Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Latin America - 6 (49) Brazil - Part 2 - Phases of Cinema Novo: Part 2: de Andrade, Diegues, Guerra

Rui Guerra

Ruy (Rui) Guerra directed 14 features,1962-2018, four in Brazil, the balance in Portugal, France, Mozambique and Mexico. He was born in Mozambique, studied at IDHEC in Paris 1952-4, and worked as an assistant director in France for several years. He shot his first feature Os Cafajestes/The Hustlers in Brazil in 1962, helping to initiate the Cinema Novo. He placed himself on the outside of the group with his uncompromising views about not abandoning a critical view of society for commercial success and saw state funding as a form of co-option.

In The Hustlers Guerra mixes fiction and documentary in focusing on the country's moral rather than economic underdevelopment in an implicit criticism of capitalism - lives lived on the margins without meaning beyond basic survival yet integrated into the system. It  was initially banned as immoral and repugnant. The characters sole goal of money is constantly frustrated. The deployment of the camera,  and image discontinuities between sound and image, often emphasises the distance between the characters and the reality surrounding them. Randal Johnson comments that while other Novo films in urban settings show the direct influence of Italian neo-realism and occasionally Eisenstein, Guerra's critique is “more subtle and indirect, his editing more akin to that of the nouvelle vague in experimenting with the use of time and space in a more formalist manner. “While Joaquim de Andrade, for example, has said that ideology is more important than form, Ruy Guerra's films suggest that only through proper form can ideology be properly transmitted.” (99)

In Os Fuzis/The Guns (1964) Guerra relocated the urban story set in Rio in The Hustlers, to the underdeveloped Brazilian northeast. It was originally to be filmed in Greece about a Greek village threatened by a pack of starving wolves. A detachment of soldiers is sent to defend the villagers and the conflict arises between them and the peasants. Guerra transformed this story into what Johnson calls “one of the most powerful political films ever made” that has been compared to Eisenstein's October and Rosi's Salvatore Guiliano, (99) “two of the very few films,” Michel Ciment identifies, “which apply a truly Marxist attitude to reality ” (100).  In The Guns the starving wolves are replaced by peasants starving in a time of drought and the soldiers' mission is not so much to protect the local population but to protect a wealthy landowner's food warehouse. Guerra also took the less obvious option of centring the conflict within the detachment of soldiers sent at the request of the local mayor, a landowner, as the story develops, which comes to serve a repressive mediating function between the peasants and the powerful, two antagonistic competing blocks. To this, Guerra added the element of mysticism.

Johnson points to a cogent article by Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz who noted that the film itself divides into “two incompatible films.” On one hand there is a documentary of drought and poverty showing the fatalism, immobility, and passivity of the peasants waiting for rain and worshipping a holy ox led by one of the bearded prophets who travel the northeast, to be seen but not understood in psychological terms. On the other hand, the soldiers, in their mobility, complexity, and psychological depth, represent a more modern society. The documentary sequences concern and use as actors, the local population and the drought victims; the fictional sequences use actors in assumed roles. A rupture in style thus exists between the two blocks. As Schwarz observes, “the actors are to the non-actors, as the city-dwellers [the soldiers] with their technical civilisation, are to the evacuees [the peasants], as possibility is to predetermined misery, as plot is to inertia.”

Johnson takes up these perceptions to further show the virtual blockade of non-comprehension existing between the two groups since they come from two different worlds. In the eyes of the peasants the soldiers must seem like mythical figures who, with their technology see themselves as superior to the peasants, to them are no more than an amorphous mass. This is exemplified on a personal level in a love-hate relationship which develops between one of the soldiers, Mario, and a local woman, Luisa. Through the relationship Mario does come to understand his contradictory roles as a soldier and individual. Johnson concludes that “the de-centring of the dramatic focus from the peasants and their situation to the various levels of authority seems on the surface to reflect the populist vision of early Cinema Novo films, in which solutions come not from the people, but rather from enlightened sections of the ruling classes. The Guns is a critical, dialectical vision, not a populist one of the reality it depicts, “an anti-militarist film par excellence, [in which] Guerra distinguishes between the army as an institution and the individual soldiers who constitute it.” (100)

