Glauber antropophagist: fever archive, from Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry to Di-Glauber

Abstract

The Brazilian Modernism, with its characteristically vanguardist impulse of the decade of the 1920s, reveals the artificiality of the Brazilian nationalistic tradition and opens up new possibilities of usage: by juxtaposing it to the modernizing currents of the twentieth century, the order of this archive is subverted and a new and misplaced national identity takes place. Di-Glauber (1977), an often disregarded documentary by specialized critics in the filmography of Glauber Rocha, offers the opportunity to study the cinematographic realization of an intervention over the aforementioned cultural tradition. Through a re-reading and an elegiac homage to the figure and oeuvre of painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Rocha turns the Modernist procedures over themselves, thus opening the Brazilian archive to the experimentation of a film that claims for itself the disruptive force of its artistic legacy.