from Jump Cut, no. 10-11,
1976, pp. 49-51
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1976, 2004
TERRA EM TRANSE (LAND IN ANGUISH), an explosive study of art and
politics in the third world, is Glauber Rocha’s most personal film
as well as his most brilliant contribution to political cinema. A
number of circumstances make this rereading of the film especially
timely. Recent events in Chile, where a rightwing, U.S.-supported
coup overturned a popularly elected and progressive government,
remind us that TERRA EM TRANSE was made after a similar coup, also
U.S.-supported, deposed Brazilian president Joao Goulart in 1964.
When it first appeared, the film was widely misread as a romantic
endorsement of Guevarism. The film’s final shot of Paolo with
upraised rifle was interpreted as a call for the kind of armed
guerilla struggle that led Che Guevara and Fidel Castro to victory
in Cuba. But in fact, as we shall see, the film is more interested
in demystifying the liberal politics that led up to the coup than in
proposing any specific revolutionary strategy.
The film is especially relevant to any discussion of a revolutionary
esthetics for film, particularly in light of the revived interest in
the implications for cinema of Brecht’s idea of distanciation. TERRA
EM TRANSE points the way to a possible political cinema which avoids
the twin dead ends of a condescending populism on the one hand and
an aridly theoretical reflexivity on the other. Populism (Pontecorvo’s
BURN, Costa-Gavras’ Z) wraps a radical political message in
Hollywood packaging in an attempt to be accessible. In contrast,
reflexive cinema (Godard’s LE GAI SAVOIR, Godard-Gorin’s WIND FROM
THE EAST) makes us painfully aware of the filmic medium by
self-conscious investigation of its processes. Rocha’s film is
reflexive—an essay on the intersection of film and politics—but it
is neither bloodless nor dispassionate. While allowing for the role
of emotions in political life, it never falls into the trap of
merely personal outburst; nor does it create idealized characters as
objects of our identification. Saturated with anger, eloquence,
personal and collective hysteria, it is in no sense a Hollywood
film, for it investigates rather than exploits its emotions.
The events of TERRA EM TRANSE takes place in the imaginary state of
Eldorado. Felipe Vieira, governor of the province of Alecrim,
refuses to resist a coup led by the rightist Porfirio Diaz. (1)
After an angry discussion with Vieira, the protagonist and narrator
Paolo Martins, accompanied by Vieira’s secretary Sara, flees the
governor’s palace and is mortally wounded by the police. As his life
ebbs away, he recalls the events which led to this personal and
political defeat. Four years earlier he had been the poet-protégé of
Diaz, before leaving him in order to explore a more political kind
of poetry. He goes to Alecrim to work with the communist militant
Sara in the gubernatorial campaign of Vieira, a liberal populist
politician. They win, but the governor elect, because of his ties to
absentee landlords, violates his campaign promises and unleashes his
police against the peasants. Disillusioned, Paolo throws himself
into a life of orgies and existential nausea.
Later, when Sara asks him to make a televised report in order to
destroy Diaz, now allied with EXPLINT (read imperialism), Paolo
accepts out of love for Sara and makes a film, “Biography of an
Adventurer,” recounting Diaz’ successive political betrayals.
Denounced as a traitor by Diaz, Paolo joins Vieira’s presidential
bandwagon. In an atmosphere of popular celebration marred by
repressive violence, the people dance the samba and contribute to
the gathering momentum of Vieira’s populist campaign. The right,
fearful of electoral defeat, beings to prepare its putsch. Brought
back to the starting point of the film, we see Paolo offer Vieira a
gun, which Vieira refuses. Crosscutting alternates Paolo’s final
dying moments with the coronation of Diaz and a long last shot shows
a silhouetted Paolo with uplifted rifle.
