Page 100 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

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Glauber Rocha
Hunger and Garbage

JAMES PHILLIPS
The trouble with most films of the left is that they are not truly revolutionary. The
revolutionary cinema should stimulate not the conformity of the public but the revolt
of the public. A film like Z, for instance, is very Hollywoodian. I think a truly revolution-
ary film is Godard's Weekend because it is a film that provokes the public.
—Glauber Rocha'*

A LATE SLOGAN from the Brazilian filmmaker and critic Glauber
Rocha reads: "The subject is KYNEMA." To interpret this, encouraged by
the eccentric orthography, as simply the declaration of an aesthete would
be an error. Rocha's entire work constitutes an exposition of the political
essence of cinema. Formalism is the mark of the revolutionary filmmaker,
since, for Rocha, cinema is properly cinema when it is political and prop-
erly political when it takes itself as theme.
Of course, all cinema can be said to be political inasmuch as it in-
evitably encodes a political position. In most instances, however, cinema
is political merely by extension: it is no more than a means of commu-
nication of an independently existing politics. Cinema only comes into
its own when it contests this subordination and participates in the sus-
pension of instrumental rationality that, following Hannah Arendt, is a
trait of the political realm. This suspension of instrumental rationality is
improperly understood as the affair of aestheticism, since in its refusal
to engage in political struggles aestheticism colludes with reaction and
subserves its ends (as Rocha reveals in his condemnations of Hollywood,
a transcendent theme can always be found for the purportedly immanent
world of illusionist cinema). Hence film takes itself as theme precisely
when it forbids itself the specious liberties of make-believe. The theme of
cinema is the freedom of cinema itself.
Yet cinema cannot enter on this freedom so long as the masses are
exploited and the earth laid waste, because by jumping ahead of the revo-
lution, cinema anticipates a freedom that is simply the corollary of illu-

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