9. Saudades on the Amazon: Toward a Soft Sweet Name for Involution

Abstract

In 1942, with Carmen Miranda’s The Gang’s All Herein production and prom-ising to be a big hit, Hollywood producers were eager to make more movieswith Brazilian characters or settings. They were talking with Orson Wellesabout his never-completed film about a Rio carnival celebration and theydecided to send Bob and Rose Brown down the Amazon to generate ideas formovies. About a decade before, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Brownswere expatriate surrealists living in France. Bob had created a sensation among the avant-garde with his “reading machine,” including praise fromGertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Kay Boyle, and F. W. Marinetti. The machine sought to change the habituated assigna-ble relations among readers, texts, and technologies; a fuller explanation ofthe machine is beyond the scope of this chapter, but a number of detaileddescriptions and discussions of the implications of the machine now exist.