young Brazilian cinema director, Glauber Rocha, in which he discusses the relations between the cinema, popular culture and revolution. He is part of the Brazilian cinema novo and he himself has made three films: Black God and White Devil, Land in Ecstasy and Antonio-dasMortes: it is about the last one that he tolks in this interview He argues that in a colonial societ» the culture of each class reflects its relation to other classes and to the overwhelming force of imperialism. For the middle classes there is an absence of culture that goes together with the adop tion of US life-styles, and this phenomenon of the decultured elite, aping the standards of the imperialist media, is universal in the cities of the third world. Cities like Tehran, Manila, Beirut and Kinshasa exhibit ruling classes who are hypnotised by the phenomenology of late capitalism. On the other hand, the culture of the popular masses is a result of the different influences brought together in the colonial experience. As they mix, African gods are merged with Christian saints, and the festivals and carnivals of the poor express a frustration that can only be declared in the violence and fantasy of tropicalism. The public spectacles of football and the Rio carnival are expressions of reconciliation. since anger is channelled into them, but also contain within them a reflection of the antagonisms that can only be resolved through revolution. It is for this reason that the Brazilian left in 1966 hoped that Brazil would lose the World Cup. because this would prevent popular discontent from being dissipated in the excutement of a sports victory.
Traditionally, revolutionaries have tried to make a tool of revolutionary propaganda and argued in an abstract way that it should serve the people. This led to the absurdities of social realism. and the problem has not been successfully resolved in China either. But Glauber Rocha begins from a more advanced position, by arguing that revolution is contained in the culture of the masses. and that the cinema that reflects the conflicts and violence of this culture will reflect the contradictions which make revolution possible and necessary.
In Black Dwarf no. 23 we published material on the recent wave of revolutionary activity in Brazil, and since then we have heard of the assassination of a leading revolutionary. Carlos Marighela. But the frustration of the masses that Glauber Rocha pictures will in the end be expressed and fulfilled in a social revolution. F.H.
While Black God and White Devil evoked the years before 1940, Antonio-das-Mortes is set very precisely in 1969. Nowadays a certain elite group thinks that Brazil is on the path of development because of the construction of motorways, electrical plants, hospitals, schools, etc., which are a sign of progress. Well, in my film I wanted above all to show that today, parallel with this movement of "progress and in this allegedly modern atmosphere, there still exists a savage condition, a mediaeval system of domination and oppression in which the landed proprietors are rather what the lords of old used to be. type of culture, although the people may otherwise be underdeveloped economically and poliWith our films we must above all contribute to a knowledge of Brazil. We must "enter" into the reality which is disguised by official propaganda and even by those who are tied to a literary or intellectual culture and find it repulsive to, discover the "unconscious" elements of their own country; they criticise the brutal images of our cinema and think that aesthetically it should be like that of Europe or America. It strikes me that our political confusion is to a large extent the result of ignorance, prejudice, and a kind of moralistic hysteria that exists. among the bourgeois elite which wants to control the problems of a nation in a theoretical way.
The real Brazil is Indian, black (there are still the remains of an African kind of religion). mystical, violent, barbarous and sentimental. For these reasons one can't draw up a revolutionary programme without basing it on the real structures of the country, without breaking all the prejudices and also with the subjective racism which survives among the bourgeoisie but not among the masses where there is a wide-ranging religious and racial mixing. I indicated this integration by making St. George a black saint.
I would also like to make quite clear that the people live completely outside the squabbles that have traditionally opposed the elites of the right and the left. Antonio-das-Mortes is about this forgotten people which has been kept apart from the squabbles of the elite and which tries to resolve its contradictions and its problems on its own. It is fundamentally a film about the orgiastic behaviour of the Brazilian people which is a subject few sociologists or anthropologists have studied.
What do you mean by orgiastic behaviour?
It is a permanent state of madness in which imaginative improvisation takes the place of ignorance, where irresponsibility and a sense of humour and mockery alleviate the lack of established values, and where aggressiveness tends to conceal a social complex of underdevelopment. In Brazil violence and paroxysm are the expression of socio-historic frustration, and if we are forced to have an epic and romantic outlook, it is because we feel that our country, immense and rich as it is, could really play a major role in the future. We actually have a popular expression which goes "Brazil is the country of the future I try to explain this orgiastic state by describing it in my films and I think that it could at some moment "realise" itself in a revolutionary explosion.
- How do you see the person of Antonio-dasMortes?
He really exists. The position he adopts is based on a mystical moralism in that he is persuaded that the poor peasants have been driver out of paradise. Mystical moralism and politica consciousness (incarnated in the character of the teacher), these are all elements which, mixed with nationalism and other forces that are still unknown, could be made to give birth to a revolution in Brazil.
