Terra em Transe. A Marxist Poetics and Aesthetics as a Critique of Capitalist Development.

Terra em Transe. Una poética y una estética marxista como crítica del desarrollo capitalista.

Abstract:

This article examines the film Terra
em Transe (Glauber Rocha, 1967), framed in the Brazilian
“Cinema Novo” movement. The analysis
revolves around the constitution of a
cinematographic poetics linked to a Marxist
aesthetic. The principle of movie montage is the essential
component of his cinematographic poetics. The Marxist aesthetic falls on what Alberto Híjar Serrano
called rough communism, and some techniques of the Brechtian
theory of distancing can also be appreciated. These elements constitute the cinematographic formula that is configured in a kind of critique of capitalist development, that industrializing meta-narrative that became hegemonic from the second half of the twentieth
century.

Keywords:           capitalism;           political cinema; Glauber Rocha; Cinema Novo; underdevelopment.

Resumen:

En
este artículo se examina la película Terra em
Transe (Glauber Rocha, 1967),
enmarcada en la corriente del “Cinema Novo” brasileño. El análisis gira en torno a la constitución de una poética cinematográfica vinculada a una estética marxista. El
principio del montaje es el
componente esencial de su poética
cinematográfica. La estética de
corte marxista recae en lo que Alberto
Híjar Serrano denominó comunismo
tosco, e igualmente se aprecian
algunas técnicas de la teoría del distanciamiento brechtiana. Estos elementos constituyen la formula cinematográfica que se configura en una suerte de crítica al desarrollo
capitalista, aquel metarrelato industrializador que se hizo hegemónico a partir de la segunda mitad del siglo XX.

Palabras
clave: capitalismo; cine
político; Glauber
Rocha; Cinema Novo; subdesarrollo.

This work is under an international license Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial
4.0.

Table of
contents. 1. Introduction. 2. Cinema Novo as
a function of poetics. 3. Terra em Transe and
its cinematographic poetics in a dictatorial context. 4. Marxist
aesthetic of crude communism. 5. Conclusions.

How to cite: Montes, D. (2024). Terra em Transe. A Marxist Poetics
and Aesthetics as a Critique
of Capitalist Development. Ñawi. Arte, Diseño,
Comunicación, Vol. 8, Núm. 2, 57-70. https://nawi.espol.edu.ec/

www.doi.org/10.37785/nw.v8n2.a3e

1.  Introduction

The New Latin American Cinema (NCL),
which emerged in the sixties of the last century, is a complex cinematographic phenomenon of Latin
American integration around the subcontinental conformation of a revolutionary counter-imperialist project, of which the Brazilian Cinema
Novo is an essential component. Since 1950, with the incipient modernization of
Brazil, leftist movements, including artistic ones, believed in the
crystallization of a socialist revolution. In this sense,
the poetic dimension that the cinemanovists presented in their films
revolves around a mimetic process
that puts in crisis the “representation” of reality; that is, it lies in the creative
overflow as a reinvention
of conventional cinematographic forms, in substance and form.

From the approaches of the so-called
cultural Marxism, I have seen how the
Marxist ideology was relevant for the filmmakers of the Third Cinema and the New Latin American
Cinema; now, from Marx’s works,
it is interesting to observe
the critique of underdevelopment and how this is related
to several turning
points that crossed
the Cinema Novo films. Suppose
we start from Marx’s predictions about the idea that large-scale commodity production would take
place globally, and thus, capital would be centralized. In that case, it is
logical to think that, in the capitalist expansion
with its modernizing projects, given at an increasingly frenetic pace,
underdevelopment will spread, especially
in the global south. Marx’s critique of capital also includes the
cultural industry and cinema.

At the beginning of the 1960s,
Cinema Novo consolidated as a movement that developed from a multiciplity of
visions and cinematographics promoted by a group of
young filmmakers Directors such as Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Glauber Rocha,
Carlos Diegues, Gustavo
Dahl, Ruy Guerra,
Juaquim Pedro de Andrade, Leon Hirszman, Paulo Cezar Saraceni, were part of the first
generation of filmmakers and founders of Cinema
Novo and built what has been classified by some historians as “the first Latin American
film movement, taking the word in the sense in which intellectual avant-garde movements use it
throughout the twentieth century” (Paranagua, 2003, 232).

