1
At the end of the first part of La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968) by the Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, after a lengthy analysis of the history of neo-colonialism in Argentina, we arrive at a cemetery in the desolate countryside of the northwest province of Jujuy, bordering on Chile and Bolivia, where a funeral is taking place. Indigenous peasants in bedraggled clothing, heads bowed, men and women walking in silent desultory procession; the camera walks with them, weaving in and out, a solitary voice intones a prayer, they drink from old bottles. We watch and then, one more time, comes the calm and serious voice of the narrator:
The Latin American peoples are condemned peoples. Neo-colonialism does not allow them to choose either their own life or death. Life and death are marked by everyday violence. This is our war: of hunger, curable diseases, of premature old age, today in Latin America four people die per minute, 5,500 per day, two million per year. This is our war, a genocide that in fifteen years cost twice as many lives as the First World War.
The moment evokes a scene from another film of the same year, by the Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Memorias de subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment) – indeed they were shown alongside each other at the Pesaro Film Festival in Italy that year. Over a montage of images of hunger in Latin America, Sergio, the protagonist is reading from a book by an Argentine journalist:
In Latin America four children die every minute due to illnesses caused by malnutrition. In ten years twenty million children will have died, the same number of deaths as were caused by the Second World War.
Somehow four people a minute has been transmuted into four children a minute, and the First World War into the Second, but these texts are echoing figures first given in 1962, in a document whose wide dissemination testifies to the powerful influence on the Latin American left of the Cuban Revolution three years earlier. Known as the Second Declaration of Havana, this was Cuba’s response (doubtless written by Fidel Castro) to its Washington-orchestrated expulsion from the OAS (Organization of American States). The Declaration also gives another statistic: ‘a continuous torrent of money flows to the United States: some $4,000 a minute, $5 million a day, $2 billion a year, $10 billion every five years. For each thousand dollars which leave us, there remains one corpse. A thousand dollars per corpse: that is the price of what is called imperialism! A thousand dollars per death, four deaths every minute!’
1This equation, in which the brutal economic exploitation of the continent by the all-powerful North (acting through the local oligarchy) is the cause of so much deprivation south of the Rio Grande, is also the underpinning of a pithy manifesto by the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha,
The Aesthetics of Hunger, known alternatively as
The Aesthetics of Violence, first delivered as a short speech at a film festival in Genoa, Italy in 1965 and then widely reprinted.
2 Hunger in Latin America, says Rocha, is not simply an alarming symptom; it is the essence of the society. ‘This hunger will not be assuaged by moderate government reforms, and the cloak of technicolor cannot hide, but rather only aggravates, its tumours.’ The language of film has to be different; it has to be capable of revealing the causes of this inequity.
The rejection of Hollywoodian spectacle was one of they key traits of
el nuevo cine latinoamericano (The New Latin American Cinema) – a term adopted in 1967 at a foundational meeting of filmmakers from across the continent in the Chilean seaside town of Viña del Mar. It also characterises other manifestos of the 1960s, especially, at the end of the decade,
Hacia un tercer cine (‘Towards a Third Cinema’), which Solanas and Getino wrote after making
La hora de los hornos, and in Cuba, Julio García Espinosa’s
Por un cine imperfecto (‘Towards an Imperfect Cinema’).
3 The former held that militant cinema (wherever it’s found – some of their examples are from first-world countries) is indifferent to the technical means of production and division of labour, because it needs to be collective, small-scale and agile. The latter argued that any attempt to match the ‘perfection’ of the commercial movie of the metropolis was mistaken, and contradicted the implicit endeavour in a revolutionary cinema to arouse an audience, because the beautifully controlled surface of commercial cinema was a way of lulling the audience into passive consumption; and besides, filmmakers in a third-world country could hardly afford such profligate ambitions. Both pieces are substantial essays which could be read as explications of the aesthetic dialectic already implicit in Rocha’s call to cinematic arms. Rocha’s brief text is short on analysis but high on rhetoric, but it’s this rhetoric, which interests me here.
2
In an interview with Julianne Burton, Rocha admitted to a personal predilection for imagery of violence: ‘In my case, I have a particular preference for violent films because I like the epic genre.’ But he also spoke of the problem of the audience’s alienation: ‘rather than use the alienating elements of imported commercial cinema to accomplish our goals … [f]or us, the violent elements typical of Brazilian films are a means of provoking the public out of its alienation’.
