Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes: On Brazil and Global Cinema

By Maite Conde and Stephanie Dennison

Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes (1916–77) is revered in Brazil as the first ardent defender, promoter and theorist of Brazilian cinema. A film professor, critic and historian, his dedication to cinema shaped a generation of influential film critics in his home country, and set the foundations for the serious study of film in Brazil. For the first time in English, this book brings together a selection of his essays for an English-speaking audience, with detailed explanatory introductions to each section for readers unfamiliar with the context of the writings of Salles Gomes.

By blending together ruminations on global and national cinema, as well as avant-garde film and popular movies, the collection shows how the defence and promotion of a national cinema has been forged through dialogues with international trends, informed by commercial influences, and shaped by global and national political contexts. The book thus introduces readers to the international dimensions of Salles Gomes’s engagements with film, and in doing so reassesses the locatedness of his formulations on national cinema and signals their international dimensions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781786833259

Book preview

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes

Series Editors

Professor David George (Swansea University)

Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds)

Editorial Board

David Frier (University of Leeds)

Lisa Shaw (University of Liverpool)

Gareth Walters (Swansea University)

Rob Stone (University of Birmingham)

David Gies (University of Virginia)

Catherine Davies (University of London)

Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds)

Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds)

Jo Labanyi (New York University)

Roger Bartra (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

Other titles in the series

The Tlatelolco Massacre, Mexico 1968, and the Emotional Triangle of Anger, Grief and Shame: Discourses of Truth(s)

Victoria Carpenter

The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism and Crisis in Argentina

Ignacio Aguiló

Catalan Culture: Experimentation, creative imagination and the relationship with Spain

Lloyd Hughes Davies, J. B. Hall and D. Gareth Walters

Catalan Cartoons: A Cultural and Political History

Rhiannon McGlade

Revolutionaries, Rebels and Robbers: The Golden Age of Banditry in Mexico, Latin America and the Chicano American southwest, 1850–1950

Pascale Baker

Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Death

Julia Banwell

Galicia, A Sentimental Nation

Helena Miguelez-Carballeira

The Brazilian Road Movie

Sara Brandellero

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes

On Brazil and Global Cinema

Edited by

MAITE CONDE AND STEPHANIE DENNISON

© The Contributors, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-323-5

e-ISBN 978-1-78683-325-9

The right of The Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes © Acervo Cinemateca Brasileira, Secretaria do Audiovisual do Ministério da Cultura.

Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword

Acknowledgements

List of Sources

List of Illustrations

Preface

Foreword

Introductory Essay: Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, Cinema and Cinephilia

Part I: Social and Cinematic Engagements

Introduction

Declaration

Commentary

A Time of Pessimism

Platform for a New Generation

Start of a Conversation

A Century of Film

Unnecessary Intellect

Part II: Foreign Dialogues

Introduction

On Hollywood

The Long Voyage Home

Against Fantasia

Citizen Kane

Orson Welles: The Brazilian Adventure

Hitchcock’s Mutations

Independence and Money

Is Chaplin Cinema?

Mythology and Truth

On Soviet and European Cinema

Jean Vigo: Zéro de Conduite

Eisenstein’s Thinking

The Other Side of Jean Renoir

The Ideology of Metropolis

A Religious Adventure

The Critic André Bazin

Battleship Potemkin and October

Cinema and Prostitution

Revolution, Cinema and Love

Part III: National Cinema

Introduction

On Brazilian Cinema

Mauro and Two Other Great Directors

The Good and the Bad in Khouri

Compensated Nudity

A Healthy Orgy

On the Banks of Ipiranga

The Secret of the Man Critics Never Praised: Mazzaropi

The Three Gunslingers

Glauber

For a National Cinema

Paulo Emílio: A Brazilian Film Critic

A Colonial Situation?

Cinema: A Trajectory within Underdevelopment

The Social Expression of Documentary Films in Silent Brazilian Cinema

Exhibitors

The Cinematheque and Obstinacy

The Latin American Situation

Bibliography

Filmography

Notes

Series Editors’ Foreword

Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superseded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa.

