Page 117 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

GlauberRocha 107

monologues, thereby problematizing the distinction between the public
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and the private. An expedient of subindustrial cinema is here turned to
account. Rochas film acquires tremendous drive from the absence of local
sound. The imposition of a new shot does not distract the spectator with
the task of orienting himself or herself within the space of the shot by
means of the acoustic clues delivered by the cast and any items in shot:
such orientation would diminish the unsettling effect of the feverish flight
of images—verbal, visual, and sonic—of which Land in Anguish is com-
posed. Given the impossibility under the military dictatorship of making
a film about political conditions in Brazil, Rocha resorts to an allegorical
setting, but rather than play down the artificiality of the cipher country of
Eldorado, he substitutes the homogeneous spatiality of the dubbing studio
for the existential thickness of the actual soundscapes in view. Just as the
question "Where?" is unanswerable, the question "When?" is meaningless
in face of the difficulty of knowing how much of what is shown is to be
attributed to the dying delusions of Paulo Martins (Jardel Filho) and how
much can pretend to an "objective" history. In the films remarkable finale
there is even a difficulty in knowing who is talking. Dom Porfirio Diaz
(Paulo Autran) is seen in full harangue at his coronation, but it is Paulo
Martins that we assume we hear in the voice-over. The aggressive and
pervasive sound track, with its machine guns, diverse drumming styles,
and operatic music, then breaks off: declaiming against hysteria Paulo
Autran, in one of the great close-ups in the history of cinema, induces
from the latent insanity of the human face a grin of scarcely conceivable
ferocity and malevolence. Raquel Gerber contends that Land in Anguish
was quickly seen as the filmic key to modern Brazilian culture because,
situating the problem of Brazil in the broader terms of the development
of international capitalism, it inaugurated Tropicalismo as an experimental
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(anti)method, across the arts, of addressing Brazilian reality. It is a real-
istic document of an exaggerated reality; the deviations and distortions of
allegory are themselves the truth of Brazil.
With a film such as Land in Anguish commentary cannot content
itself with joining the dots, pointing out the links between a supposed
project and its execution, and inferring the totality that would establish
the coherence of each element in the work. The labor of criticism, where
it exhausts itself in spelling out the agreement of means and ends in its
object of analysis, presses the case for the bourgeois respectability of the
work in question. More is to be lost than gained by a defense of this