Glauber Rocha
by Gabe Klinger
How many times can you say “Glauber” without wondering where such a funny name comes from? A Google experiment (try just typing in “Glauber”) shows that the Brazilian filmmaker is as famous today as his namesake, the German scientist Johann Rudolf Glauber, discoverer of Sodium Sulfate. It was Dona Lúcia, Rocha’s mother and until this day a tireless supporter of her son’s legacy, that gave him the odd name. It wasn’t the only thing that made him stick out, 20-odd years later, when, surrounded by the Walters, Luizs, and Joaquims, the Nelsons, Leons, and Paulos, he became one of the great filmmakers of his generation.
Widely heard-of though seldom seen, Rocha’s films are among the hardest to place in the canon of new cinemas from the 1960s. A tricontinental artist – he made films not just in Brazil but in Europe and Africa – Rocha was the victim of his own transience; he revelled in contradictions, in his aggressive theorising and self-attributed “aesthetic of hunger” – which took him from third-world-isation to the forefront of international filmmaking. From Terra em transe (1967) on, Rocha’s films resemble the didacticism of Godard’s Dziga-Vertov period, but damn if they were ever as detached from their causes as those films, so stilted in their narration, so caught in their time that – as the years have proved – they’ve barely moved forward at all. When Rocha made films, they were to reach Brazil in depths that no one had yet dreamt of…(read more)