The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art and Modernity between the Wars by Steven JacobsAnthony KinikEva Hielscher

Abstract

Reviews 111 Let the old man prattle!’ in the same breath as confessing her simplicity and lack of education, this difficulty reminds us to imagine that these conversations are happening in Konkani. That combined with excellent decisions such as to include a mix of Konkani and Portuguese titles and place names encourages us to engage with the linguistic complexity of Goa that is the product of different colonial entanglements. The introduction by Jason Keith Fernandes, explaining the context in which the book was written, helps us do this while also making an argument for the relevance of the book for contemporary Goa through what we can learn from both, the contents of the stories themselves as well as from the positioning of the author that they reveal. I believe that these same reasons make it equally relevant for India today. At the time of its first publication, Monsoon saw a Goa recently annexed to India — a time when its identity was being redefined and Goans had to reckon with Indianness and were finally forced to choose between being Indian or Portuguese. Its English translation comes at a time when Indian Citizenship is being decided in a way that echoes Fernandes’s observation about Goan politics of that time being ‘a game of musical chairs — when the music stops, those least approximating savarna Hinduism are ousted’. Finally, Monsoon offers nostalgia to those looking into the past and hope to those looking into the future, but keeps both in check with a constant sense of unease. These are an enjoyable set of stories despite the dark clouds under which they are gathered. The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art and Modernity between the Wars, edited by Steven Jacobs, Anthony Kinik and Eva Hielscher (New York: Routledge, 2018). 341 pages. Print and ebook. Reviewed by Paul Melo e Castro (University of Glasgow) One might not associate ‘the city symphony phenomenon’ with the Lusophone world, yet this genre of silent film boasted important contributions from Portugal and Brazil during its heyday between the 1920s and the 1940s. Divided into three parts, Jacobs, Kinik and Hielscher’s important new edited volume provides a penetrating conspectus of this genre, useful close readings of individual films — eschewing obvious choices like Berlin: Symphony of a Great City for lesser-known examples — and an itemized overview of films they ascribe to this genre. In the editors’ long introduction, the prototype of the genre is expressively yet accessibly presented. In essence they define the city symphony as a film in which urban life plays the role of a collective protagonist. Combining experimental, documentary and narrative elements, city symphonies draw together a fragmented, kaleidoscopic view of everyday figures and routines in the city, employing techniques of rhythmic and associative montage that often evoke musical structures. Reviews 112 Of the eighty or so titles indexed in the authors’ survey, four are from Portuguese-speaking countries, two from Brazil and two from Portugal (with the Brazil-born Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures [1929], filmed in Paris, also being a notable, if sui generis example of the genre). One of these films merits a chapter in the second section. Written by Cristina Meneguello, a specialist in urban space and industrial heritage based at the State University of Campinas, it is dedicated to São Paulo: Sinfonia da Metrópole (1931), directed by the Hungarian immigrants Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolpho Rex Lustig. If the model city symphony engages with an industrializing space characterized by centralization and congestion, it’s no accident that this genre was brought across the Atlantic to depict Brazil’s emergent megalopolis. Meneguello essentially reads the film as an attempt to place the swiftly burgeoning city on equal footing with the more established, and heralded, metropolises of America and Europe. It is interesting to note that, alongside the classic tropes of the genre, São Paulo: Sinfonia da Metrópole also features small staged scenes, performed anecdotes from everyday life, and a dramatized historical insert based on Pedro Américo’s painting ‘Independence or Death’ (1888), an aspect that opens up a productive comparison with a coeval Portuguese counterpart, Lisboa: Crónica Anedótica (1930), and its more extensive use of...