Page 106 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

96 James Phillips

essentially antipolitical magnifications, does not extend beyond the thresh-
old out into the open. Rocha does not suppress these figures of the square
and the pavement for the sake of constructing an illusion of the People. In-
stead, they remain as the guilty conscience of the operatic dramaturgy and
oratorical exchanges of the professional cast. Given that there is no way to
avoid a guilty conscience—Hollywood and the local pornochanchada (sex
comedy) certainly do not bridge the gulf between the cinematic image
and the misery of the third world—the work of art, with its pretensions to
aesthetic immanence, must shatter itself against the masses.
Rochas cinema begins with this shattering. The guilt of the work of
art is that it is not yet truly autonomous, that the theatrical excesses of a Ba-
roque sensibility never go so far as to transgress the aesthetic sphere, chal-
lenging the reactionary political investments of the quarantine of the work
of art. The ethical or political moment, which is transcendent with regard
to the aesthetic sphere, leads Rocha to the creation of a work of art rather
than to the repudiation of art, since a work of art rooted in the irrational
reality of the Brazilian people will be traversed by forces disconcerting the
equilibrium in which it might otherwise give itself up as an object for a
reductively aesthetic appreciation. The seamless and the lapidary are the
criteria of another culture. For Cinema Novo and the later underground
directors, the circumstance of an underdeveloped film industry, with its
minuscule budgets and poorly trained technicians, becomes the occasion
for a heated debate concerning whether achieving the polished produc-
tion values of first-world cinema is even desirable! This is, in one respect,
a simple question of box-office returns. The lesson from the early 1950s,
when the glossy productions of the Vera Cruz studios of Sao Paulo failed to
win a public in Brazil, was that a sustainable Brazilian film industry could
not model itself on Hollywood. Critics from the right and left will take
issue with the new cinema for essentializing the nations backwardness,
for making not exactly a virtue of necessity but a national characteristic
of poverty and clumsiness. These critics, however, address the question of
the Brazilian people within the discourse of the nation-state. Something
besides a petulant chauvinism apologetic of underdevelopment and its at-
tendant misery is involved.
In the Guevarist manifesto "The Tricontinental Filmmaker: That
Is Called the Dawn," published in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1967, Rocha
declares that the tools belong to Hollywood and then, in an analysis of
the components of Brazilian civilization, characterizes the Tupi by intel-