4 Which implies, like every avant-gardist, a certain readiness to assault his audience’s sensibilities.
Glauber Rocha was the shooting star of Brazilian cinema, the
enfant terrible of the
cinema novo of the 1960s, the pioneering Brazilian branch of
nuevo cine latinoamericano. Born in Bahia in northeast Brazil, he entered cinema as a teenager through the film clubs, studied law for two years, made a couple of shorts, wrote prolifically, joined the group around Nelson Pereira dos Santos (whom he called the father of
cinema novo), and directed his first feature in 1962. (He would die young in 1981.) Rocha not only opposes Hollywood but also the kind of Brazilian artist for whom misery becomes a form of exoticism ‘that vulgarizes social problems’.
5 He proposes an equation between hunger and violence; violence, he claims, is normal behaviour for the starving; and an aesthetics of violence is revolutionary rather than primitive because it not only reflects the culture of hunger back to itself but undermines and destroys it.
The context for this combativity is important. This is the young trio of Brazilian
cinema novo talking to Italian cinephiles at a small festival of Latin American cinema, the year after a military coup, just as political repression was beginning. The humanistic project represented by
cinema novo was in crisis, but the mood was defiant, and Rocha did not hide his feeling that Europeans hadn’t got the message: ‘For the European observer, the process of artistic creation in the underdeveloped world is of interest only in so far as it satisfies his nostalgia for primitivism.’ (Not only primitivism, of course, but exoticism, imaginary geographies, and other kinds of projection.) But
cinema novo, he insisted, is an ongoing process, which opposes ‘commercialism, exploitation, pornography and the tyranny of technique’, by filming the truth and opposing ‘the hypocrisy and repression of intellectual censorship’. However, it is also ‘a project that has grown out of the politics of hunger and suffers, for that very reason, all the consequent weaknesses which are a product of its particular situation’. In a word, it was what was known throughout Latin America as
cine pobre – the cinema of poverty.
Inevitably, films that Rocha himself describes as ‘those ugly, sad films, those screaming, desperate films in which reason has not always prevailed’, came to be seen as metaphors for what they pictured. As Robert Stam has put it: ‘films which would not only treat hunger as a theme but also be “hungry” in their own impoverished means of production. In a displaced form of mimesis, the material poverty of style would signal real-world poverty.’
6 This kind of aesthetic is in Fredric Jameson’s view allegorical, but it’s also ambiguous. If technical perfection, says Jameson, connotes advanced capitalism, then ‘imperfect cinema’ signified not merely underdevelopment but a knowing kinship with the ‘contemporaneous practices of First World oppositional filmmakers like Godard, with their use of handheld cameras, deliberately sloppy and foregrounded editing, and their ostentatious valorisation of amateurishness in place of Hollywood’.
7 Of course this is a calculated sloppiness, born of a different type of gaze and a different sense of rhythm, intended to disrupt the familiar patterns of what the new film theory of the day called the institutional mode of representation. But if this affinity is cogent, then we’re not talking of an underdeveloped cinema in the sense frequently assumed by metropolitan observers, that of being ‘backward’ and even ‘primitive’. Rocha is quite within his rights to protest: ‘The violence of a starving man is not a sign of a primitive mentality. Is Fabiano primitive? Is Antão primitive? Is Corisco primitive?’ He is speaking of the protagonists of Pereira dos Santos’
Vidas Secas (
Barren Lives, 1963), Ruy Guerra’s
Os fuzis (
The Guns, 1964) and his own
Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (
Black God, White Devil, 1964). With
Vidas Secas, dos Santos carried the spirit of neorealism deeper into new territory with a stark adaptation of a novel by Graciliano Ramos about the appalling conditions of rural northeast Brazil, a zone of underdevelopment within underdevelopment. The same aesthetic and the same locale served Guerra for
Os fuzis, a drama of hunger in the
sertão and violent confrontation between soldiers and peasants. Rocha’s film we shall come to shortly.
The intellectual context – the affinities and intertexts evoked by the manifesto – also calls for attention. In effect, Rocha raises the same classic questions posed by Walter Benjamin in his early essay, ‘Critique of Violence’:
8 can violence, as a principle, be a moral means to just ends? Is violence ever justified? Or is the use of violence incompatible with its ends? What about the right of self-defence? What of the situation of someone impelled by anger, for example, to an act of violence which is not a means to an end but a manifestation? Above all, perhaps, does violence follow a natural law, or is it a product of history? For Rocha there seems no contradiction in saying that the cruelty perpetrated by the system on its vulnerable underclasses is not natural but historical, but the counter-violence of the oppressed is its natural result – but as long as it remains only a manifestation, then it remains caught up in a hopelessly repeating circle of strife and brutality which is transcended only by the conscious turn to revolutionary violence.
