"ART, LUXURY, ELEGANCE": CRAFTING AN AESTHETIC OF ASPIRATION IN SAO PAULO'S EARLY CINEMAS.

• Author: Levy, Aiala

A reader thumbing through the May 24, 1916, issue of 0 Estado de Sao Paulo would have been surprised to confront, on page twelve, the nearly life-size face of Francesca Bertini. (1) Peering longingly into the distance, the Italian film actress was rendered dramatic in the newspaper's black and white, a contrast of colors by now familiar to Sao Paulo's moviegoers. Less familiar would have been the scale of Bertini's portrait and the surrounding text, which together formed one of the first full-page illustrated advertisements in the city's leading dailies (Figure 1). The advertised product was Bertini's latest film, Laperla del cinema (A Perola do Cinema in Portuguese) and, more precisely, the venue at which the film would be screened, the Royal Theatre. According to the announcement, the Royal was Sao Paulo's "preferred cinema, where the Paulistano Elite finds the irrefutably best programs, where the most celebrated artists in film perform on an enormous white screen, where appear the most luxurious and rich toilettes [attires], where attends all that there is of the most elegant in this capital." "The most elegant," the advertisement suggested, was the desired status, a group to which the Estado's readers yearned to belong. Moreover, it was a group to which the Estado's readers could belong. Elegance was a matter of consumption, of watching acclaimed films and donning stylish clothing in an attractive setting.

The pages below explore the marketing of cinematic programming, architecture, and audiences to analyze how early cinemas shaped public life in Sao Paulo. Cinemas like the Royal Theatre were hardly alone in selling elegance to paulistanos (the city's residents) in the period immediately before World War I, but they did so as part of a nascent industry finding its footing. The first dedicated cinema in Sao Paulo, the Bijou Theatre, was established in 1907 by Francisco Serrador, a formerly itinerant film exhibitor. Serrador's cinema proved a watershed, and over the next seven years, approximately one hundred movie theaters would open throughout Sao Paulo. Cinema producers--the men who financed, managed, or owned cinemas--rushed to capitalize on Sao Paulo's growing population, competing with one another for the loyalty of the 350,000 men, women, and children who around 1910 called Sao Paulo home. In an effort to legitimize their still experimental medium, these entrepreneurs experimented with new forms of operating and marketing. As the number and printmaking capabilities of Sao Paulo's periodicals increased, so did the number and ornamentation of cinema advertisements. (2) Likewise, plastered posters and flyers, enhanced by recently arrived zinc plating and halftone methods, turned passersby's heads in many corners of the city and especially in the bustling downtown. As in Vanessa Schwartz's Paris, print and film combined to create a heightened visual culture, a public life saturated by shared spectacular representations. (3)

In Sao Paulo, I argue, this representation took on a particular aesthetic, what I call an aesthetic of aspiration. Art, beauty, elegance, luxury, and their corresponding adjectives were the buzzwords of the day, at least in the pages of the Estado. While an imperfect measurement, queries for these terms in the Estado's digital archive illustrate a spike in their rate of appearance during the 1910s, at the same time that other common descriptors of visual pleasure, such as Undo and bonito (both roughly equivalent to "pretty"), fell out of favor. (4) More significantly, these four terms proliferated in the society and classified columns of the Estado, encompassing clothing and accessories, bodies and buildings, but also extending beyond the material to behaviors and ideas. Collectively, they referred to a refinement that flattened all it described to the two-dimensional, contributing to a "stylization of life" that prioritized the visual and external. (5) The latter qualities were those most easily consumed in the first decades of Walter Benjamin's age of mechanical reproduction; the aesthetic of aspiration was a secular, reproducible beauty, associated in form with the historically affluent but attainable in practice through financial transaction. (6) It was an aesthetic funded by and let loose in capitalism, in a city newly and markedly wealthy and brimming with newcomers, among them cinema producers. By deploying--without ever defining--art, beauty, elegance, and luxury to sell their wares, cinema producers nurtured and responded to the aspirations of an urbanizing upper class as well as those outside the "elite" of the Royal Theatre ad. Consequently, the overlap of cinema producers' and consumers' aspirations helped situate aesthetics at the heart of social belonging in Sao Paulo. (7)