The context in which the NCL and Cinema Novo emerged is due to Capitalist Modernity, and, therefore, it is worth mentioning its most important critics, Lukács, Brecht,
Benjamin, Adorno, and Bolívar Echeverría. In this sense, in this Modernity, new views and ways of seeing, understanding, and making art do not represent a unified vision
or a uniform aesthetic practice. The
relationship between the left and culture, including artistic production,
constitutes an almost inexhaustible field
of questions and theoretical and political debates.
Marcos Napolitano states
that after World War
II, so-called “Western Marxism,” beginning with the Frankfurt
School, took the cultural question as the central
axis of its reflections on advanced capitalist societies, moving towards a
critical revision of the relations between
culture and revolution throughout the second half of the 20th century.
“To some extent, both advanced capitalism and its powerful
cultural industry, as well as the effects
of the traumatic relationship between
the Stalinist Soviet Union and the artistic-cultural field, constituted the central problems
to be debated and criticized, pointing to another possible relationship between
political engagement and cultural action.” (Napolitano, 2014a, 37).

The
central axes configured in the debate of the European Marxist left will also be present in the Brazilian cultural environment, many times without
the theoretical density
that marks the European context
but always configured in a dramatic
and dilemmatic way, the rich historicity of the period,
marked by the affirmation of a mass politics aimed at overcoming historical underdevelopment (Napolitano, 2014a, 37). Ronaldo
Munck also highlighted the notion of

modernization as the essence of Marx’s conception of development: “As the bourgeoisie rose onto the world stage,
it would eliminate all old orders
and transform them in its own image.
The most developed country was a mirror in which
the less developed could glimpse their own future” (Munck, 2010).

In this context, cinema positioned
itself as a tool to legitimize the discourses of central power or, on the other hand, counter-related those discourses,
giving voice to those who have never had a place within the “modern forms” in the relatively young
nation-states. In the case of the Brazilian Cinema Novo, Rocha’s militant
position as an unorthodox Marxist was evidenced by Alberto Híjar. Along with
our analysis of the Terra em Transe
film, we will elucidate the Marxian aesthetic
elements present in the construction of this cinema novo poetics
that develop with the
framework of Brazilian dictatorial depression.

2.  Cinema Novo as a function
of poetics

Poetics can be science from a gnoseological point of view. In this sense, poetics incorporates the obverse of history, a myriad of elements that the latter
does not consider,
in casual lines of biographical trajectories. These elements
are ascribed to ethics in terms of the concern for human life beyond a
sociological group or distributive totalities because, in history, individuals always appear
classified into groups (Huerga, 2015, 17).

Poetics in cinema establishes a particular type of relationship, a kind of demand on the viewer
because the form of what is filmed demands a response from the said viewer. In this way, the poetic resides in that which intensifies the sensorial experience, in that which concerns the inventiveness of the
filmmaker through an operative deployment of
elements in the composition of the image and narrative forms to shake up our
usual way of seeing the world. “The
cinematic poetic could be found in a cinema of fireflies, as opposed to the
blinding clarity of the spotlights through which everything
must be seen.” (Martins, 2019, 4). That is to say, the cinematic poetic
moves away from the obvious,
the literal, even from what might be “logical,” formally
speaking; it may well break with traditional narrative principles
and the representation of facts.

For the poet, the substratum of his/her work is how it is made. Eisenstein said that the totalization process through montage constantly incorporates new elements articulated in a unity
whose truth cannot
be beyond verisimilitude. The poetics of Cinema Novo,
roughly speaking, are framed in narratives of individuals from underprivileged and/or
subjugated social classes, narratives of the peripheries or places
outside the perimeter of the modern State, in the most oppressed groups
within the capitalist mode of production, Terra em transe is
not only an example of this but a sample of the deep contradictions that
have been seen within the historical class struggle.

From the poetics point of view, what is most relevant is not that
the film presents a direct truth about certain
events; what is important is how the plot is woven from an operational
deployment with non-traditional narrative devices,
within which the principle of montage is fundamental to build a work in a
processual unity-totality. In this sense,
Terra em Transe
is a field of poetic constructions because it sets in motion a process of
pure creation that puts Aristotelian mimesis in crisis (Aristotle, 2008), articulating, through
a series of material and formal elements,
a totality (the film) with its
own language.