Organized around Paolo’s. memories as he lies dying, the narrative
of TERRA EM TRANSE consists of the lucid recital of a life dominated
by political illusions and thus conforms to what has been called, in
reference to Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the “Quixotic formula of
systematic disenchantment.” As if to highlight this structure of
enchantment and disenchantment, Paolo speaks in both the prologue
and epilogue of the impossibility of his naive and impotent
political faith. The first object of his faith is Porfirio Diaz,
whose very name has divine resonances, whom Paolo calls the “god of
his youth.” The second object of his faith is his “leader,” the
populist demagogue Vieira. The word “leader,” in fact, reverberates
ironically throughout the film, culminating in Paolo’s explosion of
disgust against Vieira when he fails to resist the coup: “You see,
Sara? ...Our leader! ... our great leader!”
What is new in Rocha’s elaboration of the Cervantes formula is the
precise political meaning he gives to it. Paolo comes to be
disaffected from all the bourgeois political leaders, whether
rightists like Diaz or liberals like Vieira. In his disappointment,
he is doubled by people like the journalist Alvaro and by communist
militants like Alto and Sara. Paolo shares his disenchantment with
the people, who “can believe in no leader.” (Like the peasant leader
Felicio, Paolo goes from faith in Vieira’s promises to
disillusionment and death.)
The film as a whole elaborates what can be called the theme of the
“apparent difference.” Vieira and Diaz appear to occupy opposite
ends of the political spectrum, but the parallel montage of their
electoral campaigns, superficially contrasting them, on a deeper
level creates an ironic equation of the two politicians. The press
magnate Fuentes, the “nationalist,” thinks his role differs from
that of Diaz. Historical forces stronger than both of them make
their roles converge. Paolo fondly thinks that he is not an
oppressor; but on occasion he acts as Vieira’s policeman. Sara and
the militants seem farther to the left, but their actions only
reinforce Vieira, and ultimately, Diaz. All these political figures
are linked because of their common ties to the bourgeoisie. All of
them, with the exception of Diaz, nurse the illusion of their own
purity. The film’s doubling procedures, however, constantly remind
us of their subterranean affinities with their supposed enemies.
At times the struggle between Paolo and Diaz seems less ideological
than psychological, a case of the artist wrestling with his alter
ego. Pablo nurses a kind of oedipal hatred toward Diaz, his
political and spiritual father. The oedipal note is sounded in the
final ironic words of the “Biography of an Adventurer”—“Here is the
father of our country.” A bizarre, almost sexual bond links Paolo
and Diaz. At one point, Paolo imagines himself fighting with Diaz
and abandoning him, while Diaz cries hysterically, in the accents of
desperate and unrequited love: “You left me alone, alone!” The
film’s editing reinforces the parallels between Paolo and Diaz
(“Diaz, dying like me...”). At another point, the off-screen voice
of Paolo is superimposed on the image of Diaz, whose lips are
moving, as if Paolo were somehow speaking through Diaz.
This identification of Paolo with Diaz has a social as well as a
psychological dimension. Diaz personifies the imperial origins of
Brazil. He carries the cross of the Portuguese navigators and the
black flag of the inquisition. Here, the film suggests, is the
historical source of the bourgeois class in Brazil. These are the
“rotten roots” to which Paolo refers. Paolo tries to disown these
roots by crying: “He is not in my blood!” He imagines himself
killing Diaz, but in so doing he is not so much eliminating an
individual as liquidating his own personal and historical past. For
socially speaking, he is what Alvaro calls him, “a dirty copy of
Diaz.”
The central dialectic of TERRA EM TRANSE involves art on the one
hand, and social reality on the other. The dialectic is summed up in
the poem which comments on Paolo’s death:
“He failed to sign the noble pact between the pure soul and the
bloody cosmos, a gladiator defunct but still intact—so much
violence, yet so much tenderness.”
— Mario Faustino, “Epitaph of a Poet“
The bloody cosmos and the pure soul, violence and tenderness,
politics and poetry—these are the poles around which TERRA EM TRANSE
revolves. The film shows the degradation of the ideal in the real
world, where “purity rots in tropical gardens.” Romanticism, the
film suggests, is out of place in a world where the political earth
is in convulsion. Poets like Paolo, who cultivate the private
sensibility in the world of the putsch, do not survive in places
like Eldorado. In TERRA EM TRANSE, social violence is constantly
intruding on private tenderness, just as the soundtrack superimposes
the crackling fire of machine guns on the tender harmonies of the
Brazilian composer Villa-Lobos.
