Distributions of the Dream: Ailton Krenak and Glauber Rocha, an untimely Approximation

by
Mateus Sanches Duarte, Gabriel Martins da Silva & João Pedro Saddi Cabral Menezes 

The white people, they do not dream as far as we do. They sleep a lot but only dream of themselves. Their thought remains blocked, and they slumber like tapirs or turtles. This is why they are unable to understand our words. — Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky

In July 1965, in the city of Genoa in Italy, Glauber Rocha pointed out a difficulty that seems to last over time: communicating the misery of the “third world”, underlining both the difficulty of the Latin American producer to represent it and that of the European observer to absorb it. This speech later became the manifesto “Eztetyka da fome” (An Aesthetics of Hunger, 1965), a theoretical milestone for the Cinema Novo Movement1, that laid the groundwork for the pursuit of an authorial, artistic, and socially engaged cinema. Glauber Rocha was targeting the European spectator’s ecstasy at the images of the horror of hunger, which, according to him, was due to a certain nostalgia for primitivism. As in the rear-view mirror of a car, Europeans saw in the Third World the past of their history or what they had ceased to be, what they had overcome in their lofty position of “civilization”: “If he (Europeans) understands us (Latin Americans), then, it’s not because of the lucidity of our dialogue but because of the humanitarianism that our information inspires in him” (Rocha 42).

Glauber Rocha had in mind a clear opposition to what was emerging in Brazilian cinema. On the one hand, there were the films with the large mansions and themes of the elites, the aseptic framing, the polished lines and, on the other hand, a series of films that thematized hunger, with characters who “eat soil”, “speak wrong”, using innovative editing, even though it was already known on the European avant-garde circuits (Ramos 68). It was with this wave of films produced and filmed about hunger and drought in mind that Glauber Rocha elaborated, from this Brazilian scourge (hunger), the power of the avant-garde cinema that was on the horizon: “Cinema Novo is a project that is realized in the politics of hunger, and suffers, for this very reason, all the weaknesses consequent on its existence”2 (Ramos 67). In view of this strange paradox, but which made sense to the young filmmakers of that period — or at least to Glauber Rocha — hunger was chosen as a kind of cultural symbol or emblem, as a scourge and a power, a vice and a virtue of that bomb that was being implanted in the 1960s in the form of cinema:

Latin hunger (...) is not just an alarming symptom: it is the nerve of its own society. Therein lies the tragic originality of Cinema Novo in relation to world cinema: our originality is our hunger, and our greatest misery is that this hunger, although felt, is not understood (Ramos 30).

His manifesto was read out in Europe during the V Rassegna del Cinema Latino-Americano in Genoa (Italy), an event about the relationship between Brazilian avant-garde cinema and world cinema, stressing the contact between Latin American production, its problems, and the worldwide consumption of this type of artistic object, its reception and its implications. Glauber Rocha speaks to Europeans in a provocative tone. His text is of the order of address, inverting the route usually taken in which the European speaks for the Third World subject to listen, because hunger is the theme in which we are not the “other”.

If Glauber Rocha, in his manifesto, is interested in a pronominal policy, of naming an us (Latin Americans) and them (Europeans), Ailton Krenak also does so in several of his public speeches. In The Eternal Return of the Encounter (1999), for example, Krenak retraces the contact between Europeans and the so-called New World, reconstructing the mythical scene of the encounter between whites and native peoples in American territory based on a few questions:

How has this history of contact between white people and the ancient peoples of this part of the planet come about? How have we related to each other over these almost 500 years? Is the time and the very notion of this contact different for each of our tribes? (Krenak, “Eternal Return” 24).

This scene serves, at first, to delimit the space of tension between the “universal” (white) and the alterities of the American lands (indigenous peoples); and, later, to draw up questions that concern the present, as if the 16th century event could be updated in Brazil. Sharing the same pronominal policy as Glauber Rocha, Krenak launches his untimely provocation to his readers/listeners:

When the date 1500 is seen as a milestone, people may feel that they should demarcate that time and commemorate or debate the event of our meetings in a way that demarcates time. Our meetings take place every day and will continue to do so, I’m sure, until the third millennium, and perhaps beyond. We are having the opportunity to recognize this, to recognize that there is a roadmap for an encounter that is always taking place, that always gives us the opportunity to recognize the Other, to recognize in the diversity and richness of the culture of each of our peoples the true heritage that we have, then come the other resources, the territory, the forests, the rivers, the natural wealth, our technologies and our capacity to articulate development, respect for nature and, above all, education for freedom (Krenak, “Eternal Return” 28).