The principle of
montage in the poetic constructions used by Glauber Rocha in Terra em transe is
fundamental to understanding, for example,
the disruptions and “an apparent” lack of cohesion.
Therefore, verisimilitude is

the maximum gnoseological truth that a film can reach
within the different forms of filmmaking, a truth that is potentiated through poetic exercise.
From the formal dimension of cinema, poetic cinematography does not consist
of designating or defining things.
Still, in bursting
in like a flash, producing resonances, disruptions, or luminescence that allow us a sensory game, exalting the
different, the forgotten, the unforeseen, or some detail never before perceived, Glauber Rocha achieves it in
this film, pointing to an essential historical-political process in Brazil
during a dictatorial period.

3.  Terra em Transe and Cinematic
Poetics in the Dictatorial Context

The emergence of democratic order
that occurred with the 1964 coup d’état in Brazil (which overthrew
the government of President João Goulart and established a military dictatorship headed by Umberto
de Alencar Castelo
Branco) was the result of a process that had structural causes
aggravated by a situation that added other specific ones. In the international context
of the Cold War, the military regime
crushed freedom of expression and severely repressed the political opposition, and
massive human rights violations were committed. Trending nationalism, economic development, and anti-communism
were formally adopted as official banners1. In the 1960s and
1970s, Brazil received logistical and economic assistance from the United
States government through
Plan Condor, enabling
the penetration of North American imperialism.

The
beginning of the dictatorship in Brazil took place during a highly contradictory period,
profoundly impacting the film industry.
At the same time, it convulsed the perspective of independent filmmakers, sharpening their leftist
political stance and reinventing the creative spirit embodied in multiple and novel forms within filmmaking. Marcos Napolitano, in his book “1964. História
do Regime Militar Brasileiro” (2014b), offers us the most recent
historiographical approaches,
expanding his scope of analysis beyond the institutional, macroeconomic, and
political dimensions and interweaving
them with other social and cultural dimensions, tracing a network of the
complex, contradictory relationships within these fields. He delineates the
participation of actors who often
transcend the upper echelons where
the history of the dark dictatorial period has long seemed to unfold.

The coup d’état found
its place in the prelude to the political instability of João
Goulart’s government and its inability
to operate in a scenario of strong social polarization in which the class
struggle intensified since neither the
workers and other popular sectors nor the conservative and bourgeois sectors
were able to consolidate their hegemony.
The group of Cinemanovist directors
put the contradictions arising from this struggle under the lens, giving light and voice
to the former. For their
part, the official
media and think
tanks such as the Institute for Research and Social Studies
(IPES) and the Brazilian Institute for Democratic Action
(IBAD) were the spaces in which a strongly anti- reformist discourse was created and disseminated, based
on the French Counterinsurgency Doctrine, the American National
Security Doctrine and Brazil’s own authoritarian culture,
which was able to appeal
to important sectors
of the middle class that supported the military intervention at the end of March 1964. The 1960s saw a highly irrational situation. Theotônio
Dos Santos described it as follows:

1
The idea of
“development” is linked to the notion of “economic
growth”. Both terms became the global standard, defining universal
characters based on “the conditions that characterized the world’s
most advanced countries: industrialization, high rates of urbanization
and education, the technological advancement of agriculture, and the widespread
adoption of the values and principles
of modernity anchored in a western
lifestyle and consumption (Mendoza,
2021, 2).

A country that managed to establish an industrial base was unable
to use it to improve
the living conditions of its people
as a consequence of the
harshness of the laws of dependent capitalist development (with the defeat of
the revolutionary ) to increase its productive capacity solely for the
benefit of the international big capital, with the country’s
dependent bourgeoisie dominating
the country forced to decide its own faith (Dos
Santos, 1994, 86)2.

These turbulent years in Brazil
marked the course that the group of independent film directors would take; “Artists and intellectuals played a
significant role in the construction of the utopia of a revolutionary Brasilianism that would allow to shape the potentialities of
a people and a nation” (Ridenti, 2006, 43).
Filmmaker Gustavo Dahl stated that
after 1964, the political theme in the films
was enhanced; they were
almost all self-critical, in a certain sense, and self-demystifying of what could be defined,
roughly, as “left-wing intellectuals,” which tragically showed their
powerlessness with the situation of the moment. “I think I can identify
in these films, with a political theme, fundamentally: O
Desafio, Terra
em transe, O bravo guerreiro and
Os herdeiros, a
kind of active pessimism” (León, 1979, 35). That’s what Gustavo Dahl said in an interview. “They assumed in a somewhat
idealistic way that they were the radical
expression of the otherness of Latin American
cinema in the face of the neo-colonialist cultural system” (King, 1994, 157).