In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies that explore all aspects of Cultural Production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research in the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies that explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the following experts on the work of Paulo Emílio who provided us with advice in the early stages of this project: Carlos Augusto Calil, Walnice Nogueira Galvão, Randal Johnson, Adilson Inácio Mendes and Ismail Xavier. We also had the opportunity to discuss the collection and Paulo Emílio’s work with Randal Johnson and Kleber Mendonça Filho at a conference organised by the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in February 2017. Many thanks to both Randal and Kleber for their engagements with the project and also to Wexner for organising the event. We would like to thank staff at the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo, particularly Alexandre Miyazato for providing us with supporting materials for the project. Thanks to Amber Rose McCartney for her fresh and thoughtful translations of Paulo Emílio’s work and also to Imogen Folland for her editorial assistance. We appreciate the ongoing support of our colleagues within the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge and the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds, and we acknowledge our institutions’ support. Many thanks to Paulo Emílio’s family and also to Jordi Roca and Lúcia Riff for their support and help with this project. In no particular order, our thanks also go to the following people: Lúcia Nagib for her enthusiasm and strong support for the volume; Colin Jones for copy- editing assistance; and Catherine Benamou for advising on Orson Welles’ It’s All True. Finally, many thanks to David Filipi of the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University for providing us with the initial inspiration for this project and for his continued support throughout it.

List of Sources

The essays included in this collection were originally written for and published in newspapers and journals as listed below. Most are published here for the first time in English and were translated by Amber Rose McCartney, unless otherwise indicated.

Declaration (Declaração: Clima, July/August 1942)

Commentary (Comentário: Clima, April 1943)

A Time of Pessimism (O tempo do pessimismo: Suplemento literário, 1957)

Platform for a New Generation (Plataforma da nova geração: published as a manifesto, 1945)

Start of a Conversation (Começo de conversa: Brasil, Urgente, 1963)

A Century of Film (Cinema no século: Jornal do Brasil, 1970)

Unnecessary Intellect (Desnecessidade da inteligência: Suplemento literário, 1957)

The Long Voyage Home (Clima, 1941)

Against Fantasia (Contra Fantasia: Clima, 1941)

Citizen Kane (Citizen Kane: Clima, 1941)

Orson Welles: The Brazilian Adventure (A aventura brasileira: Suplemento literário, 1957)

Hitchcock’s Mutations (As mutações de Hitchcock: Suplemento literário, 1957)

Independence and Money (Independência e dinheiro: Suplemento literário, 1958)

Is Chaplin Cinema? (Chaplin é cinema?: Suplemento literário, 1965)

Mythology and Truth (Mitologia e verdade: Suplemento literário, 1958)

Jean Vigo: Zéro de Conduite (Jean Vigo, translated into English from French by Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, 1971)

Eisenstein’s Thinking (O pensamento de Eisenstein: Suplemento literário, 1957)

The Other Side of Jean Renoir (A outra face de Jean Renoir: Suplemento literário, 1958)

The Ideology of Metropolis (Ideologia de Metrópolis: Suplemento literário, 1959)

A Religious Adventure (Uma aventura religiosa: Suplemento literário, 1958)

The Critic André Bazin (O crítico André Bazin: Suplemento literário, 1959)

Battleship Potemkin and October (Potemkin e Outubro: Suplemento literário, 1962)

Cinema and Prostitution (Cinema e prostituição: Suplemento literário, 1961)

Revolution, Cinema and Love (Revolução, cinema e amor: Suplemento literário, 1961)

Mauro and Two Other Great Directors (Mauro e dois outros grandes: Il cinema brasiliano, 1961)

The Good and the Bad in Khouri (Falar bem e mal de Khouri: Brasil, urgente, 1963)

Compensated Nudity (Uma nudez compensada: Jornal da tarde, 1973)

A Healthy Orgy (Uma orgia saudável: Jornal da tarde, 1973)

On the Banks of Ipiranga (Nas margens da Ipiranga: Jornal da tarde, 1973)

The Secret of the Man Critics Never Praised: Mazzaropi (O segredo do homem que a crítica nunca elogiou: Mazzaropi: Jornal da tarde, 1973)

The Three Gunslingers (Os três justiceiros: Jornal da tarde, 1973)

Glauber (Glauber: Glauber Rocha, 1977)

Paulo Emílio: Brazilian Film Critic (Paulo Emílio: nosso crítico de cinema: Jornal da tarde, 1973)

