Aesthetics by Glauber Rocha and the interfaces with documentary cinema

Abstract

This study intends to reflect on some aspects of Glauber Rocha's cinematographic aesthetics, looking specifically at the confluences established with the aesthetics of documentary cinema. The intention is to discuss how Glauber Rocha appropriates the documentary language to compose his aesthetics of the real and materialize his poetic and political project in a historical and cultural time that became known for the effervescence of the production of an art with an extremely political bias and tone that sought to unveil the reality of the Brazilian people and their identity in the face of North American cultural colonialism. The thinking of the Bahian intellectual and filmmaker is impregnated precisely with the spirit of that time when the production of contemporary art is undergoing a profound change both in Brazil and in Europe, where artists redefined their aesthetics, intertwining them with political causes and, in turn, committed in putting art at the service of social change. The aesthetics of the real that 'blew winds' in the European avant-gardes reverberated in Brazil in the 1960s, being reshaped by the Glauberian perspective, introducing the Brazilian people and their realities into the new Brazilian cinema. The close relationship, and why not say a visceral relationship, between Cinema Novo and the search for an aesthetic of the real leads us to reflect on how the blurring of boundaries between fictional cinema and documentary has reverberated and influenced the composition of the language of Cinema New in Brazil. For the reflections we take as reference Nicholls (2005), Penafria (1999), Xavier (2001) and Simonard (2003).