contributed to the broader decolonizing struggle for a national cinema. As Gomes put it, "To the extent that the history of our cinema is that of an oppressed culture, the elucidation of its development is transformed into an act of liberation."
These endeavors were, unsurprisingly, well received by the new generation of filmmakers. Director Glauber Rocha, for instance, registered the impact of Viany's work, writing that Brazilian cinema "can be divided into two eras: before and after Alex Viany's book." Carlos Diegues too described the national film histories of these years as "something that made an entire generation aware of its own cinematic tradition, which because of ignorance and prejudice had not been documented." The work of Viany and others therefore encouraged a new generation of filmmakers to become agents in the project of cinematic liberation, and the writing of a film history was linked to the task of making a new Brazilian cinema. While these histories, then, seemed to point to the past, to what Jacques Derrida calls "the memory-economy of the archive," they were also related to the question of Brazilian cinema's present and future development, a factor duly noted by Gomes in his essay "Pequeno cinema antigo": "Ten years ago, only some ten people or so had any interest in our cinematic past. Today, a more reasonable number feel the need to know our cinema. This research obeys the norms of any field of knowledge: to critically engage with Brazil's past in order to serve the present and the future." The work of Gomes and others received broader reception in Brazil. Newspapers and magazines published extracts of their findings, and movie theaters organized retrospectives on national cinema that included the early years, all of which were duly supplemented by symposia and printed catalogs. The accumulation of these activities and their dissemination were guided by a clear pedagogical function: to teach a broader public about the country's cinematic tradition.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
IllustrationsAcknowledgments
Introduction: The Modern Foundations of Brazilian Cinema
Part I. Locating the Belle Epoque of Brazilian Cinema
1. Early Cinema and National Identity in Brazil: Mapping Out a Space of Analysis
2. Cinematic Vistas of Rio de Janeiro’s Worldly Modernity
3. Alternative Urban Projections in Early Narrative Films
Part II. Hollywood Revisions
4. Film and Fandom in Cinearte Magazine
5. Beyond Hollywood: Reading Slave Relations in Humberto Mauro’s Lost Treasure (1927)
Part III. The Rondon Commission: Producing New Visions of the Amazon
6. Picturing the Tropics: Forging a National Territory through Photography and Film
7. The Expedition Films of Major Luiz Thomaz Reis
Part IV. Modernism and the Movies
8. Modernismo’s Literary Engagements with Film
9. The Cine-Poetry of Mário Peixoto’s Limite
10. Fabricating Discipline and Progress in São Paulo, Symphony of a Metropolis
Postscript: Toward New Cinematic Foundations
Notes
Filmography
Bibliography
Index