one Memory, images, left-wing melancholy and utopia in the film Terra em transe

Abstract

: This article aims to analyze the notion of image, memory, left-wing melancholy and utopia, refigured in the Cinema Novo Brazilian movement and also inserted in the Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano current of the 1960s. These cinematographic groups had a political bias, interested in debating social reality in cinema and in the transformation of capitalist society. For this investigation we chose the film Terra em transe (1967) by Glauber Rocha, one of the most representative of the two movements, because the social, political and economic issues of Latin America are addressed broadly and touching on common points of the countries of the continent, such as the fact of being former colonies of Iberian countries, considered underdeveloped and finally the implementation of military dictatorships in the 1960s and 1970s, with the support of the United States. It connects film analysis with the theoretical framework of concepts such as memory and images in Maurice Halbwachs and Henri Bergson, and of utopia in the works of Ernest Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Enzo Traverso. In the latter two, we also include the notion of left-wing melancholia. This theoretical and empirical framework encompasses the understanding of film not only as a means of disseminating ideas and political debates, but also as a repository of defeats, memories, and hopes that can mobilize expectations for change in the present and future.

Key words: Sociology of Art; Memory; Utopia; Left-wing Melancholy; Cinema nono.