Guerra has explained that there are no good guys and bad guys in his films because he believes “that moral values are not to be located narrowly at the individual level, but at the level of class morality […] In The Guns if you belong to a class of shopkeepers, whatever you do you are a bad guy for the peasant; your behaviour cannot be judged outside the class to which you belong.” (quoted ibid 101).  This is not to deny that change is possible on the level of individual consciousness (the example of Mario cited above), also played out in the case of Gaucho the lorry driver, a former soldier who is killed attempting to mediate.

On a formal level Guerra uses various cinematic modes in a dialectical narrative rejecting a conventional dramatic structure in which everything contributes to moving the plot forward. Ciment concurs: “Guerra stands aside, letting a network of meanings gradually rise to the surface […] a progressive unveiling of the sense without anything being said, as it's up to the audience to construe the dialectic from the story. Duration is charged with all its real weight and the direction sometimes uses plans sequences [sequence shots] lasting four or five minutes. […] The muffled build-up of the violence, the quick bursts of action, are authenticated by what psychologists have to say about the effects of starvation. Phases of elation follow periods of apathy and depression.” (100-1)

Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

Joaquim Pedro de Andrade (1932-88), described by Randal Johnson as “a poet in the guise of filmmaker,” made 5 features and 6 documentaries, 1959-82. Johnson notes that whether dealing with the impossible love of a priest in a small country town (O Padre e a Moca/The Priest and the Girl, '65), national myths (Macunaima ’ 69), Brazilian history (Os Inconfidentes/The Conspirators 71), or with sexual mores (Guerra Conjugal/Conjugal Warfare 75, Vereda Tropical/Tropical Paths 77), in which he maintains  “a consistently coherent critical perspective through several different cinematic styles.”

Macunaima was the culmination of the first three phases of Cinema Novo. Its release in 1969 coincided with the ramping up of repression by the military-controlled government and it was, Johnson suggests, “perhaps the first Cinema Novo film to be formally innovative, politically radical, and immensely popular with the Brazilian public.” It is colourful, zany and fast moving, elevates bad taste to an aesthetic level, seems to ignore the limits of the frame and creates what de Andrade called a film without style with a popular black comedian Paulo José playing the hero, in contradiction, as both a passive and exuberant free spirit. (Johnson 25)

The film is adapted from Mario de Andrade's (not related to the director) modernist novel of the same name written in 1926 and published in 1928 “as a rhapsody (in the musical sense), that is, free fantasy ‘of an epic, heroic or national character’, the author [orchestrating]  a combination of heterogeneous elements to create what has been called a compendium of Brazilian folklore […]  through which the author attempts to synthesise Brazil.  Although the base narrative structure of the novel is retained ”the film adaptation is not merely an attempt to express the ideas of the 1928 work in a different medium but is a critical reinterpretation and an ideological radicalisation of Mario de Andrade's rhapsody, recast in terms of the social, economic, and political realities of the late 1960s.” (ibid 27)  Molotnik notes that “Terra em Transe and Macunaima couch their political messages in indirect forms: Rocha in violent allegory, Andrade in stylised, sometimes wacky satire.” The latter amounts to a bizarrely original, if unmistakable, critical stance, at least to Brazilian audiences, against repressive military rule and Brazil's state of unbalanced development.

Macunaima

The director’s basic strategy in the adaptation is to simplify and condense the book’s narrative and to make concrete its magical and fantastic elements. The film develops a critical relationship with the novel. It renders explicit what is implicit in the original and radicalises many latent political aspects of the novel making the film relate more directly to modern Brazilian social, political and economic reality. Whereas the original satirises foreign influence and cultural dependence, de Andrade denounces cultural and economic imperialism transmitted through a sub-code or sub-text of cannibalism (ibid 30).

