Photography and Films: Representations of Madeira Island between Journalism, Ethnography and Tourist Propaganda in the First Decades of the 20th Century. The Case of Madeira Film and its Man with the Camera

Abstract

Taking the visual representation of Madeira island as a key issue, we will focus our attention on the analysis of the cinema produced in Funchal by Madeira Film in the 1920s, under the direction of Manuel Luiz Vieira’s camera.
Reflecting on the methodological challenges placed by the study of both the first films in the History of Cinema and the cinematography produced in peripheral spaces such as Madeira, we will defend: (1) the need to return to the Archive; (2) the non-restriction of the corpus of analysis to films (many of them meanwhile disappeared), extending it to other visual and written discourses, in particular those preserved in periodical publications; and (3) the adoption of comparative approaches, which allow the study both of the role cinema assumed in Madeiran Cultural System and its relation with other cinematographic and non-cinematographic phenomena situated in national context and other international ones. National and international phenomena in which, after all, Madeiran Cultural System and Madeira Film’s cinematographic production were also involved.
Therefore, we will relate Madeira Film’s cinema either with the broader work of its cameraman, with the Madeiran tradition of visual representation of the island (particularly relevant since the advent of photography in the 19^th Century), with the nationalist tendency then dominant in the Portuguese Cinematographic System, and even with the local dynamics of regionalist affirmation since the 1910s. We will argue that the Madeira Film repertoire, oscillating between journalistic discourse, the search for the ethnographic portrait and the investment in the island’s propaganda, experimented the invention of a typically Madeiran cinema, which not only contributed to the imagination and projection of Madeira as a community endowed with its own identity (in clear alignment with the regionalist proposals of the Cenáculo regionalist group), but also continued the process of imagining Madeira as a tourist island intensified in the 19^th century with the invention of photography and the popularization of the illustrated postcard.

Keywords

Photography; Cinema; Madeira Film; Regionalism/Nationalism; Tourism; Identity Construction.