A dialogue between Glauber Rocha and Georges Didi-Huberman

Abstract

Setting out from the way in which the curator Georges Didi-Huberman manages, in the Exhibition “Nouvelles Histoires de Fantômes” (2014), the scene of lamentation for the death of a peasant in the film of the Brazilian movie director Glauber Rocha “Terra em transe” (1967), this article intends to discuss the way in which this scene was articulated in that exhibition in a lamentation/uprising scheme. The model is that of Sergei Eisenstein's “Battleship Potemkin” in which a popular uprising broke out immediately after the death of the sailor. The article intends to show that the scheme proposed by Didi-Huberman, if the scene is contextualized in the dramatic economy of the film, does not work, because it falls into a much more complex context in which the Director Glauber Rocha discusses the deadlocks of Brazilian and Latin American Left  in the years 1960. Finally, the article sustains that the scene of the lamentation in the film can be understood within a larger conception, present in the films of Glauber Rocha, of a "Third World’s Christ".