L'âge de la Terre

Glauber Rocha was once-upon-a-time a very famous man. A key figure in world cinema. Friends with Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, an influence on film-makers as diverse as Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Amos Gitai and countless other film-makers. Today he's practically forgotten by most. His films rarely mounted as a retrospective, inspiring few articles on his rich and complex filmography.

What does it mean to be a fiercely provocative and openly formal film-maker of the "Third World". Most films from this vaguely defined economic sector of the planet that find a Western audience cater to the paternalism of the world hegemony, excorcise liberal guilt and work in schemas every bit as conventional as the worst sitcoms. With Rocha, you get fierce, cutting, vital celebrations of folk poetry, hymns to the landscape of the country that he loves so very much and a challenge to conventional film-making in Brazil and the rest of the world. His career as a film-maker suffered from problems of funding, common enough, and even moreso from the fact that his country underwent a collapse of its democracy which was replaced with a military dictatorship. This led to exile, a stint working underground and in short films.

This context makes THE AGE OF THE EARTH(A IDADE DA TERRA) all the more remarkable for its very existence. It is shot in CinemaScope, 35mm and was expensive and ambitious. It was his last film, he died shortly afterwards and it's perfectly clear from the stunning first take(no titles opening and credits) that he isn't going gently into the night. He's playing for keeps and taking no prisoners. The film's length of 2 and a half hours befits it's truly epic length.

Rocha's style of film-making challenged conventional film-making norms in a way that was totally unique. By no means a minimalist, he created a bold intense style of film-making that featured rich, saturated, loud soundtracks with eclectic music arrangements(cf, the opening of TERRA EM TRANSE) mixed with a tight emphasis on framing and long takes mixed with some of the most intense montage since Sergei Eisenstein's death. Stories matter even less in Rocha than they do in Godard. It's focus is in sculpting a particular vision of landscape, of folk rhythms and rituals.

THE AGE OF THE EARTH begins with a long tracking shot of the sun rising on the President's Palace in Brazil, slowly stretching back, recording the prism effects caused by the reflection of the sun on the lens and then a sharp cut to a rolling sphere("Action" yells Glauber offscreen) and then a frightening close-up on a very ugly mouth that yells, "My mission is to destroy this small, poor, planet earth!" The film then proceeds to a series of episodes that have vague relations to each other(it has been suggested that this film was constructed so that it could be played in any order of reels) yet at the finish of the runtime(there is no end to this picture) it constitutes a clear whole as Rocha creates a testament of his anxieties, fears and mystical visions regarding Brazil - it's various Christs and Satans, the omipresence of Western capitalist interests and a direct statement of Glauber's own political philosophy in his own write and voice.

Given the difficulties he faced in assembling money to make films, and the obscurity of those he did manage to make, Rocha's outspoken media presence had been his major role since 1969 at least, and it now entered into the films. This is a key weakness: a kind of egoic messianism, losing more and more political sense as he praised military dictators, with scenarios for ambitious films which could, in all likelihood, never be made. Both epic summation of Rocha's career and an incoherent end-of-the-line, 'A Idade' is like almost nothing else in cinema. We find one more the allegorical figures whose interactions are epic and poetic rather than realist, though we're also presented with near-documentary scenes, interviews and chaotic, seemingly improvised moments which appear closer to performance art (or, to be less kind, amateur theatre). Rocha claimed that the reels of the film could be shown in any order-history as linear order is firmly rejected for the repetitions and non-sequiturs that are held in place by mythic overlays which at the same time provide the fulfilment and solution to history. Is this a mystical escape from reality, the result of political impasse? Absolutely. But at times it's no less breath-taking for that.

