The Representation of Brazil in the 1920s through Silvino Santos’ Camera

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This post was contributed by André Reyes Novaes, Visiting Fellow in the Department of Geography, University of Nottingham and Lecturer in the Department of Geography, State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ).

Cinema and national pride have been articulated in very different contexts. As a kind of national allegory, films can become a monument and participate in the construction of identities by highlighting national virtues. These ideas were the starting point for the analysis of the representation of Brazil in 1920s cinema by Professor Eduardo Morettin, presented in the seminar series organized by the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies at Birkbeck.

Eduardo Morettin is a Professor of Audiovisual History in the School of Arts and Communication (ECA) at the University of São Paulo. His paper focused on three specific films: 1922: a Exposição da Independência (1970, Arno Konder and Roberto Kahané), No país das Amazonas (1922, Silvino Santos and Agesilau Araújo) and No Rastro do Eldorado (1925, Silvino Santos). Each film was analyzed taking into account their historical context and their functions. Morettin’s talk provoked active participation of the audience chaired by the discussant, Dr Luciana Martins, who has also published on Silvino Santos’ films.

Documenting the Brazilian Centennial Exhibition

The first film discussed by Morettin was 1922: a Exposição da Independência, which was made during the Brazilian Independence Centennial World Fair (1922-1923), the first international exhibition that took place in Rio de Janeiro after the World War. The filmmaker Silvino Santos, who was at the exhibition for the screening of his film No país das Amazonas, took the opportunity to film the event, which was intended to celebrate Brazilian independence (1822). Santos was a photographer and cameraman of Portuguese origins who lived most of his life in the Amazon region in Brazil. His films represent an important record of the transformation of many Brazilian landscapes.

1922: a Exposição da Independência displayed a newly transformed area of Rio de Janeiro that was opened up by the leveling of the Castelo hill at the heart of the city. Outdoor and indoor scenes of the temporary pavilions and permanent buildings provide a picture of the city that celebrated Brazilian modernity. The visitors of the exhibition – mostly white and well dressed – promenaded on the exhibition’s boulevards, while in the interior of the pavilions Santos’ camera showed several products and scientific innovations.

Amazon and Modernity in the Early Twentieth Century     

Screened at the Amazonas State pavilion, No país das Amazonas was very successful in terms of public and critics, as Morettin argued. The film was produced by the commercial company of J. G. Araújo, which had business in the city of Manaus, the capital of Amazonia State, and across the Amazon region. No país das Amazonas thus worked as a visual catalogue of local products and their productive processes. According to Morettin, the film was an invitation for foreign investments in the region.

By comparing the representation of the film with earlier paintings, such as the painting by Felix Emile Taunay (Mata Reduzida a Carvão, 1830), Morettin suggested that the film reproduced a familiar visual trope in the context of the Brazilian nation’s iconography, ‘the submission of our exuberant nature to the purpose of civilization’. The beginning of the film, with urban landscapes from Manaus and the emphasis on industrial activities, demonstrates the intention to construct this dichotomic image between the forest and the modern activities. In an important scene of the film, Santos evoked the famous scene of the Lumière brothers, showing workers leaving the factory. 

Scientific Exploration and Indigenous Representation

Although the main goal of J. G.Araújo was to show a modern and developed state in the Amazon region, Santos’ camera focused repeatedly on people working: fishermen, rubber tappers, Brazil nut peelers in the factory, and many other characters were highlighted, showing different elements of Brazilian modernity. In contrast to this emphasis on activities related to the commercial and industrial context in the Amazon, the last movie shown by Morettin displayed a more typical vision of the region, that of the jungle. In No Rastro do Eldorado, the film by Santos on the expedition of the American physician and geographer Alexander Hamilton Rice to the interior of the Amazon Basin, the emphasis was on indigenous people.

Invited to make the record of a modern expedition, which used new technologies such as a hydroplane and radio, Santos produced a film that showed the exuberance and the beauty of the Amazon forest. According to Morettin, in addition to focusing on the scientific activities and the potential of the region, No Rastro do Eldorado also showed the explorer’s routine, observing the native Indians with empathy. Santos’ film provided a more complete picture of the Amazon region, which went beyond the rational and economic discourse present in Alexander Hamilton Rice’s writings.     

By analyzing these pioneering Brazilian films, Morettin explored different aspects of the representation of the country during the 1920s. In a period characterized by the absence of documents and records, the films by Santos are an inestimable register of Brazil and deserve the attention of researchers from many different areas. This seminar offered to the audience a glimpse on the tensions and contradictions of Brazilian modernity during the 1920s.

