By the 1920s, new ideas regarding film as the seventh art disseminated in Europe had a profound effect on Brazilian literature, specifically the emergence of an avant-garde literary movement known as modernismo, or “modernism.” Charting the new theories regarding cinema as an art form, this chapter examines how they were appropriated and elaborated by modernist writers in Brazil in the 1920s, most notably in the novels of Oswald de Andrade, the poetry of Mário de Andrade, and an urban chronicle by Antônio de Alcântara Machado called Pathé Baby. In examining this experimental literature, the chapter shows how new international ideas regarding film form and aesthetics provided the modernist writers with a tool for critiquing the official trajectory of national modernity in Brazil.