In the form of an allegorical fable, Macunaima is a melange of Brazilian myths- 'all that is left unsaid' in Brazilian history, 'politically incorrect' in terms of race and race relations (white, black and indigenous) in the story of a man born as a black, adult-sized baby in the Amazonian wilderness to an old masculine-looking white woman of the indigenous people. Macunaima's birth is one of many scenes that plays upon race, sex, and age.  He becomes a trickster and embarks on an picaresque odyssey to the city en route being permanently turned white by water from a 'magic spring'. He has a series of bizarre encounters in the city with a giant, cannibals and Cí, a female guerilla-killer with whom he fathers a black child although both are white. The central character, Macunaima, is sexually, politically, lazily, passive, Ci is always the aggressor, both sexually, and in making war on others, like housewives go shopping, in a reversal of conventional male-female roles. He only reacts strongly when Cí blows herself and their black baby up with an ill-timed bomb.  

The narrative space of Macunaima is “one of incongruity, discontinuity, and non sequitur.“ (Johnson 29). Sexuality, urban violence, financial empire-building and capitalist development are all satirised. “incorporated by consumer society and co-opted by American cultural domination.” Macunaima pursues the magic stone, all that survives of Cí. An Olympic size swimming pool full of piranhas consumes the villainous giant Pietro Pietra after Macunaima shoots an arrow in his back. Molotnik suggests that a Brazilian audience, even without knowledge of the literary source, would have picked-up Pietro as a spoof of the immigrant Italian industrialists who “modernised” southern Brazil. Nor would they have missed the implications of the urban guerilla sequence which allows viewers to participate imaginatively in the shooting up of the forces of repression, at least until Cí meets her untimely end. The film ends with our unlikely “passive” hero of both good and evil, himself being consumed by piranhas.

In order to try and secure the film's wide release de Andrade had to play by the rules insofar as he coded the messages in highly farcical forms while capitalising on the respectability of the literary source to try and proof it against censorship generated by protest from an activist section of the middle classes. Molotnik points out that the extent of the success of Macunaimablew up the idea that social criticism, to be widely understood, must be confined to a realist aesthetic.

Cannibalism in Brazilian cultural terms was inspired by the modernist movement in the 20s as a nationalist strategy of anti-imperialism in which culture from the first world should be devoured, digested and recycled according to local needs. Cannibalism was described by Joaquin de Andrade as “an exemplary mode of consumption for underdeveloped peoples.” Another Cannibalist film is Peireiria de Santos's How Tasty was My Little Frenchman (1971)

Following the popular tropicalist films, Cinema Novo entered into “a politically engendered crisis of creativity” in 1971-2. As censorship and repression worsened, Glauber Rocha, Ruy Guerra and Carlos Diegues left Brazil for Europe. As funding became more problematic, several directors entered into co-production arrangements with other countries or financed their projects completely abroad.  Brazilian cinema as a whole prospered through the “economic miracle” years 1967-73 which ultimately weakened the military dictatorship while resulting in “a brutal transference of wealth from the bottom to the top.”

Carlos Diegues 

Carlos Diegues (1940-2025) directed 17 features and a number of documentaries, 1963-2018. Of all the Cinema Novo directors, Johnson regards Diegues “as perhaps the most intensely personal in his approach to filmmaking.” Johnson also nominates Diegues as one of the major theoreticians of Cinema Novo (52-3). One of the first to define the movement, he was also one of the first to protest its mythification and also the first “to declare it moribund.” He emphasised that new Brazilian cinema was a socially committed cinema but with the individuality of each film and filmmaker being defended. He emphasised that Cinema Novo “was not a school, it has no established style” (ibid).

