Sob o desígnio moral: o cinema além do filme (1900-1964)

Abstract

Interpretations about cinema, in many cases, reduce it to the specific film. Meantime, cinema as a whole is something much broader than going beyond the film itself. In the contours of the projection, maximum object of the cinema, they orbit a set of activities that dimension the idea of cinema for something much more complex. In this research, the relations between cinema and morality are investigated in order to seek the understanding of how this association provoked movements in the direction that the historical course of the cinematographic activities were taking as the cinema became popular and developed, and therefore caused in groups that organized themselves in the yearning to try to direct the destinies and applicabilitys of the cinema in the social. However, research begins by analyzing the moral self-regulation of the beginnings of the American film industry, that is, the ways in which, through a pressure from morality, legislation has been created until the Code of Production, which promoted a targeted filter to movies considered immoral fearing losing the big profits billed by the industry. Due to the financial power of the American film industry in the distribution of films around the world, this self-regulatory moral filter influenced perceptions about cinema in several countries, with emphasis in this research for Brazil. In this scenario, catholic organizations were created in order to try to solve the threats that the cinema caused to what they conceived as the moral conduct of christian individuals, being more prominent in this sense the Office Catholique Internationale Du Cinema and the Legion of the Decency of the United States , the latter, which had great influence with the film industries and the high catholic hierarchical authorities, an influence that culminated in the articulation and production by the Vatican of a legitimating document that served as a basis for directing catholic actions to the cinema: encyclical Vigilanti Cura. Parallel to these situations, there was also the desire to direct the direction of cinema through the bias of moral argument through the theories of popes who, since the end of the nineteenth century, understood that there was a need to dispute within the discourse what consisted and what was the place of cinema within the modernity that for them was even denied. This anti-modernity whose cinema was a product of danger led to the creation of Catholic Action, which created specific secretariats and departments to deal with the cinema, which on the other hand ended up generating an intense cinematographic movement in Brazil, by fomenting activities that led to the formation of militant intellectuals of the moral cause for the cinema, as well as they have strengthened the cineclubism, magazines of cinema and the creation of the first academic superior course of cinema in Brazil. Therefore, this research seeks to highlight the ways in which through the argumentative/discursive axis that sought to link the cinema to the moral discourse construct according to the conveniences, several were the situations that, starting from this linkage, moved the cinematographic activities in the United States and Brazil during large part of the twentieth century