Four Third-World Christs are the knights of the apocalypse of the Tupiniquim lands, fighting against the greed and violence of the powerful John Brahms, a foreign and unscrupulous explorer.
EN
“Rocha's last film practices that defiance of the spectator's taste and narrative expectations that is more characteristic of underground filmmakers such as Julio Bressane and Rogerio Sganzerla than of Cinema Novo proper, and he subjects this defiance to a defiance of its own from the quarter of the political problem of cinema. The Age of the Earth cancels out Rocha's other films, but they in turn cancel it out: one-sided approaches do not complement one another to form a solution. There is no way to make cinema, and it is the greatness of Rocha's work to realize itself in this impossibility.”
James Philips1
“Rocha has always attempted comprehensive views of history observed on a large scale. The scope of his reflection demanded the alternate strategies of modern cinema as they took place in the 1960s and early 1970s, fostering that mode of representation defined by a play on discontinuities and an aggressive refusal of ‘normal’ plots. As we have seen, in Brazil political engagement and modernist concerns favored national allegories – or their aggressive deconstruction. Rocha's Age of the Earth is the ultimate example of the peculiar combination of both impulses.”
Ismail Xavier2
“The director vehemently rejects imitations of Hollywood as well as European leftism, exotic folklore and simplistic styles; instead, he insists on the highly complex Brazilian roots of his art, whether they reflect its violence or its
music.”
Judy Stone3
“He hit himself against the impossible, the impossibility of being a great filmmaker of the Third World, a great black filmmaker. The Age of the Earth is the film of the Third World, there is no other. The others are films that join other films. The Age of the Earth is a great impossibility, a passage through world and time, a discovery of America on the opposite lane, a black Battleship Potemkin, or rather, it informs, full of gestures and rhythm, an extreme anti-classic – a spitting of blood in the face of the current cinema, dominated by sweetness.”
Pascal Bonitzer4
- 1James Philips, “Glauber Rocha: Hunger and Garbage,” in Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema, ed. James Phillips. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 93.
- 2Ismail Xavier, Allegories of Underdevelopment (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 255.
- 3Judy Stone, Eye on the World: Conversations with International Filmmakers (Los Angeles : Silman-James Press, 1997), 62.
- 4Pascal Bonitzer, cited in “Across the Margins, Beyond the Pale,” Diagonal Thoughts, 3 February 2014.