We know that Krenak, like a number of other indigenous authors, is interested in “(...) an indigenous counter-history and counter-anthropology, the object of which is the dominant culture of the nation-state that has befallen the native peoples of this part of the world” (Viveiros de Castro 75), as anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro writes in the afterword to the Brazilian version of Krenak’s book Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo), published in 2020. This rewriting of history, of the tightrope on which the infinite voices that make up the great ethnic playbook that is Brazil are balanced, stems from a yearning close to that of Glauber in his manifestos, that is, how to communicate that which marks our difference, which is displayed on our skin and in the affections that link us to other beings, but which, at the same time, is uncapturable?

In addition to this affinity of method, it’s important to point out the differences in style between Ailton Krenak and Glauber Rocha, such as the temporalities at play in the speeches of these two figures who are so different in terms of their mouths; the tone, gesture and speed of their oral speech is imprinted inside the writing, in the thin layer of the letter, transposed almost audibly in the way each of them relates to language; the difference between Glauber Rocha’s hurried, incisive and rushed writing and Ailton Krenak’s slow, from another time, less incessant and more measured — which doesn’t mean that Krenak’s texts are less combative or that Glauber Rocha’s are less organized. In short, how can we think about the relationships, echoes and approximations between two figures who are so disparate, so far apart in their attributions, social positions and political-aesthetic ambitions, but who, at the same time, participated and participate in the public debate, in the contact between minorities and majorities, engaged in issues of an urgent nature? How can we deal with the untimeliness of these authors, without reducing them to the same problem and without totally separating them in their provocations? With this series of questions in mind, our interest in this essay is to build a transversal dialog between these two authors based on the institution of the dream, perhaps the dimension that best crosses their affinities and dissonances.

A politics of dreams

In his books Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (2020) and Life is Not Useful (2023), Ailton Krenak seems aligned with the most recent movement in the mainstream publishing market and the desire of indigenous leaders to address the white world through what we understand best: the written word, as the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa argues in his cross-cultural ethnographic partnership with Bruce Albert at the beginning of The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (2013):

Unlike them, I do not possess old books in which my ancestors’ words have been drawn (…) I asked you to set them on this paper in order to give them to the white people who will be willing to know their lines. Maybe then they will finally lend an ear to the inhabitants of the forest’s words and start thinking about them in a more upright manner? (Kopenawa and Albert 13).

Krenak’s call echoes other voices of these peoples in the most diverse areas, from anthropology to the plastic arts, in a context of intensified attacks by the Brazilian state on indigenous peoples: the resurrection of hydroelectric dam projects in the north of the country; the accumulation of historical violence perpetrated by governments and their minions; the recent intensification of conflicts in the public sphere, materialized in the openly anti-indigenous representatives of the Bolsonaro government; offensives such as the Time Frame Argument3; and, of course, the Anthropocene, the greatest threat ever faced by humanity as a species, whose effects directly concern indigenous peoples and those who come from the Earth and belong to it. The two books resonate with contemporary discussions and bring them face to face with indigenous cosmologies, especially the world of the Krenak, who live on the banks of the Rio Doce, recently affected by the Vale S.A. ecocide4 disaster5.

One of the points that interests us is the institution of the dream, which does not appear in these books as a speculative space of escape from the problems that Krenak, as an activist and leader, is committed to denouncing and combating. On the contrary, the space of the dream acts politically in indigenous cosmologies at the heart of everyday life, as one of the ways of orienting the day and the world, reprogramming practices of always dangerous contact with the outside, with the power of otherness. Krenak’s call for the cultivation of dreams is a call for practices of deceleration — as the title of his book suggests, a postponement, we could say — and the establishment of another relationship with time, another community experience:

