Early Cinema and National Identity in Brazil

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview and critique of theories of Brazil’s cinematic belle epoque, which have depicted the early film period as a golden age of Brazilian filmmaking in contrast to later decades that were dominated by Hollywood’s hegemony. The chapter shows how these utopian discourses regarding the belle epoque have obscured the cinematic period’s intrinsic link to Rio de Janeiro and its modernizing reforms, reforms that were inextricably linked to the development and expansion of global capitalism.

The coloniality of infrastructure: Engineering, landscape and modernity in Recife

“…In its first decades, Brazilian film produced images of uneven urban modernity, technological networks and the infrastructural sublime (López, 2000). In this period and beyond, the relationship between film and modernity in Brazil was intimate and multi-faceted (Conde, 2018). The economic/functional and the aesthetic/ideological of infrastructural modernity co-exist and mutually support one another.…”

“…This ongoing photographic record of the city’s changing urban space privileged, in real time, the visual field as a source of the city’s modernity (Blake, 2016). The regional cinematic flourishing of the ‘Recife cycle’, like the newspapers and magazines Stanley Blake analyses, was tied to the modernization projects and regionalist politics of the time (Araújo, 2013, 2015; Saraiva, 2017; Souza Leão Vieira, 2003), and can be inserted into the contested production of modernity and the nation in early 20th century Brazil (Conde, 2018). A Unlike many films from Latin America in the period, it is a film we can also actually watch.…”