When Rocha declares that revolutionary violence is distinguished by its moral justification, there is a profound correspondence with Che Guevara playing beneath the surface: it is ‘not filled with hatred; nor is it linked to the old, colonising humanism … because it is not the kind of love which derives from complacency or contemplation, but rather a love of action and transformation’. For this is sure to evoke Guevara at his most paradoxical, in a published letter to a Uruguayan journalist in 1965 which became known as ‘Socialism and Man in Cuba’: ‘At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love’ – that is to say, a deep sense of humanity and love of justice; for according to Guevara, only this will save the revolutionary from ‘dogmatic extremes, cold scholasticism, or isolation from the masses’.
9 Perhaps it is psychoanalysis we should turn to here for help, because it knows about the way that affects can turn into their opposites.
Above all there is Rocha’s affinity (which is shared by Solanas and Getino) for Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born psychiatrist whose culminating work,
The Wretched of the Earth, born of his experience in Algeria, published in France with its famous introduction by Sartre in 1961, is in Robert Young’s phrase, ‘both a revolutionary manifesto of decolonization and the founding analysis of the effects of colonialism upon colonized peoples and their cultures’.
10 The kinship between them, which Rocha signals in his phraseology without mentioning Fanon’s name, arises because the Brazilian filmmaker identifies the condition of his country as one of colonisation, not independence. The history of Latin America – this is a view that is widely shared – is that of exchanging one coloniser for the next, one type of colonisation for another, and ‘What distinguishes yesterday’s colonialism from today’s is merely the more refined forms employed by the contemporary coloniser.’ Thus it is Fanon from whom Rocha draws his rationale: ‘The moment of violence is the moment when the coloniser becomes aware of the existence of the colonised. Only when he is confronted with violence can the coloniser understand, through horror, the strength of the culture he exploits. […] The first policeman had to die before the French became aware of the Algerians.’
The film screen presents the symbolic expression of this confrontation with the violence inherent in what Fanon’s teacher Aimé Cesaire called the ‘colonial trauma’, of which poetry may carry the trace, a wound which persists in the pseudo-independence of postcolonial governance which continues to the haunted by the spectre of colonialism.
11 In the new wave Latin American cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, violence is a presupposition, a systemic feature of the world, and at the very centre of the plot in paradigmatic films like
Yawar Mallku (
Blood of the Condor) by Jorge Sanjinés, and
El chacal de Nahueltoro (
The Jackal of Nahueltoro) by Miguel Littin. The violence represented in these two films – the first Bolivian, the second Chilean, both dating from 1969 – is of different kinds, but both provide a synoptic analysis of its ramifications through all levels of society. Both are based on fact.
Yawar Mallku, which recounts the response of a Quechua community to the sterilisation of its women who attend a maternity clinic run by the American Peace Corps, not only treats of an explicit racist violence, but also the structural racism of Bolivian society.
El chacal de Nahueltoro, a sociologically precise reconstruction of the murder of a woman and her children by an illiterate casual worker, not only discloses the workings of the forces of law and order through which the criminal is caught, convicted, imprisoned and finally executed, but also exposes the role of the social agencies – school, church, mass media – in producing the social discourse of criminality. In both cases we see how violence of one kind begets violence of another, how this may produce a chain of responses, a kind of negative feedback process, and this is a seemingly endemic and everyday condition. It should be added that these were not esoteric films.
El Chacal de Nahueltoro was Chile’s most successful film at the domestic box office to date, and clearly articulates the feelings that led to Salvador Allende’s election the following year as President of the Popular Unity government.
Yawar Mallku has the distinction of being one of the few films anytime anywhere with a direct political effect: it led to the expulsion of the Peace Corps from Bolivia.
3
Rocha’s manifesto, in all its brevity, lumps together the various different kinds of violence that are dramatised in the films, and thereby placed in complex narrative and symbolic relationship to each other. Already in Rocha’s first film,
Barravento (
The Turning Wind, 1962), there are several kinds of violence. The setting is a fishing village in Bahia, where the huge net the villagers use for the catch is owned by the local white boss who reaps all the profits. Firmino, whom the police have down as a troublemaker, returns to his native village to seek refuge, and begins to challenge the fatalistic beliefs of the villagers. Violence first breaks out physically in a clash over one of the women between Firmino and Arua, whom the whole village believes to be protected by Yemanya, the goddess of the sea; symbolic violence is perpetrated through the casting of spells; Firmino commits instrumental violence when he cuts the net; and when the wind turns, the violence of nature is unleashed both physically and symbolically by the storm that it brings.
