The Brazilian Road Movie

Journeys of (self) Discovery

Sara Brandellero, Sara Brandellero

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781783165650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Lateinamerikanische & karibische Geschichte

The Brazilian Road Movie: Journeys of (Self)Discovery explores some of the key trends and films in the development of the road movie in Brazil. Through a collection of essays by distinguished scholars, and covering a broad range of case studies, this text spans Brazilian film production from the silent era to the present day. This text examines issues such as the reworking of the genre in a Brazilian context, the relationship between documentary and fiction, between history, politics and cinema, gender and race, the wilderness and the urban space, the national and the transnational. The essays consider among other things how the experience of the journey helped develop and was instrumental in defining identities on screen. Adopting a variety of approaches, the volume considers the significance of the iconography of the road, the experience of movement and of life on the move for the representation of Brazil on screen.

Part I

On the Road

Chapter One

Silvino Santos and the Mobile View: Documentary Geographies of Modern Brazil

LUCIANA MARTINS

In 1969, the documentary film-maker Silvino Santos was awarded a prize at the First Northern Festival of Brazilian Cinema (I Festival Norte do Cinema Brasileiro) in Manaos, in recognition of his pioneering work on the Amazon. Almost forgotten, aged eighty-two, Silvino Santos had been making films since 1913. In the same festival, the best film award was given to Macunaíma (1969), Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s adaptation of Mário de Andrade’s novel from 1928. In a period of intensely politicized cultural production at the end of the 1960s, artists were looking back to modernism in order to find answers to contemporary problems of art and society.¹ In their attempts to decolonize Brazilian culture, it is perhaps not surprising that film-makers linked to the Cinema Novo movement would celebrate Silvino Santos as a pioneer of Brazilian cinema. It is mostly to this sixties generation of film-makers, who were intent on creating a new language for Brazilian cinema, that we owe the recovery of what is extant of Silvino Santos’s work as a film-maker today.²

Silvino Santos was a Portuguese immigrant who settled in the Amazon region of Brazil in 1890, first in Belém, subsequently moving to Manaos in 1910. His career as a film-maker began under the patronage of the Peruvian Júlio César Araña, the influential rubber baron, who envisaged in the ‘documentary’ function of the camera a powerful weapon in the defence of his company in the public debate over allegations of atrocities against indigenous peoples in the Putumayo region.³ In 1913, Araña sent Silvino Santos to Paris to learn the art of film-making with the Pathé brothers.⁴ According to Santos himself, writing many years later, the brothers were enthusiastic about training a film-maker to work on the ‘unknown’ Amazon, and after just one month of tuition they considered him ready to work with moving pictures.⁵ In 1922, after a period spent working for a short-lived filmmaking company – the Amazônia Cine-Film – Santos began to work for another rubber baron, the Portuguese J. G. Araújo, owner of the biggest department store in Manaos. Santos remained as an employee of Araújo for the rest of his life (he died in 1970), mainly in a clerical capacity, though he continued his photographic and filmic work in documenting the domestic life of the Araújo clan.⁶

Silvino Santos’s first film for J. G. Araújo was No paiz das Amazonas (In the Land of the Amazons), which he produced with J. G.’s son Agesilau de Araújo in 1922 for the International Exhibition in Rio de Janeiro, marking the centenary of Brazilian independence.⁷ Having overcome early reservations among the exhibition organizers at the prospect of screening a ‘natural’ film about the Amazon, Agesilau de Araújo managed to have the film shown to the newly-elected president Artur Bernardes and other members of the Brazilian government, to great critical acclaim.⁸ No paiz das Amazonas was not only screened at the exhibition, but was also awarded a Gold Medal, becoming a considerable national and international commercial success at the time.⁹ Having travelled more than 10,000 kilometres throughout the Amazon region with camera in hand, Santos managed to show the world a view of the region that had never been seen in quite the same way before.

While in Rio de Janeiro for the launch of No paiz das Amazonas – he stayed there for a year – Silvino Santos took the opportunity to document the buzz of urban life, filming the cityscape of Rio, its imposing buildings, its boulevards, its electric streetcars and automobiles, and numerous passers-by. What remained of the resulting original film – entitled Terra encantada (Enchanted Land), co-produced with Agesilau de Araújo in 1923 – was remounted by Roberto Kahané and Domingos Demasi in 1970 resulting in two short films, Fragmentos da terra encantada (Fragments of Enchanted Land) and 1922 – A exposição da independência (1922 – The Independence Exhibition).¹⁰ Focusing particularly on these films and their forerunner No paiz das Amazonas, this chapter explores the relationship between cinematic technology and the civilizing desires of the modern urban elites of Brazil in the early twentieth century, paying particular attention to the ways in which urban reform was reframed and indeed re-energized by cinema’s impulse towards movement, display and spectacle. While this process was not exceptional, as Ana M. López has demonstrated in her work on early cinema and modernity in Latin America, the case of Rio de Janeiro in 1922 provides a way of getting closer to local, specific forms of modern sensibility, one in which the moving image played a key role.¹¹

