Glauber Rocha/Third cinema

Love this guy: V lucky to see The Age of the Earth, his final film which is really like nothing else. A bunch of screaming matches between not so much characters and people as symbols, intercut with a 10 min 'history lesson' on Brazilian dictatorship 30 mins in and a spoken essay on 'Pasolini and the Third cinema' toward the end.

There are some beautiful shots too: of the carnival (its a Brazilian film after all), the favelas (the main players dissolve into the crowds at the end, that ws breathtaking), of sunsets against modernist buildings.

That led me to other things: Solanas' Hour of the Furnaces,Battle of Chile...and then some African cinema I knew about beforehand: Mambety, Sembene.

All of which is relevant to today, right now. The issues talked about are still w/us. But when I had a search the posts are few and far between so I wanted a thread to recommend more to me.

This is all, often enough, a tightrope act, and I'm impressed in the frequency with which this is performed -- they are fkn good films as films, but they don't fail to talk about things which need to be talked about. And they are not scared of boring you for a while.

A lot of Third World Cinema (as all cinema) is non-political but watching Tony Manero I wonder if I'll ever see a Chilean film that isn't about the coup. But this is a problem for all foreign cinema that gets seen in the West where context is created for a partic audience.

I watched "Black God White Devil" until the wee hours on Film 4 last night. I've always wanted to see one of Glauber Rocha's films ever since I read Scorsese mentioning him in an interview. It's an odd and wild epic. Its brutal at times with bombastic performances and a bit boring at points (but thats ok). Some great scenes like Saint Sebastian preaching on the mountaintop. Sergio Leone certainly watched this. I felt I was being schooled on Brazilian history watching it; the massacre of Canudos, religious fundamentalism, the pants-shitting poverty of the Northeastern hinterlands, the self-defeating nature of revolutionary violence, its all in there. I'd like to see more of his stuff (he was only 25 when he made this which is astonishing)

For more of this stuff:

https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/seasons/ica-cinematheque-we-must-discuss-we-must-invent

I wonder if I'll ever see a Chilean film that isn't about the coup.

I did see Gloria which was v funny.