A Colonial Situation? (Uma situação colonial?: Suplemento literário, 1960)

Cinema: A Trajectory within Underdevelopment (Cinema: trajetória em desenvolvimento: Argumento, 1973)

The Social Expression of Documentary Films in Silent Brazilian Cinema (A expressão social dos filmes documentais no cinema mudo brasileiro: Anais da 1a mostra e 1o simpósio do filme documentário brasileiro, 1974)

Exhibitors (Exibidores: Jornal da tarde, 1973)

The Cinematheque and Obstinacy (Cinemateca e obstinação: Suplemento literário, 1957)

The Latin American Situation (Situação latinoamericana: Suplemento literário, 1957)

List of Illustrations

Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes: Film critic and activist.

Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes on a film location in Brazil.

Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes at the Cinemateca Brasileira

Images courtesy of Acervo Cinemateca Brasileira/SAv/MinC

Preface

DAVID FILIPI

Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University

Early in 2010, the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in Columbus was invited by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to conceive an ambitious Center-wide project that would be grounded in research and education and that would expand our collective curatorial breadth in a manner simply not possible with the resources to which we were accustomed. The Center’s programmatic philosophy has always had an international focus and our numerous discussions quickly pointed in that direction. Around this time, Ohio State announced its intention to open a Global Gateway in São Paulo in the wake of the university opening offices in Shanghai and Mumbai. We certainly presented Brazilian art, film and music throughout the Center’s history but no one on the staff had a deep level of expertise about the country, let alone its art and culture. Instead of seeing this as an obstacle, we viewed our collective lack as a wonderful opportunity for research and discovery. Thus, in October 2010 we very humbly embarked on what would become an almost six-year initiative to research the contemporary art and culture of Brazil across disciplines and throughout regions. The Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary arts organisation and the programming the Mellon grant made possible is a clear reflection of this.

Perhaps the most ambitious project was our 2014 exhibition Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil, a four-gallery show featuring more than 71 works by 35 contemporary artists. Some of the work was created especially for the exhibition, most notably Lucia Koch’s Mirrorama, an installation which transformed a large portion of the Center’s lobby space. Feeding on the notion of the Portuguese word ‘cruzamentos’, which translates literally to ‘intersections’ and ‘crossings’ but is also rich with more figurative interpretations that speak to Brazil’s cultural hybridity, we presented Cruzamentos: Contemporary Brazilian Documentary, which examined the country’s rich documentary tradition across 24 features and 15 shorts, from 1974’s Iracema to contemporary times. We also sponsored residencies by Gabriel Mascaro and Jonathas de Andrade via our film/video studio programme – hosted by Walter Salles, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Cao Guimarães and Karim Ainouz, who all introduced films – along with individual screenings and talks throughout the initiative.

This volume represents the last in a series of programmes and projects organised under the auspices of the Mellon grant. While carrying out initial research on Brazilian culture a name continually appeared: Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes. We realised that it would be a significant contribution to the field and to a deeper understanding of Brazilian film history if we supported a translation of this pivotal figure’s important writings.

We provided the impulse but it was Maite Conde and Stephanie Dennison, this book’s editors and experienced scholars of Brazilian film culture, who provided the expertise and organised the contents of this volume, and we are deeply indebted to them for their combined dedication to this book. I would also like to thank the translator Amber Rose McCartney, a former student of Stephanie on the University of Leeds Masters programme in Translation Studies, who so graciously and enthusiastically agreed to participate in our endeavour.

Finally, my deep thanks to the Mellon Foundation not only for its generous support of all of these projects but also for its patience in seeing this publication through to the end.

Foreword

RANDAL JOHNSON

University of California, Los Angeles

I had the honour to meet Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes in 1975. I was a doctoral student in Luso-Brazilian Literature at the University of Texas, and I went to São Paulo to undertake research for my dissertation on Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s adaptation of Mário de Andrade’s 1928 novel, Macunaíma. I knew few people in São Paulo, and for reasons I don’t recall, Paulo Emílio became my contact person at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), where I would carry out a shot-by-shot analysis of Joaquim Pedro’s film. I remember one moment of my first day very clearly. As we were walking toward the building that housed ECA, the Escola de Comunicações e Artes (School of Communication and Art), Paulo Emílio said ‘some people will think you’re with the CIA, but don’t pay any attention to them’. He was correct on both counts: some people did apparently have suspicions about my presence at USP at a moment when Brazil was in the middle of a twenty-one-year military dictatorship supported by the United States, but in the long run those suspicions didn’t matter, and I was able to make many friends and contacts in São Paulo’s intellectual and film communities.

