“The Population Needs to Know the Dangers They Face!”: Cinematic Consumption and Rhetoric of Fear in Belle Époque Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This article addresses the journalistic series Cinemas-arapucas (Trap-cinemas), published by the newspaper A Noite between August 8 and 16, 1912, which denounced some movie theaters in the central areas of Rio de Janeiro because of noncompliance with rules related to public safety. We intend to verify how the journalistic series was inserted in the dissemination of a rhetoric of fear regarding cinematographic consumption - and, by extension, with which other fears it engaged and what mechanisms of power it triggered from this. As a central question, our proposal is to analyze the Cinemas-arapucas series to verify some relations among the press, authorities, cinematographers, and cinema audiences in Rio de Janeiro in the first decades of the 20th century. To do so, we used the evidential paradigm methodology, as proposed by Carlo Ginzburg.