When I said I was going to speak of dreams and the earth, what I had in mind was a place and a practice that is perceived in so many different cultures, by so many different peoples, not merely as part of the daily experience of sleeping and dreaming, but as the disciplined exercise of deriving guidance for our actions in the waking world from the dreams that visit us in our slumber. For some people, to dream is to step outside of reality, relinquish the practical meaning of life. For others, however, there is no meaning to life unless informed by dreams, the place we go in search of songs, cures, inspiration, and even solutions to practical problems that befuddle and elude us in the daytime, but which are laid out in all their possibilities in the realm of dream. I was very content this afternoon when more than one colleague mentioned the institution of dreaming, not as mere oneiric experience, but as a discipline related to our formation, to our cosmovision, to the traditions of different peoples who approach dreams as a path toward learning, self-knowledge, and awareness of life, and the application of that knowledge in our interaction with the world and other people. (Krenak, Ideas to Postpone 30)

It’s interesting to see how the relationship with the dream does not appear in Krenak’s thought as an indigenous exclusivity, but as a space that can be reclaimed, summoning readers to a markedly everyday experience, linked to the smallest things of everyday life, of a personal and community relationship:

The kind of dream I am referring to is an institution. An institution that welcomes dreamers, and where people learn different languages, drawing on various resources to reckon with themselves and their surroundings. (...) Today, the dreams of someone who worries about cataclysms, about the planet’s environmental tragedy, may be similar like those dreamt by a Xavante Shaman (...). (Krenak, Life Is Not Useful 16)

In telling the story of his relationship with a shaman, Krenak confesses that “Since then, I have been experiencing the meaning of the dream as an institution that prepares people to relate to everyday life” (Krenak, Life Is Not Useful 17), and continues:

This institution also affects more domestic spheres. Dreaming is a practice that can be understood as a cultural regime in which, early in the morning, people tell each other about the dream they had — not as a public practice, but as an intimate one. You don’t talk about your dreams in public, but you share them with the people with whom you have a relationship. This also suggests that the dreams are a place for conveying affection. I mean affection in the broad sense. I’m not only talking about your mother and your siblings, but also about how the dreams affect the sensory world; how the act of sharing your dreams with others creates connections between the dream world and the dawn of a new day; and how sharing them with your companions transforms that into intangible matter right away. When dreams are finished being told, those who listen can already pick up their tools and go about the day’s activities: the fisherman can go fishing, the hunter can go hunting and those who have nothing to do can rest. There is no veil separating dreams from everyday life and they emerge with wonderful clarity (Krenak, Life Is Not Useful 17-18).

The domesticity and everydayness of the dream appear in Krenak’s speech as an inexorable instance of this, as a space for experimentation and for engendering a practice and politics of the community world. Not being the opposite of “reality”, of the waking world (the opposite of the fictional), the dream appears precisely as an experience that organizes and, at the limit, produces everyday life. We’d like to briefly highlight, by way of example, two ethnographic experiences that attest to this every day and constitutive dimension of dreams in indigenous life. The first is the description given by Philippe Descola, a “disciple” and “heir” to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s chair at the Collège de France in Paris, France, of the relationship between the Achuar, a people commonly known as the Jivaro, inhabitants of the Amazonian border between Peru and Ecuador, and dreams and the daily life of the village:

The Achuar get up very early, around three or four in the morning, but they also go to bed very early, because at half past six it’s night in Ecuador, and by eight o’clock everyone is asleep. Just before dawn, they would gather around a campfire to decide what they would do during the day, based on what they had dreamt at night. Most of the time, they interpreted their dreams according to simple rules, usually based on the inversion between the dream image and the indication they could extract from that image. For example, dreaming that they caught a fish was a good sign to go hunting and, conversely, dreaming that they killed a caititu was a good sign to go fishing. (Descola 11-12)

The institution of the dream for the Achuar resonates very much with the characteristics, objectives and powers to which Ailton Krenak refers to, because the dream participates in and constructs daily life, as if the day had to be “assembled” collectively by sharing the dream world, which, of course, always has something to say to the group. Philippe Descola’s text is, like Krenak’s, the transcript of a public speech, this time addressed to a young audience, high school students.

