Page 102 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

92 James Phillips

for the sake of beauty are without interest for Brazilian cinema, just as they
3
always were for any cinema." Cinema cannot come into its own through
aestheticism, and it is perhaps in protest against the aesthetic detachment
he suspects behind the international reception of his first two features,
Barravento (1962) and Black God, White Devil {Deus e 0 diabo na terra do
sol) (1964), that Rocha articulates the critical position of the "Aesthetics
of Hunger" and thereafter breaks with stylistic austerity. The agony of
hunger passes over into the cinematic image itself, convulsing it in Land in
Anguish (Terra em transe) (1967) before overseeing its disintegration in the
final provocations of the garbage cinema of The Age of the Earth {A idade
da terra) (1980).
Rocha, of course, did not see himself as cinemas destroyer. Cinema,
for him, does not yet exist. Notwithstanding his admiration and affection
for Godard, Rocha rejects his definition of the revolutionary filmmaker as
destroyer. This rejection is consistent with his advocacy of the new Brazil-
ian cinema. Rocha was tireless in promoting the works of fellow filmmak-
ers, attending screenings at international festivals, giving interviews, and
writing articles in their defense. He was intensely aware of the fragility of
the constellation of economic and political factors that allowed Cinema
Novo to come about. The system of production and distribution that, for
Godard (and other filmmakers of what has come to be known as Second
Cinema), possesses the domineering dead weight of a fact was as yet, for
Rocha in Brazil (and Third Cinema in general), barely more than a possi-
bility. Rocha's rejection of Godard's definition is consistent, however, not
only with his cultivation of a national film industry but also with his aver-
sion to aestheticism. To recognize the political collusion of the cinema of
spectacle and then to define one's task as the destruction of this cinema is
to remain within aestheticism, because it is to remain within the dishon-
est aestheticism of aestheticism's bare negation. As cinema still awaits to
be born in its essential politicality, it is not a matter of destroying it.
What, then, is taking its course in the violence that Rocha inflicts
on the academicism of cinematographic discourse? It follows from the po-
litical essence of Rochas work that it cannot be analyzed in terms of prob-
lem and solution: anything that is not the emancipation of the third world
cannot be regarded as a solution. Rocha's work does not realize itself in
violence. The violence is neither a means nor an end. On the basis of a so-
ber insight into the relations between politics and cinema, Rocha, whom
Carlos Heitor Cony is right to call an "envoy of delirium," 4 is an artist of