Picturing Regional Modernity in Brazil: Silent Cinema outside Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, 1923–30

As early twentieth-century Brazil experienced an economic boom fueled by export commodities like coffee, industrial infrastructure and population were increasingly concentrated in the Southeastern cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.  Residents of smaller cities and even regional capitals found themselves in the position of onlookers to a national modernization rapidly unfolding elsewhere.  In the face of their more limited access to imported cultural products, including cinema, film fans in cities and towns across Brazil ranging from Porto Alegre in the far South to the city of Campinas in the state of São Paulo to Recife in the Northeast found an unconventional means of using cinema as a vehicle for participation in modernity. Organizing themselves into precarious production companies, regional filmmakers constructed and presented their own vision of local modernity, highlighting infrastructure like railroads and factories, as well as the glamorous figure of the melindrosa (flapper).  With each locus of film production implicitly claiming to be "the Brazilian Los Angeles," regional film production contested the economic and cultural centrality of Rio and São Paulo.

Since these films faced formidable obstacles to nation-wide distribution, they received their broadest dissemination in Rio de Janeiro-based illustrated magazines like Para Todos, Selecta, and Cinearte, which published production stills, portraits of actors, and reports on local filmmaking efforts in monthly columns dedicated to Brazilian cinema.  Simultaneously publicizing and policing regional film production, these magazines' critics insisted that Brazilian cinema could progress aesthetically and financially only if it conformed closely to the codes of the latest Hollywood super-productions.  Mediated in the pages of illustrated magazines, regional filmmaking played a key role in competing attempts to define the geographic parameters of Brazil's cultural modernity.