Suffering in Whitened Frames: Historical Films and Representations of Slavery in Rio de Janeiro during the First Republic (1907-1916)

Abstract The theme of this article is the encounter between some historical films that portrayed slavery in Classical Antiquity and Rio de Janeiro’s public scene during the First Republic, more precisely in the period between 1907 and 1916. Our main argument is that the consumption of such historical films contributed to the whitening of experiences of slavery in the common sense of carioca spectators of the time. The circulation of such productions thus fostered an erasure of the traumatic experiences that slavery represented for Afro-Brazilian populations. Our sources are the films A Slave’s Love and The Slave, available in online databases of the Library of Congress and Cinémathèque Française, as well as advertisements published by several newspapers concomitantly to their exhibitions and collected in the Hemeroteca Digital da Biblioteca Nacional. In our conclusion, we emphasize how the narratives of the films used procedures related to the massive genre of melodrama and, in their consumption, obscured some references that were closer to carioca spectators’ experiences of slavery in Brazil.