In the
context of repression in the
various institutional,
cultural, and artistic fields, the realist
poetics that erected the Cinema Novo at its inception (with the influence of Italian neorealism) developed with an innovative force.
There was among the
filmmakers, even more so, a desire to continue along the line of building
reality in a faithful way. However,
the operational deployments due to dictatorial repression were forced to change; the film language needed a formal reinvention.

Within its own historical
process, the production
of meanings through a symbolic character became present in
Brazilian cinema. New forms of creation in terms of disruptive and alienating elements
were explored, formal structures were cracked open,
and the political act of the film was strengthened through
new narrative devices;
its creators showed their
militancy and ideology, articulated to these criticisms of capitalist Modernity
and its Marxist analytical principle
of criticism of political economy.
The plausibility of films was altered through
these new narrative forms.

To delve into the universe of Marxist
aesthetics as a substantial component of that verisimilitude present in art, it is necessary to take Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez as a reference, who stated the following: “Marx’s
aesthetic thought does not constitute an organic body of doctrine, an aesthetic in itself, but this does not diminish, in any way, its importance

2
Considering these words by Theotônio Dos Santos,
it is important to distinguish between the fact that, although
the ideas of "dependentist" Marxists were beginning to emerge, the
critique of the notion of development is a distinct issue; both are framed within the critique of modernity as phenomena resulting from
the expansion of the capitalist production system. However, the developmentalist
metanarrative created by ECLAC began en masse with US President Truman's
1949 speech, delimiting the relevance
and necessity of industrializing Latin America, while the dependency
ideologists sharpened their critique of the generation of sui generis
capitalisms, as Ruy Mauro Marini
called them, dependent
on a central capitalism, hence the dominance of hegemonic forces from central
countries over peripheral ones. Marini goes beyond the development-underdevelopment dichotomy, within the limits developed
by emblematic authors from the early days of ECLAC. His masterpiece, Dialectics of Dependency, was necessary
in the midst of the crisis of "developmentalism" in the 1970s, not only as an internal debate among activists, but as a real way of overcoming these
theoretical approaches to development.
In this way, he proposes a historical reference to the subordination of Latin
America to voracious capitalist economies, in which
the oligarchic interpretation of development is the specialization of southern nations
in the production of their raw materials.

as an essential aspect of his conception of man and
society” (1979, 14). In that sense, Marx did not separate art from ideology; on the contrary, he pointed
to art as a substantial form of the ideological superstructure, granting preponderance to society and work as the essence of aesthetics. His doctrine cannot be reduced to a mere interpreted political and economic doctrine;
therefore, his artistic ideas cannot be separated from human and artistic
practice, nor can the understanding of his philosophy as a philosophy of praxis, whose telos is to transform human reality, be underestimate

In this review of Marx’s studies on the artistic sphere, specifically in reference to an aesthetic where the principles of the
critique of political economy are present in the aesthetic dimension of art, it
is worth highlighting the fundamental
role of Alberto Híjar Serrano in the study of
the genealogies of unorthodox Marxisms in this
aesthetic dimension, genealogies
delimited by the author in the exact course of his itineraries as a Marxist. In
his corollary of studies on
revolutionary art, he has pointed out the massive recourse to the construction
of the subject-people. This process
significantly impacts the aesthetic extensions of Marxism, emerging
from the early
decades of the 20th century. Agustín Cueva emphasizes
that “it was from the 1930s
onward that Latin America became Marxistized”.

Marxism is indissolubly fused with the national and the
popular to the extent that: (a) it recovers the underlying popular roots of oppressed
ethnic groups: Indians,
blacks, mulattos, mestizos,
etc. (b) our history and traditions are reinterpreted; (c) a
new symbolic repertoire and even a new language are created from the above; and
this (d) without falling into folklorism and
placing these images and representations in the perspective of the construction
of a national culture that did not exist until
then, or at least atrophied by the stereotyped character of the oligarchic
society and by imperial domination; and (e) highlighting the multiple tensions
and contradictions, including those of class,
that furrow the life of our nations
(Híjar, 2021, 64-65).

