O cinema mudo Brasileiro

CLASSICS & ANTHOLOGIES

O cinema mudo Brasileiro

Following in the footsteps of the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé in Paris, CINEMATEK is hosting a panorama of silent films from the Brazilian Cinémathèque this autumn, all in newly restored versions. The program is supplemented by a focus on the silent cinema of Alberto Cavalcanti, a Brazilian who began his filmmaking career in Paris during the bustling 1920s.

This program also bears witness to a century of international cinematic exchanges. It features figures like anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and poet-filmmaker Mario Peixoto, both born in Brussels, as well as the early career of Alberto Cavalcanti, a Brazilian who studied architecture at the Geneva School of Fine Arts. An experimenter and critic, Cavalcanti was a key figure in the history of French silent cinema and even more so in British documentary filmmaking after the arrival of sound. In the 1950s, he was invited back to Brazil to help relaunch national production. Two Hungarian immigrants, Rex Lustig and Adalberto Kemeny, created a beautiful urban symphony in São Paulo, a symphonia da metrópole.

Brazil quickly embraced the new art of filmmaking, organizing screenings of locally shot films, which included adaptations of Brazilian and foreign literature, as well as films sometimes sung or spoken by the actors during projection (filmes falantes e cantantes). By 1915, American studios arrived in Rio and São Paulo, imposing the style of their successful films, such as adventure stories and melodramas.

Outside the capital, however, a new type of cinema emerged that, while inspired by fashionable genres, forged the originality of Brazilian silent film. A filmmaker named Humberto Mauro, from the city of Cataguases in Minas Gerais, founded his own company (Phebo Film) and shot three low-budget films. One of them, Thesouro Perdido, was critically acclaimed in 1927, followed by Brasa Dormida, the first box-office success in the history of Brazilian cinema. This success secured him funding for the film Sangue Mineiro, a melodrama starring Carmen Santos, an iconic actress who was also Brazil's first female director and producer. Under the condition of securing a role, she gave a chance to the Brussels-born Mario Peixoto for what would become the first avant-garde film in the history of Latin American cinema, Limite. In the Northeast, in Recife, Gentil Roiz directed visually stunning melodramas like Aitaré da Praia, often shot on location. The original colors of these films, released on color-tinted film stock to set the mood (a technique known as tinting or toning), were restored by the Brazilian Cinémathèque using a process invented by Noël Desmet, the founder of CINEMATEK’s lab, known as "Desmetcolor".

In collaboration with

Tuesday 02.09 18:00 PLATEAU Cart

Tuesday 09.09 20:00 PLATEAU Cart

O cinema mudo Brasileiro

La Galerie des monstres

Jaque-Catelain, France 1924 ⁄ Jaque-Catelain, Jean Murat, Loïs Moran ⁄ B&W ⁄ 82' ⁄ TIT: FR ⁄ ST - OND: — ⁄ PIANO