During my months-long stay in São Paulo, I had somewhat regular contact with Paulo Emílio. One day he took me to visit the Cinemateca Brasileira, which was then housed in the Parque de Ibirapuera, and on another he invited me to lunch in his apartment, where I met his wife, writer Lygia Fagundes Telles. My impression of him then and now, 41 years after I met him and 39 since his death, is of a very kind, gentle, generous and intellectually rigorous person who had a huge influence on those with whom he came into contact. A few years later, Robert Stam and I dedicated Brazilian Cinema to Paulo Emílio, using a photograph of him holding a can of film, with the following words: ‘Dedicated to Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes (1916–1977) for all he has done to preserve the Brazilian cinematic memory.’ Even though the book was published five years after his death, we deliberately chose to use the present perfect – ‘all he has done’ – because his initiatives, example, and intellectual influence continued long after his untimely passing.

Paulo Emílio’s impact in Brazil is at once intellectual, institutional and personal. The essays collected in this volume are representative of his intellectual concerns, including some of his key political reflections from the 1940s (Part I) as well as a selection of his film criticism or articles on film-related topics. To give a sense of the breadth of his writing, the editors have included essays dealing with foreign cinemas (American, European and Soviet) in addition to Brazilian cinema, which concerned Paulo Emílio almost exclusively starting in the 1960s. This is the first collection of Paulo Emílio’s writings published in English, and it is long overdue.

To begin to understand Paulo Emílio’s trajectory, profile and legacy, one might think of the subtitle of a collection of his articles published two decades ago in São Paulo: ‘Um intelectual na linha de frente’ (‘An intellectual on the front line’).¹ He was on the front lines of political activism in the 1930s as a member of a communist youth organisation and the Aliança Nacional Libertadora (National Liberation Alliance), which led to his fourteen-month imprisonment in late 1935. His intellectual engagement also began early. In July 1935, at the age of nineteen, he and future theatre critic Décio de Almeida Prado founded Movimento, ‘a magazine of the present that looks toward the future’,² a short-lived publication that included the collaboration of such intellectual and artistic luminaries as Mário de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, and Lúcia Miguel Pereira. In the review, under the pseudonym of Hag Reindrahr, Paulo Emílio published a poem about the death of a young Jewish worker because of the terrible working conditions at the Santa Maria factory, which belonged to his own family.³

Starting in 1939, Paulo Emílio formed part of a group of young intellectuals – Antonio Candido, Décio de Almeida Prado, Lourival Gomes Machado, Ruy Coelho, and Gilda de Mello e Souza – who published the journal Clima (1941–44). They comprised a generation of critics who would collectively have a lasting impact on Brazil’s cultural and intellectual life, both in the university and in the press, as leading figures in areas such as literature (Candido and Mello e Souza), theatre (Prado), art (Machado), anthropology (Coelho), and cinema (Paulo Emílio). According to Heloísa Pontes, the group’s participants ‘established the contours of their generation’s intellectual and political platform; rendered viable the beginning of their careers as cultural critics; and laid the foundations for the construction of their own authorial voice’.⁴ It was in Clima that Paulo Emílio, at the age of twenty-five, would begin his long and productive career as a film critic, another area in which he was on the front lines, as indicated throughout this volume.

Paulo Emílio’s interest in film actually began a few years earlier, during his exile in Paris after his escape from prison in 1936. There, he was able to screen such films as Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928), Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), which he had been unable to see when it was released in Brazil because of his imprisonment, and Renoir’s The Grand Illusion (1937), among many other films.⁵ He became friends with Plínio Sussekind Rocha, one of the founding members of the Chaplin Club, a film club established in Rio de Janeiro in 1928 that published the review O Fan (The Fan).