In his work La praxis estética. Dimensión estética libertaria (2016), Alberto Híjar
develops the notion of rough communism
and explains how Marx and Engels distanced themselves from it due to its instinctive impulses absent from
political economy since it rejected private property in general at all costs.
However, it was useful for the
construction of a radical proletarian communist tendency that was convincing
due to its emotional force and pragmatic character. “Eduard Bernstein’s slogan
of exalting the social movement
above principles seemed
to them a good
synthesis of rough communism” (Híjar, 2016, 161). If
communism is supported by the workers’ movement and the emancipation of the working class can
only be born from within itself, when vindicating communism, Engels pointed
out the demarcation of communism in order to work with the “a
little rough” ones because they are radical.
In this sense, rough reading
is a slogan opposed to theoretical work for historical and dialectical criticism. “The notion of people demands historical and social
precisions to distinguish its demagogic uses from those commonly used in the names of organizations of rough communism” (Híjar, 2016, 165). “Rough communism” would be communitarian poetics, but not the romanticization of a state of poverty, literacy, or savagery, as Western
civilizationists suggest. “This impoverishment of humanity characteristic
of rough communism required Lenin, so
respectful of the autonomy of intellectuals and artists, to propose to the Proletkult in 1918 a resolution
guided by the need to liberate the productive forces,
including the mass of traditions, signs, and symbols
produced under bourgeois rule” (Híjar, 2016, 167).

Rough communists repudiate theoretical
criticism party construction; they repudiate theoretical radicalism. Rough
communism becomes a powerful tool, like anthropology, for example, with
which the colonized devoured the colonizer,
appropriating their qualities
to create human beings in further powerful development, and not only

assumed their status as underdeveloped, but they
reversed it to get out of the historical negation of their own ontology.
Something similar happens
with Gross Communism; “the ideology of the noble savage implies
opposition to rationalism to
legitimize anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and national liberation resistance (Híjar, 2016, 168).

The
cinematographic work Terra em Transe illustrates the construction of a poetics around
that Marxist aesthetic of rough communism by
presenting the essence of the subject-people, the communitarian power in its
frames and sequences, by exalting the contradictions and nooks and crannies of capitalist development, through the presence
of the collective
subject framed in the working class. Terra em Transe places the action in the fictitious republic El Dorado, Rocha’s representation of modern Brazil. Pablo Martins is a poet, journalist, and follower of Porfirio Díaz’s conservative politics.
As he experiences the contradictions and problems of his people, his social
conscience leads him to break the ideological relationship with Diaz and join the progressive politics
of his opponent, Felipe Viera.
Still, the latter
falters when he is pressured by the revolutionary climate
of the proletariat, which causes Paulo’s disenchantment, who sees how realizing his ideals must go through
active struggle and not only through discursive struggle.

To establish the construction of
cinematic poetics, attention must be focused on editing. Pablo Martins immerses us in his world of ideological artistic crisis, political disenchantment, and the factual fifth
power of the official media,
against which he swims against the
tide. In a psychological back-and-forth, the film places us inside
Paulo’s ideological conflict, his internal struggles, and the chaos
of his political self-confrontations in a convulsive country is reflected in Rocha’s disruptive editing, with vertiginous moments in the splicing of images, where the autonomy
of each frame is the cause of a visual shock. In Figure 1, we can observe a sequence that shows the highly theatrical expressions of the protagonist,
Pablo Martins, which is essential to witness one of the components of the
Brechtian distancing theory within a
materialistic aesthetic.

Figure 1. A frame of Pablo Martins is an act with high theatricality that unveils his gaze at afixed
point, expressing the coldness and disenchantment of

his self-confrontation (own elaboration, 2023; source: Mubi).

Glauber Rocha placed the emphasis on political violence, pain, despair, and death as the foundations of reality. Life is understood as poetry that appeals
to a theory of sensibility. His opinion is communion with what the most human emerges amidst the agony of
violence; that is why Terra em transe is an absolute
truth of feeling, a truth achieved
through montage. “From his personal experience, Roca composed in this
film the chronicle of an official tragedy
based on the anguish and shock of so many insurgent poets, morally defeated or,
in other cases, directly eliminated
the State[…]. It is about placing the
violence in poetic immortality (Elena & Díaz,
1999, 195-196).

