Hello, Guides!
My name is José Luís. I am a journalist and postgraduate in Public Administration of Culture. If you want to know environments that promote Brazilian, Latin American or Latin American culture I will indicate 5 places in the largest city in Brazil that many who live here are unaware or simply never visited:
Cinemateca Brasileira (Brazilian Cinematheque)
The Brazilian Cinematheque is the institution responsible for the preservation of Brazilian audiovisual production. Since 1940, it has developed activities around the dissemination and restoration of its collection, with about 200 thousand rolls of films. Physically, it is located in Largo Senador Raul Cardoso, 207, in Sao Paulo, where from 1887 to 1927 was the former Municipal Slaughterhouse (Beef) of Sao Paulo.
The Cinemateca Brasileira is one of the largest collections of “moving image” in Latin America. It preserves a great part of the national cinematographic content, and because of this, it hosts the greatest diffusion of Brazilian cinema, with more than 2000 film reels, which correspond to 30.0000 titles among foreign works produced since 1895, and thus the collection of the library consists of approximately f4.700 documents as certificates of censorship, invitations and also a huge collection with about 3.000 scripts and 8.000 posters of films, of which 2,6 related to the national cinema.
Biblioteca Mário de Andrade - Mário de Andrade Library (BMA)
Located in the centre of the city of Sao Paulo, was the first and is the main public library of the city. Founded in 1925, from the collection of the City Hall, it has consolidated throughout its history as one of the most important Brazilian cultural institutions. Its headquarters building is considered one of the architectural landmarks of the art deco style in the city, was designed by French architect Jacques Pilon, is recognized as a landmark of this architecture, which is a popular style in the twentieth century and received great influence from the cubism artistic movement.
The BMA is the custodian of all historical-cultural records of the city of Sao Paulo, which holds the second largest documentary and bibliographic collection in the country - behind only the National Library of Rio de Janeiro.
Its collections have approximately 3.3 million titles, covering all areas of humans knowledge, and preserves a wide range of incunabula, manuscripts, Brazilian, engravings, maps and other rare works, mostly produced between the 15th and 19th centuries.
Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) - Museum of Art of Sao Paulo is a private not-for-profit museum founded in 1947 by business mogul and patron of the arts Assis Chateaubriand (1892–1968), becoming the first modern museum in the country. Chateaubriand invited Italian art dealer and critic Pietro Maria Bardi (1900–1999) to direct MASP, and Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) to conceive the architecture and the exhibition design. With the most important collection of European art in the southern hemisphere, MASP’s holdings currently consist of more than 10 thousand artworks, including paintings, sculptures, objects, photographs, videos and pieces of clothing from various periods, from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Initially located on street 7 de Abril, in downtown São Paulo, in 1968 the museum was transferred to its current location on Avenida Paulista, in the iconic building designed by Lina Bo Bardi, which has become a landmark in the history of 20th-century architecture. Making use of glass and concrete, in her architecture, Lina Bo Bardi put rough, unfinished surfaces into harmony with aspects of lightness, transparency and suspension. The ground-level plaza under the building’s immense free span was designed as a multipurpose public square.
The architect’s radicality is also present in the glass display easels created to show the collection on the building’s second floor. By taking the artworks off the walls, the display easels question the traditional model of the European museum, in which the spectator is led to follow a linear narrative suggested by the order and arrangement of the artworks in the rooms. In MASP’s spacious picture gallery, the suspended and transparent exhibition design allows the public to engage in a closer relationship with the collection since the visitor can choose his or her own path among the artworks, move around them and see their backs.
**Rua Augusta - **Augusta Street is an important arterial street in the city of São Paulo, connecting the Gardens to the city centre. From its beginning in Martins Fontes Street with Martinho Prado and Franklin Roosevelt Square until the intersection with Avenida Paulista is a climb, and from this point begins to descend until its end in Colombia street, which is nothing more than a continuation with another name.
Currently, the stretch from the beginning of it to the intersection with Paulista, which is located in the Central Region of São Paulo, with the presence of nightclubs, saunas and concert halls, is one of the points of meretrício in the city. The rest of its length is taken over by banks, upscale shops and boutiques, theatres, upscale restaurants and movie theatres, possessing an appearance that may be considered nobler, sophisticated and even an open-air mall. Highlights include the Alameda Santos, Oscar Freire Street and the United States.
CINE SESC - Since 1979 on Augusta Street, cinema has been focused on cult titles as well as shows. With a large 16 x 8 m screen, impressive compared to the city cinema, the room has 279 seats with comfortable armchairs and Dolby Digital 7.1 sound. It can design titles in 35 mm, DCP (digital projection with film-on-film standard) and 3D and 4D productions. It is still a Latin American room that has a bar in the projection space. There, snacks and drinks, such as beer or a shot of whiskey, are offered.