Page 111 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Glauber Rocha 101

minorities, this says more about the anemia of Kant's reception than about
Kant's ^philosophy itself. The movement of thought is bilateral: thought
abstracts from the here and now, but it also returns to the here and now as
its dislocation and Utopian promise.
Rocha's humanism is explicit, and for the public that takes away from
Heidegger's "Letter on 'Humanism'" and its French legatees no more than
a handful of catchwords this humanism is an object of Enlightenment
nostalgia, and, as an element in the aesthetic spectacle of primitivism, its
stridency is "moving." If Rocha, and left-wing discourse in Latin America
generally, adheres to the ideals of the eighteenth century (and of Marx),
this is for the "European observer" of the "Aesthetics of Hunger" just a fur-
ther manifestation of underdevelopment. The assiduity and reflectiveness
with which Cinema Novo takes underdevelopment as its theme cautions,
however, against such a patronizing account. Heidegger's dismissal in his
postwar text of the task of restoring a sense to the term humanism does not
take in its compass a humanism that grounds itself in underdevelopment.
The humanism of which Heidegger is wary is the humanism from which
he traces a genealogical line from the Renaissance's exalted conception
of the human being as the master manipulator of material (a trope with
which Jacob Burckhardt accosted Heidegger's generation) to the racial
breeding programs and spoliation of the earth in modern technicism. To
revive the dignity of the human subject after Hitler's dictatorship is to pay
the excessive price of a debasement of the world to stock. In contrast to the
masterpieces of the Renaissance, where, according to bourgeois histories
of art, the autonomy of the human spirit asserts itself in overcoming the
refractoriness of brute matter, Rocha offers a cinema with "inferior cam-
eras and laboratories, and therefore crude images and muffled dialogue,
unwanted noise on the soundtrack, editing accidents, and unclear credits
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and titles." Rochas humanism is not a humanism of the empowerment
of the subject, just as his cinema does not provide the grislier consequences
of such a humanism with their artistic gloss. To protest against the per-
fectionism of Hollywood is to protest against the esteem given to the pre-
eminent manipulator of material, once embodied in the Renaissance by
the artist of genius but now a role reserved for American studios with their
vast technological resources. Outside Hollywood all art, by comparison,
inevitably assumes the appearance of a cottage industry. By politicizing
the backwardness of the Brazilian film industry, by mobilizing the relation
to the benchmarks against which it is seen to fall short, Rocha intimates