While it would not be appropriate to classify Silvino Santos’s early cinematography as ‘road movies’ tout court, his films certainly helped to develop and sustain the public taste for visions of the world ‘out there’. As Ian Christie reminds us in The Last Machine, his pathbreaking work on turn of the century technologies and the cinema, a growing interest in technologies of transportation was inextricably connected to the formation of a spectatorial subject, of viewers expecting to be transported.¹² Equally, it is important to remember, as Devin Orgeron remarks, that cinema’s preoccupations with mobility are not restricted to its early days; albeit in a very different fashion, cinema still ‘moves’ spectators into journeys today.¹³

The focus on Silvino Santos’s work in this chapter seeks to contribute to the critical debate about road movies in two main ways. Firstly, by examining films produced in the 1920s, it follows Orgeron’s suggestion to broaden the understanding of road movies beyond a single generic category, taking into consideration cinema’s early attraction to the subject of transportation.¹⁴ Secondly, following one of this book’s main goals, it aims to provide new insights on the history of road movies and filmic travel narratives beyond the Euro-American centre of gravity, focusing specifically on the context of Brazilian cinema. The chapter thus begins with a brief overview of the relationship between visuality and mobility in early twentieth-century Brazil. A second section outlines the historical context, focusing on the anniversary year of 1922 in Brazil and the Centennial International Exhibition in Rio de Janeiro. The close analysis of the films No paiz das Amazonas, Fragmentos da terra encantada and 1922 – A exposição da independência brings us to the third section.¹⁵ The chapter ends with some reflections on the ‘rediscovery’ of Silvino Santos in the 1960s.

Visuality, Mobility and Brazilian Urban Modernity

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, Brazil underwent considerable changes, economically, politically, socially and culturally. This period saw the peak of the coffee production cycle in São Paulo and of the rubber production cycle in the Amazon; substantial British capital investment, notably in railways, shipping, urban services and commerce; the abolition of slavery in 1888, followed by official programmes to promote immigration (it is estimated that three million immigrants, mainly Italian, entered the country between 1884 and 1920); and, finally, the end of the monarchy and the establishment of a progressive republic (1889).¹⁶ While these changes have usually been represented as marking the triumph of the forces of modernity, the resulting political formation nevertheless constituted a somewhat ‘traditional’ modernity, as José Murilo de Carvalho has suggested, one in which the values of a rural, patriarchal and hierarchical society were maintained alongside the signs and symbols of modernization.¹⁷

Living through such a rapid yet uneven modernizing process could be a traumatic experience, especially for the poor population and the newly arrived immigrants. Yet the opening up of Brazil offered new cultural as well as economic opportunities. As in the case of several other countries in Latin America, it was among the first generation of European immigrants in this period that many of the early filmmakers came: the Segreto family came from Italy, Antonio Leal and Silvino Santos from Portugal, and Francisco Serrador from Spain. In the words of Ana M. López:

cinema was a medium not only of mobility but also of great appeal to the mobile, to immigrants seeking to make their fortunes in the new world through the apparatuses of modernity yet eager to assert their new national affiliations, and to those who restlessly traveled throughout the continent.¹⁸

In different ways, then, cinema provided both spectators and filmmakers in Latin America with a new sense of global connection. As spectators, cinema enabled the citizen to be ‘transported’ to different sites around the world; for film-makers, it provided a visual grammar that was part and parcel of the modernity that was in the process of shaping that world.¹⁹

The Brazilian capital in this period, Rio de Janeiro, was itself a city ‘on the move’. Old narrow, dark streets were giving way to wide, airy boulevards; electric power was extending the streetcar system beyond the relatively wealthy southern suburbs to other parts of the city; in combination, the advent of electricity, the telephone, gramophone, cinema, the automobile and the airplane introduced a small revolution in the habits of the urban population.²⁰ The urban reforms made in Rio de Janeiro around the turn of the century created a series of new places to be ‘looked at’ by strollers in promenade, a practice that paralleled the mobile and visual experience of the movies.²¹ The reform programme was the result of two somewhat different tendencies in urban planning that converged in Rio during this period. The first, promoted by the federal government under the direction of the minister Lauro Müller and the engineer Francisco Bicalho, was designed above all to modernize the port; the aim was to have products from around the world distributed across the city in a more efficient way. The second, headed by the mayor Pereira Passos, aimed at a closer and more organic integration of the various neighbourhoods with the centre of the city, which was to be privileged as its ‘civilizing’ hub. Despite their differences, both these plans had a common focus on facilitating mobility across the capital city – of products, in the first case, and of people in the second.²²

For all Pereira Passos’s efforts to promote the centre of the capital as a means of educating the urban population into the ways of modern civility, an ideal clearly inspired by the examples of Britain and France, the complex historical geography of Rio de Janeiro – slave city turned tropical metropolis – frequently evaded the designs of the planners. The presence of a highly visible, heterogeneous population, composed of former slaves, street-sellers, rural migrants and immigrants, posed a particular challenge to the mores of bourgeois society. Gradually, Passos introduced a series of repressive measures designed to render traditional urban practices into ‘civilized’ ones. This was one of the main characteristics of the ambivalent modernity taking shape in the First Republic in Brazil: in the words of the historian José Murilo de Carvalho, ‘modernity was allergic t...