Glauber Rocha Overview

"A camera in your hand and an idea in your head" was how film critic-turned-filmmaker Glauber Rocha characterized the creative conditions under which Brazil's "Cinema Novo" (New Cinema) began. Rocha was the movement's guiding spirit, both in theory and in practice,... [more]

"A camera in your hand and an idea in your head" was how film critic-turned-filmmaker Glauber Rocha characterized the creative conditions under which Brazil's "Cinema Novo" (New Cinema) began. Rocha was the movement's guiding spirit, both in theory and in practice, as he and other filmmakers sought to develop a new cinematic language that was genuinely Brazilian and Latin American. Rejecting the models of Hollywood and European film, Rocha argued that the core of Latin American reality was "an aesthetic of hunger and violence." Cinema Novo needed unique vision and a worldly aesthetic, not Golden Age glamour and Bergmanesque nuance. "Hunger is the essence of our society... and hunger's most noble cultural manifestation is violence." Although greatly influenced by the auteur concept of the French New Wave, Rocha nonetheless differentiated between the intellectual dilemmas of the developed world and the more fundamental social concerns of Latin America, saying: "We're not interested in neurotics' problems, we're interested in the problems faced by those who are lucid." Cinema Novo officially began in 1962 with Rocha's "Barravento," a Neo-Realist drama about the exploitation of black fishermen in Bahia. Although the film was initially banned in Brazil, it attracted considerable attention at international film festivals that year. The films following "Barravento" show a marked turn in style; operatic and spectacular, they reflect Rocha's desire to capture the Magical Realism found in the works of Latin American writers such as Juan Rolfo and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Rocha's first color film was the extravagant "Antonio das Mortes" (1969), an operatic drama in which a bounty hunter becomes a hero. The film brought him much critical acclaim, including a shared best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It also brought sharp criticism from the Brazil's political right, which banned the film and threatened Rocha with imprisonment. Angry and frustrated, Rocha left Brazil for a time to work in Africa and Europe. The problem of his reception in Brazil continued to plague his career. At the time of his death at age 43, he was again in Europe working on a large-scale film about Napoleon to star Orson Welles. Although Rocha left behind only a handful of completed projects, his efforts to create a unique film vernacular based on Brazilian popular culture, aesthetics, and themes made him the unquestioned figurehead of the important Cinema Novo movement. [show less]