Cinema fascinated Brazilian writers, critics, and citizens in the early twentieth century as a new form of art and entertainment that had widespread social and cultural repercussions. Lena Oak Suk offers a compelling cultural history of how cinema—as an emerging industry and a social practice of moviegoing—informed views of gender and sexual morality in Brazil. Suk explores the multiple meanings of cinema’s “darkness”—the literal dark of the theater, the fear of indecent acts on-screen or in the audience, the danger of film as a fire hazard—in contrast with its “lightness”—the light upon leaving a theater, the hope for less rigid social hierarchies, the elegance of modern cinemas. This dichotomy of dark and light—with its shades of gray in between—emerges as a throughline across five chapters that combine thorough research with insightful analysis of varied primary sources. While focused on the pre-Vargas years in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the book gestures toward later time periods and other regions to speak more generally about cinema, gender, and urbanization in Brazil.

Organized thematically, the chapters also proceed in a relative chronological order with the first four chapters focused on the 1920s and 1930s and the fifth chapter considering the 1950s to 1980s. This structure enables readers to perceive how ideas about cinema, gender, and sexual morality change in a mutually constitutive manner between the early twentieth century and the mid to late twentieth century. Each chapter opens with evocative examples of film culture and social life in urban Brazil from news articles, film advertisements, or song lyrics that draw readers into the topic. Chapter one examines how early-twentieth-century print culture depicted the melindrosa (the Brazilian “modern girl”) and the “movie-struck girl.” Rich visual analysis of cartoons and ads pairs with references to texts by prominent writers like Patrícia Galvão (Pagu) to reveal the racial anxieties and moral concerns that film culture generated. Chapter two similarly illustrates how filmmakers and intellectuals in the 1920s centered gender and sexual mores in tales that represented urban Brazil alternately as an ideal and a threat. Suk combines her reading of urban-rural dichotomies, gender roles, and race in narrative silent films from Recife, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo with a discussion of how the magazine CineArte offered a nationalist vision of cinema that idealized modern cities and traditional heterosexual romances.

Chapter three discusses the enclosed space of the movie theater—with its dank air and flammable film—as a perceived threat to health, safety, and morality. Suk effectively brings together public health discourses, articles from film magazines, and municipal records to demonstrate how hygienic conditions became synonymous with the gender respectability of certain cinemas in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, as divisions of gender, class, and propriety existed between and within theaters. The following chapter delves further into how intersectional dynamics of gender, class, and race expressed themselves spatially in São Paulo in the 1920s and 1930s and, in turn, informed moviegoers’ different experiences of romance, desire, and the city itself. Suk uses photos, articles, and maps from periodicals and municipal records alongside literary examples—most notably Galvão’s 1933 novel Industrial Park—and oral histories to craft a more nuanced understanding of the spatial practices and social constructions of moviegoing and cinema. Chapter five foregrounds oral histories to analyze how moviegoing transformed in São Paulo from the mid to late twentieth century. By weaving moviegoers’ memories with ephemera of film culture, the chapter portrays the late 1930s to mid-1950s as a nostalgic “golden age” of cinema’s heightened respectability, whereas the 1970s and 1980s were marked by comparative deterioration of theaters, the film industry, and traditional gender roles.

Suk approaches film culture as a historian interested in the vast effects of cinema on gender and urbanization in twentieth-century Brazil, which leads her to examine an unexpected range of sources. She describes her process as “pulling specific threads out of the available material,” which “enriches our knowledge about the lives of young women in the time period” (24). This method allows for the inclusion of women’s magazines, Afro-Brazilian newspapers, and other perspectives often marginalized or excluded in histories of cinema, modernization, and urbanization in Brazil. Importantly, she argues for “the history of women’s participation in film and leisure culture as inherently valuable to the formation of modern Brazil” (179). In doing so, her study contributes to our understanding of how women lived, socialized, and engaged with new cultural forms and social practices in urban Brazil during the twentieth century.