O Descobrimento do Brasil

Released three years after Ganga Bruta, this Discovery of Brazil is certainly not as sophisticated as previous movie by Humberto Mauro, who, anyway, still must be praised by his pioneer work. Besides him, other giants from Brazilian cultural and intellectual circles cooperated in the film. Nobody less than Heitor Villa-Lobos composed the obviously excellent soudtrack. The father of Brazilian radio, Roquette Pinto, was a consultant, together with Afonso Taunay and Bernardino José de Souza. The movie is very didactical, as it was a project by the Ministry of Education for educational reasons. Off course the film was biased by the historical views of those times, very acritical ones. The contact between Portuguese and native people is portrayed as very kind, calm and well intentioned in both sides, in spite of minor mutual strangeness. In the beginning, there is a bizarre inclusion of two kids in Pedro Álvares Cabral's ship, what I cannot believe that may have happened. Technically, the film has a very good production, with a nice portrayal of the ships from inside and outside, and convincing enough costume design and navigation instruments. While there are some nice sail scenes, I considered most of the film too static, almost as if the characters were motionless paintings (no, it was not similar to Barry Lyndon, far from it, if you are thinking about it). It is curious that, despite it be a spoken movie, with some dialogues either in Portuguese or in Tupy, there are also many moments in which the characters talk but the sound is just the musical score, as if it were a silent film. A great part of the old movie portrays the trip from Portugal to America, also showing a map where the ship singals the crossed path. What happened along that trip follows closely the testimonies by Pero Vaz de Caminha, the man in the crew who was responsible for reporting the events. To resume, the film is not a gem, but it is historically important and still has some merits despite dated.

It's a historical movie. One of the first of Brazilian Filmography, it has it's importance, but clearly shows how underdeveloped the seventh art was in Brasil in that point. Years before had been made: City Lights, Modern Times ans M (Fritz Lang). Mauro's filmed theater was then dated and boring, but important to the development. History curiosity, that's all.

The acting is definitely theatrical and the quality of the copy we have today, even restored, is terrible.

In the years to come, better things (considering international panorama) were made in Brazil.

No great performances required, no rich plot written, this is a simple and unpretentious reenactment of Pêro Vaz de Caminha's letter to king D. Manuel I of Portugal.

Pêro Vaz de Caminha was the senior scribe of the Portuguese armada of Pedro Álvares de Cabral that officially discovered Brazil in 1500, and this letter marks the beginning of the current country Brazil, founded on Portuguese colonization. Just for that reason this is an interesting enough film to anyone interested in world history.

The somewhat hammy acting is interspersed with text separators, but hey!, these were the 30's, cinema everywhere was still getting used to the 'talkies' and still had too much of the 20's influence to be really good. The Portuguese sailors' anguish on their long months at sea, the portrait of the native Brazilians, and the contact between the two civilizations are moving and funny enough because of the innocence with which they were acted.

All in all, good piece of entertaining, a classic of Brazilian cinema and a worthy theme. And it could kinda be considered a great-grandfather of Ridley Scott's 1492.