Film Comment – July 01, 2019

(Elle) #1
Cinemademonstrates, he had an acute sense of his own histori-
cal position: “I was a surrealist, a futurist, a Dadaist, and a Marxist
all at the same time.”
On Cinemacollects articles and essays from three hitherto
untranslated books: A Critical Review of Brazilian Cinema, The
Cinema Novo Revolution, and the posthumously published The
Century of Cinema. In the first, Rocha acknowledges his Brazilian
predecessors, Humberto Mauro and Nelson Pereira dos Santos. In
the second, he explicates Cinema Novo (“an evolving collection of
films which will eventually give to the public an awareness of its
own existence”) and issues a few succinct Third Worldist mani-
festos, notably “An Aesthetics of Hunger” and “Tropicalism,
Anthropology, Myth, Ideography.” There’s also a fantastic shpritz
that begins with Brecht and ends, by way of Lola Montès, with
Cahiers du Cinéma.
As a critical theorist, Rocha is brash and humble, hyperbolic
and shrewd. He combines a bracing hostility to Hollywood
(“the most aggressive and widespread form of American culture
inflicted upon the world”) with an impressive knowledge of its
movies, demonstrated by his readings of Westerns and ’50s
youth films, not to mention his speculation that “the genuine
modern character” Che Guevara was influenced by Henry Fonda
in The Grapes of Wrath.
Rocha’s writing on other directors is marked by pithy analyses
(Kubrick “can take any theme and make it the starting point from
which to denounce man and his circumstances”) and total hero
worship. Buñuel, Rossellini, and to some extent Antonioni are his
masters. And then there is “the greatest filmmaker since Eisen-
stein died,” Jean-Luc Godard; per Rocha, he “is worth, just by
himself, all of American cinema!” Rocha continues: “He has
achieved in six years that which hundreds of filmmakers
achieved in sixty. He has completely reformulated cinema,
learning the lessons of Roberto
[Rossellini] with all the humility of
a disciple. It is from this humility
that he was able, bringing together
the various lines of crisis, to cata-
logue modern culture in a great
work composed of small-yet-great
films, the peak of which, up till
now, has been Pierrot le fou, the
modern tragedy par excellence.”
Thus Rocha reveals himself to
be the ’60s cineaste par excellence.
Had this collection been published
in 1970, it would have been on
every film student’s shelf.

The Good Fight


Cinema Novo mastermind Glauber Rocha


pulled no punches as a critic


BY J. HOBERMAN


On Cinema
By Glauber Rocha, edited by Ismail Xavier
I.B. Tauris, $99


Y


ou might say that on cinema, a compilation of
the Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha’s writings, is
cinema. To read it is to experience in concentrated
form the cinephilia of the late ’60s: Rocha was not
only a filmmaker but, as Jonas Mekas called himself, a “raving
maniac of cinema.”
As the best-known representative of Brazil’s Cinema Novo,
Rocha (1939-1981) is arguably the preeminent figure in Brazilian
film history—first, because he makes an impassioned intellectual
case for Cinema Novo as the successor movement to the French
New Wave and Italian neorealism, and second, because as On


78 | FILMCOMMENT| July-August 2019


READINGS Books about all aspects of filmmaking and film culture


America: Films from Elsewhere
Edited by Shanay Jhaveri
The Shoestring Publisher, $34.99

A generously illustrated, wide-
ranging selection of essays on
American films helmed by non-
American filmmakers, America:
Films from Elsewhere is, as editor

Shanay Jhaveri writes, “equally
interested in the films as reflec-
tions on America as it is in the
creative process and what Amer-
ica enables as a site of produc-
tion.” Rooted in seminal analyses
from the likes of Tocqueville and
Baudrillard, the writings explore
not only outsider views of U.S.

culture, history and landscape,
but also the effects of these
forces upon the viewer: the young
Chantal Akerman’s formative feast
on the avant-garde at Anthology
Film Archives, the unlocking of
Paul Verhoeven’s latent auteurism,
or the curdling of Jacques Demy’s
counterculture idealism.

Punishment Park

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Free download pdf