1 - Traffic in Images: Visual Spectacle before Cinema in Brazil

Summary

Past generations of film historians, especially those exploring the early years of their national cinemas, tended understandably to focus on the birth of indigenous production. They strove to discover the first films made by native filmmakers as distinct from those by visitors – often roving Lumière operators capturing local scenes for encyclopaedic catalogues of, from our perspective, a somewhat ‘imperial’ character. Revealingly, the memoir of one of the Lumière cameramen was subtitled ‘Memories of an Image-hunter’ (Souvenirs d’un chasseur d’images) (Mesguich 1933). But the preoccupation with ‘firsts’ has had a damaging effect on more ambitious histories of image-making and consumption that are increasingly relevant in today's multiplatform environment.

A media archaeological approach urges us to avoid teleological assumptions about media ‘succession’, considering instead the diverse factors that influence innovation, and recognising that media rarely ‘die’, even if they may be temporarily eclipsed, before reappearing in new modes (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011: 3). Perhaps the most productive concept to explain the dynamic of innovation has been Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin's ‘remediation’, proposed as ‘the logic of new media’ in their landmark book (Bolter and Grusin 2000). In place of succession, Bolter and Grusin showed how new media have self-consciously paid homage to and refashioned earlier media, demonstrating how these could be enhanced by new technologies – as in the familiar ‘desktop’ of computer interfaces. So the earliest popular successes of ‘animated photography’ in Brazil, as in many other predominantly Catholic countries, would be established subjects such as the ‘life of Christ’, and religiously themed melodramas. Remediation, in turn, has fed into the currency of ‘intermediality’, now used in a variety of senses to discuss relations between parallel media (Rajewsky 2005: 43). But the other overarching consideration that needs to be borne in mind in rewriting ‘national’ film histories is the inherent globality of technological media, whereby these were widely exported and welcomed as tokens of modernity and interconnection throughout the nineteenth century.

Traditionally, histories of Brazilian cinema have begun by recording that an ‘Omniographo’ was exhibited in Rio de Janeiro on 8 July 1896 (see Johnson and Stam 1995: 19).