Freedom for Diegues extended beyond freedom of expression for the auteur, to become one of the major thematic threads running through his films. Freedom from slavery in Ganga Zumba (1963), confirmed the existence of a new Brazilian cinema, and in his sixth feature,Xica da Silva (1976), the story tends to a utopian mode of love of freedom in the form of “an ode to the creativity to the Brazilian people […} a colourful, noisy, playful celebration of a little known historical figure.” The spirit, the director suggests, transcends any specific political situation […] evoking political struggle by opposing the [racist] stodginess of alien European culture and the vitality of Brazilian popular culture (ibid 75, 80).

A Grande Cicade/The Big City (1966) described by Johnson, like Ganga Zumba, as “an urban fable,” working toward an almost mythological freedom from economic marginalisation in an anti-realistic mosaic structure continuing and deepening that of the earlier film. Freedom from foreign domination and neocolonialism in Joana Francesco (1974) and Bye Bye Brasil (1979), transmutes to freedom to love regardless of age in Chuvas de Verão/Summer Showers (1978).

Diegues' special concern with the relationship between film and viewer, how a film is perceived and understood  - he criticised the didactic posture of early Cinema Novo. This led him to experiment with different styles and modes of discourse ranging from the slow, deliberate realism in the fable form of Ganga Zumba (1963) to the anti-realism of The Big City ; the carnivalesque exuberance of Xica da Silva to non-linear Brechtian-influenced dramatic structure in Os Herdeiros/The Heirs (1968), intended as a mural of Brazilian political and cultural history from 1930-64, seen through the trajectory of a single, bourgeois family; and a major step forward to musical comedy in Quando o Carnival Chegar/When Carnival Comes (1972), from the political didacticism of Quando de samba, Alegria de Viva/Samba School, Joy of Living (1962).

Bye Bye Brasil

Johnson suggests that another central theme of Diegues' films - “a director in search of a style” - might be considered that of Brazilian cinema itself.”  The “Hollywoodian” Bye Bye Brasil (1980), the first Brazilian feature to be commercially released in the United States, is dedicatedto Brazilians’ past, present and “perhaps the future,” as seen through the travels of a small-time circus troupe, a form of spectacle becoming less and less viable.  Diegues’ cinema had evolved “from the relative “poverty” of Ganga Zumba to the relative “luxury” of Bye Bye Brasil, from the “esthetic of hunger” to a more commercially oriented and communicative esthetic of artistic pluralism.” Johnson adds that   “(figuratively) run out of town by critics, Carlos Dieges [knew] that the only choice was to go forward in search of the artist’s utopia” (90).

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Robert Stam, “Third World and Postcolonial Cinema” The Cinema Book  Cook & Bernink eds. pp. 120-9 

Robert Stam, “Land in Anguish: Revolutionary Lessons” Jump Cut 10/11 1976  

Robert Stam, Randal Johnson, Brazilian Cinema 1982 ; “Beyond Cinema Novo” Jump Cut  Nov. 1979                                                                                                                                                     

Malcolm Coad, “Last Tangoes” Latin American Cinema in the 50s & 60s. ibid. pp.155-7                                                  

Michael Chanan, “New Cinemas in Latin America” Oxford History World Cinema ed. Nowell-Smith 1996                                                 

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Latin America” Making Waves:New Cinema of the 1960s 2008                                                  

Michel Ciment, “Glauber Rocha” “Ruy Guerra” Second Wave ed. Ian Cameron 1970                                                

J.R.Molotnik, “Macunáimá” Jump Cut 12/13 197                                                                                                                

Gordon Hitchens, “ A Conversation with Glauber Rocha”  Film Quarterly Fall 1970                                                         

Randal Johnson Cinema Novo x 5  1984 essays on de Andrade, Diegues, Guerra, Rocha, dos Santos 

Julianne Burton  Cinema and Social Change in Latin America: Conversations with Filmmakers 1986 