Technically speaking, Barravento is still close to the practices of Italian neorealism, shooting on location in black-and-white with non-professional actors led by a few select professionals, and with the sound dubbed and mixed in postproduction. Rocha claimed the film not really to be his own because he took it over in the middle, but it already shows the mark of his baroque, and in his own word, ‘tropicalist’ sense of style; not least in the extensive use of music and dance over long takes, sometimes in long shot, sometimes with a swirling camera, which helps to give the film its pervading tone of heightened lyricism: long takes of the fishermen singing as they haul in the net, of macumba drumming on the sound-track, of candomblé and even capoeira. Indeed the first third of the film is more like an ethnographic musical than a political drama, and later on, when Firmino and Arua fight again, but in the form of capoeira, their struggle takes on a ritual and allegorical quality which lifts the film entirely out of a naturalistic vein (not in the spectacular manner of kung fu movies, but neither does Rocha here assault the viewer’s sensibilities as in later films).
Five years later, in
Terra em Transe (
Land in Anguish, 1967), still using basically the same technical means, a curious thing occurs. A baroque allegory about Brazilian politics, conceived in the wake of the traumatic 1964 coup d’état, this is the tale of Paulo, a poet, who in a neat account by Roy Armes, ‘veers erratically between the mystic conservatism of his first patron, Díaz, and the empty populism of the pseudorevolutionary leader Vieira’.
12 The film is pervaded throughout by a sense of violence – the threat of political violence is introduced explicitly in the very first scene – but it is never directly observed. It is seen only in the form of threat or aftermath. It can be heard, however, several times in the form of gunfire on the soundtrack, unconnected with the diegesis, and therefore fulfilling an ambiguous symbolic function. Like the Sternberg of
The Scarlet Empress (1934) says Armes, Rocha scorns the primacy of narrative clarity and puts his faith in violent, expressive imagery, arranged in short sequences joined jaggedly and abruptly.
In between, in
Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, violence spills out of the screen in abundance. Manuel is a tenant farmer who kills the cheating and physically abusive
terrateniente in self-defence, and is forced with his wife Rosa to become a fugitive, where they enter the realm of legend. They first seek the holy man Sebastião, who preaches a mystical salvation, but Sebastião demands total submission, including physical trials and even the sacrificial killing of Manuel’s child. Rosa, in her horror, stabs Sebastiâo, but the couple are spared by the arrival of Antonio das Mortes, killer of bandits and hireling of church and landlords, described by Armes as ‘a man without a past who strides through the film with the invulnerability of a Clint Eastwood hero’. Das Mortes, who will become the eponymous protagonist of Rocha’s next film, shoots down Sebastiâo’s followers, allowing the couple to escape, only to encounter the bandit Corisco, who kills the poor to spare them from starving and metes out to the rich a justice that consists solely of rape, mutilation and slow death.
Rocha’s special fascination is the violence expressed in and through popular religious practices. His masterpiece, Antonio das Mortes (The Dragon of Evil Against the Warrior Saint, 1969) is again set in northeast Brazil, with emblematic characters performing stylised actions, in a strange amalgamation of fact and legend, epic and lyric. For Rocha the mysticism of popular religion, a syncretistic fusion of Catholicism and the motifs of African religion transplanted with the slave trade, became the expression of a permanent spirit of rebellion against unceasing oppression, a rejection and refusal of the condition in which the common people had been condemned to live for centuries. It also provided him with a model for the syncretism of his own film language, where the exuberant torrent of images, the mix of mysticism and legend, cult and ritual, were married to surrealistic symbolism to achieve a visionary force.
4
Rocha wishes to de-naturalise violence. He shows a strong affinity with Brechtian ideas, which are also found in García Espinosa, about breaking the illusionism of traditional realist forms of representation. The filmic equivalent of the theatrical Verfremdungseffekt is understood to require a negation of conventional mise-en-scène, and Rocha’s aesthetics of violence, as he practices it himself in different keys in successive films, always employs an anti-classical form of montage – including the paradigmatic alternation between long takes, sometimes static, sometimes mobile, and the sudden violent outburst of visual and musical energy. The interruption often produces narrative ambiguity and elision, in short, a form of aesthetic aggression against the good narrative.
