Page 112 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

102 James Phillips

that the artist has another task than proving the superiority of Man over
Nature. Even if Nature remains defined by the actuality of material, it
is no longer subordinate to Man as infinite possibilities, and humanity
even comes most into its difference from the actuality by which material
things have been understood—the difference that humanism has always
endeavored to illuminate—precisely when our possibilities fail to be real-
ized, when our pretensions to control are rebuffed, and when expectation
and execution part company.
Rocha finds ever new ways to make cinema falter and stammer. For
the sake seemingly of the open space of experimentation by which Arendt
understands the political, his films turn their back on perfection. Some-
thing is always missing from the perfect work of art, because in the exact
correspondence of its means and ends, of its conception and implementa-
tion, it does not reach beyond the categories of labor to the freedom and
spontaneity of political action. In The Human Condition Arendt writes:
"There is in fact no thing that does not in some way transcend its func-
tional use, and its transcendence, its beauty or ugliness, is identical with
appearing publicly and being seen." 19 This transcendence, however, can-
not be conceived in terms of perfection. In a sense the work of art that is
held to be perfect does not appear publicly, because, by virtue of the im-
manence of means and ends, it occupies a sphere of realization inviolably
secured against the possibilities of the political and the erraticism of the
public's judgments of taste.
Where liberal-minded art critics adopt the meretricious language of
a celebration of differences and posit the immanence of individual works,
the fickle community of aesthetic judgment is also foreclosed. Every work,
once it is considered perfect in its own way, folds in on itself in replication
of the atomization of community in liberal political philosophy: the work
now consummates its relationship with its own concept. The anarchic mo-
ment in the exercise of the Kantian faculty of judgment—that moment
in which the process of judgment still plays havoc with the discrepancy
between intuition and concept—is elided in favor of a sedimentation of
differences in which each work is perfectly itself and merely different from
all others. Given that it is the community of aesthetic judgment that dis-
covers the work's ontological undecidability, perfection and immanence
stand between the work and the indeterminacy in which humanism sees
itself reflected. For a number of Brazilian filmmakers, to be judged differ-
ent appeared not to be enough. The community of aesthetic judgment is