To the intellectual hunger for the ideal of romanticism, TERRA EM
TRANSE opposes the real physical hunger of the Brazilian masses.
When Paolo, quoting the French romantic Chateaubriand, speaks of his
“hunger for the absolute,” Sara brings him back to earth by
asserting simply, “Hunger.” While Paolo bemoans “the misery of our
souls,” Sara is more preoccupied with social misery.
Rocha’s art refuses to obscure the fact of hunger. His films treat
hunger as subject and as pervasive metaphor. His cinema is hungry in
its urgency as well as in the enforced technological poverty which
characterizes film production in the third world. It is not
surprising that Rocha entitled one of his most important
declarations of artistic principles: “An Esthetic of Hunger.”
Paolo represents the poet, abroad in the world of class struggle and
coups d'etat. His habitual mode of speech, simultaneously frenetic
and solemn, is poetic.(2) The lava of his words repeatedly erupts
into apostrophe, incantation, angry curses. His poetry, ubiquitous
in TERRA EM TRANSE, punctuates, interrupts, underlines and
counterpoints the action. Most often, however, it expresses his
inner voice, rather like the soliloquies in Hamlet. Paolo
recurrently appears in close up with his voice off, in a technique
reminiscent of the Orson Welles’ adaptations of Shakespearean
tragedies.
Paolo, furthermore, shares significant traits with Hamlet—an
overheated imagination, a perverse virtuosity of language, a
rigorous skepticism coexisting with exasperated idealism, and the
view of himself as the legitimate heir of power. Like Hamlet, he is
the more or less lucid critic of an ambient corruption in which he
himself participates. His almost obsessive references to death, to
worms, to a people whose sadness has rotted its blood, reinforce the
atmosphere of suffocating malaise. TERRA EM TRANSE is Shakespearean
in its intense interplay of the personal and the political.
Shakespearean as well are the frequent ruptures of tone, with lyric
calm preceding explosions of violence, and the complex interaction
of love scenes and political scenes, so that the two come to color
and “contaminate” each other.
Apart from putting poetry to diverse rhetorical uses, TERRA EM
TRANSE also pinpoints the diverse political uses to which poetry can
be put. While working as Diaz’ protégé, Paolo timidly expresses a
desire to speak of politics in a new kind of poetry. Diaz
condescendingly suggests that everyone feels radical in their youth.
Paolo subsequently offers his services to the apparently more
receptive Vieira. The country needs poets, Vieira remarks, like
those romantics whose voices stirred the crowds.
He applauds Sara’s recitation of a poem (“The street belongs to the
people, as the sky belongs to the condor”) by Castro Alves, a
Brazilian romantic poet who fought for the abolitionist cause. The
poem highlights the historical ambiguity of Romanticism; the same
movement that produced the self-indulgent narcissism of the French
poet Lamartine also engendered the socially conscious poetry of
Percy Bysse Shelley and Castro Alves. Vieira’s allusion to “those
romantics” evokes a moment in Brazilian history when political and
artistic movements acted in symbiosis.
The subsequent events of the film, however, show the precise
political limits within which poetry, and art generally, operate. It
becomes obvious that Vieira prefers his political poets to be safely
buried in the past. When Paolo tries to dissuade Vieira from using
the police against the peasants, a voice over sings the Castro Alves
poem. The street may belong to the people in the world of poetry,
the film suggests, but in fact it belongs to their oppressors.
