Studio: Empresa William & Cia (Brazil)
Short Synopsis
Barcarola belongs to the first years of Brazilian cinema, when Julio Ferrez, son of the pioneer exhibitor Marc Ferrez, was making short films for the Rio de Janeiro trade. Its title names the Venetian boating song it illustrates, and it is documented as one of the "filmes cantantes", sung films, in which a singer or singers performed from behind the screen in time with the picture. Antonio Cataldi, a singer, is the only credited performer. The film does not survive, and no description of what appeared on screen has been found beyond catalogue entries, so what the pictures showed, and how much of them was drawn, painted or trick-photographed rather than filmed, cannot be stated. This entry records what the filmographies record and no more.
Why It Matters
- As an object it is almost entirely lost; as a fact it is interesting. The sung film was Brazil's answer to the problem of silent cinema, a mixture of picture, music and live voice that was for a few years the most popular form in Rio, and Barcarola is one of the earliest titles in that fashion.
- It appears in surveys of early Brazilian film and in some early-animation lists because Ferrez's productions sat on the border between filmed theatre, trick film and the illustrated song, the same border on which animation was emerging in France and the United States at the same time. Its inclusion here marks the Latin American side of that moment.
Notes and Trivia
- The Ferrez family dominated early Brazilian film exhibition; Marc Ferrez's shop imported the first projectors to Rio.
- The sung-film fashion collapsed after 1911 when American and European imports took over Brazilian screens.
- See also: El Apóstol (1917), Peludópolis (1931).