Ecos da modernidade

Abstract

This study approaches the cycle of the wandering cinema in São Luis, capital city of the state of Maranhão, Brazil, performed between the years of 1898 and 1909, which consisted of a series of cinema spectacles that happened most of the time at the Teatro São Luiz, today known as Teatro Arthur Azevedo, that ended when the first movie theater was inaugurated (the São Luiz Cinema, in 31/11/1909). The theory and methodology used are the French Discourse Analysis. The corpus embraces the registers found in the newspapers Pacotilha, Diário de Maranhão e O Federalista: quick notes (informative and opinions), news, chronicles and mainly advertisements. The main point is to establish, through French Discourse Analysis, which were the representations that the newspapers brought to the society about the cinema. The hypothesis is that these newspapers provided the cinema with the image of modernity icons, strongly connected to the machine tools that were all over the country, resulted from the Industrial Revolution, especially in Rio de Janeiro. It is possible to believe that the enunciates about the wandering cinema have in its inner speech the mark of the modernity inter speech: the heavy descriptive tone of the machinery found in the informative and opinion notes. The presence of superlatives in the advertisement text and the notes about the spectacles; the apologetic tone with which the newspapers defined the presentations. The divinization of the cinemas was the logic of the period all over the world, as we can see in the analysis done on texts from Rio de Janeiro newspapers and other places, including French newspapers, that report the cinema spectacle during all the wandering phase, also known as domestication phase or first cinema.