Diálogo entre a filosofia crítica de Theodor Adorno e o cinema de Glauber Rocha: formação e experiência estética

Abstract

Based on the critique of the Enlightenment made by Theodor Adorno, this study investigates the aesthetic experience’s formative role, using as main object the cinema as an emancipated art. The foundation for this approach is the notion of antifilm mentioned by the author in his text Transparencies on Film (1966) and in the discussion of the aesthetic and formal properties of cinema being portrayed in Composing for the Films (1944). Through key concepts such as: cultural industry, administered world, kitsch and catharsis, we will look into how the process of instrumentalization has an impact on art, even when its right to being in the contemporary world is sub judice. The consequences that the technical rationality brings to the individual comes from there, especially the annulment of his subjectivity and the construction of a semiformed man. Using this analysis in Glauber Rocha's filmic works, that is, the trilogy of the earth, it is found that such movies stimulate the viewer to reflect on what is put on the screen and bring them into a stage of "trance" of thinking by breaking with traditional narratives. In this process, we highlight the importance of catharsis from the Adornan perspective as happening in the work itself and not in the individual. As opposed to the cultural industry, the film would be then art as an objective replacement for a critical-reflective experience. In addition to the alienation and domestication of the individual in the cultural industry, cinema can in fact provide a subjective emancipatory experience, through its formal aspects (assembly technique), and thus be converted into a device for expanding critical conscience through the reeducation of the senses.