Page 105 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Glauber Rocha 95

created, if it is not a fact to be destroyed, it is because it is a becoming in
Deleuze's sense: it is a nonexistence that is again and again to be realized,
as the expression of a people to come, never to come.
In his monograph devoted to Rochas cinema (his "text"), Gardies
offers a historical explanation for the absence of the people: "During the
decade (1961-1971) in which this text comes about, the Brazilian working
class [la classe populaire] suffers from an almost total alienation." 9 Given
the harshness of the military dictatorship of Artur Costa e Silva and, later,
Garrastazu Médici, Gardies should not be accused of sociological reduc-
tionism. With the imposition of curfews and the revocation of habeas
corpus under the infamous Institutional Act No. V of 1968, the people,
quite literally, were missing from public places. Nonetheless, Gardies's ac-
count needs to be supplemented by a far more mundane explanation. Even
if Rocha had desired to stage crowd scenes in the manner of Eisenstein,
the budgets for his films would not have permitted it. Whenever there is
a crowd in Rocha's cinema, it is not a drilled corps of extras assigned the
role of "the people" but rather a chance assemblage of onlookers. 10 The
women of the village of Milagres, for example, show themselves interested
but not altogether convinced by developments among the cast of Antonio
das Mortes (O dragâo da maldade contra 0 santo guerreiro) (1969). The gulf
in Rochas films between the professional actors and the people is perhaps
at its deepest in The Age of the Earth. Seated at a sidewalk café in the center
of Rio, Ana Maria Magalhäes and Tarcisio Meira impassively deliver their
flowery lines in what comes across as a tribute to Last Year atMarienbad,
while a few bemused and bored passersby with time on their hands loiter
in front of the camera.
Public places have almost never been invested by the People in its
bourgeois conception. In the classical polis the public place is the domain
and demonstration of free men, and its loss in the generalized house arrest
of tyranny is dreaded as a leveler of social and sexual differences. In the
urban cinema of Brazil, for its part, the public places are left to meninos da
rua (street children), the homeless, the unemployed and underemployed,
and "office boys" (more a social group with its own dialect and sexuality
than a profession) whose ingenuity expends itself in prolonging the out-
of-office trajectories of their errands. The isonomy of the classical agora is
remembered in the garbage anarchically proliferating in the streets: the au-
thority and responsibility of the house, which sets to it that everything is
in its proper place and of which tyranny and the society of control are the