TERRA EM TRANSE criticizes the naive notion that art in itself can
create a revolution. Paolo Martins loses his initial faith in
political poetry, concluding that “words are useless.” Sara, who
generally represents the best face of orthodox communism, tells
Paolo that poetry and politics are too much for one man. Literal
minded critics, taking Sara’s judgment as the film’s final verdict
on the question of art and politics, fail to appreciate the
dialectical relation between poetry and politics in the film. They
also miss the obvious irony, since the film itself not only
“includes” poetry but also proceeds poetically, constituting the
cinematographic equivalent of poetry.
Cinema has accustomed us to filmmakers who include in their films
surrogates for themselves (for example, the magic lanternist in
Bergman’s THE MAGICIAN) or analogues for their art. In the
references to poetry in TERRA EM TRANSE, one must read as well art
in general, and cinema in particular. Paolo’s talk of new poetic
forms in which to speak of politics inevitably calls up Rocha the
filmmaker, creating new forms of political cinema. Who would know
better than he that established power prefers servile pens—and
cameras—to aggressive and radical ones?
Both his enthusiasm for poetry and his reservations about its social
efficacy apply as well to cinema. One moment in the film effectively
equates the two. In a shot whose backlighting and rectangular
composition recall Godard, we see Paolo aim his camera out of his
apartment window and take a photograph, while his off-screen voice
comments: “I, for example, devote myself to the vain exercise of
poetry.”
Paolo, we must remember, is a journalist and filmmaker as well as a
poet. He makes “Biography of an Adventurer” in order to destroy his
fallen idol Diaz, who is shown laughing while the off screen
commentary tells of the successive betrayals behind his rise to
pre-eminence. In one sense, “Biography of an Adventurer” is a kind
of micro-tale which resumes and recapitulates the film as a whole,
for the film within the film, like TERRA EM TRANSE, recounts Diaz’
rise to political power. On a deeper level, however, “Biography of
an Adventurer” tells a story which resembles that of another
“adventurer”—Paolo himself in TERRA EM TRANSE.
Important differences, however, prevent the film within the film
from being a mere replica in miniature of the film as a whole. The
“Biography” is a piece of militant journalism sponsored by one
political force in order to destroy another political force. It is
the kind of film that politically committed filmmakers often make or
are encouraged to make—clear, factual, militant, and immediately
“useful.” The dialectical juxtaposition of two kinds of political
film brings out the strengths and weaknesses inherent in each. The
“Biography” is direct, “effective,” but also unsubtle, manipulative,
and slick. TERRA EM TRANSE as a whole is complex, all nuance and
subtle contradiction, but at the same time it is difficult of
access, full of subjectivity, somewhat confusing. Thus the film
within the film serves as a critique of the totality of the film,
and the film as a whole points up the limitations of the film within
the film.
TERRA EM TRANSE shares a number of features with CITIZEN KANE—its
flashback structure, its journalistic subject, its verbal and visual
exuberance, its baroque density. The “Biography,” for its part, is
modeled on the “March of Time” newsreel in Welles’ film. Like the
newsreel, it exposes the duplicity and treachery of people in power.
Diaz represents an underdeveloped, third world Hearst; both of them
are wealthy, arrogant and demagogic. In both films, the metallic
staccato voice of a news reporter hammers home the points of the
film with heavy handed irony. Both of the films within the film,
furthermore, are situated in a precise political context. In CITIZEN
KANE, the masters of a new kind of filmic journalism finance a film
in order to “bury” the older journalism of the Kane-Hearst empire.
Paolo makes his film to politically bury Diaz.
TERRA EM TRANSE sensitizes us to the social context of filmmaking.
We are shown that films do not emerge full blown from the heads of
their creators. Paolo makes his film because certain political
enemies of Diaz pay for him to make it. Paolo, having offered his
humble pen first to Diaz and then to Vieira, now offers his humble
camera to those who would destroy Diaz. If Paulo’s poetry was
already conditioned by political ends, his film—since cinema by its
very nature is immersed in socio-economic process—is even more
profoundly affected by political and material interests. The film
exposes the illusion of the self-determining artist who thinks he’s
using the apparatus which is in fact using him.
Both films are treated reflexively. The newsreel in CITIZEN KANE is
shown as part of a discussion among the participating journalists.
