Page 115 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Glauber Rocha 105

with a stake in keeping things as they are is interested in an image of Bra-
zil in which the stain of colonialism is laid bare. There is an overt asymme-
try between the nationalism of Cinema Novo and the nationalism of the
political and economic bodies without which Cinema Novo could never
have gotten off the ground (Rocha s needlessly blunt declaration of sup-
port in 1974 for Ernesto Geisel's presidency during the military dictator-
ship remains an open sore in his biography, in part because it made light
otthis asymmetry). Black God, White Devilreflects a lacerated Brazil. The
catatonic rhythms of the characters are an index of a political state of af-
fairs rather than of the physiological constitution of a "race." According to
Fanon, the French colonial psychiatrists for whom the lethargy and sud-
den violent outbursts of Africans evoked "lobotomised Europeans" were,
wittingly or unwittingly, transforming a consequence of colonialism into
a justification of colonial rule over a people without application or self-
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control. The immutability of Rocha's mythic Brazil corresponds not so
much to a national essence as to the entrenchment of contingent national
and international structures of power.
Inventing a cinema of the colonized masses, of the "lobotomised
European," Rocha deploys speeds and slownesses irreconcilable with that
which Deleuze, in his book on roughly the first half-century of cinema,
calls the "action-image." In postwar European cinema Fassbinders zom-
bies, who do not always possess a motive for running suddenly amok,
betray the strongest family resemblance, even if there is also something of
the rhythms of Rochas figures in Visconti's superannuated, neurasthenic
aristocracy. In two of the films Rocha made while in exile—Der leone have
septcabeças (1970) and Claw (1975)—the catatonia of Cinema Novo comes
into direct contact with the catatonia of the nouvelle vague through the
performances respectively of Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto (the latter
best known from Godard s La Chinoise and Rivette's wondrous Celine and
Julie Go Boating). Rocha, who for his part appears in Godard's Vent d'Est
(1969) giving "lessons" on the path of political cinema, discerns behind
the stylistic similarities between Cinema Novo and the New European
Cinema a political solidarity. In question here is not the symbiosis that
the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s was briefly allowed to posit between
political and artistic revolution (as in Mayakovskys dictum, "Without a
revolutionary form revolutionary art does not exist"). The artistic revolu-
tion of cinema is immediately political because the object of revolution is
no longer the seizure of power by the people or the proletariat but rather