Glauber Rocha in a prismatic approach: comparative cinema essays

• Grant number: 12/50292-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): October 01, 2012
• Effective date (End): September 30, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Cinema
• Principal Investigator: Ismail Norberto Xavier
• Grantee: Mateus Araujo Silva
• Host Institution: Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to reexamine, as well as some of previous works I have been publishing in the last years, the entire body of work of Glauber Rocha (films and writings) from the point of view of the dialogue he kept with other film-makers, from different periods and countries, that he knew very well and notoriously respected. In some essays l've published in France and in Brazil, I already compared Rocha's work to that of Jean Rouch, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet. I intend now to enlarge more systematically this comparative atrempt in trying to confront Rocha with some film-makers that were fundamental interlocutors to his cinematographic project along the years (John Ford, Serguei Eisenstein, Luis Bunuel, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Carmelo Bene) as well as with some film-makers whose works allow parallels that clarify, by resemblance or by contrast, aspects of that project (Miklos Jancso, Robert Kramer, Hugo Santiago, Tomás Gutierrez Álea, Fernando Solanas, Alexander Kluge). The aim of this research ís a double one: 1) to test by sampling the heuristic power of a comparative approach of a "prismatic" kind (in which an artist is compared with many others), wich is a method rarely performed in film studies, in Brazil as everywhere and; 2), to explore some features less discussed in the work of Rocha who, in spite of his well known attention to the work of his colleagues, hasn't been the object of studies on his dialogues with them. (AU)