The other example, an excerpt from Tânia Stolze Lima’s ethnography, which meets other theoretical and conceptual objectives, discusses the role of dreams in the dualities of hunting among the Yudjá in the Upper Xingu:

Considering that the metaphysics of hunting places one dream at the beginning and the other at the end of the story of a hunt, given as an anticipated hunt and an extension of a hunt already carried out in sensitive experience; considering also that this metaphysics places the past and the future in a metaphorical or parallel relationship, we can say that the initial dream is parallel to the final dream, thus forming the framework for the other lines of the hunt. The hunter’s story (apart from the fact that he bears scars on his skin that allow him to remember old adventures) is thus made up of countless motives — many of which are incomplete, due to his luck or misfortune — framed by dreams (his own or someone else’s, factual or virtual), which are themselves framed by the long lines of the hunter’s Life and Dream (Lima 42).

In what way do these accounts communicate with what Glauber Rocha did in cinema and wrote in his manifestos “Eztetyka da fome” (An Aesthetics of Hunger, 1965) and “Eztetyka do sonho” (An Aesthetics of Dreams, 1971)? We know that, in the 1970s, the filmmaker established a relationship with another part of the third world, specifically with the transoceanic communication between Brazil and the African continent, whose greatest cinematographic expression is Der Leone have sept cabeças (1970), shot in the Republic of Congo, with the broad participation of the “native” population, delving into the debate on the decolonization of African countries.

Ivana Bentes, in “Terra de fome e sonho: o paraíso material de Glauber Rocha” (Land of hunger and dreams: Glauber Rocha’s material paradise) (2002), indicates a certain timeline that we can follow to try to find the missing link between Glauber Rocha and the Amerindians, starting from the Modern Art Week of 19226 to the tropicalism7 of the 1970s (Bentes 1) — even though this link doesn’t actually exist, it is precisely through the extemporaneous search that we can speculate imaginary connections between Glauber and these other peoples. Although we know that cinema was not an artistic expression widely valued by the creators of the Modern Art Week of 1922 (Cavour et al. 5), the Cinema Novo generation reverberated São Paulo’s modernism, taking this heritage head-on, with various adaptations of novels, the discovery of Oswald de Andrade and the incorporation of elements dear to the first heroic generation, such as experimentation with language, anthropophagy and a return to “deep Brazil”. The need to find a national cinema, as was already clear in the first manifesto, together with the recognition of the heritage of national literature, produced the lines of force of Cinema Novo. It is precisely here that our hypothesis about Glauber’s encounter with the Amerindians is strengthened, or at least the valorization of this tópos as material for artistic experimentation.

At another point, Glauber Rocha, in a short text entitled “Tropicalismo, antropologia, mito, ideograma” (Tropicalism, anthropology, myth, ideogram, 1969), before going into a discussion about cinematographic language, makes a brief reference to the Modern Art Week of 1922 and the “cultural revolution” that was that year. It’s curious how Oswald de Andrade is described as “genius” by Glauber, who at that time, in the 1960s, was being rediscovered by the Brazilian intelligentsia, specifically by Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos and the generation linked to concrete poetry. Glauber Rocha went so far as to state categorically that “Tropicalism, anthropophagy and its development, this is the most important feature of Brazilian culture today” (Rocha 100). Beyond this speculation and the always mistaken attempt to trace the origin and the problematic encounter between Glauber Rocha and the Amerindians, it is worth emphasizing the extemporaneous affinity between Krenak’s dream and the dream proposed by the filmmaker in his second manifesto.

An aesthetic of the dream

In “Eztetyka do sonho” (An Aesthetics of Dreams, 1971), also written and delivered outside Brazil, this time in New York, at Columbia University, Glauber was interested in “updating” his first manifesto. In the text, the filmmaker dwells on the discussion of revolutionary art and the production of a politically engaged and involved cinema: “A work of revolutionary art should not only act in an immediately political way, but it should also promote philosophical speculation, thus creating an aesthetic of the eternal human movement towards its cosmic integration” (Rocha 122-23). His project aimed to distance itself from the pamphleteering that inflicted some left-wing cinema, such as La Hora de los Hornos (1973), by Argentinian Fernando Ezequiel Solanas, cited as a counter-example by Glauber in his manifesto.