It is integral to this style that when it comes to the direct representation of violence, the mise-en-scène is motivated by the refusal of spectacle. As Stam explains, speaking of Terra em Transe:
Violence, above all, is consistently de-realized by the editing. Guns are omnipresent but they are never coordinated with their sounds. We see pistols and hear machine guns; we hear machine guns but see nothing. A policeman on a motorcycle presumably shoots Paolo, but we see no wound. Violence is treated in a fragmented and anti-realistic way, in keeping with Rocha’s expressed desire to reflect on violence rather than make a spectacle of it.
13
Armes remarks that the opening of Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, in which Manuel kills the terrateniente, ‘would not be out of place in a 1940s realist drama’, but the way it’s shot and edited is quite different. Not only does Rocha avoid focusing the camera on the act of violence itself, but there is an elision after the killing in which a whole chunk of narrative is omitted that the Hollywood genre movie, telling the same story, would expand inordinately in order to create suspense. But here, instead of seeing the terrateniente’s henchmen going after Manuel, we cut directly to the end of the pursuit, and even then, the camera hangs back as the second bout of killing occurs. You could almost say that Rocha constructs his narrative out of precisely those bits and pieces of footage which, if this were a Hollywood movie, would have been left on the cutting room floor.
Another example occurs in Terra em Transe, when a humble peasant leader, Felicio, defies Vieira, and Paulo menaces him, a tussle we see from a distance, immediately cutting to the apartment where Paulo confesses to Sara, Vieira’s dedicated secretary, how he ‘beat a poor peasant because he threatened me’ (although what we saw was the opposite – Paulo was the one doing the threatening); abruptly we cut again, to the wailing of the campesinos who have discovered Felicio’s dead body – there is a moment of ambiguity until we hear them accusing Vieira of the murder. Again a whole tranche of narrative is omitted that would be meat to a Hollywood movie. This is not the same as poor plotting, and there is no plot lapse in the narrative gap, for this is a different mode of fiction altogether.
All this presents us with a conundrum, because Rocha’s aesthetics of violence is clearly not the only or the usual aesthetics of violence. On the contrary, violent imagery – artificial, highly stylised and spectacular – is the daily bread of both Hollywood and television drama; television is also the site for the raw representation of violence in the news, and each of these strands of imagery has its own codes and its own aesthetic of violence. There are critical differences between fiction and documentary. Much of what fiction portrays, which the viewer knows to be illusory, is unavailable to documentary, which is taken to be veridical. This doesn’t mean that the truth of documentary is the whole truth: an impossible idea, because the documentary camera is always seeing from a partial point of view, and certain things remain hidden, taboo or invisible. In consequence of these differences, each of these representational codes or sub-codes has its own ideological implications, arising essentially from what the code foregrounds and what it suppresses – not even comedy is innocent. Rocha’s version is concerned with forms of social violence which are systemically suppressed in the cinematic codes he opposes – the silent everyday violence perpetrated by the system, the hunger and disease, the social violence of political deception, the popular spirit of rebellion that these forces engender, which needs to be brought back down from religious messianism into revolutionary focus.
Societies of hunger generate fear – but different fears in the hungry multitude and the few who eat well, whose politics are geared to controlling the masses and blocking their tendency to rebel – the army is their agent, but sometimes gets uppity, and acts on its own behalf. What happens when the masses acquire leaders who represent their authentic interests, and they enter into politics? The oligarchy’s fear of losing control is subsumed by the military, who take on the role of defender of the nation, and the politicisation of the military brings the supreme act of violence which is constituted by taking over the State. There were sixteen military coups in Latin America in the twenty years from the end of World War Two to the moment Rocha wrote ‘The Aesthetics of Hunger’. (Costa Rica and Venezuela, 1948; Peru, 1948 and 1962; Nicaragua and Haiti, 1950; Bolivia, 1951 and 1964; Cuba, 1952; Colombia, 1953; Paraguay, 1954; Argentina, 1955; Honduras, 1956, 1963; Guatemala, 1957, 1963). This too is part of the context of Rocha’s manifesto, and the historical intertext of his films.
