Rocha, Glauber

(1939–1981)

   Brazilian filmmaker, writer, and film theorist. Born in Vitória da Conquista, in the state of Bahia, Rocha is credited with being one of the founders of Brazil’s visionary Cinema Novo movement, which in the 1960s captured the attention of moviegoers at home and abroad. Along with Miguel Littín of Chile, Jorge Sanjinés of Bolivia, and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea of Cuba—practitioners of the Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano (New Latin American cinema)—this new cinema aesthetic favored political themes and small independent productions in opposition to the Hollywood style of filmmaking then prevalent in Latin America. In Brazil Rocha was associated with the directors Ruy Guerra, Carlos Diegues, Arnaldo Jabor, and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, though he remained for many years the most visible Brazilian director abroad. An early fan of film, Rocha reportedly organized film clubs during his youth. He studied law at the Universidade da Bahia but abandoned it in his third year. His first film dates from those years, as well as an incipient career as a film reviewer for the daily Jornal da Bahia, for which he would go on to edit the literary supplement. His first film exhibited abroad was Barravento (1962, Turning Wind), which he completed after taking over from director Roberto Pires. In 1963 another of his films, Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (literally, God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun, released as Black God, White Devil), brought him international renown as a finalist for the Palme d’Or in Cannes. Both films featured mixed-race segments of Brazilian society, without resorting to the picturesque treatment so common in the country. By this time he had settled in Rio, where he joined a young circle of influential filmmakers.

   With the advent of the military coup of 1964, Rocha soon found himself the subject of political persecution. In October 1965 he was arrested following a demonstration in front of the Hotel Glória in Rio de Janeiro, along with other Brazilian artists, including the novelist and journalist Carlos Heitor Cony. He also shared a cell for a time with the novelist and journalist Antonio Callado. Despite the increasing military censorship, Rocha continued to work with great success. Earlier, he had collaborated on the film Vent d’Est (Wind from the East), by the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, playing a very close approximation of his public persona: the intellectual as revolutionary. In his own work, Rocha went on to direct Terra em Transe (1967, The Anguished Land) and O Dragão da Maldade Contra o Santo Guerreiro (1969, released in the United States as Antonio das mortes), which won him the Best Director award at Cannes, a prize he shared that year with the Czech filmmaker Vojtěch Jasnэ. Along with Deus e o diabo na terra do sol, the films remain Rocha’s most enduring filmic legacy. Terra em transe, according to one scholar, examines the failure of both the populist left and the fascist right in a Brazil faced with the rise of authoritarian regime. O dragão da maldade contra o santo guerreiro, shot in color, draws upon Brazilian popular culture, including the “culture of resistance” that the filmmaker saw in the indigenous people of Brazil. Set in the sertão region of the northwest, it has been described by one scholar as an “allegorical political Western.” A polemical artist, Rocha defended the use of violence as a transformative element of society. In his often-quoted 1965 manifesto, “The Aesthetic of Hunger” (first published in Portuguese as “A Estética da Fome”), he stated that “the moment of violence is the moment when the colonizer becomes aware of the existence of the colonized.” In 1971 he left Brazil for exile, spending time in Cuba, Italy, Spain, and France. He directed several films on the theme of colonization, including Der Leone Have Sept Cabeças (1970, released as The Lion Has Seven Heads), whose multilanguage title is meant to echo the experience of colonial exploitation in Africa, and Cabezas cortadas (1971, released internationally as Cutting Heads). During his five years of exile, the original negatives for Terra em transe and O Dragão da Maldade Contra o Santo Guerreiro were destroyed in a mysterious fire at a film laboratory in France.

   Upon his return in 1976, Rocha went on to film two documentaries of note. One, filmed amid a Carnavalesque atmosphere, is about the funeral of the painter Di Cavalcanti (né Emiliano Augusto Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Melo, 1897–1976). The film is reportedly still banned in Brazil because of an injunction brought by the painter’s family, who objected to the treatment of the occasion; nonetheless, it was awarded a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival. He also filmed Jorge Amado no cinema (1979, Jorge Amado on Film), on the novelist Jorge Amado. However, his last, most ambitious work remains La Idade da Terra (1980, released as The Age of the Earth), an allegory that explored the themes of colonialism, liberation, and violence in Brazilian history. Blending myth and history, in what some scholars have termed an almost Baroque style, the film presented four Christlike figures—in segments conceived to be seen in any order—preaching on the possibilities of national redemption. Although critics savaged the film at home and in that year’s Film Festival in Venice, it has been reevaluated in recent years. Other scholars suggest that film tastes had changed since his last critical success in Cannes.

   In 1980, deeply affected by the accidental death of his sister, the actress Anecy Rocha, and the negative reception of La Idade da Terra, Rocha went into voluntary exile. However, sick with a pulmonary disease, in August 1981 he returned to Brazil from Lisbon, where he had been receiving treatment. Rocha died three days later, on 22 August, in a clinic in Rio de Janeiro, at age 43.