Page 107 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Glauber Rocha 97

ligence and artistic incompetence. 11 To make incompetence an object of
militancy is not enough to single out Brazil among the nations. Convinced
of the inimitability of Greek art and hence suspicious of the imperatives of
Winckelmanns neoclassicism, Hölderlin had already asked if a specifical-
ly Western poetry could come into its own by means of the—definitively
Greek—mastery of the presentation of material. Gombrowicz, in turn,
will reject the rallying cry of many Polish artists, "Catch up to Europe!"
in order to make a program out of immaturity: "Bad art may be more rep-
12
resentative of a people." Arguably, neither a people at home in its unique
characteristics nor the People of bourgeois cosmopolitanism is represented
in art that falls short of itself, since it is with the masses, with the people to
come as unidentifiable multiplicity, that the unmanageability of the gap
between expectation and accomplishment is populated.
It would be easy to attribute to Rocha, on the basis of his mistrust of
aestheticism and the bourgeois myth of "the" People, a stance at odds with
the Enlightenment, or at least with its bastardized form in liberal ideol-
ogy. In place of the disinterested appreciation of the beauty of the work
in which humanity sets itself reflected in its universality, there is pursued
a violation of the apathy of taste for the sake of an image of an unrepre-
sented, unrepresentable populace. But even if the Enlightenment sought
to isolate beauty as a phenomenon for analysis, it would be an unduly
prim account of the movement that labeled its efforts to see beauty for
what it is as mere aestheticism. Is it out of opposition to Enlightenment
aesthetics when a cinema does not wish to hear the judgment passed on it,
"This is merely beautiful"? The merely beautiful (the beauty that is innocu-
ous because it keeps within the political and social limits set for beauty in
general) is not necessarily identical with the beauty that the Enlightenment
endeavored to grasp in its distinctness, since the distinctness of beauty is
not necessarily identical with the place beauty occupies in existing condi-
tions. One of the distinguishing features of the beautiful, as discerned by
Kant in his third Critique, is its relationship to subjective judgment. The
judgment "This is beautiful" claims to speak in a universal voice ("we are
agreed that this is beautiful"), and hence—so it might seem—to speak for
"the" People, whereas "This pleases me" claims to speak only for the speak-
er. When the judgment "This is beautiful" is made in response to Rochas
cinema, it amounts to a covert expression of discomfiture and hostility,
but only if it claims to extract from that which endeavors to be resolutely
minor an empirical proof of universal community (the claim to speak in a