Revolutionary and Other Screens

Panel 4: “Revolutionary and Other Screens” at the International Conference “The other 68: Anthropophagic Revolutions in Brazilian Counterculture after 1968” at Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, 23-25 May 2018

Chair: Vinzenz Hediger (Frankfurt)
Daniel Fairfax (Frankfurt)
Cancer: Glauber Rocha in 1968

The most globally renowned of the Cinema Novo filmmakers following the international success of Deus e o diabo na terra do sul (1964) and Terra em transe (1967), Glauber Rocha was also the Brazilian director whose practice was most fundamentally transformed by the worldwide political earthquake of 1968. The spirit in which Rocha experienced the seismic events of 1968 is best embodied in a work that even today remains one of his least known (and least viewed) films: Cancer. This paper will seek to place Cancer in the context of Brazilian politics and culture in the 1960s, as well as integrating this critically neglected film into Rocha’s broader corpus of cinematic works and critical/theoretical writings.

Daniel Fairfax is an assistant professor in film studies at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. His study of the transformation of Cahiers du cinema and film theory in the wake of 1968 will be published in 2019.

Closing keynote
Robert Stam (New York)
Anthropophagy, the Carib Revolution, and Popular Culture: the Transnational Gaze on the Radical “Indian”

This lecture/video presentation will focus on the circulation around the “Red Atlantic” of the image of the misnamed “Indian” as “exemplar of freedom,” both in popular media culture (film, music, the internet) and in social thought. It will highlight interconnections between radically indigenizing social discourses in the U.S., France, and Brazil, especially emphasizing the 500 year Franco-Brazilian-indigenous dialogue which traces back to the 16th century French colony in Brazil. The focus will be on moments, in social philosophy and in popular culture, where indigenous critique and western awareness of the egalitarian communal freedom of some native societies catalyzed expanded notions of freedom and equality and the radical interrogation of social norms.

Robert Stam is university professor at New York University and author of some seventeen books on film, the media, and ultural studies, including Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (1997).

Presented by:
The conference is part of the series “Tropical Underground” and is organized by the Cluster of Excellence “Normative Orders” with the Department of Theatre, Cinema and Media Studies at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.