Glauber Rocha, like Ailton Krenak, attributes the evils of his issues — in the filmmaker’s case art, in Ailton Krenak’s case ways of life — to rationalism, the mental system that organizes social life in so-called “civilizations”, which, for Ailton Krenak, makes life hostage to a disempowered utilitarianism, the source of our greatest catastrophes. For Glauber Rocha, it is at this crossroads that we also find the excessive formalization of revolutionary films, which turns the people into the myth of the bourgeoisie, as he writes in his manifesto. With just one stroke, Glauber Rocha hit the right and the left wing: the first for obvious reasons, since Brazil was in the midst of a military dictatorship, and the second thanks to the controversial reception of his work by some groups he described as “sectarian”. Like Ailton Krenak, for Glauber Rocha, the “rupture with colonizing rationalisms is the only way out” (Rocha 123), the transformation of our way of life and the reconfiguration of art are the only possible coordinates for drawing a line of escape from the inflection point we were at.

Allegory as a problem

Ana Kiffer, in “Glauber Rocha, do dialético ao intempestivo” (Glauber Rocha, from the dialectic to the untimely) (2012), tries an alternative reading to Glauber Rocha’s hunger-dream path in his manifestos:

(...) it seems urgent to point out that, even though ten years later he revisited the aesthetics of hunger in a text entitled “Eztetyka do sonho” (An Aesthetics of Dreams, 1971), the dream does not function as either the negation or the antithesis of a dialectical process that will result in his last and incomprehensible film The age of the earth. On the contrary, it seems to us that the negativity or opacity of this limiting experience of hunger is radicalized in constant metamorphoses in Glauber’s work. The dream shouldn’t be understood as the departure of a collective thinking about the end of its work, as is commonly done (Kiffer 19).

If there is no qualitative or ontological mutation between hunger and dream, the reading moves towards the discovery of dream in Glauber as an internal unfolding of hunger, an immanent transformation, as if dream were one of the forms of expression and continuity of hunger, one of its virtualities. In line with this reading, Gilles Deleuze, in Cinéma 2: L’image-temps published in 1985, considers the various configurations of the people in Glauber Rocha’s early films8. The philosopher follows Schwarz’s reading of Glauber, moving away from a dialectical reading and attributing to him an extemporaneous and untimely character, based on a discussion of the juxtaposition between the archaic and the modern in cinema: “(...) it is not a matter of analysing myth in order to discover its archaic meaning or structure, but of connecting archaic myth to the state of the drives in an absolutely contemporary society, hunger, thirst, sexuality, power, death, worship” (Deleuze 219). This indistinction between the archaic and the contemporary, the virtualization of secular problems in the fabric of the present, is what makes Deleuze’s and Kiffer’s reading interesting for thinking about the consubstantiality of hunger and dreams and the radical topicality of these problems and artistic productions for thinking about Brazil. Ana Kiffer also summarizes this proposal and shows us the importance of thinking of hunger and dreams as two sides of the same coin, both involved in the constitution of a people that does not yet exist, in a constant updating of archaic myths in contemporary problems:

(...) it seems that, for Glauber Rocha, something of revolutionary Brazil is made in this passage from hunger to dream, but not as an overcoming of the former through the latter. On the contrary, hunger is central for Glauber’s dream to move away from the allegorical and become embodied in the delirium of a people to come (Kiffer 21).

The interest in this gesture is only justified as a methodology of critical intemperance, updating the “(...) event(s) that are still and always present” (Kiffer 12). This is because the type of reading that the author rejects is that of certain Brazilian critics who have tried to think of Glauber’s films as a decapsulation of national allegorical formations, as if this work were irremediably connected to the past, to the “representation” of hunger and to the recurrence of problems in the political world. In this way, there is an opportune coincidence between this type of reading and Glauber Rocha’s personal position as “affiliated” with a dialectical historical and philosophical perspective. This kind of alignment between Marxian criticism and biography guaranteed density to the allegorizing readings of Glauber’s work, making it hegemonic in the reception of his films. Going against the grain of this reception, Ana Kiffer shows how, in her body to body with the author’s work, a certain untimeliness emerges in the apparent dialectical predisposition of his images, in which the problem of hunger is no longer something atomized in the colonial past that the images try to “represent”, but reveals an insistent actuality of these structures in the present, opening up his work to a powerful anachronism, whose problems concern Brazil’s past, present and future (Kiffer, “Brasil”).

