Page 104 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

94 James Phillips

itself any comprehension of expropriation in pre-Columbian societies, is
directed properly against the spurious autonomy of Brazil. As the country's
independence from Portugal was declared by the Portuguese prince regent
himself in 1822, the struggle against colonialism, such as it was carried out
in Algeria and Vietnam, was preempted rather than won. Brazil was inde-
pendent but a Bragança still sat on its throne. A self-assertion of national
identity is not in and of itself the answer. Rocha says in a statement first
published in Positif m 1970: "The seizure of political power by the colo-
nized is fundamental. But the seizure of power is not »enough." 7
In Cinema 2: The Time-Image Gilles Deleuze writes of the changed
political perspective of Rocha, Youssef Chahine, and black American cine-
ma: "The death-knell for becoming conscious was precisely the conscious-
ness that there were no people, but always several peoples, an infinity of
peoples, who remained to be united, or should not be united, in order for
the problem to change. It is in this way that third world cinema is a cinema
of minorities, because the people exist only in the condition of minority,
8
which is why they are missing." If the task of third-world cinema is not to
mobilize the masses for the bourgeois myth of the sovereign people, it is
just as little to hypostasize the powerlessness of the masses as their essential
condition (such a hypostasis would be simply the cynical complement of
the bourgeois notion of popular sovereignty). The problem to be changed
will be changed at its roots by a dismantling of the concept of power.
The essence of cinema is tied to a future revolution. Cinema cannot
assert itself because it lies in the very nature of this revolution to with-
hold itself. In its contestational potentiality, the revolution stands over
the actual as its caveat and comes between power and the proof with
which power provides itself in realization. The desperation of Rochas
cinema is both an acknowledgment of the impossibility of revolution and
the modus operandi of this revolution with respect to the ontological
foundations of power. The impossibility of the revolution is not to be con-
verted into a fact, an aspect of the prevailing state of affairs and a negative
actuality. Just as cinema cannot assert itself, it also cannot resign itself
without betraying the revolutions radical objection to the status quo.
The impossibility of the revolution is its pure possibility: it is impossible
not because it lacks the specific conditions in which it could be actual-
ized but because actuality itself, in which beings are decidable and lend
themselves to identification and control, is incompatible with it. Possibil-
ity presses its philosophical priority. If, for Rocha, cinema remains to be