10 - Intermediality in Brazilian Silent Cinema: Luiz de Barros's Works and Intermedial Strategies

Summary

Luiz ‘Lulu’ de Barros was one of Brazil's most prolific filmmakers. Between 1916 and 1977 he directed over 100 films, which included features and shorts, fiction and non-fiction films. Barros also worked extensively with theatre and scenography, as director, set designer, playwright and impresario, in theatres, casinos and other entertainment venues. His constant transit across different types of media and forms of entertainment contributed to the construction and viability of a career that spanned no fewer than seven decades.

Although intermedial strategies, alongside constant dialogues with foreign cinema, characterise his entire career, this chapter will focus on the period between the 1910s and 1920s. This is because the study of Barros's activities in that period can enlighten us on some significant intermedial dynamics pertaining to Brazilian silent cinema as a whole.

There are no known surviving film elements of Barros's silent films. Albeit distressing, this does stimulate an analysis of intermedial relations beyond film texts. Following Rick Altman (1992: 6–7), who proposes the concept of cinema as ‘event’ rather than as ‘text’, this chapter aims to consider ‘a broad spectrum of objects, processes, and activities’.

In Brazilian cinema scholarship, a key reference over the past decades has been Jean-Claude Bernardet's book Historiografia clássica do cinema brasileiro (Classical Historiography of Brazilian Cinema), published in 1995. Although it does not deal directly with the concept of intermediality, the book leans towards this field of enquiry. Its methodological proposals aim at dismantling and refuting the classical historiography that tends to isolate film production from other related arenas. By suggesting a series of ‘research itineraries’, Bernardet (1995: 85) argues that the ‘crossover of diverse territories can enrich the way in which each one of them is understood’. Avoiding nationalistic and overgeneralised approaches, he analyses the production of the so-called Bela Época (Belle Époque) of Brazilian cinema, between 1907 and 1911, by means of transversal cuts or ‘veins’ (filões, in the original) and draws several comparisons: between the most successful genres back then (crime films, sung films and revue films) and other fields such as the press and the theatri-cal revues of the year; between Brazilian and foreign cinema; and between film production and film exhibition and reception.