We are shown a projection room and the projectionist who adjusts his
equipment. The journalists discuss possible changes in the film. We
are made aware that film is artifice, a collective creation, the end
product of innumerable esthetic and political decisions. The
“Biography” highlights the artifice of film in a different way. As
an off screen voice delineates his perfidies, Diaz laughs as if he
were conscious of the soundtrack but unmoved. The footage has
obviously been manipulated, for we see Diaz perform in a film whose
political ends he would never have approved. The technique reminds
us that all films are fabrications; it illustrates Godard’s notion
that the distinction between documentary and fiction film is an
arbitrary one.
This reflexivity partially explains a puzzling fact about TERRA EM
TRANSE. On the surface, the film leads us to identify with a central
hero, yet somehow we never do. As both narrator and protagonist of
the tale, Paolo is the only personage who is granted subjectivity.
His sensibility colors all the events of the film. His lyric poems
punctuate the action, and lyric poetry, after all, is the privileged
mode of personal feeling. Voice over monologues in conjunction with
close shots of Paolo—certainly the cinematographic equivalent of the
lyrical mode—recur throughout the film. Paolo, furthermore,
resembles the conventional cinematic hero. Young, handsome, dynamic,
sensitive, articulate, sexually attractive, he would seem to
constitute an ideal object for our identification. Yet the
identification never takes place. We neither identify with Paolo’s
life nor weep over his death.
In a sense, TERRA EM TRANSE is linked to one of the least realistic
of artistic genres—opera. Rocha has often expressed his fondness for
the “cinema opera” of Welles and Eisenstein. Opera itself,
especially Verdi and his Brazilian counterpart, Carlos Gomes,
pervades the soundtrack. Paolo’s death, coextensive with the film,
recalls the protracted agonies of opera, where people die
eloquently, interminably, and with poetry on their lips. As if to
call attention to the operatic reference, the wounded Paolo twice
declaims: “Eu preciso cantar!” (I must sing!) Paolo does not try to
escape or locate a doctor. Sara does not bind his wounds. Such
basely material preoccupations have no place in cinema opera. The
film also shares with opera its love of exalted, stylized speech.
Although some of the dialogue is naturalistically rendered, the
world of the film remains one where people speak naturally to each
other in poetry.
In his famous essay on the significance of a revitalized opera for
the creation of epic theatre, Brecht speaks of his desire to make
opera contemporary and democratic. He claims that opera, while
procuring a certain realism, annihilates it by having everyone sing.
If we apply the terms of his comparison of epic and dramatic
theatre, we find that TERRA EM TRANSE invariably falls into the epic
category. Rather than incarnate a process, it tells its story with
narrative distance. Rather than involve the spectator, it transforms
him into a critical observer of the contradictions of character.
We are in a sense Paolo; yet at the same time we see him critically,
much as we see a figure like Mother Courage, simultaneously from
within and without. Paolo, like Mother Courage, ultimately learns
very little from the disasters that befall him, but we as an
audience can learn much by observing him. He is, as Walter Benjamin
said of Gaily Gay, the protagonist of Brecht’s A Man’s a Man, “an
empty stage on which the contradictions of out society are acted
out.” Rather than treat Paolo as an exhibit of some absolutized
Human Nature, TERRA EM TRANSE makes him and his transformations the
object of study.
The mechanisms that subvert our identification with Paolo are
extremely complex. Paolo is less a rounded character than a
political figured the point of convergence of various political and
cultural forces. Our interest in Paolo, consequently, is always
subordinated to our interest in the political realities in which he
is enmeshed. The title reads TERRA EM TRANSE, not PAOLO EM TRANSE.
The film aborts our natural tendency to idealize Paolo, for he is
always seen critically, and first of all by himself. At one point,
he denounces his own bourgeois class as week and decadent. He
derides himself as “a romantic,” and other characters echo his
autocritique. The communist militants berate his political
irresponsibility, while Sara always brings him back to concrete
social reality. To his temptation for facile heroism, she responds:
“We don't need heroes.” When he laments having sacrificed his
profoundest ambitions, she reminds him what real sacrifice
means—thankless political work, childlessness, imprisonment and
torture.
