The Discovery of Brazil Suites by Villa-Lobos and the Soundtrack of the Motion Picture by Humberto Mauro: Bricolage and Sequentiality in the Construction of an Audiovisual Narrative

Abstract

This article seeks to understand the procedures used by Villa-Lobos and Humberto Mauro to construct the soundtrack for the motion picture Discovery of Brazil (1937). Based on archival research and a comparison of a description left by Villa-Lobos, the scores of the Suites, and the music in the film, the hypothesis supported here is that, despite information shared within musical and intellectual circles, the suites entitled Discovery of Brazil were not composed for Mauro’s film. I argue that the Suites are later works resulting from a long process of returning to and reworking the themes and ideas that reverberate in Villa-Lobos’ work for the film. Accordingly, to understand the poetics of the motion picture, the conception and creation of its soundtrack are contextualized in a moment shortly after the advent of sound cinema when codes and audiovisual poetics were being widely discussed and different possibilities emerge in constructing auditory imagery in narratives. I conclude that the music in the film is primarily used for constituting narrative sequences and point out that the procedures used by Mauro to construct the soundtrack for Discovery of Brazil are intimately related to the bricolage dynamics that characterize Villa-Lobos’ own creative process.

Keywords

• Trilha sonora
• filme Descobrimento do Brasil (1937)
• Villa-Lobos
• narrativa audiovisual.