Terra em Transe as a film-manifest, a possible approach

Abstract

How to read Terra em Transe (1967, Glauber Rocha), with all the data accumulated, 55 years later, at this moment of the rise of fascism in Brazil? How can we understand, since his administration, this object of translation of our tragedies as a people and society? How to pay attention to its symbolic apparatus in the tension of its own contradictory artistic proposition? A valid hypothesis is to think of Terra em Transe as a film-manifest. In this sense, some connections seem to be plausible. If, at first, we can associate the manifesto with a discursive genre based on revolutionary and avant-garde processes, we could also say, in essence, that the tone of the manifesto – and its political propulsion – is almost always convening, willing to propose levels of confrontation against certain traditions, quarrels, impositions. In another perspective, the manifesto is an action configured in forceful performative gestures. So, the act of the manifesto is a libel that translates into the force of the voice, and which is largely enclosed in the text, on the wall, on paper, in history, etc. The record of the manifesto is the preponderant aesthetic element of what is said, what is claimed, what is pointed out, what is printed.