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Conde, Maite. Consuming Visions: Cinema, Writing, and Modernity in Rio de Janeiro.
Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2012. 227 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8139-3214-9.
This book examines literature and cinema's relationship with one another and to Rio de Janeiro (then Brazil's capital) primarily during the "pre-modernist" period, i.e. from the late 1890s to 1922, the year of the Semana de Arte Moderna and the Manifesto Modernista. Conde maintains that early cinema planted the seeds of that period's literary innovations, and she initially presents the late 1890s and early twentieth century as one of great change in Brazil's demographic, economic, and artistic states of affairs. Indeed, during the period in question, Brazil was intent on modernizing and beautifying its capital city.
Brazil's first film came from France and played in Rio in 1896. During the period under study, many films were made in Brazil - of which only 3% exist today. Conde couples Cariocas' avid movie-going with the increasing popularity of the crònica in Brazilian newspapers. This peculiarly Brazilian genre dates from the mid-nineteenth century and has persisted and thrived to the present day. Like the early films, the crònica is a short piece in which the everyman confronts an often bewildering modernity. A popular cronista (Joäo do Rio) and the Parnassian poet Olavo Bilac found subject matter for their crónicas in the Cariocas' (and their own) reactions to the movies. Joäo do Rio embraced the worldliness, motion, juxtapositions, and rapid-fire imagery movies offered and even likened his crónicas to contemporary movies. Bilac was less accepting. He saw film as the harbinger of literature's demise and (before anyone knew about mirror neurons) reported being both physically and emotionally shattered by two hours at the movies. He argued that movies deprived viewers of the ability to ponder and speculate and that they contributed to modern man's obsession with immediacy.
Conde reminds us that despite the cosmetic changes instituted in Rio' s architecture and layout, "there was no great socioeconomic reform" (58) and "traditional hierarchies [... were] simply...