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati

6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer

6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti

6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One

6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism

6(20) - Rossellini in Australia

6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni

6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi

6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi

6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren

6 (25) West Germany

6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One

6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two

6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta

6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder

6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet

6(31) - New Spanish Cinema

6 (32) - Bunuel in the 60s

6 (33) Nordic Cinemas - Bergman and Widerberg

6 (34) - Scandinavia - Sjoman, Zetterling, Troell

6 (35) - East Germany - Konrad Wolf, Frank Beyer

6 (36) - East Central Europe - Poland

6(37) - East Central Europe - Hungary Part One

6 (38) East Central Europe - Miklos Jancso

6 (39) East Central Europe - Czechoslovakia

6 (40) East Central Europe - Yugoslavia

6 (41) - The Soviet Union

6 (42) - Asia - Japan - Part One

6 (43) - Japan - Part Two

6 (44) - Japan - Part Three - Shohei Imamura

6 (45) Asia - India Pt 1 - Satyajit Ray

6 (46) Asia - India Pt 2- Ghatak, Dutt, Sen, Parallel Cinema

Asia - 6 (47) China  (To be published shortly)

6 (48) - Brazil Pt 1- Cinema Novo, dos Santos, Rocha

Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Latin America - 6 (48) Brazil - Part 1 Phases of Cinema Novo: dos Santos and Glauber Rocha

Brazil: Nelson Pereira dos Santos b.28, Ruy Guerra b.31, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade b.32, Glauber Rocha b.38, Carlos Diegues b.40

Dos Santos and Glauber Rocha’s redefining of Brazilian and Latin American cinema

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Cinema Novo's origins were in the early 50s. “a result of debates between young Brazilian critics and writers opposed to the 'empty cosmopolitanism' of Hollywood and the 'false populism' of  national studios such as Atlantida and Vera Cruz. “Italian neo-realism […] pointed the way towards a critical realist method based in few technical resources” (Coad 157).  “As part of a broad, heterogeneous movement of cultural transformation that involved theatre, popular music, and literature, cinema evolved through a number of phases.” (Johnson 2).

Cinema Novo challenged both the ideology and aesthetics of Hollywood and its distribution chains and the Brazilian commercial cinema. Like Soviet filmmakers in the 20s, Cinema Novo “sought to decolonise film language and liberate its people from oppressive political and economic structures.”  In their auteurist political and aesthetic production strategies the Novo filmmakers more radically took inspiration from the French New Wave. (Stam 309).

The first phase from 1960-64 ended with a military coup d'etat. Successive populist governments, following a period of political stability and “national-developmentalism,” in the 50s had created a feeling that the country was on the verge of a radical transformation. Filmmakers initially deployed limited resources in highly individualised searches for an aesthetic appropriate to portraying the real Brazil of poverty, violence and great inequality, similar to the way neo-realism had exposed economic oppression in underdeveloped southern Italy. Films in this 'open' phase of Cinema Novo include Vidas Secas, Roy Guerra's Oz Fuzis/The Guns, Rocha's first feature Barravento (1962) and his Black God, White Devil.

The second Phase of Cinema Novo extended from 1964 to 1968, the year of the Fifth Institutional Act which ended with a coup-within-a-coup inaugurating a period of repressive military rule. Prior to this there was still space for discussion and debate on the failure of the intellectual left in the events of 1964. Paradoxically in the years immediately following the military coup, sectors of the left - including Cinema Novo - strengthened their position. Optimism of the first phase gave way to analyses of failure. In attempting to reach a wider public a distribution co-operative was established and started making films with more popular appeal. The focus of Cinema Novo shifted from rural to urban Brazil, from the lumpen proletariat to the middle class. The commitment to realism in the first phase (with the exception of Glauber Rocha) tended toward self-referentiality and anti-illusionism in the second. Films included Rocha's Terra em Transe (1967) and dos Santos's Hunger for Love (1968). During this phase filmmakers also began to recognise that they were not reaching a wide public and films began to be more commercially oriented.

