Screening Rio: Cinema and the Desire for 'The City' in Turn-of-the-Century Brazil.

This paper draws upon and contributes to recent discussions concerning the homologous relationship between early cinema and urban space. It focuses on the ways in which the introduction and development of film in Brazil was part of a project of urban transformation that took place in the country's then capital, Rio de Janeiro, at the start of the twentieth century, a project that was intended to transform the city into Brazil's capital of the twentieth century. The paper argues that while the foreign medium's arrival was inscribed and implicated in the city's transformation, helping to map and project an ideal image of urban space, its subsequent development produced patterns of spectatorship and production that charted new spatial practices, in which Brazilian spectators negotiated their own local experiences in the modernized city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]