Consuming Visions

By: Maite Conde

¿No es miembro? Sign Up

Synopsis

Consuming Visions explores the relationship between

cinema and writing in early twentieth-century Brazil, focusing on how the new and foreign medium

of film was consumed by a literary society in the throes of modernization. Maite Conde places this

relationship in the specific context of turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro, which

underwent a radical transformation to a modern global city, becoming a concrete symbol of the

country's broader processes of change and modernization. Analyzing an array of literary texts, from

journalistic essays and popular women's novels to anarchist treatises and vaudeville plays, the

author shows how the writers' encounters with the cinema were consistent with the significant

changes taking place in the city.The arrival and initial development of

the cinema in Brazil were part of the new urban landscape in which early Brazilian movies not only

articulated the processes of the city's modernization but also enabled new urban

spectators--women, immigrants, a new working class, and a recently liberated slave

population--to see, believe in, and participate in its future. In the process, these early

movies challenged the power of the written word and of Brazilian writers, threatening the hegemonic

function of writing that had traditionally forged the contours of the nation's cultural life. An

emerging market of consumers of the new cultural phenomena--popular theater, the department

store, the factory, illustrated magazines--reflected changes that not only modernized literary

production but also altered the very life and everyday urban experiences of the population.

Consuming Visions is an ambitious and engaging examination of the ways in which

mass culture can become an agent of intellectual and aesthetic transformation.

Derechos de autor:: 2012 the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia