Light and shadow on the screen: reality, movies and the street at the chronicle printed in Rio's press from 1894 to 1922

Author(s)

Danielle Crepaldi Carvalho

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
• Defense date: 2014-08-22

Examining board members

Miriam Gárate; Eduardo Morettin; Arthur Autran Franco de Sá Neto; Orna Messer Levin; Jefferson Cano

• Advisor: Miriam Gárate

Abstract

This thesis compiles and analyses the chronicle regarding the kinetoscope/ cinematograph published in carioca's newspapers and magazines from 1894 to 1922 - from the beginning of these media up to the establishment of the cinema as both a solid industry and as an art form. It aims to deal with a big issue of this period of time that goes from the arrival of the kinetoscope in Brazil until the development of the star system: the scenic "realism"; a fundamental step for the transformation of the North American cinema in one of the most important industries of the USA. The "realism" of the moving pictures, semantically determined by the name given to the cinematographic lenses - "objective" - moved Brazilian newspapers writers from the beginning. This piece of work centers in the way this realism was experimented and though by writers such as Arthur Azevedo, Paulo Barreto/João do Rio, Olavo Bilac, Elvira Gama, Figueiredo Coimbra, Eva Canel, Baptista Coelho, Figueiredo Pimentel and Graça Aranha. The goal of the research is to establish how the kinetoscope and the cinematograph gave form to the way writers observed the city in general, and specially the streets of Rio de Janeiro in those years when the unbreathable alleys of the provincial city turned into long and elegant avenues built up as open stages - inviting the "Society" to give up private habits to public ones. This study regards the chronicles considering their structure and themes, and the dialogue they established with the moving pictures seen in Rio. Therefore, it's driven into an interdisciplinary job, regarding the cinema from the multiples relations it established with the cultural production of its time: the theater plays, the museums' mise-en-scène, the painting "panoramas", the newspaper novels and reports, etc. We're talking about a two-way path between staging and reality, according to which "real" is staged using as a model solid scenic and literary conventions (AU)