I really think that our country is very different from the rest of Latin America. It is as strange and peculiar as China or India, for example, as well as being possibly more dramatic. The reason is that we don't have a pure civilisation, but a mixture of all that is most "vital" and most decadent in the world. I mean that the masses are poor, but they are developed culturally. The middle classes are decadent because they represent a caricature of the American consumer society, and the national bourgeoisie, which is rich, remains culturally underdeveloped because it is afraid of realising that it is an instrument of imperialist exploitation. In the "third world" - this is a thesis All these things form the subject-matter of cinema novo ...
In recent years, and not only in the cinema but also in the theatre and in music, there has existed what one can now call a tropicalist current or rather art. Tropicalism goes back to four centuries of often interrupted Brazilian culture and consists of daring to enter into this orgiastic state and to try to understand it and analyse it in smashing all forms of fear and doubt. With Vidas Secas, Os Fuzis (The Rifles) and Black God and White Devil we were still trying to systematise the problems, whereas with films like, for example, The Heirs by Carlos Diegues, or Land in Dread or Antonio-das-Mortes and others which have now been finished in Brazil we have abandoned reserve and idealism and we are beginning to find an original style of presentation that accords with the physical and But we are in conflict with the avant-garde Brazilian economists of right and left, whose objective is to create a consumer society of the Soviet-American type and to do it by destroying the roots and characteristics of our civilisation. For us, the cineastes and artists of the new generation, the great concern is to show that economic development will only have a humanist content if it allows the integral development of the tropicalist spirit, even under a socialist system.
Our movement is attacked a lot from the right and left because we refuse to idealise reality. That is why the economists, who are the dominant caste among us, had to admit that their technological revolution needed the productive tropicalist madness to succeed. We do not want to make films for digestive consumption, we want a cinema that can become one of the instruments of a cultural revolution. We cannot still make the mistake of thinking that cultural production is of secondary importance in economic expansion: it would be equally cruel and fascist to "mechanise" man as to exploit him. We have to find a political regime that is ready to integrate all the great contradictions of Brazil, and what should be important for the intellectuals of the third world is to compare primitive societies to modern ones and thereby to investigate the deep origins of underdevelopment, to discover where alienation really is, beyond the most obvious economic schemes.
For us tropicalism is love for our country without being ashamed to say that it is underdeveloped, barbarous and corrupt. Once all the masks have fallen off, it is a real intimate engagement with Latin America.
(Translated from Le Monde, 26-27 October 1969)
DWARF 2nd Edition: DIRECTORY OF ORGANIZATION over 500 groups for left activists. 3/- pp. 18a New I seuate. Longon. N.w.s.
VIETNAM lack Dwarf, 7 Carlisle Street, London. WIA 4PZ. ne Guevara s souvan Dari THE 1WW A. post 1r 2/10d Sh-per new revolute shop kita mostani Marxis per copy, c/o Pakistani Group, 8 Toynbee Street, London, E.1.
Back copies of Luc black wwar avanaDe OBE war once. early copies z-. ssue onwards ar Soment Wonth potinged by groupt of somen Nottingham A subscriptior costs only 4/- for 6 issue to 16 Ella Road, West Bridgford Nottingham NG2 SGW ndustry on the Anti-Capitalist programm ouglass, 16 Abbeyfield Road, Dunscroft, Doncaste Yorkshire.
Rank-and-File: mutant teachers ournar Bor. 201, Path Be Pationary Weekly, Write: Rouge Grass Eye, Manchester local paper. Eye. Match stor Jat al papi on 15 Sinke Street. copies 1/6. 'Solidarity' (West London). First issue of their mag zine. Contents include occupation that failed (by the man that nearh DECHL bustmen Strike: Viners post free or 10 - for 12 issues. 15 Taylors Green, Acton, London W.3.
EKNEO MANDEL. Theory. 9/- ppd. Introduction to Marxist The Revolutionary Student Movement, Theory and rracuice. o- ood Marxist economic ineory (2 vols). t4 4s Od the se The Inconsistencies of State Capitalism. isner Back Spital, 8 To pod. Available from Street, London E.1.
Help smash Social Fascism! Subscribe to the new militant left-wing scandal sheet INSURRECTION Insur rection will appear bi-monthly and advocates the for mation of a Popular Front. Cheques or postal order: for 1 (including postage) to the West London Free Press, 39 Chelmsford Road, Shenfield, Essex. MAO TSE-TUNG "Selected Readings", 410 pp - 6/9.
arx; Lenin; Stalin; Mao, pamphlets. All China mag ines (English) etc. FREE MAGNIFICENT CHINES CALENDAR status, USEs LEEDS SQUATTERS: Douglas Jordan, 28 Grantham Road, Bradlord 7 is willing to start a squatters group in the Leeds-Bradford area. or co-ordinate with existing groups there. Leeds comrades please contac him.
Vanted: musicians to join a band which will among uner umes, work wul neit rrop tucatre group. t details, phone Pete Taunton 789 5604.
"The Bread is rising. To keep it high we need cast