The Politics of Population Change: Launch of Book and Research Group

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This post was contributed by Guy Collender, Communications Manager at Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations

The links between politics and population change – often deemed too controversial for debate – were explored during a frank discussion at a book launch held at Birkbeck.

Speakers urged academics and society to recognise the many implications of unprecedented and unfolding developments addressed in the new book Political demography: How population changes are reshaping international security and national politics.

The Population, Environment and Resources Group – a new part of Birkbeck’s Politics Department – was also launched at the event on Thursday 19 April.

Professor Eric Kaufmann, of Birkbeck’s Department of Politics and co-editor of the book, described the range of population dynamics affecting politics. Birth rates, urbanisation, sex ratios and the age structure of a population all have far-reaching consequences for nations, ethnic groups, religions, civilizations, and development.

He explained how we are living through “unprecedented” demographic shifts as the “population explosion” which began in the 20th century is being followed by a “fertility implosion.” These trends are much more exaggerated today in the developing world than they were during the demographic transition – the progression from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates – in the developed world between 1750 and 1900.

Kaufmann mentioned that such “great unevenness” promises to result in dramatic change. He suggested, for example, how high birth rates, a young population and high unemployment  – a combinations of factors relating to population – might lead to violence.

Fertility as a weapon

Monica Duffy Toft, Associate Professor at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and co-editor of Political Demography, focused on the use of fertility as a political weapon in her presentation on “wombfare.” She said: “In international relations and politics numbers matter. If numbers shift and the political institutions do not this will lead to problems. It becomes a conflict if one group is out-birthing another.” In particular, Toft referred to the political importance of fertility between different groups in Lebanon (Christians and Muslims), and Israel and Palestine (Jews and Arabs, Jews and Muslims).

Population dynamics in Africa

Dr Elliott Green, of the London School of Economics, referred to the interaction between population and conflict in Africa. He emphasised Africa’s low population density, which has led to communal land rights as there is more demand for labour than land, and the existence of large states. Green discussed the phenomenon of rural to rural migration, and conflict between settler and native groups, particularly in Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which have both experienced population growth rates of four per cent since the mid-20th century.

Sensible debate needed

Professor Tim Dyson, of LSE, reiterated the significance of the demographic transition. He declared that “nothing is more important” in explaining the growth of democratisation as fertility decline leads to a greater proportion of adults in the population, and adults demand a voice in how they are governed. The positive impact on women’s lives because of fertility decline was also mentioned.

However, Dyson warned about the virtual disappearance of demography as a discipline in the English-speaking world, and the widespread aversion to raising population concerns, as well as discussing climate change. He added: “Human beings everywhere do not like to talk about difficult issues. We should be able to talk about these things in a balanced, sensible and civilized way.”

Listen to the podcast of The Politics of Population Change

BabyLab Showcase 2012

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This post was contributed by Denise Breitenbach and Yvonne Whelan 

Introduced by Prof. Mark Johnson, this year’s Birkbeck BabyLab Showcase highlighted the importance of researching aspects of infant cognition over time. Between birth and adolescence, our grey ‘jelly-like’ brains expand three times in size and undergo an astounding amount of structural adaptation. These changes aren’t solely reliant on our genes: genetic information unfolds over time by interacting with our external world experiences. For example, social skills related to the processing of facial cues such as smiling, develop early on as children experience seeing others’ faces. Early life contextual factors can also impact negatively upon development: poverty has been linked to effects on the brain which can result in a range of mental health difficulties.

So how are BabyLab scientists linking structural brain changes to the development of perceptual, cognitive, motor and language abilities? As babies often lurch rapidly between contented gurgling, gutsy wailing and gentle snoozing, novel experimental techniques are required. These include: 1) Behavioural testing such as eye tracking (e.g. used for testing preferential looking at faces versus complex objects) 2) Electromagnetic recording methods (EEG/ERPs) using a damp hat to record tiny voltage changes on the scalp as groups of neurons synchronously fire together on exposure to a task 3) Optical imaging (NIRS), where weak light beams are used to track blood flow in the brain as babies are thinking/perceiving stimuli 4) MRI scanning – used for sleeping babies to discover more about brain structure and functioning.

