Summary
A celluloid fever-dream stitched from nitrate and gunpowder sun, O Que Foi O Carnaval de 1920! detonates the notion that archival footage must behave like polite anthropology. Botelho’s hand-cranked camera, drunk on equatorial light, plunges into Rio’s tidal roar of confetti, sweat, and brass just as the republic’s oligarchic mask begins to slip. The carnival he captures is no folkloric postcard; it is a living fresco of bodies—Afro-Brazilian afoxés, Portuguese shop-boys, newly arrived Syrian peddlers—milling beneath façades still scarred by the 1919 Spanish-flu quarantine. Over three reels that feel like three centuries, the film pirouettes from the hilltop battlements of São Januário to the swampy back-lots where papier-mâché floats collapse into river clay, exposing the raw scaffolding of spectacle. Children smear lamp-black across their cheeks, mimicking the Hollywood charcoal of Theda Bara, while dockworkers in wire-rimmed spectacles quote anarchist broadsheets between refrains of “Pelo Telefone.” The camera lingers on sequins trembling like fish-scales, on policemen’s sabers catching the flash of magnesium flares, on a lone woman in Pierrot costume who stares back at the lens until the Fourth Wall liquefies. At the climax, Botelho intercuts the coronation of the Rio carnival king with a shot of a tram cable snapping—sparks showering the avenue like a premature burial of the Belle Époque itself. The film ends where it began: waves gnawing the shore, cymbals fading, a stray feather spiraling in the gutter—history’s heartbeat caught between a samba and a gasp.
Synopsis
A view of the Carnival festivities in the city of Rio de Janeiro, as covered by filmmaker Alberto Botelho in 1920.
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