Olney Sao Paulo by himself -

Olney Sao Paulo by himself

11/09/2024

Cinema • Culture • Books

By YVES SÃO PAULO*

Excerpt from the preface of the recently published collection of writings by the filmmaker from Bahia

Certainly, the reader who holds this volume in his hands knows Olney São Paulo's cinematographic work better than his production for the press. He would like to know that, since his entire life's effort was to build a personal filmography and his work with the press was a means of shedding light on these efforts. With the help of the biography written by Ângela José, Olney São Paulo and the struggle of country cinema (Quartet, 1999), we discover a new side of this filmmaker. In his first steps into the cultural world, still in the city of Feira de Santana, we find the high school student Olney writing for the newspaper set up inside the Santanópolis school and already demonstrating his inclination towards the art for which he would later become known.

The work we did with the press helps us paint a broader picture of the personality of a filmmaker who left us too soon. The texts we were able to compile over the following pages bring together a lifetime of efforts to think about cinema, breathe cinema and observe society cinematically. A striking characteristic of Olney São Paulo's texts – even those that do not address cinema as a theme – is the formal inclination to resemble the art of moving images. His writing style is cinematic.

In the lines dedicated to journalistic writing, we discover the films watched by the filmmaker during his formative years; the years of transition from adolescence to adulthood. Especially in the two columns that make up the first sections of this book, we find a young cinephile constantly citing films, commenting on them in various ways; either directly through a review, or indirectly by mentioning them in the context of a social observation scenario.

There was also a specific interest in observing the cultural movement that took place in the city of Feira de Santana during the 1950s. Its various movie theaters were the stage for the young aspiring filmmaker to discover an impressive variety of titles – not only Hollywood works, as is the norm in the current commercial exhibition circuit, but also films from other countries. The difference in profile between the different movie theaters in the city can be noted in the brief mentions made about each one.

In order to encompass the breadth of three decades of production, thought and dedication to cinema, we traveled to several places, researching in newspapers and magazines, the articles, chronicles and interviews that make up the collection that we present. This research was possible thanks to a post-doctoral research grant granted by Capes, together with the State University of Feira de Santana. It was in the space of the UEFS campus where the research began, more precisely in the Monsenhor Galvão Library, in the Casa do Sertão Museum. There, we found the newspapers Santanopolis, The Owl e North Sheet, which helped us identify much of Olney São Paulo's production during his formative years, preceding the production of his first feature film, scream from the earth, in 1965. For the production after his professional film debut, we searched the National Library, where we found interviews given to newspapers from different states in the country. Next to the Central Library of the State of Bahia, we found the newspapers published in Bahia. Unfortunately, in this collection, we were unable to access the newspaper In the afternoon, just as we were unable to contact the newspaper to find out how to access its collection, despite some contacts made without response. Thus, I present this data to demonstrate how this book is a work that is likely to undergo new future interventions to add new texts found.

I tried to intervene as little as possible with notes so that this book would not become a work of the organizer instead of what it really is, a work of Olney São Paulo; therefore, my role is to be responsible for gathering and editing the texts that follow. Some of the copies we had access to had illegible or torn sections, making it difficult to read certain passages, which will be pointed out throughout the text – but there were few cases of newspapers with these characteristics.

Especially with regard to the two columns that make up Olney São Paulo's youth period, Chat e Cineopolis, we made grammatical corrections to errors that were common throughout the writing process. I present this information as a measure of transparency to the reader of this volume. The corrected passages will be highlighted in the body of the text, even if their spelling has been changed. We speculate that the errors found were not due to the author's stylistic resource, but rather due to the rush of journalistic production, and may even have been due to a typographical error. We also point out this change to maintain the conjecture that this is a youthful piece of writing, since the errors found during the writing process, as well as its stylistic flaws, are largely due to the formative nature of someone who sets out to produce before their peak of maturity. The urgency of production would be a hallmark of the generation of filmmakers who would form the Bahian Cinema Cycle of the 1960s, and this characteristic can be noted in Olney São Paulo's youthful writings.

We divided the book into four sections, which are: Chat, Cineopolis, Others, Interviews. The first two sections correspond to the period of Olney São Paulo's most intense media production, when he dedicated himself to writing for newspapers Santanopolis e The Owl. In them, he was given the space to create these two columns that appeared frequently. They appear as two separate sections given the prolixity with which they were written. The section Others presents articles and chronicles written in the most varied periods of the filmmaker's life, more specifically presenting itself between the period of the newspaper's closure The Owl and the release of scream from the earth, when the filmmaker remains without a fixed space in local newspapers, maintaining the energetic search for film production. Finally, the section Interviews marks the period of maturity, when his work began to be recognized by the press to the point that the filmmaker was sought out to give reports on his films, on the situation of Brazilian cinema, in addition to pointing out paths for the industry that was trying to move forward in the shadow of Embrafilme and the American power dominating the national market. Through the division between these sections, the different periods and concerns that boiled in the mind of this filmmaker are marked.

In total, we typed 62 text pieces that served as the basis for the research of the archive that makes up this volume. Of these, only two were observed as not being directly authored by Olney São Paulo and, therefore, not fitting within the book's program. The column Chat is the one that brings the largest number of contributions, totaling 21. The column Cineopolis has 14 texts. The section Others comes with 16 writings. Finally, the Interviews there are 9.

Olney Sao Paulo by himself can be downloaded for free from the Editora Fi website, in PDF version. The physical version is available, upon request, on Amazon.

*Yves Sao Paulo holds a PhD in philosophy from UFBA. Author of the book The metaphysics of cinephilia (Publisher Fi).

Reference

Olney Sao Paulo. Olney Sao Paulo by himself. Ed. Fi, 2024, 213 pages. [https://amzn.to/3ZkBtuH]