Terra em transe is a theory developed in images. When it transgresses the formalism
of language and creates disruptive techniques in film, it is theorizing. The images Rocha
offers are very clear regarding the aesthetic sense
in the montage;
they are images given to time because they have no conclusion and are not due to any plot; they are films open to the power of images. The images are used as devices of thought, which, through different
instrumentations, belong to a
theoretical and academic instance. In Terra
em Transe, there is not only a story, a plot, and
a mise-en- scène; here, montage is the central axis of creation, as
it gives his films their poetic character. This character resides in the constant displacement of images that lack the Aristotelian dramatic
structure; this phenomenon can be seen in Figure 2. Each frame has its own force and
is presented as flashes that pass in seconds.

Figure 2. Pablo Martins
and the curator Porfirio Díaz in a disruptive montage sequence (own elaboration, 2023; source: Mubi).

Rocha vindicates the epic Eisenstein montage,
understanding it as the driving
force of ideas in motion and as the impulse of the poetry of a discontinuous
mode that forms a signifier. As a non-capitalist approach, it explains what economic
theories cannot explain solely based on static data. Cinema addresses these
topics from a non-rational, sensitive dimension
through the primary
analytical categories of hunger and sleep. Regarding
his admiration for Luis Buñuel shows us in Terra em Transe the
deployment of a dreamlike aesthetic of surrealism, which we perceive
as the dialect of the unconscious 3.

The theatricality of the characters
is one of the components of the distancing in the materialist aesthetics that the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht used
in his Epic Theater to generate
precisely a distancing between the play and
the spectator. In Terra em transe, this component is
present. The constant tension of the characters creates ideological emotion; the weight of the performance is in the
character’s theatrical character, and the contrasts of light on the faces in the manner of
expressionist lighting create that dramatic theatrical tension. The abolition
of time and narrative configures an
aesthetic form that, in turn, is a revolutionary event from an artistic and
cultural point of view. This film acquires
a performative character, in which the vigor is in the life experience provided by the contingency to which this performative character
is due (the figuration that accompanies it in the creation itself).
In Figure 3, we can observe the theatrical character
of both the characters and the staging;
the “overacted” expressions and the expressionist lighting exhibit the presence of a
materialistic aesthetic.

Figure 3 Frame of Pablo Martins
and the politician Viera in a theatrical performance act (own elaboration, 2023; source: Mubi).

4.  A Marxist aesthetic
of Rough communism

Glauber Rocha’s “unorthodox” character
lies in the fact that he does not come from a formal Marxism
because his Marxism
is not epistemological; rather, it rests on the praxis of Rough Communism, which, as noted above, is the communism
of the subject-people, therefore, of the popular
and even of the pamphleteer—the collective subject as the engine of change in the class struggle. The aesthetic of the pamphleteer lies in its recipient, the public, who has no idea of material-dialectical Marxism.
Rather, it sustains
the crudeness of the non-literate community; it has its

3
See Glauber’s Rocha Los
doce mandamientos of our
lord Buñuel, de Glauber Rocha; and Arnold Hauser’s
Dialéctica en el arte no racional.

4
See Yessir Calderón’s work performance as an art that responds
to the dimensions of the artistic, aesthetic and political fields

own sense of class through
alienation. The worker does not conceive of himself as a social class but inclines toward communism unconsciously.

Rocha focuses on the collective subject,
the roughness of the people in a state almost of “brute and immaculate purity.” He finds the power of
mysticism in the popular and sees it as a magic scorned by theorists and
sectarians who view hunger as mere
primitivism or tropical surrealism. In Figure 4, we can observe the
representation of the collective
subject, of the sense of community of a people deemed savage by those who seek to civilize, which Híjar sees in the aesthetics of rough communism.

Figure 4. Frame of the collective-community subject
in political action
(own elaboration, 2023; source: Mubi).

In Terra em transe,
we find the construction of a Marxist poetics reflected not only within a
discourse or an ideology but also in a number of aesthetic
elements that appeal to a theory of sensibility: ignorance,
unconsciousness, mysticism,
and illiteracy comprise this poetics. The
notions of “uncivilized” and “savage” run counter to
the white- Western images
reproduced by Hollywood. These elements represent a rough communism
articulated with
disruptive narrative
techniques to pave the way for a historical process anchored in Marxist thought and practice. In this way, the aesthetics of violence that Rocha proposes
is that rough
communism that emerges
at a specific moment in Marxist work, that of showing the people in their
pure State, which has not yet culminated in their separation from
nature since they have not yet fully adhered to the civilizing project that
the Ecuadorian philosopher Bolívar Echeverria called whiteness, an issue that goes beyond
ethnicity or race but rather
consists of a whole series
of behaviors derived
from the internalization of
capitalism.