In Paris, he and Rocha frequented screenings at a number of venues and film societies, including the Cercle du cinéma, which was created by Henri Langlois and Georges Franju and associated with the Cinématheque Française. The Cercle and other film clubs, as well as the Cinématheque, provided a model for what Paulo Emílio would like to do in Brazil. As José Inácio de Melo Souza writes, ‘the seed was planted’ for future initiatives in Brazil that would have a long-lasting institutional impact,⁶ and Paulo Emílio and his friend Décio de Almeida Prado discussed their plans while still in Paris.⁷

In 1940, not long after he returned to São Paulo, Paulo Emílio and Décio were among the founders of the Clube de Cinema de São Paulo in the Faculdade de Letras, Ciência e Filosofia (Faculty of Letters, Science and Philosophy), in what Ismail Xavier calls ‘the best tradition of film clubs’.⁸ The Clube would screen and discuss silent films, of which Paulo Emílio was an ardent defender, but its ambitions were much higher. Its founders wanted to create a filmoteca (film library) and establish relationships with such international institutions as MoMA, in New York, Cine-Arte, in Buenos Aires and the Cercle du Cinéma in Paris.⁹ However, the Clube lasted only a short while before it closed by the government.¹⁰Although students and professors – including such foreign luminaries as Roger Bastide and Giuseppe Ungaretti – attended the screenings, according to Ruy Coelho, ‘The centre of everything was Paulo Emílio, with his booming voice, his contagious laughter, his tireless activity, and, a rare quality in intellectuals, his modesty.’¹¹ In 1946, after the war and the fall of the Estado Novo dictatorship, the club was re-established. Paulo Emílio was not one of its founding members. He returned to Paris, where he became the club’s European correspondent.¹² He remained in Paris until 1954 and became engaged in articulations between film organisations in São Paulo – the Clube de Cinema and the filmoteca (film library) of the new Museu de Arte Moderna – and FIAF (the International Federation of Film Archives), which had accepted the filmoteca’s membership in 1948. The Clube soon became associated with the filmoteca, while Paulo Emílio was active in FIAF in Europe.¹³

After Paulo Emílio’s return to Brazil, in 1956, he and a number of other intellectuals, including several from the Clima generation, founded the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo, finally bringing to fruition an idea that he had had since his initial sojourn in Paris in the late 1930s. Today, the Cinemateca maintains intensive programming, preservation, educational and research activities. Paulo Emílio was a central figure in its operation until his death in 1977. The Cinemateca is but one example of his immense institutional impact.

A second example involves the longest-running festival of Brazilian cinema in Brazil. In 1965, Paulo Emílio participated the organisation of a Semana de Cinema Brasileiro (Week of Brazilian Cinema) while he was a professor at the University of Brasília. The films exhibited in the Semana, all from 1965, included some of the most important works of the second wave of the Cinema Novo movement: Leon Hirszman’s A falecida (The Deceased), Roberto Santos’s A hora e vez de Augusto Matraga (The Hour and Turn of Augusto Matraga), Paulo César Saraceni’s O desafio (The Dare), Walter Lima Jr’s Menino de engenho (Plantation Boy), and Luis Sérgio Person’s São Paulo S.A. (São Paulo Inc.), among others. The Semana was the embryo of the Festival de Brasília de Cinema Brasileiro (Brasilia Festival of Brazilian Cinema), which celebrated its fiftieth year in 2017.

The formal study of film in Brazilian universities dates from the 1960s, and this represents yet another example of Paulo Emílio’s institutional legacy. He began teaching film-related courses at both the Universidade de São Paulo and the Universidade de Brasília as early as 1962.¹⁴ He participated in the creation of the latter’s film programme in 1965.¹⁵ Unfortunately, the military dictatorship imposed in 1964 did not allow the programme to flourish, and the entire film faculty resigned en masse. Two years later, Paulo Emílio, along with Jean-Claude Bernardet and Rudá de Andrade, became one of the inaugural professors of cinema at the Universidade de São Paulo, where he helped establish the Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA) which continues to house one of the strongest film programmes in Brazil.