The third phase ranged from 1968-72, a further period of very harsh military rule with habeus corpus suspended, censorship tightened and torture institutionalised. Concurrent with the third phase there emerged a radically different tendency – udigrudi  (underground). Novo filmmakers, unable to express views directly, resorted to allegory and a coded language of revolt in their films, the so-called cannibal-tropicalism, a 60s amalgam of popular Brazilian genres and the avant-garde, as in de Andrade's Macunaima (69) and dos Santos's The Alienist and How Tasty was My Little Frenchman (both 1970). The latter has been described as “a kind of anthropological fiction” suggesting that the (Brazilian) Indians should metaphorically cannibalise their foreign enemies, appropriating their force instead of being dominated by them. Antonio das Mortes was released as the military coup took a more savage turn in 1969, effectively marking the end of Cinema Novo as a movement in support of revolutionary change.

Just when Cinema Novo decided to reach out for a popular audience in the third phase, the underground opted “to slap the audience in the face.” As Cinema Novo moved towards technical polish and production values, the ‘Novo Cinema Novo’ (as the underground was also called) demanded a radicalization of the aesthetics of hunger, rejecting the dominant codes of well-made cinema in favour of a “dirty screen” and “garbage aesthetics.” In doing so they were not only influenced by international currents of the avant-garde but were reviving a long combative tradition in the Brazilian cinema. “The movement [which continued in the following decades] nurtured an Oedipal love-hate relationship with Cinema Novo, at times paying homage to its early purity, while lambasting what it saw as its subsequent populist co-optation.” (Stam & Johnson). Although the films were intentionally marginal they were also marginalised - harassed by the censors and boycotted by exhibitors.

Nelson Pereira dos Santos

Nelson Pereira dos Santos (1928-2018) directed two films in the mid-fifties considered precursors to Cinema Novo. In 1963 he had, with others, been advocating the need for an independent national cinema that fully revealed poverty and oppression in Brazil's north-east. Vidas Secas/Barren Lives (1963), a stark adaptation of a novel by Graceiliano Ramos, is considered a high point of first phase of Cinema Novo; Rocha called Pereira dos Santos its “conscience.” Dos Santos's own trajectory as a filmmaker consisted of his initial 'sociological' phase (1955-67), his six features, with the exception of Vidas Secas, following fairly traditional classical narrative form while maintaining  a sociological critique of Brazilian society.

In his second 'ideological' phase of four features (1968-73) dos Santos deals not so much with events, social situations and structures as with the way in which events and society are interpreted. Fome de Amor/Hunger for Love (1968), for example, calls into question traditional leftist politics in the face of a repressive military regime while Azyllo Muito Luco/The Alienist(1970) questions  the repressive nature of all ideologies. The films in this phase are consistently allegorical in content and discontinuous in form, breaking away from the realist discourse of his first phase. Santos's third “popular” phase followed the publication of his “Manifesto for a Popular Cinema (1974).”

Glauber Rocha

Glauber Rocha (1938-81) is a key figure as a filmmaker-poet and polemicist in redefining Brazilian and Latin American cinema. Edgardo Cozarinsky suggests that the confusing and contradictory reality of a continent whose historical and cultural development, for European and American intellectuals, did not follow an accessibly understandable pattern of ready-made equations. Right-wing, tradition and mysticism, against left-wing, progress and rationalism “were dismissed in a shock of colourful violence in a body of work which thrilled the European intelligentsia by questioning their most enlightened assumptions.” (Dictionary of Cinema vol.2  ed. R.Roud 878)

Rocha in his mid-twenties, in a book, “Critical Condition of Brazilian Cinema,” published in 1965 after the release of his first film, Barravento (1961), embraced the notion of the auteur propounded in 'Cahiers du Cinema'. Rocha's emphasis on the importance of self-expression in his critique of the national cinema was attacked by activist Brazilian documentary filmmaker Fernando Birri, and later by Argentinians Solanas and Getino in their manifesto for a Third Cinema. But as Nowell-Smith suggests in Rocha's defence, “a cinema of individual expression, such as one finds in Barravento and Rocha's subsequent films, is the only possible counterweight to a commercial cinema in thrall to folkloric clichés about 'the people' and which treated the audience as irredeemably petty bourgeois in mentality.(179).