Untimely relationships

If, for Ana Kiffer, Glauber Rocha in “Eztetyka da fome” (An Aesthetics of Hunger, 1965) aimed at the dialectic and hit the untimely, in our view, in “Eztetyka do sonho” (An Aesthetics of Dreams, 1971) he aimed at revolutionary art and found Amerindian cosmologies. We can say that if the untimely in Glauber breaks with dialectics here, establishing itself in a thought of difference, in Ailton Krenak, the thought of difference points to alliances with the other beings of the earth, towards the survival of a people whose knowledge is built on the dream, that is, escaping the limiting tutelage of utilitarian and economic reason.

This rather strong inference is due to the fact that, despite the differences, we can imagine some similarities between the dream for the filmmaker and for Krenak — for whom the institution of the dream, however much it is thought of from his experience as a member of the Krenak community, ends up appearing as a metonymy of the indigenous dream in general, as has been demonstrated throughout this essay with the examples of the Achuar and Yudjá peoples9. Ailton Krenak uses dreams as a way of projecting other ways of life, of imagining other possibilities, thanks to the status that dreams have in the composition of daily life and in affecting the rhythm of the day for indigenous communities. Dreams are mobilized as a space for experimentation available to everyone to think about slowing down life and, consequently, postponing the end of the world, since, for Krenak, the Anthropocene is unavoidable due to our way of consuming, entirely linked to the colonizing rationalism that Glauber Rocha denounces in his second manifesto. To this end, Krenak uses the figure of the parachute, an instrument that serves to save us, but which has a very specific physical meaning: to slow us down until we meet the surface. The body’s contact with the ground, which would be deadly without the parachute, is inevitable, writes Krenak:

Where do we go to design parachutes? We go to that place beyond this hard earth: the land of dreams. Not of dreams as we usually speak of them when we wake up from a nap, or the kind we banalize in the sense of “my dream job” or “my dream car.” I mean dreams as the transcendental experience in which the human chrysalis cracks open onto unlimited new visions of life. Perhaps it’s another word for what we generally call “nature.” But, in fact, it has no name as such, because we can only name what we know. The dream of which I speak is the experience of those initiated into the tradition of dreaming. Just as you go to school to learn something — a subject, a meditation, a dance — you can learn this too, earn initiation into this world of dream. Some Shamans and magicians’ dwell in these realms or can visit them — places of connection with the shared world. It’s not a parallel world, but the world in another register, another potency (Krenak, Ideas to Postpone 34-35).

This important distinction that Ailton Krenak makes between the dream of white people — that of the next dream job, the new dream car, in other words, ontologically opposed to reality — and the dream of indigenous people (linked to everyday life, in direct contact with reality, with the power to change the practices that guide everyday life) is key to understanding the politics of the indigenous dream. Glauber’s dream is also along these lines, not necessarily linked to everyday life, but interested in contact with reality, as Ana Kiffer confirms: “His (Glauber Rocha’s) sense of dream is not surrealist, it is not a dream as fantasy, averse to the reality of hunger. His dream should be closer to the vision, to the event, to what is not surpassed” (Kiffer 21). Glauber’s dream, therefore, is that space, far removed from engaged realism, from political pamphleteering, which can engender new artistic languages and provide the Third World filmmaker with a communicative particularity that gives him an advantage over the colonizer. For Glauber, the distinction between colonizer and colonized is not simply a differentiation between the Latin American and the European, since, for the filmmaker, the national bourgeoisie is the colonizer. This space linked to reality guarantees that dreams can be used to compose new forms, to reinvigorate revolutionary art. “To dream is the only right that cannot be prohibited” (Rocha 124), writes Glauber Rocha in his manifesto, marking the space that cannot be captured by the capitalist order that is attributed to dreaming, this space that cannot be located by colonialism, free from the clichés of forms, but which can nevertheless be part of the daily life of editing, filming and artistic creation.

