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Glauber Rocha 91

sion, thereby forfeiting all claim to freedom and becoming an instrument
of colonialist oppression. For Rocha the theme of cinema is its impos-
sibility, and his films are made out of the agony that is their condition of
existence. The autonomy of the work of art, which in bourgeois aesthetics
functions as an axiom, here becomes the problem itself of politics. The
theoretical fascination of Rochas work lies partly in its political reinven-
tion of the autonomy attributed to the modern work of art.
Cinema can only feel asphyxiated in the liberties of aestheticism. As
soon as the question "What is to be done?" concerns itself with the achieve-
ment of particular aesthetic effects, cinema turns away from its own pos-
sibility in the political. Given that aestheticism is intrinsically illusionist,
extrication from illusionist cinema cannot be secured by adherence to an
aesthetic manifesto. In this regard Rocha does not share the naïveté of the
DOGMA 95 filmmakers. If Rocha denounces the technical sophistication
of Western commercial cinema, it is not because he believes the problem of
film, which is immediately the political problem of the third world, can be
solved by renouncing sets, lighting, makeup, and so forth. For one thing,
Rocha does not have the luxury of possession that precedes renunciation.
No aesthetic choice informs the austere production values of his films. To
be sure, Rocha appropriates the austerity imposed by economic under-
development—most famously in the text presented in Genoa in January
1965, "Aesthetics of Hunger"—and sets it to work. But what is at issue is a
mobilization of the political force inherent in the simple fact of the back-
wardness of the Brazilian film industry, rather than an artistic fetishization
of the frugal and the deficient. The title "Aesthetics of Hunger" refers to
what Rocha analyzes as the European delectation in the misery of Latin
America: "For the European observer, the processes of artistic creation in
the underdeveloped world only interest him to the extent that they satisfy
his nostalgia for primitivism." 2 Such an aestheticization of hunger is the
very last thing that Rocha desires, since the extraction of an aesthetic value
from indigence contributes to its political apology.
The problem confronting the filmmaker of what is to be done does
not lend itself to aesthetic solutions. Rocha is merciless to the point of
humor on this score. In 1963, on grounds of its reputed aestheticism, he
dismissed unseen Mario Peixoto's Limite (1930), a film withdrawn from
circulation early by its director and long held in such high esteem that it
could be accounted the "La chasse spirituelle" of Brazilian avant-garde cin-
ema: "In their bourgeois, sentimental subjectivity, films that are beautiful