This glimpse at the impact of technology on Brazilian cultural life between 1880 and 1920 should interest historians in a number of ways. The author argues that the preconditions of the Modernist movement emerged out of the excitement and novelty of technical change. Her major contribution is her distinction between “modernism” as a cultural-literary phenomenon and “modernization” as a byproduct of technical change. Technology played a major role. There was the sensation of photography’s “magic eye,” broadly magnified after the 1880s when newly simplified techniques permitted even amateurs to record visual images and therefore make social statements. Motion pictures, dating from the 1890s, followed suit, creating, as it were, a new generation—homus cinematographicus—attuned to the possibilities of the modern age.
Politicians borrowed from technology as well. Floriano Peixoto’s handlers created a personality cult by distributing thousands of portraits of the dictator. The first known public demonstration of the phonograph occurred in 1891, when a monarchist in Pará recorded and played back an antirepublican diatribe. Mass advertising appeared soon after 1900. Periodicals, nourished by advertising revenue and a doubling of the percentage of literate citizens between 1890 and 1900, rapidly took on the modern appearance of industrialized mass media.
“Industrialized” rather than “pure” artifacts imprinted themselves in the Brazilian psyche and conjured up new forms of perception. Kodak snapshots paralleled a new kind of literary throw-away imagery, typified by Oswald de Andrade’s “minute poem,” Velhice:
O netinho jogou os óculos
Na Iatrina
The pre-Modernist literary movement, embracing such figures as João do Rio and Monteiro Lobato, generated a visual dimension with far-reaching impact. Film assaulted literary senses, bringing to writing the quality of a “cinematógrafo de letras.” Photographs, the author shows, helped shape the way Brazilians visualized (and thereby internalized) the changing world.
Flora Süssekind joins the literary critics and cultural historians—José Paulo Paes, Francis Foot Hardman, Nicolau Sevcenko, among others—who have been reinterpreting the post-Modernist emergence of Brazilian culture. Not only has a new generation of scholars surfaced, but a panoply of rediscovered authors and cultural figures for the pre-1920 period: Valdomiro Silveiro, Gonzaga Duque, Coelho Neto, Hilário Tácito, Godofredo Rangel, and the “calígrafo” school (so designated by Antônio Cândido). Cinematógrafo de letras demonstrates convincingly that there is ample room for inquiry into the links between modernization and cultural expression.