The film also insists on the scorn that Paolo displays toward the
very people he wants to liberate. While clinging to a romantic
notion of “the people,” he shows only contempt for them in his
everyday life. It is as if Rocha has anticipated, within the film
itself, all possible criticisms of his protagonist. His refusal of
heroes reflects both his analysis of the Brazilian political
situation as well as his programmatic opposition to Hollywood
conventions of character.
This critical undercutting of Paolo’s status as hero does not,
however, fully explain our failure to identify with him. The failure
derives rather from the basic esthetic strategy of the film—its
refusal of the techniques of dramatic realism. TERRA EM , TRANSE
underlines its anti-realistic intentions by the ultimate
implausibility —the posthumous narrator. Everything conspires,
furthermore, to diminish any feeling of suspense.
The film is framed by a prologue and epilogue, both of which treat
the coup d'etat, Paolo’s flight and his subsequent death. We know
from the outset both the how and the why of Paolo’s death, and this
knowledge frees us to look at the film critically, as an analysis of
political forces. Rocha is less interested in the outcome of the
conflict than in an “anatomy” of the conflict. He has called TERRA
EM TRANSE an “anti-dramatic film, which destroys itself by a montage
à repetitions.” The narrative is constantly derailed, deconstructed,
re-elaborated. The incidents of the film are exploded, analyzed into
a play of political forces.
The world of TERRA EM TRANSE is one of spatio-temporal
discontinuity. Rather than giving us the conventional impression of
spatio-temporal coherence, Rocha forces us to reconstruct spatial
and temporal relationships. There are no establishing shots to
situate us. We are further disoriented by dizzying camera movements
and an unorthodox variety of camera angles. Even in sequences
characterized by spatial homogeneity, there is discontinuity in the
cinematographic treatment of the unified space. We are given
fragments which defy organization into a narrative whole. In the
various orgy and cabaret sequences, for example, it is impossible
too divine any preexisting fiction which has been treated
elliptically. We have to create the spatiality and the temporality
of the scene.
TERRA EM TRANSE proliferates in jump cuts and violations of orthodox
“continuity.” Two different shots, for example, show Sara entering
the same door twice in a row in what the film itself designates as a
temporally impossible repetition. Violence, above all, is
consistently de-realized by the editing. Guns are omnipresent but
they are never coordinated with their sounds. We see pistols and
hear machine guns; we hear machine guns but see nothing. A policeman
on a motorcycle presumably shoots Paolo, but we see no wound.
Violence is treated in a fragmented and anti-realistic way, in
keeping with Rocha’s expressed desire to reflect on violence rather
than make a spectacle of it.
Realism is further undermined by an autonomous and discontinuous
soundtrack. There are contradictions, for example, between visual
and aural “scales” we see Fuentes in extreme long shot but hear his
voice in aural “close up.” We see Alto fire a machine gun, but we
hear nothing; yet the people quiet down, as if they had heard it.
Then Rocha suspends the soundtrack to an unnaturally total silence.
The same, autonomy which characterizes the soundtrack also marks the
camera movements. The camera does not generally accompany the
action. Rather, it performs its own autonomous ballet of stylized,
geometricized and choreographed movements, creating a tension
between the mobility of the personages and that of the camera. The
work of the camera is extremely “visible” and the visibility is
designated as such by the inclusion in certain shots of the
equipment involved in making a film. At one point, for example, we
see a cameraman filming exactly the shot—of the murdered man of the
people—that we have just seen in the film.
TERRA EM TRANSE refuses transparence and illusionism in yet another
sense, by always making us aware of the rhetorical and stylistic
mediation of the story. The film exhibits a conflict of
cinematographic styles, so that the meaning partially emerges from
the creative tension between diverse methods of filmic writing.