Changing their mind

In the first showcase talk, Dr Natasha Kirkham explained how good working memory (WM) and inhibitory control (IC) in children contribute to the development of decision-making, remembering of rules and the production of contextually appropriate behaviour  (e.g. speaking loudly in assembly, but not at the cinema). Childhood development of WM and IC has been tested using the Dimensional Change Card Sort Task where firstly, children were asked to match a target card with reference stimuli according to shape, and then to only match according to colour. Although 3 year olds performed worse than 5 year olds where there was a category conflict according to the prior rule (e.g. a red truck had to be matched with a red star), scaffolding a 3 year old child’s learning experience helped to improve their performance. For instance, instructing them to repeat a new rule, rather than solely providing ‘yes/no’ feedback to card choices delivered the greatest improvement. Next, Natasha provided us with an additional experimental example testing WM and IC – the ‘Delay of Gratification Task’ where in order to earn many more Oreo cookies, children were asked to refrain from eating those already placed before them until an adult re-entered the room. Amusing strategies employed included children sitting on their hands or putting cookies in drawers!

Shining Light on the Infant Brain

In the second showcase talk Dr Sarah Lloyd-Fox informed us how an exciting and novel way to shine light on the functioning of an infant’s brain is to do it literally by using a technique called NIRS. This works by shining a weak light into the infant’s head which passes through the infant’s skull and reaches underlying brain tissue.

NIRS comes with many benefits to researchers: it can be used on babies who are awake (so they can be tested with visual imagery rather than sounds only) and has better spatial resolution than MRI. At Birkbeck, NIRS has been used to investigate when infants start to see and interpret actions, alongside questions such as ‘is our ability to use our hands to interact with our environment related to how we respond when we see other people performing similar actions?’. As emphasized by Dr. Natasha Kirkham earlier, the experimental value of play should never have been underestimated and this question was examined using games testing infants’ manual expertise. Intriguingly enough, evidence suggests that there may be a relationship between the way our developing brain responds to the sight of human motion and the motion we learn to form ourselves.

Infant time perception – ‘Escaping the Eternal Now’

In the third talk Dr Caspar Addyman highlighted how babies are often absorbed in something in the ‘now’: “in one moment babies can be in howls of tears and the next, in peals of laughter”.

How is it that humans gauge how quickly an event ‘feels’? Caspar described how for adults the longer ago something occurred, the fuzzier a memory exists of it. Judging the ‘fuzziness’ gives us a measure of how long ago in time it occurred. Since infants’ memories are not very well developed, it is difficult for them to judge the continuity of events. Thus, in order to learn more about the development of infants’ perception of time, BabyLab researchers are testing the long and short term memories of 6, 10 and 14 month olds using habituation (the classic technique of making babies bored!) with heart rate measures and eye movements being monitored. In addition, movement is thought to be very important to an infant’s developing understanding and judgement of time and events – at 6 months the world has to come to you, by 14 months exploration increases as crawling and walking ensue, expanding an infant’s sphere of the world. Such interaction may link to changes in the judgement of time. This is ongoing research and we look forward to hearing the results of Caspar’s study in the future.

Autism in infancy

The final talk, given by Dr Teodora Gliga, described the progress developmental science is making towards understanding autism spectrum disorders (ASD). ASD are presently diagnosed from 24 months onwards when children fail to meet social communicative developmental milestones. Researchers at Birkbeck are investigating how ASD can be detected and diagnosed earlier, for example by trying to decipher the pre-requisites for language development. As ASD is a genetic disorder (there is a 10% chance of developing ASD if one has a sibling with it vs a 1% chance for the general population), a prospective longitudinal study has been used to investigate infants who have siblings with autism over a 3 year clinical assessment period. 

Evidence indicates that although there are no differences in paying attention to faces between ASD and typically developing infants at 6 months and 12 months, there are early differences with gaze direction and a failure to follow gaze from 6 months – a precursor of social ability. In order to inform intervention strategies, future studies will need to focus on testing children at multiple time points and using measures such as attention (looking away from irrelevant objects), the ability to discriminate gaze direction, follow gaze, to acquire words,  maternal input (words child hears), the social and biological environment, a child’s genes, and risk factors during pregnancy.

Read more about BabyLab research in the news.

Birkbeck Commemorates World TB Day by Discussing Drugs from Plants

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This post was contributed by Clare Sansom, a part-time lecturer in Birkbeck’s Department of Biological Sciences, and a freelance consultant and science journalist.

