The following text is a highlight from an exhaustive database compiled by scholar Lila Foster of amateur cinema columns in Cinearte, which emerged as Brazil’s leading fan magazine in the latter half of the 1920s. Cinearte was reminiscent of Photoplay in its focus on Hollywood films and their glamorous stars; yet its editor-in-chief, future director Adhemar Gonzaga, also spearheaded an influential press campaign in support of Brazilian cinema. Together with his close friend and fellow journalist Pedro Lima, Gonzaga encouraged film enthusiasts scattered across the country to focus their efforts on Hollywood-style narrative filmmaking and abandon nonfiction and promotional films (considered “films de cavação,” a term implying that the filmmakers were exploiting their sponsors by deceiving them about their potential benefits). The campaign urged aspiring filmmakers to cultivate polished production values and a Brazilian star system that would project an image of a racially White and technologically modern nation to domestic and (it was hoped) even foreign audiences.
Cinearte covered amateur cinema from its very first issue in a section entitled “Um pouco de technica” (meaning “a bit of technique” or “a bit of technical instruction”).1 The inaugural column stressed how the ubiquity of light, affordable cameras was rendering amateur moviemaking newly accessible: “The multiplicity of equipment accessible to all budgets found on the market today, of different brands and different origins, make it ever more possible for laypeople to adopt this diversion….equipment of reduced weight and size, as well as price, is divulging the secrets of cinematography, generating new possibilities for all who want to dedicate themselves to this field of activity.”2
Not surprisingly, given the aspirations for a commercially viable cinema energetically promoted by its editor, Cinearte hailed amateur film not as a mere pastime or as an alternative to dominant forms of film production or aesthetics, but rather as a means of professional training in the absence of adequate industrial infrastructure, an ambition that becomes clear in this 1929 column by journalist Sérgio Barretto Filho.3 Ironically, Brazilian cinéastes of the period—who were alternately encouraged in their work by Gonzaga and Lima and chastised for deviating from the Hollywood model, both in private letters and publicly in the pages of Cinearte—might best be considered artisanal filmmakers who straddled the boundary between amateur and professional. They scraped together funds, worked in improvised studio facilities, and often used cameras intended for hobbyists, even though their works attained local and even national distribution at times. Significantly, the text stresses Brazilian film pioneers’ use of amateur equipment while evoking a utopian scenario in which a group of hobbyists from a middle-class suburb would someday use the Bell & Howell or Mitchell cameras standard in Hollywood studios.
Writing in 1929, a moment when this mode of production was waning in Brazil as the transition to sound transformed exhibition and rendered commercial filmmaking ever more inaccessible, Barretto Filho dreamed that a new generation of cinéastes might emerge from an expanding network of amateur moviemakers. That is, as the journalist repeatedly remarked, amateurism could serve as an “access ladder to professionalism.”4 The columnist suggests that Cinearte’s campaign in favor of Brazilian cinema, which included Lima’s efforts to stamp out unscrupulous film schools that offered students false promises of stardom, and the support and friendship the magazine’s staff offered directors like Humberto Mauro—director of silent features like Tesouro perdido (Lost treasure, 1927), Braza dormida (Sleeping ember, 1928), and Sangue mineiro (Blood of Minas Gerais, 1929)—had laid the groundwork for future achievements that amateur filmmakers would do well to imitate. Significantly, Barretto Filho asserts his column’s role in inspiring new filmmakers and shaping audience tastes in order to secure a bright future for Brazilian film. The text demonstrates how, even at a moment when the semi-professional cinema of the silent era was in decline, Cinearte remained a clearinghouse for aspiring filmmakers who sought to learn about and connect with like-minded enthusiasts through its pages. Furthermore, Cinearte’s coverage of amateur and semi-amateur filmmaking activities rendered them publicly visible and thus socially meaningful, even as broad distribution and profitability remained elusive for Brazilian cinema in the period.
1. In 1928, the column was renamed “O desenvolvimento do cinema dos amadores no nosso paiz” (“The development of amateur cinema in our country”), becoming simply “Cinema de amadores” (“Amateur film”) in 1929.↩
2. Filmóphilo [pseud.], “Um pouco de technica,” Cinearte, March 3, 1926, 10.↩
3. Barretto Filho worked for an early Rio de Janeiro film magazine, Palcos e telas, and wrote Cinearte’s sections on amateur and educational film. “Sérgio Barretto Filho,” Cinearte, April 15, 1933, 11.↩
4. “Sérgio Barretto Filho,” Cinearte, April 15, 1933, 11.↩