Alongside the Welles influence, two other specifically
cinematographic styles can be discerned.
One is the style of direct cinema, obvious in the hand held camera,
in the frequent use of direct sound, and in the preference for
ambient light. The technique, when this style predominates, seems to
operate by chance. People block the camera’s access to key
personages, as if the camera were capturing spontaneous moments of
everyday life. Coexisting with this direct style is the style of
Eisensteinian montage, which reconstructs the action as a function
of the director’s political intentions. The Eisensteinian style is
visible in the jump cuts and deliberate mismatches between shots, in
the use of socially emblematic personages (Felicio the peasant,
Geronimo the union official, Vieira the populist), in the graphic
stylization, and in the use of nonsynchronous sound.
Glauber Rocha does not merely cite the cinematic tradition; he uses
it and transforms it. One moment, for example, recalls the sequence
from POTEMKIN when the goateed Doctor Smirnov, responding to
complaints by the sailors, uses his glasses as a kind of magnifying
glass to examine maggot covered meat, which he pronounces “perfectly
healthy and ready to be eaten.” Rocha has his senator, after
lavishing grandiloquent praise on Eldorado’s perfect society, use
his glasses in an identical fashion to examine the corpse of the
murdered man of the people. The analogy is clear—in both cases the
corrupt representatives of established power deny the most glaring
evidence of social ills. The senator’s empty and swollen phrases
mask sordid political realities. He too pronounces a visibly sick
society, a maggot-ridden corpse, “perfectly healthy.”
Just as Eisenstein drew on the popular theater of his day—his
“montage of attractions” originally referred to the “attractions” in
a circus: tightrope, lion tamer, clown—so Rocha turns to account
various popular traditions and “lower” forms. Vieira’s electoral
campaign is treated as an ambulatory circus, aptly metaphorizing the
bread and circuses of populist politics. Thus Rocha exploits the
theatricality inherent in certain privileged moments of Brazilian
collective life—circuses, carnival, samba schools, political
rallies, processions.
TERRA EM TRANSE operates a double demystification—one political, the
other esthetic. It deconstructs two styles of representation.
Populism, after all, constitutes a style of political
representation. In its Latin American version, certain progressive
and nationalist elements of the bourgeoisie enlist the support of
the people in order to advance their own interests. TERRA EM TRANSE
performs a mise en scene of the contradictions of populism. The
character Vieira represents a composite political figure, combining
the traits of a number of Brazilian populist leaders. The film
exposes the fatal compromises that Vieira makes as well as his
failure of nerve in moments of conflict with the extreme right.
The sequence of confrontation between the peasants and Vieira’s
police unmasks the contradiction between the electoral promises—of
populism and its real commitments. To Paolo’s question—“I wondered
how the governor elect would respond to the promises of the
candidate”—the sequence gives an unequivocal answer, The
governor-elect responds with guns and billy clubs. Populism sets a
trap for the people. It incites the people to speak, but represses
them when their voices of protest become too strident. It invites
the people into the palace, but murders them if they become too
militant. Paternalistic encouragement precedes brutal repression.
On another level, TERRA EM TRANSE rejects an aesthetic style of
representation which might also be labeled “populist.” The populist
esthetic is paternalistic. It claims that art should speak to the
people in simple and transparent language, at the risk of not
“communicating.” It practices the sugarcoated pill theory of art. It
is sweet in order to be useful. To get its message across, it gives
the public its habitual dose of cinematic gratifications—an
intrigue, a love story, spectacle. It treats the public as slightly
retarded, in need of a simplistic and prettifying art, just as
Vieira speaks demagogically of justice and the power of the people,
while doing nothing to advance the political maturation of the
people. Populism treats the people as mere extras: it wants its
spectators to be passive.
Just as important as this work of demystification is the fact that
TERRA EM TRANSE renders the “feel” of political experience. The film
recognizes the importance of human feelings in politics—the euphoric
camaraderie of a political campaign, the resentments which arise
when fragile alliances disintegrate, the provisional relative
moralities of political combat, with its betrayals and problematic
commitments. TERRA EM TRANSE communicates the anguished excitement
of political action in a brutally repressive Latin American context.
