Brazilian Modernism and the Movies. Oswald de Andrade's Cinematic Consumption

By the 1920s, new ideas regarding film as the seventh art disseminated in Europe had a profound effect on Brazilian literature, specifically the emergence of the avant-garde literary movement known modernismo. Charting the new theories regarding cinema as an art form, this essay examines how they were appropriated and re-elaborated by modernist writers in Brazil in the early 1920s as part of their project to redefine Brazilian letters for the twentieth century. It focuses specifically on novels and writings by Oswald de Andrade. Like other modernists, such as Mário de Andrade and Guilherme de Almeida, Oswald wrote about film in the press in the early 1900s. His interest in the moving pictures, however went further. Taking on board new film theories from Europe, Oswald incorporated cinematic techniques in his novels, reconceptualising realism for the modern age. Examining Memorias sentimentais de João Miramar (1924) and Seraphim Ponte Grande (1928) along with his manifestos, the essay looks at how Oswald’s self-conscious cinematic consumption enabled him to challenge the aura of the traditional role of Brazilian writing and of the writer and in doing so construct a new literary subjectivity, one that was inherently cinematic