ABSTRACT
In the prologue to his 1909 collection Cinematograph: Rio Chronicles [Cinematógrafo: Crônicas cariocas], the Brazilian writer João do Rio [Paulo Barreto] declares cinema the fi rst and only medium of expression that “reproduces the integral polymorphism of life.” Since the camera is really an extension of our sensory perception, do Rio writes, fi lm comes closest to reproducing the perceptions of the human “machine” (x). If other Latin American writers of the nickelodeon era typically see cinema as a mysterious source of magic, the Brazilian cronista skirts the larger question of the “means” of fi lm technology by likening humans themselves to the apparatus, rendering fi lm a kind of prosthetic device of mundane and practical value. Though virtually unread outside of Brazil, do Rio’s precocious assessment of cinema closely parallels the Futurists’ reverence for fi lm. In his 1914 “Manifesto of the Seventh Art,” Ricciotto Canudo praises fi lm’s ability to unite individuals of “whatever historic, geographic, ethnic or ethical” environment in a shared aesthetic experience, proclaiming the cinema an “art of total synthesis [ . . . ] born of the Machine and of Sentiment” (15-17). Although their similarities are remarkable, it would be a mistake to equate early cine-crônicas like do Rio’s with European avant-garde projects by the likes of Marinetti and Canudo, fi rst because Latin American writers of the fi rst two decades of the twentieth century lacked a collective ideological platform from which to formulate unifi ed theories about mass culture, fi lm and technology; and second because their disparate, peripheral sites of enunciation separated these writers geographically and symbolically from the principal centers of early fi lm production: Europe and North America.