The coextensiveness between dreams, daily life and reality is in the indigenous meaning of this institution: “(...) everyday life was an extension of dreaming. And the relationships, the contracts woven in the dream world, were still meaningful after you woke up” (Krenak, Life Is Not Useful 24), writes Ailton Krenak about the meetings and agreements signed in dreams with other human and non-human communities and which continued after waking up, which confirms the falsity of the opposition between dream and reality for the whites. There is something untraceable about the dream, as Glauber Rocha has already described, but before it is untraceable, there is another key issue: the dream here is indescribable, of the order of experimentation, writes the filmmaker: “I do not justify nor explain my dream because it has its origin in the increasing intimacy with the subject of my films, the natural meaning of my life” (Rocha 125). It is from this point that the dream communicates with everyday life.

The indigenous roots of Latin American culture appear in “Eztetyka do sonho” (An Aesthetics of Dreams, 1971) as one of the few powers — apart from the African one — against the colonizing rationalism that Glauber Rocha denounces, also taking on the colonial dimension of the Brazilian bourgeoisie and middle classes. Finding himself in popular language and knowledge, Glauber looks to the future and finds the indigenous people, not as the crystallization of a myth of origin of national identity, but as a driving force for the production of a revolutionary art engaged in the production of new languages, peeling back the capitalist cultural shell, the clichés of the mass industry and a new relationship with cinematic time:

The indigenous and black roots of Latin American people should be understood as the only developed force on this continent. Our middle classes and bourgeoisie are decadent caricatures of colonizing societies. Popular culture is not technically folklore; it’s the popular language of permanent historical rebellion (Rocha 124).

Out-of-time characters

Eldorado, as we know from Terra em transe (Entranced Earth, 1967), is a former colony, where we can hear Porfirio Diaz (Paulo Autran) in the famous coronation scene, promising order and civility: “They will learn! I will rule this land. I will put these hysterical traditions in order. By force. By love of force! By the universal harmony of hell. We will achieve civilization!”. Porfirio Diaz’s desire for power reveals the innermost delirium of a decadent populist: to transform the “primitive” into the “civilized”. The political aspects of the resistance to transformation (civilization) are different in Krenak and Glauber: the former is more interested in what we can roughly call the “Technicized Barbarian” (Andrade 48), i.e. the projection of the “primitive” into the “civilized” or the future projection of the “savage” as a future, and the second more engaged in resistance to modernization and the various forms of colonization, in what Glauber Rocha himself calls “o artesanato contra a tecnologia” (craftsmanship against technology), in the opening of one of his TV Tupi program “Abertura” at the end of the 1970s10. Beyond this difference, there is one aspect common to both: the valorization of this “artisanal”, popular, the so-called “barbaric”, “savage” and, ultimately, “primitive” heritage.

The composition of this series of forces outlines what Glauber Rocha calls a dream, something of the order of delirium, and what Ailton Krenak also evokes with the same name, something that is in direct alignment with everyday life, the elaboration of community life and the intimate relationship with otherness — whether in the dream world or in the friction of affections in community, if this distinction makes sense for these peoples. Glauber Rocha’s untimeliness is to be found in his manifestos, in the timeliness and power of hunger as an affliction and singularity, but also in the out-of-time characters in his films, in the anachronism (not ahistorical, but transtemporal) of his symbols. Glauber Rocha’s characters — like Porfírio Diaz or the various modulations of the people — are filmed as out-of-time11, extemporaneous, crossing the layers of time and coexisting in his cinematic orchestra. Ailton Krenak, on the other hand, can be attributed the nickname of the untimely because he deals with what would be the most urgent issue of our time, the climate crisis and, consequently, the reshaping of everyday practices, betting on the indigenous people as the key to the future, to the partial resolution of the conflicts between society, nature and the climate, to a better way of living and dying in the Anthropocene.

Works Cited

Andrade, Oswald de. A Utopia Antropofágica. Obras Completas de Oswald de Andrade, Secretaria de Estado da Cultura de São
Paulo / Editora Globo, 1990.
Bentes, Ivana. “Terra de Fome e Sonho: O Paraíso Material de Glauber Rocha.” Ressonâncias do Brasil, Fundación Santillana,
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Authors’ Note: This text was originally published in the Brazilian journal ALEA: Estudos Neolatinos, vol. 25, no. 2, 2023, pp. 60–77, under the title “A partilha do sonho: Ailton Krenak e Glauber Rocha, uma aproximação intempestiva”. The footnotes have been adapted for English-speaking readers to ensure clarity and accessibility.

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