Numa cama, numa festa, numa greve, numa revolução: o cinema se bifurca, o tempo se abre

Abstract

In a bed, a strike, a party or a revolution: that was how Glauber Rocha once thought that his last film, A Idade da Terra (1980), could be experienced. The work takes to the limit a research that turns making cinema a process more radical. It also invents news possibilities to aesthetic experience. It’s a film that I try to think with two others works from Glauber: Claro (1975), shot when he was in exile in Rome, and Di Cavalcanti (1977), a short film that he produced on an impulse, when he heard that his painter friend had died. Each of these films triggers singular procedures on occupying the world and on inventing paths to the cinema. They are taken here as bifurcations on configured forms of sensibility, as they try to proliferate ways of making a film. This is a broader concern in discussing the politics of films, singular ways in which cinema can inscribe in the world an operation of aesthetic fracture that is already political. In this sense, it is thinking with the works that we can propose some figures who claim cinema as field of resistances. One of the questions that guide the discussions of this work is the concept of a becoming minority, thought from Deleuze and Guattari, a movement in which cinema can engage to create tension with a visible and an audible that present themselves as major facts. In this process, it is common life that is at stake. Those operations of invention are taken in a entanglement of temporalities, which leads to an approach frankly anachronistic, on thinking what a work can shake in time and how it can open this time, in which I try to articulate with the thoughts of Benjamin, Warburg, Didi-Huberman and Agamben. Thus, the idea is to investigate how we could consider a contemporaneity in this cinema of Glauber, in that the proliferations researched by filmic forms are not restricted to a chronology of successive events, rather they spread in a rhizomatic way through temporalities, a proliferative and differentiating movement. Politics and aesthetics would be questions of how we bridge the temporalities, of which tracings are turn into possibilities. Or how the engagements in time can raise events and create resistances in becoming.