Page 103 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

GlauberRocha 93

a frenzy without return. Cinema must not shy away from its own inca-
pacity, its constitutive condition of impossibility. As there is no aesthetic
solution with regard to what is to be done, Rochas abandonment of the
critical realism of his early films in favor of an underground cinema in The
Age of the Earth is a gesture of political desperation rather than of artistic
acumen. Without a stylistic degree zero or terra firma, Rocha's cinema
contents itself with neither the Rossellinian asperities of Barravento nor
the "garbage aesthetic" that came to the fore in the late 1960s as a reaction
to the perceived gravity of Cinema Novo. The Age of the Earth, which was
years in the making and which drained the resources of the government
funding body, Embrafilme, only to premiere in Venice to general execra-
tion, is a stupendous film by virtue of its defiance. Passages of dialogue are
repeated without coherence or affectivity; a nude black Christ (Antonio
Pitanga) solicits from a tree outside Brasilia; an apocalyptic pantomime
in sequins plays itself out involving ventriloquism with a skull; and John
Brahms—in an enrapturing performance by Maurfcio do Valle that is
half Falstaff and half Ubu—declares it his mission to destroy the earth,
"this poor, small planet." Rocha's last film practices that defiance of the
spectator's taste and narrative expectations that is more characteristic of
underground filmmakers such as Julio Bressane and Rogério Sganzerla
than of Cinema Novo proper, and he subjects this defiance to a defiance
of its own from the quarter of the political problem of cinema. The Age of
the Earth cancels out Rochas other films, but they in turn cancel it out:
one-sided approaches do not complement one another to form a solution.
There is no way to make cinema, and it is the greatness of Rochas work to
realize itself in this impossibility.
If the impossibility of cinema is (without any mediation or reflexiv-
ity) a political impossibility, if the birth of cinema is postponed so long as
the masses remain exploited, it is nonetheless not a question of the people's
seizure of power. For Rocha power is not the object of politics. Subscrib-
ing to a conventional terminology, René Gardies misconceives the pre-
revolutionary character of Rochas work: "The Nothingness of today (the
absence of the people) appears as the utter negative of the Everything of
5
tomorrow, of the People-King." In the "Aesthetics of Dream," a text deliv-
ered in 1971, Rocha denounces "the People" as the myth of the bourgeoi-
6
sie. The people that knows how to rule is a people that has surrendered
its last vestige of resistance to colonialism, since the very notion of control
is colonialist. The extremism of Rochas position, which appears to forbid