Barravento

Randal Johnson finds that all Rocha's films are replete with religious imagery and the basic structure of life arising from death. A new world from the old is also their basis, if albeit often deprived of immediate religious significance. “Rocha has taken the form of the myth and used it in endless variations... until finally in his last film A Idade da Terra/The Age of the Earth  (1981) the form assumes its original content […] The structuring element is not only Protestant; it is, rather, syncretic, like Brazil itself, and mixes a baroque, Catholic mise-en-scène with Afro-Brazilian rituals and saints”(118-9). Johnson takes up René Gardies perception that Rocha's films “taken as a single text, are informed by the repetition of a single, Catholic myth: Saint George slaying the dragon.” Johnson suggests, however, that this only shows one side of the coin pointing out that “the difficulty of many of Rocha's films is that images, people, and things are rarely what they appear to be, or, better said, rarely only what they appear to be.” Johnson notes that William van Wert in studying Rocha's typage finds his types [such as the bandits or cangaceiros] “are in continual metamorphosis, always at contradiction with their landscape, always at contradiction within themselves.” (120)

Glauber Rocha was in the forefront of the concern to create a “decolonized” cinematic language, a new cinematic language based on Brazilian social reality […] In his films, underlying religious form is often expressed in terms of revolutionary politics: a new political order arising from the destruction of the old from the ruins of mysticism, alienation, and archaic ideologies. His films are a protest (“protest-ant”) against mystification, capitalism and imperialism at the same time as they are a prophecy of revolution. The prophetic and the messianic are profoundly rooted in Rocha's Protestant ethos and are present throughout his work.” (ibid)

Rocha was born in the poverty of the drought stricken rural northeast/Nordeste.  The arid Sertão are where two of his three major Novo features were filmed. In 1965 Rocha published his manifesto, “The Aesthetics of Hunger” in which  he argued “that the politics of the underdeveloped world was, of necessity, the politics of hunger and that, again of necessity, there had to be an aesthetic of hunger to match it.” (Nowell-Smith ed. 179).

Black God, White Devil

In Dues e o diabo na terre do sol/Black God White Devil (1964), set in Rocha's Bahia homelands, the conflict is not between peasants and landowners or a struggle not between good and evil but between opposing sides that cancel each other out. Moral values are interchangeable  - the Black God (a charismatic black prophet' Sebastião, messianic leader of a strange millenial cult) commits crimes and the White Devil (the blonde bandit or cangacieros, Corisco) sometimes acts as a liberating force to create a new awareness. Antonio das mortes- the killer and hired gun paid by the Catholic church and state - is “a real catalyst of history” as Ciment puts it. (Cameron ed.111)  The displaced peasant couple is ambiguously placed in relation to the other central players. A fundamental ambiguity in Rocha's filmic system is carried over and the oppositions that are shifting and unstable develop between different groups and characters.

Antonio das Mortes

The quasi-abstract and enigmatic figure of Antonio the bandit-killer for hire is the mythic centre in themes and location of a companion 'novo western', Antonio das Mortes (1969) set in 1940. Although Antonio is apparently based loosely on an historical figure, he is clearly symbolic. The characters resembling “ideas on the move” are placed stylistically on the screen by a mix of montage and sequence shots. In contrast to the “frenetic camerawork and shorthand montage” of Black God White Devil, Rocha abandons realism in Antonio das Mortes for an theatrical  spectacle to engage the viewer, delivering a twist at the end. The ritual of dancing, sacrifice and procession, which Ciment suggests is reminiscent of Artaud's theories on the theatre of cruelty, is in all three films, including  Terra em Transe (116 ibid).

The cangaceiros having been killed as negative forces in the Black God are resurrected in Antonio as positive forces. Rocha explained this reversal as recognition of the strength of mysticism (hence the reincarnations) as a popular force in the Northeast. In sociological terms he acknowledged it is recognised as a very negative phenomenon whereas from a subjective and unconscious point of view it is very positive “because it signifies a permanent rebellion of the people against the oppression of that region.” (ibid 143).  

