"We, makers of those ugly and sad films, those shouted and desperate films where reason does not always speak in the loudest voice, we know that hunger will not be cured by the cabinet's formulations and that Technicolor patches do not hide, but only worsen, hunger’s tumors. Thus, only a culture of hunger, drenched in its own structures, can take a qualitative leap. And the noblest cultural manifestation of hunger is violence. The act of begging, a tradition set up along with redeeming; colonialist pity, has been one of the causes of political mystification and of a haughty cultural lie: official tales of hunger ask the colonizing countries for money in order to build schools without creating teachers, to build houses without giving work, to teach a trade without teaching the alphabet. Diplomats solicit, economists solicit, politicians solicits. On the international front, Cinema Novo did not solicit anything, but rather imposed the violence of its images and sounds at twenty two international festivals.
"For Cinema Novo, the precise behavior of the hungry is violence, and his violence is not primitivism. Is Corisco primitive? Is the woman in Porto das Caixas primitive? Cinema Novo: more than primitive and revolutionary, it is an aesthetic of violence. Here lies the starting point for the colonizer to understand the existence of the colonized. Only by becoming conscious of the colonized's one possibility, violence, that's the only way the colonizer can understand, to his horror, the power of the culture that he exploits. As long as he does not rise up, the colonized is a slave: there had to be a first dead policeman for the French to see an Algerian.
"Despite it all, that violence is not part of the ear, as it is not bound to the old colonizing humanism. The love that this violence contains is as brutal as the violence itself, because it is not a complacent or contemplative love, but rather a love of action and transformation."
"We, makers of those ugly and sad films, those shouted and desperate films where reason does not always speak in the loudest voice, we know that hunger will not be cured by the cabinet's formulations and that Technicolor patches do not hide, but only worsen, hunger’s tumors. Thus, only a culture of hunger, drenched in its own structures, can take a qualitative leap. And the noblest cultural manifestation of hunger is violence. The act of begging, a tradition set up along with redeeming; colonialist pity, has been one of the causes of political mystification and of a haughty cultural lie: official tales of hunger ask the colonizing countries for money in order to build schools without creating teachers, to build houses without giving work, to teach a trade without teaching the alphabet. Diplomats solicit, economists solicit, politicians solicits. On the international front, Cinema Novo did not solicit anything, but rather imposed the violence of its images and sounds at twenty two international festivals.
ReplyDelete"For Cinema Novo, the precise behavior of the hungry is violence, and his violence is not primitivism. Is Corisco primitive? Is the woman in Porto das Caixas primitive? Cinema Novo: more than primitive and revolutionary, it is an aesthetic of violence. Here lies the starting point for the colonizer to understand the existence of the colonized. Only by becoming conscious of the colonized's one possibility, violence, that's the only way the colonizer can understand, to his horror, the power of the culture that he exploits. As long as he does not rise up, the colonized is a slave: there had to be a first dead policeman for the French to see an Algerian.
"Despite it all, that violence is not part of the ear, as it is not bound to the old colonizing humanism. The love that this violence contains is as brutal as the violence itself, because it is not a complacent or contemplative love, but rather a love of action and transformation."
-- Glauber Rocha, from "Aesthetic Hunger"