“The Population Needs to Know the Dangers They Face!”: Cinematic Consumption and Rhetoric of Fear in Belle Époque Rio de Janeiro

ABSTRACT This article addresses the journalistic series Cinemas-arapucas (Trap-cinemas), published by the newspaper A Noite between August 8 and 16, 1912, which denounced some movie theaters in the central areas of Rio de Janeiro because of noncompliance with rules related to public safety. We intend to verify how the journalistic series was inserted in the dissemination of a rhetoric of fear regarding cinematographic consumption - and, by extension, with which other fears it engaged and what mechanisms of power it triggered from this. As a central question, our proposal is to analyze the Cinemas-arapucas series to verify some relations among the press, authorities, cinematographers, and cinema audiences in Rio de Janeiro in the first decades of the 20th century. To do so, we used the evidential paradigm methodology, as proposed by Carlo Ginzburg.摘要 本文针对1912年8月8日至16日间由《A Noite报》刊发的新闻专栏《Cinemas-arapucas（陷阱影院）》展开研究，该专栏揭露了里约热内卢中心城区多家影院违反公共安全相关规定的行为。本研究旨在厘清该新闻专栏在电影消费恐惧修辞传播中的嵌入路径，并进一步探讨其关联了哪些其他类型的恐惧，以及由此触发了何种权力运作机制。本研究的核心议题为：通过分析《Cinemas-arapucas（陷阱影院）》专栏，考察20世纪最初数十年间里约热内卢的报业、官方机构、电影从业者与观影群体之间的多元关联。为此，本研究采用了卡洛·金茨堡（Carlo Ginzburg）所提出的证据范式方法论。