The allegorical forces this time are four 'Christs' who are also the four horsemen of the apocalypse, St George, and so on, and their female counterparts-Aurora (sunrise is an important figure for the film), Magdalena, the queen of the Amazons. A businessman-imperialist, the hulking and Aryan 'John Brahms' staggers through the city in hysterical displays of sadistic power. These figures move around in public spaces in sequences that appear improvised, shot amongst traffic or in crowd scenes with puzzled onlookers, or in cramped interiors with Rocha's own voice shouting offscreen at the actors to scream their lines 'ten times louder'. Rocha further destabilises time by often including multiple takes of the same lines, repeated as many as five times-the 'military Christ' sitting in front of a café and proclaiming that, even if he uses violence and ignores human rights, he upholds essential 'spiritual' rights-and what would appear to be 'outtakes'-Brahms collapsing and apologising to Glauber for his weaknesss; Rocha's infant daughter banging at a piano. The shifting alliances of the film's allegorical figures, in their gendered pairings and their various speeches, provide uneasy mapping of betrayal, power and, at times, possibility. The gringo imperialist, Brahms, appears perpetually on the verge of collapse, yet that collapse never comes: political stasis is the overwhelming feel, despite the surge of action and event and the promises to provide a more democratic future Brazil, couched in the language of mystical, syncretic Christianity. This is a paradoxical teleology without end in its interchangeable reels, the film can have no conclusion. In what is probably the film's key sequence, Rocha yells out an incoherent voiceover speech to footage of the 'Black Christ' as St George, holding aloft a garish Expressionist icon of the crucified Christ, in which he claims the ultimate political ambition should be to defeat death itself. Rocha's voiceover-which, in its halting pauses and streams of language, sounds improvised rather than scripted-explains the genesis of the film as a life of Christ inspired by Pasolini's murder. Pasolini serves as the corpse from which a new, third world Christ can emerge, as Rocha preaches an incoherent political gospel in which a transformed Christianity serves as the beacon of global hope, along with a vision of Brazilian 'democracy' that functions beyond 'capitalism, socialism, communism'. This utopian, ultimately nonsensical vision-which also claims that the ultimate political ambition must be to defeat death itself-has to be expressed in manifesto-like words in order to give some coherence to what see onscreen, even as the film itself seeks for a visual 'trance' based on fragments of language, overwhelming and jarringly intercut blasts of sound, from Villa Lobos to carnival music and improvised free jazz, that rejects the cohesion Rocha's speech seeks to impose. The whole film is a total blaze of overkill-too loud, too long, with the maximum of excess as fundamental methodogical starting point-that cannot and does not end. Ismail Xavier call this the limits of national allegory as methodology-while apparently mythic structure presented in Rocha's previous films is ultimately grounded in a historical basis, it fails when it comes to the present of the 1980s, of a decade lived under military dictatorship. Rocha in essence admits as such in his voiceover description of the utopian city project of Brasilia, an analogy, it would seem, for his own film: "strong irradiation, light of the Third World, a metaphor that doesn't come true in history, but meets a feeling of greatness, the vision of paradise". This is a matter of faith: but faith, while it might at times seem the only possible way to survive a dictatorship with no end in sight, is hardly adequate on its own. Unable to account for the profusion of elements brought into the audience's view, 'A Idade' asserts the positive force of Brazilian syncretism against the violence embedded in its history and as a way beyond the crippling underdevelopment fostered by American imperial interests in the region. But this nationalism-even if it seeks to counter the mendacious nationalisms of religious and military power-ultimately cannot see a way out of them, falling prey to a disunited model of national unity that veers near to complicity with the repressive forces that governed the nation, against which Glauber might at times have staked his life.

I watched the Brazilian film "A Idade da Terra" by Glaube Rocha, from 1980 .The film begins five-minute staff of the rising sun, with the Brazilian, indigenous music. The following are alternate shots of contrasts of light and darkness, music, songs and dances, colorful costumes , which remindes me of the famous Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Alternate story about the end of the world, with tales of revolutions in the world, the independence of all countries, the totality of U.S. policy. Less knowledge about the historical and social conditions in Brazil ,hinder me in understanding some parts of the film, especially when it comes to associations with some political leaders and political events in Brazil, and the entire film I experienced as a theatrical performance. I can not say I understand it well enough, just hints of something about which I do not have enough knowledge and information.

