Foundational Films. Cinema and Modernity in Brazil, 1889-1930

这项拟议的研究建立在我近年来一直在进行的探索巴西早期电影的工作的基础上。我将出版一本书长的专著，更深入地研究这个主题。自20世纪80年代以来，电影研究学者开始对电影的沉寂年代进行新的研究，着眼于电影的出现与更广泛的现代文化之间的关系。这些研究强调了先锋对生活的新表现--城市的发展、美学的变化(包括博物馆展示的新文化)以及智力变化--是如何通过电影院的发展解决并与之相交的。《基础电影》探讨了电影在巴西对现代生活的发明，考察了媒体的到来和早期传播是如何与第一共和国(1889-1930)的现代化岁月重叠在一起的。在这样做的过程中，它探索了电影如何卷入一个更广泛的项目，该项目旨在构建现代巴西身份，同时寻求保持该国的传统社会和政治轮廓。这项研究的两个关键问题涉及：1)电影是如何在第一共和国期间发生的更广泛的现代化进程中的一部分？2)探索电影在这一时期的到来和发展如何有助于关于巴西文化现代性的辩论，揭示其电影层面？该项目通过一本分为四个部分的书籍长度的专著来探讨这些研究问题。第一部分探讨了早期电影和城市之间的关系，重点是媒体在一个将里约热内卢转变为现代城市的项目中的叠加。第二部分考察了路易斯·托马斯·里斯在1910年代中期制作的民族志电影，当时他在一次探险中绘制了亚马逊盆地未知的地区和民族。在这样做的过程中，它追溯了电影和人类学之间的关系，考察了这两个概念如何为现代巴西投射出种族和文化差异的概念。第三部分探讨了巴西知识分子和电影制作人在20世纪20年代采用好莱坞经典模式时性别和种族政治的交集，将其与他们规范现代媒体大众接受的运动以及对治理的更广泛关注联系在一起；第四部分揭示了巴西电影现代主义，分析了20世纪20年代制作的先锋电影。这些部分中的每一个都说明了电影在展示现代巴西方面所扮演的角色。这项研究之所以重要，有两个原因。首先，巴西的案例研究为早期电影学术及其与现代性文化的联系提供了新的见解。到目前为止，专注于早期电影的电影学者还没有接触到欧美背景之外的背景，在这些背景下，必须重新考虑关于电影与工业和技术进步密不可分的联系的假设，必须考虑媒介的国际传播。这个项目探索了巴西早期电影如何应对来自国外的冲动和模式，根据第一共和国的特定政治和社会背景重新创造它们。其次，对第一共和国时期的电影参与，提供了对拉丁美洲现代性的电影层面的迫切需要的洞察，更具体地说，是对巴西的现代性。近年来，关于拉美电影的研究激增，这引发了关于该地区现代性壮观品质的关键问题。这项工作在很大程度上倾向于关注更当代的发展。通过关注鲜为人知的巴西电影早期，该项目为这一日益增长的研究领域做出了贡献，该领域专注于拉丁美洲电影与现代性之间的关系，同时将其带入不同的历史方向。

The proposed research builds on work I have been conducting in recent years that explores early cinema in Brazil. I will publish a book-length monograph to examine this theme in more depth. Since the 1980s film studies scholars have embarked on new studiesof the silent years of cinema, looking at the relationship between the emergence of film and the broader culture of modernity. These studies have highlighted how physical transformations - the growth of the city, aesthetics changes, which included new cultures of display in museums, , as well as intellectual changes - new representations of life by the vanguard, were addressed by and intersected with the development of the cinema. 'Foundational Films' explores the cinema's invention of modern life in Brazil, looking at how the medium's arrival and early dissemination was imbricated with the modernizing years of the First Republic (1889-1930). In doing so it explores how film was implicated in a broader project that set out to construct a modern Brazilian identity, while at the same time seeking to maintain the country's traditional social and political contours. The two key questions of this research concern: 1) How was the cinema part of broader processes of modernization taking place during the First Republic? 2) How does exploring cinema's arrival and development during this period contribute to debates concerning cultural modernity in Brazil, revealing its cinematic dimensions?The project pursues these research questions through a book length monograph divided into four parts. Part 1 explores the relationship between early cinema and the city, focusing on the medium's imbrication in a project to transform Rio de Janeiro into a modern city. Part 2 examines ethnographic films made in the mid 1910s by Luiz Thomas Reis during an expedition to map the unknown regions and peoples of the Amazon basin. In doing so it traces relationships between film and anthropology, looking at how both projected notions of racial and cultural difference for a modern Brazil. Part 3 explores intersections ofsexual and racial politics in Brazilian intellectual and filmmaker's adoption of Hollywood's classical mode in the 1920s, linking it to their campaign to regulate the modern medium's mass reception and to broader concerns regarding governance; Part 4 uncovers a Brazilian cinematic modernism, analyzing vanguard movies made in the 1920s. Each of these parts illuminates the cinema's role in projecting a modern Brazil. This research is important for two reasons. First, the Brazilian case study offers new insights to early cinema scholarship and its link to the culture of modernity. To date, film scholars focusing on early cinema have not engaged with contexts beyond the Euro-American context, where assumptions about the film's inextricable link to industrial and technological advances must be rethought, and the medium's international dissemination must be considered. This project explores how Brazil's early cinema addressed impulses and models from abroad, recreating them according to the specific political and social context of the First Republic. Second, a cinematic engagement into the period of the First Republic provides much needed insights into the cinematic dimensions of modernity in Latin America, in general, and of Brazil, more specifically. Recent years have seen a proliferation of studies on Latin American film, which has raised key questions concerning modernity's spectacular qualities in the region. This work has largely tended to focus on more contemporary developments. By focusing on the lesser-known early years of Brazilian cinema, this project contributes to this growing area of research that has focused on the relationship between Latin American film and modernity, while taking it into a different historical direction.