FilmsTerra em Transe

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 is simply another imperialist power-interest seeking markets) and encouraging its imitation ("national" projects usually financed by foreign capital). Cultural-like political-dissent, nationalism, and moves toward independence are suppressed: "primitive" native expressions, pure and unmediated myth and emotional savagery are the violent undercurrents of these societies.

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 elements in fierce confrontation, in his role as poet and actualizer of the people's collective unconscious and as collaborator with two different (and conflicting) populist politicians in the imaginary country of Elderado. The narrative is of course based on familiar patterns in Brazilian politics in which fascist elites crush slightly less-fascist elites, manipulating and mystifying the masses, who remain politically blind and passive participants, despite their spiritual ferment, their extreme hunger and suffering.

Rocha treats these conflicts between elites and masses in two other films about primitive religion in the impoverished northeast of Brazil, Black God. White Devil (1964) and Antonio das Mortes (1969) where the people are actually killed off during the fighting between the elite revolutionary cangaceiros and the beatos, the hired killers of the landowning aristocracy. Rocha deals with Warrior Saints and Dragons of Evil, cut off from the masses by their self-consciousness as legend and their mystical level of existence. Sebastiao, for instance, the revolutionary "Black God," seeks to "revenge the death of Christ with the blood of the innocent" (he kills babies) and to reunite the entities of the earth and the sea. In Terra em Transe the mysticism shifts to the realm of political and economic power. The right-wing senator Diaz fulfills a Christian mission "to put hysterical traditions in order, through violence and the love of violence," while the populist governor Vierra professes a metaphysic of the masses ("the blood of the people is sacred!") which restrains him from benefiting them materially through force against a feudal system. Paulo Martins combines the political rationality of one and the spirituality of the other, attempting synthesis in his own chaotic life. He narrates the film in flashback, struggling between newsreel-like objectivity and the violent subjectivity of his surrealist fantasies-a dialectic that can't be separated from Rocha's camera-style.

PROBABLY the most important early influences on Brazilian directors of the Cinema Novo movement, Rocha has commented, were the films and theoretical writings of Sergei Eisenstein and especially his concept of dialectical montage. This inter-cutting of images as "shocks" provides a language for expressing abstractly the confrontations between abstract forces of history, constructed into a coherent whole, an "agit-guinol" by the director, who intends to achieve a specific effect for the audience, which remains essentially passive. Rocha modifies this concept in developing the dialectical shot, in which each element-each character, myth, power-figure-comes into conflict with other elements, leaving nothing to exist as a pure entity (like each image in a montage style), nothing to operate outside of a natural dialectical context. Rocha sees this kind of context as a constant, being a Marxist, and portrays no character without a dual, self-contradictory, internally dialectical nature. Diaz, for example, is continually marching around carrying the black flag of the labor movement in one hand and a crucifix in the other. Martins tells his story, alternating extreme long-shots for a bare objectivity with the jerkiness of hand-held shots that move with the dynamics of a scene. This latter, subjective technique involves you in an operatic (as opposed to dramatic), stylized penetration of depth in a frenzied, musical chaos, coaxing you into a participation with the dialectics of each stage-setting. The violent editing, however, as well as a sound-track that works against the images, "objective sound" (unrelated to the distance of the image) alternating with a subjective and poetically rich interior monologue, objective long shots, all create the opposite effect: critical alienation. You aren't just barraged by stimuli, as with dialectical montage; you become part of a process, a total dialectic: political rationality vs, surreal conditions.

And Terra em Transe is an enormous, complex, and exciting process. It contains not only political elucidation, but also implications for creating a crude and alive revolutionary culture-struggling against the imitations of European perfection as well as the populist paternalism and "simplicity." Rocha strives politically for imperfection, as he said at the Pesera New Cinema Festival in 1968, since "true modern art-ethically, aesthetically, revolutionary-uses a language to oppose the dominating language... to oppose through the impure aggressiveness of art."