"A idade da terra" is both suggestive and abstract. It stimulates a divine satisfaction, its rewarding but overly unstructured, annoyingly insane, and punishingly long. The film presents a whole state of mind, a mind that believe in the greatness of religion, its supreme purposes, to bring hope, meaning, answer's, strive. The worship of a superhuman controlling power, a personal kingdom of god within every man. If religion never existed: the Pyramids would never exist, world history would never exist. All the grandest achievements of mankind would cease from the earths surface. If religion didn't exist everything would change. Countries, languages, fashion, politics. Religion was what gave revolution for the renaissance. Religion gave birth to science. Its the source of morality, thy what is good, thy what is evil. Religion is the best placebo. The very idea of a miracle gives people hope, when acceptance gives death. It shows christ in a underdeveloped but modern part of the "Third World" . Christ - a primitive phenomenon in a very primitive, very new civilisation.

Rocha's last film is a culmination of his avant-garde cinematic language, portraying Brazil in a series of scenes, painting a cinematographic postcard of the country with a barrage of dances, parties, songs, theatrics, discussions and speeches on Brazil's history and politics, religious scenes, with passionate actors as society's archetypes. Bizarre performances in a world of war and peace. Freedom and slavery. A world of Black man, white man. Devil and God. The new world, the old world. Glauber sees the world changing as its core of the wretched Earth shrivels into darkness, he knows the world must evolve for if it did not it would become dust. Possessed by a demon - his heart screams, his vocal chords hum. If only it were the reverse. "A Idade da terra" = The last warcry from a revolutionary director.

This must be a work of a genius or a work of a madman who knows more than we poor mortals can possibly know. Glauber Rocha and his "A Idade da Terra" ("The Age of the Earth") is more than its images and words and speeches. It is a masterpiece from Brazil's cinema, an experimental film that challenges its viewers, gives something to think about and leaves wonderful moments in your head.

First of all, there's no plot although it has characters, figures, and actors performing them in repetitive monologues and in strange situations. The director explains to us that he wanted to make a film about Christ on a primitive world like Brazil, he conceived this idea after hearing about Pasolini's murder, guess he remembered some of his works. What we see is four Christs divided traveling through Brazil and spreading God's message to the desperate and hungry people of the third world, summoning all the people to a Third World revolution to help all the underprivileged people of Asia, Africa and Americas to get together and help each other. There's a Military Christ, a Black Christ, a Indian Christ and a Revolutionary Christ and they seem to fight against a diabolic figure named Brahms (Mauricio do Valle) that wants to rule the world. This is my view from the film, it might not be the same as yours, so feel free to watch a very philosophical and meaningful film.

In "A Idade da Terra" there's culture, religion, political speeches, the director's own voice and presence (on and off screen; on screen teaching an actor how to play his role; off screen you can hear his voice shouting at actors to speak their lines louder, one example is the famous moment where he shouts "Speak up Danuza" and his poetic perception of the world, explained in a long monologue explaining the film and the history of the world, very interesting). And what can be interesting too or not depending on your patience is that Glauber selected actors moments that are shown over and over again, some outtakes where the actors say the same lines multiple times (Tarcisio Meira and his lines about the destruction of the world).

The eternal revolutionary writer-director-producer Glauber Rocha makes important statements about the History of Brazil, a reminder that we should love and respect our country no matter what happens; and in each scene you can sense this pride, not only with words but in its images presenting a country beautifully filmed, very vivid. Sadly, this was his last film, he died in 1981, leaving an impressive filmography and being one of the greatest directors of all time, in Brazil and in the world. Once again he had a camera in the hand and an idea in the head (this is the slogan of the filmmakers of Cinema Novo "New Cinema" of which Glauber was his most expressive and important figure).

It's almost like watching a Godard film, there's a political message mixed with something that might be a plot and other things but in the end you get the whole picture and can make an idea of what it is and what it means. I must confess that I walked out of this film after ten minutes on my first view, it was just images without coherence I thought at the time, but something was keep calling me to watch it again and I did. Time makes you understand more of things and enjoy more experiences and this film is a memorable and positive experience. I know it's not for everyone, it's almost a impenetrable work but it has many things to show. See it if you can! 10/10