World TB Day is held on 24 March every year, to mark the day in 1882 when Robert Koch, one of the fathers of microbiology, first announced that he had discovered the cause of tuberculosis (TB) – the bacterium now known as Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Over 125 years since its discovery, and despite billions of dollars of investment in drug discovery, this bacterium is still a killer. The World Health Organisation estimates that about two billion people are infected with latent tuberculosis; in 2010, the last year for which full figures are available, over eight million people became ill with active tuberculosis, and 1.4 million people died from the disease. Two factors help make TB particularly deadly: it often occurs in people infected with the HIV virus, where it is one of the major causes of death, and drug resistant forms are becoming more common. In January 2012, Nature reported the identification in India of so-called “totally drug resistant” (TDR) tuberculosis, resistant to all anti-TB drugs in general use.

In 2012 at Birkbeck, World TB Day coincided with the start of the College’s annual Science Week. Dr Sanjib Bhakta, head of the Mycobacteria Research Laboratory in the Department of Biological Sciences, organised a well-attended symposium on tuberculosis and its treatment. Besides two scientific presentations, the symposium featured a short video, Tuberculosis: The Real Story, highlighting the views of people affected by TB in the UK, and a panel discussion led by the grassroots volunteer organisation Results UK on some of the political challenges raised by tuberculosis. 

Both science lectures focused on plants as a source of potential new drugs for tuberculosis. Professor Franz Bucar from the University of Graz in Austria highlighted the extreme chemical diversity of compounds that could be extracted from plants, particularly as compared to those found in the average synthetic compound library. Plants have always existed alongside their own microbial pathogens and have evolved natural antibiotics to protect themselves. Our ancestors, before the dawn of scientific medicine, used plant extracts to treat infectious disease, often quite successfully. The sub-discipline of ethnomedicine involves “mining” these traditional or historical remedies for pure chemicals that can be developed as, or modified into, drugs.

Bucar described a European herb, elecampane or Inula helenium, which is known to have been used to treat lung disease in the sixteenth century. He explained how a complex mixture of natural products derived from this plant had been tested against mycobacteria. Compounds found to have anti-mycobacterial activity were extracted and purified. Other plants have also yielded useful lead compounds; extracts of bark from a small tree with the Latin name of Berchemia discolor have even been shown to inhibit multi-drug resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis at useful concentrations.

Discovering antibacterial products in plant extracts, however, is only a first step towards drug discovery. Even when natural products like these compounds are found to be selective for bacterial over human cells, it is necessary to discover their mechanism of action; to modify them to optimize their activity; and, since plant sources are often scarce and extraction processes costly, to determine methods of synthesizing them in the laboratory.

The second scientific presentation was given by Dr. Bhakta himself and described current work in Birkbeck’s Mycobacteria Research Laboratory in searching for potential drugs for TB. These are needed not only to combat resistant forms of the bacteria but to improve current treatment regimens for “standard”, drug-sensitive TB. This requires a combination of four drugs to be taken for two months followed by two drugs for another four months, and many patients, particularly poorer and less well educated ones, fail to complete such a long and complex regimen. This in turn can lead to the development of further resistant strains.

Ideally, new drugs are required that target proteins not targeted by existing drugs, as resistance will be harder to develop. Mycobacteria have extremely complex cell walls, unlike those of other types of bacteria; they are essential for the bacteria to survive, and the enzymes used to synthesise them have no equivalents in mammalian genomes. These enzymes, therefore, have many of the characteristics of excellent drug targets.  Bhakta and his group have been exploring ways to inhibit the synthesis of the peptidoglycan that is one of the most important constituents of that cell wall. This molecule has been described as the bacterium’s “Achilles heel”, but no drugs targeting its synthesis have yet entered the clinic.

Mycobacteria synthesise peptidoglycan via a series of enzymes known as ligases, each of which adds a new link to the growing peptidoglycan chain. Bhaka’s group has focused on one of these ligases, termed MurE. This enzyme is essential for the bacterium to survive and it is conserved in all Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains. Working in collaboration with Professor Nick Keep, also in the Department of Biology, Bhakta solved the structure of MurE and showed it to have an active site that could in theory, at least, be occupied, and blocked, by a relatively small, “drug-like” molecule. He and his co-workers are now searching libraries of natural products for compounds that might inhibit this enzyme. They have identified promising MurE inhibitors from plants endemic to both Colombia and China, and are synthesizing analogues of these compounds for further testing.

It is unlikely that the next generation of anti-tuberculosis drugs will include any unchanged natural products. It is extremely likely, however, that natural products will yield the “scaffolds” on which these desperately needed drugs may be built, and perhaps one of these will be generated from within Bucar’s or Bhakta’s groups.