Page 118 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

108 James Phillips

kind, since the sense that is made of art in such criticism is the sense of
instrumental rationality. In the case of Land in Anguish, under the cover
of praise an explicitly political work is smuggled out of the domain of the
experimentation and spontaneity of human plurality. If the thesis from
the bourgeois history of art concerning the autonomy of the work of art
is taken seriously, the work has to overcome its instrumentalization, even
as it shows up in the fulfillment of its own ends, and push through to the
political itself: the highest praise, following Rocha, is due the work of art
on account not of its perfection but of the politicization of both its form
and content.
In the hunger and garbage of his cinema Rocha is suspicious of the
principle of adequateness by which technicism is motivated in pursuing
means to its ends. According to Arendts retrieval of the vita activa^ this
suspicion animated the Greek polis. Rochas work is classical not because it
recalls the "perfection" of classical art but because it recreates the anarchic
conditions in which the Greek cities differentiated themselves from the des-
potism of their Persian and Egyptian neighbors. In this anarchy, the Greek
is a citizen and not a subject, a means to the rulers ends. Rochas novel
Riverâo Sussuarana (1977) is too anarchic to be recognizable as a novel. It
begins as literary criticism, with a text that could serve as a preface to a
festschrift for the Brazilian writer Joao Guimaraes Rosa. Its pseudography
yields to nonsense words. Episodes from Brazilian history rub up against
paranoiac conspiracies relating to the Cheese Manhattan Bank, slaves nour-
ish themselves on anteater soup, and a detailed account is offered of the
death of Rochas sister in a lift shaft in Rio. Rochas delirium is classical
to the extent that it appears, by the standards of the society of control,
barbaric. His is a pure cinema to the extent that it is a political cinema. In
the cinematic image there is a becoming-discourse of light, a murmuring, a
babbling, a screaming; there is a barbarism of discourse, an irreducibility to
the conceptual and the actual, in which the undecidability of the vita activa
and aesthetic judgment takes hold.