The power and appeal of the aesthetic of aspiration lay in its pretension to spatial and temporal universality. In other words, the principles of beauty that determined what constituted "elegant" and so forth were presumed to cut across space and time, to hold constant in an otherwise transforming world. Yet, these principles traveled along imperialist routes that located Europe, especially Paris, at the center of cultural production and consequently modernity. (8) Early cinema followed the same paths, disseminating the literal and figurative viewpoints of European and US filmmakers and repackaging these as globally comprehensive. Film's attraction for Latin Americans lay not only in its breathtaking presentation of reality, but, as Ana Lopez notes, in its function as an import that offered an "accessible globality." (9) The consumption of foreign cinema contributed to what Maite Conde, citing Brito Broca, describes for Rio de Janeiro as worldliness (mundanismo), fulfilling what Jeffrey Needell calls an "aristocratic fantasy" of "cultural identification" with European elites. (10) In early twentieth-century Sao Paulo, however, globality was not entirely a fantasy nor was it confined to society's upper echelon: half the population, including most cinema producers, had been born abroad and another (significantly smaller) segment was well traveled. By extending our analysis beyond the screen, we can see how cinema producers' adoption and adaption of "North Atlantic universals"--art, beauty, elegance, luxury--invited monied paulistanos to affirm their global taste and thus membership in a local elite."

Indeed, cinema producers around 1910 relied on paulistanos' history of cosmopolitan theatergoing to frame moviegoing as elite leisure. Seeking to attract theatergoers, producers repurposed long-held conventions of highbrow theater to interpret art, beauty, elegance, and luxury as temporally stable values. Early cinema in this manner functioned as a "space in between" Brazil and the world, but also past and present and elite and popular. (12) The timelessness that paulistano exhibitors invoked stood in contrast to the "dictatorship of smartismo" in Rio's press, which linked cosmopolitan consumption to ephemeral fashions and social climbing to social chaos. (13) Although equally dissociated from Catholic aesthetics, characterizations of elite leisure and status in the boomtown that was Sao Paulo were more conservative (and in Portuguese or French, rather than English), grounded in individuals' desires to prove a personal or familial history of cultural sophistication. If in Rio the fetishization of foreign commodities validated a nobility stripped of its titles after the 1889 republican coup, in Sao Paulo, the consumption of the artistic status quo opened doors to those eager to rise within the social status quo. (14) By promising an enduring cultural refinement, cinema producers peddled cultural capital to a budding white-collar sector, serving as accidental "middle-class gatekeepers." (15) Cinema producers' marketing of a seemingly ageless beauty also appealed to a newly urban upper class anxious to remedy the city's perceived lack of cultural progress; early cinema's period of "transitional narratives" usefully coincided with the Chakrabartian "transition narrative" of Sao Paulo's boosters. (16) Furthermore, at a moment when municipal leaders were rewriting their past, allusions to cultural tradition strengthened the narrative of Sao Paulo as historically exceptional. (17) The aesthetic of aspiration was an intentional hybridity of tradition and modernity, a provincial cosmopolitanism that, as Nestor Garcia Canclini observes, proved advantageous in Latin America both "to hegemonic groups and to popular sectors [wishing] to take possession of the benefits of modernity." (18)

Cinema producers' aesthetic of aspiration is thus a Sao Paulo story but also a global story of aesthetic legitimization and cultural indigenization. Like Arjun Appadurai's Indian cricket, early cinemas in Sao Paulo were "spectacular experiments with modernity" whose local experimentality was made possible by initial claims to traditional, foreign notions of propriety and refinement. (19) At the same time that they broadened their audience, cinema producers reinforced an existing cultural hierarchy that simultaneously belied and reified a classed and racialized ordering of society. The aesthetic of aspiration promulgated the idea that social belonging entailed little more than a performance, an act accessible to any paulistano capable of purchasing the right props and training, regardless of their skin color, occupation, sex, or nationality. Moreover, the universalization and commodification of European forms perpetuated a global racial hierarchy while avoiding the language of race; "artistic" and "elegant" were convenient euphemisms in a country that had recently abolished slavery. (20) From this perspective, the 1930s whitening of paulista regionalism studied by Barbara Weinstein can be attributed in part to the more comprehensive embrace, including by some Afro-paulistanos, of a commercialized, purportedly universal...