Word: rochas
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WHILE the filmmaker-revolutionaries of our "developed" culture are busily spinning abstract "fabrics of contradiction," using the formal tools of High Intellectuality, Glauber Rocha has created a vital and concrete anti-imperialist Cinema Novo in Brazil with the forms of a crude dialectic generated organically out of revolutionary struggle. The "underdeveloped" nature of Third World Culture, with fewer legitimized forms and fewer aesthetic contradictions to sort, actually advances the political clarity and power of an art that is directly rooted in social realities. The ruling elites have always aligned themselves with European (and now American) culture, proliferating it economically (Hollywood...
...Rocha explores these essential contradictions, which come closer to treating the surfaces of material life than any of those explored by Marxist-intellectuals in the oppressor culture. He stands at the center, the crossroads of neo-colonialist contradictions, and in Terra em Transe (Land in Angitish) he approaches them dialectically, attempting a mediation between Brazil's political realities and the poetic violence, the spiritual energies of an oppressed people. There are both concrete and at the same time surreal situations, like all the other sounds and images of the film. The hero Paulo Martins embodies all of the central dialectical...
...ROCHA's dialectic ranges over all levels of film reality. In one sequence the old landowner's whore Laura stands in the center of a mid-shot, leaning on a balustrade with one plant in left frame balanced by one plant in right; close in back of her a flat wall, close in front of her the screen. Behind her Dr. Matos paces from the left frame edge to the right and back. She talks, and we start with the conventional assumption that she is talking to the other person depicted in the frame. Then we notice that...
...balancing and leaving its crux, in center frame, to be the truth of the image and of the film at this instant. Sometimes a symbolic figure occupies the center between the cangaceiro and his opponent; sometimes there is just the space between foreground and background masses. In each case Rocha's dialectical construction tells us the precise nature of their relationship. As elsewhere, dialectic shows itself to be the best way of understanding events, of laying them open to us. The central fact about this film, the root of its success, is that its method is perfectly in accord with...
...frame, to oppose a thesis. The concrete relation between these two generates a provisional synthesis, which changes as one term becomes more powerful, and then changes into a new synthesis (a new order of the moment) as a new term enters the frame. To the truth of each image Rocha does not oppose an antithetical truth-instead he adds an element that transforms this total truth into a new relationship on a new level...