The
main category of analysis for the representation of violent aesthetics is hunger;
Rocha deployed a series of aesthetic
devices as part of his activism to address this category. The exaltation of this crude communism is
linked to this notion of hunger within
underdevelopment, denied in the
developmental-progressive meta discourse with the civilizational telos embodied
in whiteness as the identity
of capitalist logic;
hunger as a Marxist category
empowering a revolutionary praxis, as Rocha expresses in his text “The Aesthetics of Hunger,” part of the work The Revolution
is an

Aesthetic. In Figure
5, we observe scenes that confirm that the savage needs to be guided
to the path of redemption and Western
civilization, either by a monarchical redemptive figure or by a political
leader who instructs him.

Figure 5. The Porfirio
Díaz being crowned
and repeating the words You will learn!
Following the sequence
under the title “The encounter of a leader with his own
people,”

to the politician Felipe Viera guiding the people (own elaboration, 2023; source: Mubi).

Through Terra em Transe, Rocha offers us a poetic approach built
around a profound critique of colonization and
imperialism. For example, the close-up,
low-angle shots of the conservative Díaz denote power and authority; he holds a monarchical-style crown,
and after an abrupt silence that puts an end to the sound shots and disruptive editing that precede it, he repeats:
“You will learn, I will dominate this land, I will put those hysterical
traditions in order, by the force of the universal harmony
of hell we will reach civilization.” “You will learn!” is the message
of the colonizer instructing the savages, the underdeveloped, represented by the crude communism that
the ruling classes
deny because they feel threatened by the revolutionary specter that would defeat imperialism in the context
of the Cold War
when capitalism was in a period of expansion, and the oligarchies were
increasing their power. Therefore, it is necessary to highlight the Marxist value of crude communism
in a jumble
of images based
on a totalizing montage that confronts us with the same class
struggle and the processes of domination that have plagued the so-called “Third World.” Figure 6 shows the religious symbols
used by the conservative character Porfirio Díaz; the “civilized” character repudiates the mystique of the
people but embraces an evangelizing project as the supreme power of conquest and domination.

Rocha’s aesthetic theorization can be found in his texts The Aesthetics of Hunger and The
Aesthetics of Dream; both
writings represent contemporary aesthetics in Brazil. His cinema not only
reflects the importance of context but
also the theoretical modes of its enunciation. Rocha intervenes theoretically
in a broad space of interlocution, in the particular bosom
of an unorthodox Marxism; his militant aesthetic devices allude to the categories of hunger and violence linked to the aesthetics of rough communism.
There is no correspondence of these elements with an orthodox level; therefore, it
transcends the development-underdevelopment dichotomy, Marxism-Leninism, Soviet
realism, etc. Before
that, his primary
theoretical instances are hunger and violence. For Rocha, the brute and coarseness of the worker’s alienation is the historical seal of his condition; in the case of the Indigenous, his fictional sighting is always perceived within
mysticism.

Figura 6. El conservador Porfirio
Díaz con la cruz y la corona
como símbolos de dominio (elaboración propia, 2023; fuente: Mubi).

Rocha sees in underdevelopment a dimension of value that manifests itself in the context of making his films and the
polemic they aroused; it was not an economic fact but a tragic and vivid
symptom. Therefore, it is not reason but
the condition of sensibility that brings about the transformation, and that is
why one must appreciate rough communism in his images as a program
and not as a utopia, lodged in the rough sensibility of the oppressed as an engine of change, as that Marxian
philosophy anchored in the praxis of social transformation. In Terra em Transe, Glauber Rocha pays special attention to
dialectics as a unit of reflection and exercise of criticism, as an abstract relational unit of moments of
contradictions and synthesis. Glauber’s dialectic contains elements:
didactics, epic, and revolution. He
recognizes dialectics in the dimension of its popular elements; he appropriates
the colonizing devices to liberate himself
and uses audiovisual shock as a disruptive element
that has a didactic value in the popular component.

