Promoting Intellectual Film Culture Since 1973
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Terra Em Transe, (1967)Terra Em Transe, (1967) UK, 2009 Considered the seismic epicentre of Tropicalist sensibility by Caetano Veloso whom identified and valorized the cinematographic matrix as a place of passage and dialogue between different fields and traditions; Rocha’s third film exemplifies the meta-critical polyphony characterizing the cinematic unrest convulsing the Brazilian screens in the 60s also, reductively (as reductive are all sort of labels) known as Cinema Novo. Set in the imaginary (yet eloquently actual) country of Eldorado Terra Em Transe enacts the sensory recollection of Paulo Martins, a young leftist intellectual, torn between political responsibility and poetical engagement (“Poetry and politics are too much for a single man” claims Paulo), in a paroxysmal reflection on the intellectual and its tragic impotence and incapability to take part in the events he so much analyses. Conceived in radical opposition to the mediocrity of commoditized cinema, Rocha’s films chanted ‘Down with Populism’ while being informingly staged by/on the ‘Aesthetics of Hunger’ aspiring to the violent lyricism of liberation willing to unhinge dominant narratives in order to free the spectator from the burden of passive spectatorship. Although agitated by a rigorous ethical will – provocatively seen by the aesthetic dynamiter of Cinema Marginal Rogerio Sganzerla as the scream of protest coming from an abortive ‘mise-en-scene’ – Terra Em Transe does neither surrender to rhetoric dogmatisms nor to simplistic moralism, but, one the contrary, bedazzles the spectator with elliptical accelerations and discursive layers whose poetical urges inhabit a dialectical space of critical questioning markedly absent from certain European ideological purism. After the heretical panegyric of Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (1964) exposing the tragic link between hunger and fear whereby the exploited subject was able to express its dissent only through an iconic identification with a spiritual or political image, the agitator of Cinema Novo continues his revolutionary exegesis of Brazilian folk traditions aimed at the imagining of a stateless (semiot)insurrection. Like O Desafio by Paulo Cesar Saraceni, Terra Em Transe is heavily influenced by the national crisis traversing the Brasilian society of the time; rather, is a film about the crisis, bred by the crisis: earth entranced is the Brasil taken over by the dictatorship of Castelo Branco and the disoriented opposition crushed by the events impotently observed by the intellectual(s). The film is structurally articulated into a whole extensive flashback, the filmic body is constituted by memories, sensations, by the confused and fragmented images traversing the mind of a dying man. Places and visages alternate evocative sequences of aesthetic explosions basting a hammering succession of reiterative actions where reality hallucinates into imagination. The rapid and break-beaten montage configures a passionate tachycardia feverishly dancing on the edge between life and death thus donating the film its characteristic urgency oozing out from the tormented frames. Demonstrating an incredible (self)critical attitude towards what only post-ideology will start to organically question: the intellectual and its position in relation to insurrectional stances; Glauber Rocha exposes the incapability to emancipate oneself from fatal habits circumventing the ultimate endorsement of the revolutionary struggle. The schizophrenic crack between words and facts, practice and ideas captured in a filmic (syn)thesis whose organic balance amongst form and content remains sublimely airtight. Paulo Martinez, the protagonist, shares a professional and affective relationship with Porfirio Diaz, a senator embodying the apparent benevolence of power, its edulcorated detachment from real problems, in other words: the threatening joy of command. On Diaz’s right side sits the catholic power and on his left the practical guiding force of every government, the multinational economic enterprise, the secular inquisitor of the capital. It is perhaps the paternalist affection that takes Paulo away from Diaz and his anonymous girlfriend Silvia to bring him closer to Vieira, the new leader Paulo forges an extemporary sodality with, only to return once again to the dead-end relation with Diaz. And when Diaz will finally triumph, Paulo decides not to side with him embracing a phoney revolutionary suicide that Rocha reflexively depicts as a useless sacrifice egotistically invoking political martyrdom. After endlessly seesawing between politics and poetry, words and facts Paulo pays his privileged indecision with life, but, as his new girlfriend Sara belatedly warns him: “We don’t need heroes!” It is during Vieira’s emphatic electioneering campaign – punctuated by a pervasive trombone – that we first encounter the poetical pillar of Rocha’s discourse: the people. Unlike in Deus e o Diabo where the people lived in a constant state mute delegation, in Terra Em Transe they autonomously declare their own misery and destitutenesses. Felicio, a humble and respectful agrarian, becomes the spokesman of the silenced masses and talk to Vieira, demanding improved conditions, which, of course, the governor promises. Alternately, all the main characters find themselves clashing with the people and in a specular operation they reveal their profound despise for them (the film was in fact harshly criticized by the Brazilian left, while extremely appreciated by the far-left). Paulo himself will knock a begging peasant down to demonstrate him: “how coward and vile he was…”; but to the spectator is obvious – and unpleasant to admit for Paulo being the protagonist and the reincarnation of the average intellectual – that cowardice belongs to Paulo as much as it belong to the passive audience. Unable to meaningfully act Paulo lives the bourgeois decline, simultaneously accepting and refusing its reactionary essence. The film is in fact punctuated in its final stages made of slow and oppressive sequences by Paulo’s monologues concisely expressing the existential abasement of an intellectually futile experience. Irremediably torn by an unresolved dialectic schizophrenia, between idea(l)s and practice. The hypnotic alternation among succinct and evasive sequences further emphasized by a lyrical tone on the one hand very frantic and on the other almost dilated suggests an (a)temporal dimension built on a thought stream whose frontiers cannot be geographical. After having watched Terra Em Transe one finds it difficult to rationally determine how much time has passed by and whether space relate to the latter in canonical terms, a riot of images convulse the mind. The impossibility to order such creational chaos is clearly felt and yet one has lucidly grasped the sense of this participating film although unable to rationally illustrate the whys. Contributor details Celluloid Liberation Front is a multi-use(r) name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by a desiring multitude of insurgent cinephiles, transmedial terrorists, aesthetic dynamyters and random deviants. For reasons that remain unknown, the name was borrowed from a collective of anti-imperialist blind filmmakers from the Cayman Islands whose films have rarely been unseen. CLF is currently working on a book about Marco Ferreri (The Veterinaria of (wo)mankind) and looking for an editor to endorse the project. Contacts: celluloidliberationfront@gmail.com, www.celluloidliberationfront.blogspot.com This article is protected at the request of the author under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States license. |
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