The Dialogue Between Literature and Film in Early Twentieth Century Rio de Janeiro Robert Patrick Newcomb Maite, Conde. Consuming Visions: Cinema, Writing, and Modernity in Rio de Janeiro. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012. 227 pp. ISBN 978-0-8139-3214-9. In Consuming Visions: Cinema, Writing, and Modernity in Rio de Janeiro, Maite Conde charts the dialectical relationship between literary composition and incipient Brazilian film production in Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the twentieth century. Conde observes a two-part movement: Brazilian writers including Olavo Bilac and João do Rio commented on the emerging medium of film, and in certain cases, as in Monteiro Lobato’s “Marabá” (1923), incorporated cinematic techniques or motifs into their work. Meanwhile, early Brazilian filmmakers sought inspiration in nineteenth-century novels such as José de Alencar’s O guarani and Iracema (dir. Vittório Capellaro, 1916 and 1920) and Joaquim Manuel de Macedo’s A moreninha (dir. Antonio Leal, 1917), as well as in French and U.S. models. Conde backdates Brazilian literature’s engagement with cinema to the first two decades of the twentieth century, demonstrating that “Brazilian writers had been observing film well before the advent of modernism in 1922” (2). She thereby contributes to a valuable, ongoing reappraisal of the vitality of Brazilian literary culture during the period commonly referred to as pré-modernismo, which has traditionally been overlooked. Conde highlights several interesting features of early twentieth century Rio de Janeiro’s literary culture. In her second chapter, “Comic Visions of the New City,” she describes practices of the period that bridged the journalistic, literary, theatrical and cinematic. These include the jornal falado (spoken newspaper), in which “new bohemian” writers recited their newspaper pieces in venues such as cafés and theatres, “ma[king] fun of contemporary life, parodying fashionable writing, as well as Rio’s Europeanized social and political landscape” (73), and Bastos Tigre’s fitas impressas (printed movies), which were “tantamount to a crônica written in the form of a movie” (74). And early films such as Alberto Botelho’s Paz e amor (Love and Peace, 1910) drew on the vaudevillian tradition of teatro de revista, and in doing so “domesticated, or localized” film, rendering it more authentic to—and critical of—Brazil (77). In what to my mind is the book’s best chapter, “Envisioning a New Political Landscape,” Conde describes the film production of recent, [End Page 142] often Italian immigrants to Brazil. She convincingly argues that their films, frequently produced by mutualist associations, constituted a cinema of identification distinct from the exotic foreign vistas marketed to fashionable carioca moviegoers. And finally, in the chapter “Women, Rio’s Modernity, and Film’s Visual Pleasures,” Conde makes a strong case for Benjamin Costallat’s novel Mademoiselle Cinema (1923) as an important reflection on consumerism and changing women’s roles that has perhaps been obscured by the prominence of the São Paulo-based Brazilian modernistas. Conde’s broad literary-historical claims are bold, and invite debate. In arguing for the specific importance of the first years of Brazil’s Old Republic, Conde risks downplaying certain overarching historical continuities. First, in her introduction and opening chapter, “Documenting New Urban Experiences,” she describes early twentieth century Rio de Janeiro’s “French-style makeover [which was] aimed at expressing and projecting the country’s new and modern identity, which was profoundly identified with Europe” (4). She also references Brazil’s contemporaneous insertion into “neocolonial” economic relations in which European nations “export[ed] consumer items and new technologies in exchange for raw materials, such as coffee” (26). While Rio’s “Haussmanization” under Mayor Francisco Pereira Passos (1902–06) was dramatic, it followed earlier urban renewal efforts, which can be backdated at least to the arrival of the Portuguese court in 1808. Indeed, as early as Manuel Antônio de Almeida’s comic novel Memórias de um sargento de milícias (Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant; 1852–53), which chronicles the period of Dom João VI’s residency in Rio (1808–21), carioca writers had been documenting a city that had since been altered by urban reforms. Similarly, the Brazilian economy had been built since...
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Jan 1, 2024
Alckmar Luiz Dos Santos 