Antonio das Mortes

As in Rocha's previous films, the characters of Antonio das Mortes are not psychological beings but symbols in a mystical, operatic structure - the local feudalistic landowner who is blind and rapacious, Mattos his manager intelligent and sensitive but weak (representing the bourgeoisie), and the drunken teacher “the Professor” (the intelligentsia) - “are formed by ambiguous, shifting signifiers and signifieds, as the role of St George passes from personage to personage.” (145)  Coriana in Antonio das Mortes has much in common with the Black God Corsico, spiritual symbol of the oppressed in the earlier film but lacking a history as a leader that Coriana is given as a reincarnation of the last cangaciero Lampiao, supposedly killed by Antonio in 1938. As a force of history with a record of killing more than 100 cangaceiros in the northeastern back country coming out of retirement, Antonio kills Coriana in a ritualistic duel. The presence of Coriana's followers “the holy one” (a girl in white) and a black dressed in red, seem to be the catalyst for Antonio doubting his historical role in a revolutionary transformation. He asks for food to be distributed to the poor and he and “the Professor” take on the gang of hired killers, brought in to finish Antonio's work, in a climactic Peckinpah-esque gun battle, and Antão, the black in red, kills the landowner with a lance.”

For Rocha “the true revolutionaries in South America are individuals, suffering personalities, who are not involved in theoretical problems. Latin American peasants have not read Marx […] the upheaval can only come from individual people who have suffered themselves and who have realized that a need for change is present – not for theoretical reasons but because of personal agony.”

In explaining his intention in his two 'Novo Westerns', Rocha referred to the mysticism that marks all of Latin America.  Above all, in Brazil, it is based on “an emotional Dionysiac behaviour” which comes from what he describes as “a very strange mixture of Catholic Christianity and African religions involving an energy that is “more emotional than critical...the alienation of the people from everyday reality.” But this energy found in the people “draws its sources from this mysticism, which results from this fusion of all religions in Latin America.” It is hardly surprising that Rocha fell out with Godard during the making of Wind from the East.

Land in a Trance

Between Black God,White Devil and Antonio das Mortes, Rocha made Terra em Transe/Land in a Trance/Land in Anguish (1965), his most personal work - he also claimed it his most important. It embodies “a convulsive, apocalyptic vision of Latin American politics, a cinematic poem-meditation on the death of populist politics which, according to Rocha, has nothing to offer.” The “land in a trance” is immersed in a carnival of eternal crises and political madness. Resurrection, in Rocha's view, “remains only implicit, however, in the dialectical notion that the only positive thing in Latin America is that which is normally considered to be negative and from which a new society can arise.” (Johnson 135).

Pervaded by the influence of Eisenstein, “Rocha wanted a cinematographic confrontation that would put an end to myth where the degeneration of a civilization could be explained and where 'the state of trance could be presented as a ‘state of transition'...The film at the same time is cradled in the blackest romanticism and lightened by the critical gaze the director levels at his character.” (Ciment 115)

Land in a Trance

The poet Paulo Martin's agonised recollections of the political and personal events that have led to his failure and impending death constitute the film's complexity shaped by the free movement between the subjective and the objective, forming what has been called “a sulphurous poem.” The events take place in the imaginary country of Eldorado where the populist provincial governor, Veira, is reluctant to resist a coup led by the right-wing leader, Diaz. Martin who has been trying to persuade Veira to resist, is mortally wounded when he breaks through a police barricade.

In writing about music in his films Graham Bruce leads with a quote from Rocha: “Brazil is a musical country and I think of cinema as musical montage with pauses and musical spaces.”  It plays a distinctive Brechtian role in his films “as a vital element, not simply something reproducing and reinforcing the image but as a means of both structuring sequences and commenting on individual images.