The film conveys an atmosphere of menace and the pervasive odor of
imminent death. One cannot expect a Brazilian political film to have
the icy theoretical distance of Godard’s LE GAI SAVOIR, for leftist
politics in Brazil is literally a matter of life and death, as it
rarely is for left bank intellectuals.
TERRA EM TRANSE portrays what Rocha has called the “tragic carnival”
of Brazilian politics. The carnival ambiance is omnipresent in TERRA
EM TRANSE. Fuentes, in carnival costume, declaiming to his fellow
orgiasts, declares the state of permanent happiness in Eldorado.
While the people, again in costume, dance the samba, the senator
declares that neither hunger nor illiteracy exist in Eldorado’s best
of all possible worlds.
“Transe,” in Portuguese, simultaneously connotes frenetic movement,
personal delirium and collective hysteria. It evokes as well the
trance of African religious cults, like the music of candomble which
opens and closes the film. At the same time, the apparent movement
of carnival (and of populist politics) is shown as alienated and
factitious, a dead end frenzy. The word transe itself conveys this
paradoxical simultaneity of stasis and movement. The carnival is
seen through disabused eyes, and the hysteria is ultimately mastered
by the distancing technique. The film alternates distanced analysis
with psychic explosions. Like Paolo, the spectator goes in and out
of the transe.
TERRE EM TRANSE is a provocative, aggressive, intentionally
difficult film, an advanced lesson in reading political and
cinematographic significations. It consistently violates our
expectations; it withholds spectacle when the story demands it, and
denies romance where plot conventions would require it. Even its
orgies are anti-erotic. Where we expect sharp political definition,
the film gives us poetic, imagistic freedom. It creates a world of
systematic contradiction, between and within the personages, between
sound and image, between cinematographic styles. Brutal ruptures in
editing keep the spectator off balance, incapable of identifying in
the conventional way. For Glauber Rocha, to have proceeded in any
other way would have been radically compromised through the very
artistic codes by which it had been mediated. TERRA EM TRANSE is a
piece of revolutionary pedagogy. While its methodology and vision
are Marxist, it offers no correct line or pat answers. The solution
lies in our becoming conscious.
Notes
1. A word on the prototypes for the political figures in TERRA EM
TRANSE. Porfirio Diaz, named after the Mexican dictator, embodies
the Latin American version of Iberian despotism, while his political
career parallels that of the Brazilian politician Carlos Lacerda,
evolving from youthful leftism to an almost religious anticommunism.
Vieira, for his part, combines the traits of a number of Brazilian
populist leaders. Like Miguel Arraes, he is a provincial governor
elected with the support of students and peasants. Like Joao
Goulart, he is a gaucho and is deposed by a rightwing coup. His
description of himself as a self-made politician recalls Janio
Quadros, while his speech of resignation echoes Vargas’ famous
suicide letter denouncing international conspiracies. Sara and her
militant friends represent the communist party, whose policy it then
was (and still is) to support populist politicians like Vieira,
seeing itself as a kind of midwife for a bourgeois revolution which
would logically precede an authentic proletarian one. EXPLINT
(Company of International Exploitation) obviously represent as
foreign (mainly North American) economic forces, and especially
multinational corporations, which were involved in the coup against
Joao Goulart.
2. A word on the English subtitles for TERRA EM TRANSE. The English
titles for TERRA EM TRANSE are incompetent at best and disastrous at
worst. When Paolo speaks in poetry for example, the titles not only
do not translate his words into poetry—that is admittedly
difficult—but they do not communicate the fact that he is speaking
in poetry, with the result that the spectator takes what is in fact
heightened, lyrical speech for an inept attempt at naturalistic
dialogue. At other times, the text is distorted or simply
impoverished. “I abandon myself to the vain exercise of poetry”
becomes “I, for example, write poetry.”
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