Page 113 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

GlauberRocha 103

to be weaned away from the automatic responses of instrumental rational-
ity (the work is a "success" because the artist has realized his or her inten-
20
tions) by a militant artistic incompetence. Art is to be judged bad, but as
it should not simply escape the immanent perfection by which it serves a
reactionary political agenda, it must likewise bring to its shortcomings an
aggression that sets them in conflict with the technicism reasserting itself,
in the transcendent model of perfection, over every deviation.
^ The volatility with which Kants aesthetic judgment alternates be-
tween condemnation and approval is more auspicious for a "minoritarian '
cinema than the complacent postulate according to which everything is
different. For Rogério Sganzerla, Brazilian cinema is both the greatest and
the worst cinema in the world: the swings in assessment can be ascribed
to the ontological undecidability in which the community of aesthetic
judgment exercises its freedom from objective criteria. If many Brazilian
directors of the 1960s and 1970s admit to an inferiority complex in rela-
tion to their counterparts in North America and Europe, this need not
invite the consolations of the language of the celebration of differences.
A revitalization of aesthetic judgment is at issue behind the psychological
condition. Similarly, if Rocha persists in employing the derogatory phrase
"the third world," it is arguably not only because there is a quantitative
difference in living standards that should not be trivialized under the cover
of the qualitative difference of the exotic but also because the revolution-
ary task of Brazilian cinema with regard to the apparent self-evidence of
technicism is informed by the very gap between the means of production
in Brazilian cinema and the prevailing standard imposed by international
technicism. The judgment that this cinema is beautiful, if it seals the gap
and glosses over underdevelopment, continues to tie beauty to notions of
perfection and immanence. It delivers the critical realism of Cinema Novo
up to exoticism and opposes the ontological undecidability by which the
community of aesthetic judgment can here break with the hegemony of
technicism and neocolonialism.
Rochas work frustrates the taste for the exotic without opting for
an insipid internationalism. The myths of Brazil are called up and ranged
against Hollywood, but they articulate an oppressive national identity
from which the masses likewise have to flee. There seems little sense in dis-
cussing Rocha's treatment of myth, as some have done, in terms of Jungs
archetypes of a collective unconscious. 21 In Rocha myth arises with the
failure of history: it constitutes an aspect of the problem facing the masses