Q&A: Editors of Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes: On Brazil and Global Cinema

How did the book come about?

The idea for the volume came from Dave Filipi at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Dave’s Center was involved in a large project, the Via Brazil Project, a multiyear initiative focusing on the contemporary culture of Brazil, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. While he was researching for the project, he kept coming across citations of Paulo Emílio’s work. [Dave] soon realised how central [this] work was to understanding Brazilian culture, and he was frankly surprised to discover that very little of Paulo Emílio’s work has been translated into English. So, he approached us, as film scholars who have both published on Brazilian film culture and who have been involved in large-scale translation projects, to edit a volume of Paulo Emílio’s essays for an English-speaking public. We selected 39 essays, dating from the 1950s to the 1970s, which traverse a varied cinematic landscape. The book includes texts dealing with Hollywood, European, and Brazilian film alongside essays on varied topics such as pornography, art-house movies, commercial cinema, and the vicissitudes of developing both a national film archive and film culture against official government resistance and in the absence of technological infrastructures. We’ve included in the volume introductory essays to the different sections, for the benefit of readers who are unfamiliar with the context in which Paulo Emílio was writing. We also oversaw the translations, which were expertly produced by Amber Rose McCartney, a graduate of Leeds University’s Translation Studies MA.

How important is Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes’s work to film culture in Brazil?

If there is still a strong tradition of cinephilia in Brazil in certain circles, Paulo Emílio has a lot to do with it. By engaging with the broader picture of film and filmmaking, and the actual films’ relationship with the socio-political context in which they were produced, Paulo Emílio was instrumental in creating a central place for film in 20th-century cultural history. It is perhaps no exaggeration to claim that it was thanks to his trailblazing work on film culture that filmmakers, curators, and critics are afforded a privileged position within cultural debates in Brazil to this day. Far from being an enlightened critic who was communicating preconceived ideas regarding cinema, Paulo Emílio paid close attention to the audience, seeking to learn about film from viewers themselves. This engagement with the audience is at the heart of Paulo Emílio’s distinctive style of film criticism. As well as showing a singular awareness of the importance of questions such as production, exhibition, reception, and preservation for a nuanced understanding of Brazilian cinema, Paulo Emílio was one of the first film critics both to find value in popular Brazilian cinema (e.g. chanchadas and the films of Amácio Mazzaropi) and to consider the place of Brazilian cinema within the context of Latin American film production. Beyond his film criticism, he was also instrumental in setting up the Cinemateca Brasileira, the Brasilia Film Festival, and tirelessly promoting film archiving and preservation. Paulo Emílio’s university classes additionally set the high standard for film studies teaching and research that we see in Brazil today.

What impact will Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes’s translated works have outside of Brazil?

While a prolific film scholar, critic, and historian, Paulo Emílio’s work has not been widely disseminated beyond Brazil, and very little of it exists in translation. The only works that have received broader dissemination are his study of French filmmaker Jean Vigo, published in French in 1957 and in English in 1971, and his seminal essay “Cinema: Trajectory Within Underdevelopment,” parts of which have been translated into English and have been reproduced in film anthologies in the United States and the United Kingdom. This collection will present readers outside of Brazil with Paulo Emílio’s extensive body of work, allowing them to see his ruminations on Brazilian cinema and also European, Soviet, and Hollywood film, as well as to get to know his political commitment and background. This broad inclusion was part of our commitment to allowing readers to get an idea of Paulo Emílio’s wide ranging knowledge in film and film culture and also to break the straightjacketing of Brazilian critics and scholars of cinema as only being able to talk to and about their own national film culture scholarship, part of a broader limitation and entrenchment, whereby critical reflections on European and US cinema by non-western scholars are by and large elided. Another important contribution of this collection to non-Brazilian readers will be thinking about film theory itself. Firstly, by inserting Brazil’s film scholarship and film culture within broader film theory, which tends to be produced by US or European film scholars. Secondly, what film theory actually is and how it is written. Paulo Emílio has a very personal and intimate style of writing, something that is rarely evident in US and European film theory. We hope that this will allow people to ruminate on how theory is written in the world. 

What have you learned from working on this project?

Both of us were aware of how important Paulo Emílio had been to establishing film culture in Brazil, yet we were both surprised at how much affection critics, filmmakers, and scholars today still have for him, including those who had never met him. This helped the project immensely, as numerous people in Brazil helped us by speaking to us about Paulo Emílio, telling us personal stories about him, and also telling us which essays were important for them personally. We also learned how Paulo Emílio’s political and social commitments and beliefs shaped his cinematic endeavours. We decided to foreground this by starting the collection with a section dedicated precisely to social and political essays and manifestos he wrote, linking them to his work on film, which he very much perceived of as part of his broader politics. I think we were also both struck at how extensive Paulo Emílio’s cinematic work was—from his work as a critic, which covered global cinema in its entirety, to his campaigning for Brazilian cinema as a film archivist who set up Brazil’s first film clubs and the Cinemateca Brasileira. He really is a complete cinephile, and this is something we wanted the collection to communicate—his complete love of cinema and his dedication to working for film to be taken seriously in Brazil. It’s been an illuminating experience bringing the collection together and we hope that readers will enjoy his work and learn to appreciate Paulo Emílio through it as much as we did. 

Images: Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes: On Brazil and Global Cinema. Group from right to left: Stephanie Dennison, Professor of Brazilian Studies, University of Leeds; Maite Conde, Fellow, Director of Studies in Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge; and Dave Filipi, Director of Film/Video, Wexner Center for the Arts. Dave Filipi visits the Brazilian Embassy in London.