Page 116 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

106 James Phillips

the institution of the "minoritarian" rhythms by which processes of sub-
jectification are waylaid and the aesthetic community more plainly enters
political actions domain of experimentation. Cinema Novo, regardless of
the intentions of its conservative backers, was not to conceive the estab-
lishment of a Brazilian film industry in terms of a process of subjectifica-
tion. In place of either a self-assertion of the masses raising their voice
against colonization as a people-subject or the admission to the bourgeois
canon of a Brazilian filmmaker on the strength of his or her perfection-
ism, personal vision, and mastery of material, there is catatonia, spontane-
ity, and improvisation. What becomes clear in Rocha, perhaps even more
explicitly than in Godard, is that a new road for art—a deepening and
elaborating of its essential possibility—thereby opens up.
Land in Anguish is a delirious collective utterance. To be sure, Rocha
himself advocates an auteur cinema as the polar opposite of commercial
cinema, and the meticulousness, resourcefulness, and originality that he
brings, for example, to the editing of his films are evidence of an extraor-
dinary will to art, but it makes little real sense to subsume Rocha under
the bourgeois conception according to which the artist is the legitimating
myth of subjectivity. The beauty, indispensability, and artistic ambition of
Rocha's work lie in its overtaxing and dismantling of this myth. With the
concept of the "auteur," Cahiers du Cinéma sought to raise the prestige of
film by insisting on the director's participation in the figure of the artist
prevalent since the Renaissance. This theoretical move, however, encour-
ages a misunderstanding of the new works that Cahiers du Cinéma sought
to champion, as though what the New Cinema, as a whole, rejected in
the studio system was the obstacle it posed to the auteurs articulation of
a bourgeois interiority. For Rocha what is objectionable in commercial
cinema is ultimately not its anonymity but the political ideology of which
it is an instrument.
Commercial cinema even seems to define itself by the refusal to
extract from the polyvocality of its conflicting interests the stutter of
a collective utterance. Regardless of how many people collaborate on a
so-called commercial film, the proliferation of perspectives is generally
checked; a neutrality is presupposed that has little in common with the
anonymity in which the delirious collective utterance of Land in Anguish
frustrates processes of subjectification and objectification. As the audio
was not recorded directly at the time the scenes were shot, the dialogue
in Land in Anguish occupies the same acoustic space as the many interior