5.  Conclusions

Terra em Transe told through impossible times and reveries, is a
political and theoretical intervention constructed in the form of a poetry of revolutionary praxis. Violence is captured on screen through discontinuous editing, creating the experience
of this political and existential trance amidst instability; the actors’
theatricality creates tense relationships between
them and the camera, constructing an unconventional dramaturgy (influenced by Brecht).
It creates a baroque blend in a performative tone, the characteristics of this baroque
Modernity around the different forms of internalization of capitalism
(Echeverría, 2010), constructing and expressing the aesthetic,
discursive, and political dimensions.
Terra
em Transe
is the power of a cinema that expresses a country with all its contradictions.

Glauber made cinema for the people,
by the people, and with the people as the collective subject
and aesthetic motor for rough communism. He speaks to generate them self-awareness; it dispels the opacity that supposes the category of free men offers them,
confronting their own conscience, breaking with the alienation of plasticity
and superficiality of the industrial
cinema of the time.

We
interpret Glauber Rocha through the gaze and theoretical proposal of Alberto Híjar, who placed Third Cinema Filmmakers within the
aesthetics of unorthodox Marxism. Híjar’s
vindication of Glauber Rocha, as an unorthodox
Marxist, is through
his aesthetics of violence
articulated with aesthetics of rough communism, based on the historical necessity of the emergence of other Marxisms, those present in arts. Rocha’s Marxism is
also inscribed in the core of his
interlocutors. However, it has no place in art history or Marxist aesthetics
due to the limited focus on his theoretical work.

Terra em Transe is an example of a film that transcends, through its autonomy, an
enrichment of cinematic language through
poetics focused on disruption
and discontinuity, all of which is based on the principle
of montage as a performative act that breaks
with narrative tradition. This film’s exploration of film grammar
is that of a prodigy
who creates a human world where he places capitalism at odds with his
art. A constant in this work is the causal relationship
between specific conflicts and external dynamics, conveyed through off-screen
sound, signifying the country’s
predicament. The film’s poetry flows around the force in each shot
through the composition, ultimately achieving a complex arrangement of these in a montage
that gives the sensation of navigating impossible times. We see images that evoke the dissonant
disturbance of reality.

In Terra em Transe, a sort of
aesthetic-political poetic construction emerges; this is the starting point for constructing a shrewd critique of
capitalist development embedded in
the lens of partisan politics with its liberal
democracy within a modern state. At first glance, it might seem that
Marxism would not provide answers to the problem
of development within capitalist logic, given its very recent genealogy, and
the debate regarding the emergence of developmental theses
only arose with Truman’s 1949 report and the creation
of ECLAC. Or, as Ronaldo
Munck (2010) warned, “Marxism has barely been on par with Western
imperialism as an agent of development. However, orthodox
Marxism was an integral part of the modernist paradigm,
and in many ways, it is its epitome.” In this sense,
development can, in fact, be seen as a central
axis of Marx’s entire work and can also be understood in its own dialectic within
the artistic-cinematographic dimension, which focuses on a whole series of contradictions that arise
from the imposition of a single civilizing plan.

A fundamental part of Cinema Novo’s
revolutionary project was to shed light on the repercussions of the challenges posed by industrial development
in backward social formations, where the bourgeoisie emerged late, drawing
on Marx’s critique.
In the case of Terra em Transe, the critique through
a Marxist aesthetic
grounded in the rough communism of
the people as a subject
and engine of change points
to the ahistoricism of the concepts used by theorists
of development economics, playing
with different narrative and aesthetic elements
that also contradicted this ahistoricism of the hegemonic fictional narrative of
cinema.

In
this analysis of the film Terra em Transe, we have distinguished different elements that constitute a critique of the
process of underdevelopment. Glauber Rocha understood that this
underdevelopment depends on the nature of the global expansion
of capitalism. However,
he also saw the opportunity, like other filmmakers of this cinematic
phenomenon, to carry out a poetic exercise of this underdevelopment,
which went beyond and put into crisis the “representative” forms of reality
and opted for an exercise of pure creation, unexplored in
political cinema until then.

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Curricular Overview

Diana Montes has worked as a teacher and a researcher. She is
currently a doctoral candidate in the Latin American Studies Program at UNAM.
Her
research interest
focuses on Political
Cinema in Latin
America, particularly in
films made in
Mexico and Brazil.