In the university, he taught a broad range of courses. Regardless of the topic at hand, he never saw film aesthetics isolated from broader social, political and cultural contexts. He was insistent that students understand formal characteristics of film. To that end, he would apparently have them screen the same film over and over again. Film director Jorge Bodanzky, who studied with Paulo Emílio in Brasília, for example, relates that Paulo Emílio would screen Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) for his students multiple times. The first several times they would have to count the number of shots, repeating the exercise until they had a relatively approximate number. He would then have them screen it several more times, paying attention to such things as the photography, dialogue, camera movement, and sound.¹⁶

It was in the university, as well as in numerous seminars and short courses given in multiple cities in Brazil, that Paulo Emílio left an enduring personal and intellectual legacy through the many people with whom he worked, taught and engaged in discussions about cinema. In 2007 I presented a paper at a Latin American Studies Association Congress titled ‘Configurations of Brazilian Film Criticism’. Paulo Emílio was, of course, an important reference in the paper. As part of my research for the paper, I attempted to give a very brief and purely quantitative sense of Paulo Emílio’s lasting importance by counting his doctoral advisees as well as his advisees’ advisees. At the time, I found that Paulo Emílio and two of his doctoral students, Maria Rita Galvão and Ismail Xavier, were responsible for directing 8.1 per cent of all of the film-related theses and dissertations written to that point in Brazil, and 10.5 per cent of those dealing with Brazilian cinema. Together with the following generation of scholars – that is, scholars who worked under the supervision of Maria Rita or Ismail – they accounted for almost 15 per cent of all theses and dissertations defended in Brazil, and almost 18 per cent of those dealing with Brazilian topics. This intellectual genealogy includes such people as Tunico Amâncio, Mariarosaria Fabris, Rubens Machado Jr., Lúcia Nagib, and Fernão Pessoa Ramos, among others, names with which anyone working on Brazilian cinema today would be familiar.

Even though he had spent many years in France, where he had first become interested in the cinema as an art form, and even though his first book dealt with French director Jean Vigo, late in his life Paulo Emílio focused increasingly on Brazilian cinema. In interviews, he sees this shift as part of a process of cultural decolonisation,¹⁷ a process that may have begun as early as 1960 with the publication of the article ‘A Colonial Situation?’, which is included in this volume. He indicated, after his about-face, that he was ashamed of the fact that for many years Brazilian cinema simply did not exist for him: ‘I think it’s very sad that my generation still only take foreign cinema into consideration, and have the impression that I have made a great deal of progress by being interested only in Brazilian cinema.’¹⁸

Paulo Emílio is often said to have declared, in the early 1970s, that ‘the worst Brazilian film is better than any foreign film’, provoking virulent responses from a number of distinguished intellectuals. Whether or not he actually made the statement is an open question, but a response to a question in the above-cited interview granted to Carlos Reichenbach, Éder Mazini, and Inácio Araújo may provide a level of nuance: ‘We find so much of ourselves in a bad film that may reveal much about our problematics, our culture, our underdevelopment, our coarseness, which are inseparable from our humanity, that in the final analysis it is much more stimulating to the spirit and the culture to pay attention to these works than to continue consuming foreign products with intellectual comfort and aesthetic satisfaction.’¹⁹ In other words, to perhaps state the obvious, the worst Brazilian film has more to say about Brazil, its culture, and its society, than the best foreign film. Paulo Emílio’s dedication to Brazilian cinema towards the end of his life can thus be seen as an eminently political gesture, and one that is perfectly consistent with political positions taken throughout his adult life.

Introductory Essay: Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, Cinema and Cinephilia

MAITE CONDE AND STEPHANIE DENNISON

The best criticism deepens our interests in individual films, reveals new meanings and perspectives, expands our sense of the medium, confronts our assumptions about value, and sharpens our capacity to discriminate.¹

Best known outside Brazil for his work on French cinema, notably his definitive study of the eponymous Jean Vigo (1957),² Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes (1916–77) is revered within Brazil as one of the country’s founding fathers of film criticism and film studies both through the large volume of essays he published throughout his life (some 400)³ and latterly through his teaching at a number of important film schools; as an instrumental figure in the development of film archiving, both in Europe and in Brazil; and as the first ardent defender and promoter of Brazilian cinema. This anthology brings together a selection of his most influential essays for an English-speaking audience. In doing so, it introduces readers to the work of Brazil’s first and foremost cinephile.

Paulo Emílio: Brazil’s Total Cinephile

In a much-discussed 1996 article titled ‘The Decay of Cinema’,⁴ Susan Sontag writes that while it has become commonplace to lament