A ética revolucionária: utopia e desgraça em "Terra em transe" (1967)

Abstract

Brazilian Cinema Novo producers designed audiovisual narratives on revolutionary theory and action at the same time as narratives were written within the pale of militancy and intellectuality, therefore being consecrated as some of the chief designers of Brazilian revolution ideology. Based on such premise, this study analyzes how the movie Entranced earth (1967) renders hegemonic revolutionary ideas problematic, within three distinct contexts, disconnected by both 1964 military blow and AI-5: the primer, marked by the defense for “an anti-imperialist and anti-feudal democratic-bourgeois revolution”, accomplished by the engagement between national bourgeoisie, PCB, workers and peasants against landowners and multinational companies, inspired by the III International’s (1919) postulates, distributed in Brazil by PCB; the second, celebrated by the relative overcoming of revolutionary stagism and armed actions of guerrilla influenced by Cuban foquist approach and the Maoism, and whose principles retake the IV International’s (1938) recommendations on uneven and combined nature of capitalism and the “permanent revolution”; the latter, embedded on the conservative modernization that militaries triggered, under the guidelines from National Security Doctrine, with Sebastianist and counter-reformer resonances. Moreover, the study shows that over revolutionary grounds and strategies in Brazilian setting, Glauber Rocha’s film brings into light the problem of the very revolutionary mentality, that Leszlek Kolakowski points as the belief in the entire man’s redemption through his absolute denial of the existing world, in the end of which would be subordinated all the other values, transformed hence in means.