5
There is another difficulty. The discourse around the representation of violence is all too loose. It has a habit of conflating violence and aggression, strife and struggle, force, brutality and cruelty, as well as differences between individual and social violence. Nowhere have these differences been investigated as fully as in the literature of psychoanalysis, where treatment requires that violence be distinguished from aggression, and the physical from its psychological forms, verbal and symbolic. Foundational figures like Freud, Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott all had something to say about it, as Richard Mizen and Mark Morris (2007) remind us in a recent study of the subject, although they disagree whether the source of violence is reactive or instinctual (Freud himself characteristically changed his mind). The problem in turning to psychoanalysis is the shift in focus from the social to the individual: we will have to understand the relation between them. Mizen and Morris have little to say about the social, but they’re clear on one thing: aggression, they attest, is a basic instinctual and affective component of the human being, at the deep level where the psyche and soma, mind and body, meet, which equips the subject to deal with threat and lack. Violence, however, despite the cliché ‘mindless violence’, is neither mindless nor innate, ‘and no more a part of the human condition than, say, starvation, even if eradication seems insuperable…’
14Rocha’s aesthetic of violence is not very interested in individual psychology. The perpetrators of violence in his films are representative and symbolic figures, icons of social forces or sectors. We should take heed, however, that the level of the individual is not spirited away. There is in the experience of violence an irreducible psychic experience. Physical violence is perpetrated and experienced bodily; and all violence is experienced subjectively. This includes the film viewer, for whom the sight of violence on the screen is always liable to produce a physical shudder. Neuroscientists have recently discovered what they call ‘mirror neurons’ in the brain which not only fire when a subject is poked with a needle, for example, but also when they watch someone else being poked. According to V. S. Ramachandran these neurons comprise a network that allows us to see things ‘from the other person’s point of view’, they ‘dissolve the barrier between self and others’ and might be called ‘empathy neurons’.
15 This is not empathy in its deep ethical sense, but as the term ‘mirror’ neuron implies, only on the surface, but we can predict that these neurons will be found to be firing overtime in the brain that is watching a movie.
Neuroscience has little to say about the causes of violent behaviour, which psychoanalysis perceives as the result of a failure of psychic integration, or a process of psychic disintegration, which becomes manifest in pathological forms (which remain outside the comfort zone of analytic treatment). However, what counts as pathological behaviour (and therefore subject to incarceration in a secure asylum) is a matter of social definition, medical and legal, and thus historical in character. Moreover, there are also forms of violent behaviour which cannot be morally regarded in this way because they are socially sanctioned and institutional – the foremost are war, where men are licensed to kill and maim the enemy; and policing, where the agents of law and order are licensed to use physical force. These of course are the legitimate forms of violence which in classic accounts are monopolised by the state, but there are also others. Benjamin mentions organised labour and the strike; and nowadays, in the neoliberal state, some of the means of law and order have been privatised. But here’s the rub: within the appropriate institutional milieu, people are able to satisfy psychological desires which otherwise, unprotected by the sanction of their social function, might be judged psychopathic – the mercenary in Iraq; the prison guard at home; the manager in a company who engages in bullying and intimidation (or any institution: a university, for example); the politician drunk on power.
This masking also happens in the formation of crowds and mobs (as we know from Elias Canetti’s study of
Crowds and Power), where the multitude and the collective provide protection for individuals to express themselves in a manner they would otherwise suppress. You can see it in the ‘tribalism’ of football hooliganism. Or breakaway factions of militants in political demonstrations who lash out. It is seen in symbolic form in the street dancing of crowds of religious in Rocha’s films, whose aggression borders on rebellion. In short, violence and agression must also be seen in the context of their social, institutional, economic and cultural milieu, where ‘economic, political, ethical, moral and religious factors play their part, even where these are obscure or ambiguous’.
16 The only essential difference here from Rocha’s view is that for him the ‘economic, political, ethical, moral and religious factors’ are not at all obscure: the same goes for Fanon, who turned to the historical and the material to identify the political source of the mental distress he saw in the clinic. They agree that violence, whatever its psychic mechanisms, is socially and historically produced. But still, is it possible to talk of a social psychopathology where these behaviours play out at a collective level? To which we must add, because we’re speaking of countries like Brazil and Algeria, will it be the same social psychopathology as in Europe, where psychoanalysis originated? Can the psychiatric categories of the coloniser be applicable to the colonised?
Psychoanalysis itself has generally refused political questions, partly out of appropriate caution about notions of a collective psyche, and partly preferring to render its practices as apolitical and neutral, for fear of the charge of political complicity. But this is not the end of the story, as attested by writers like Fanon, Octave Mannoni and Albert Memmi, not to mention Sartre. According to Ranjana Khanna, in her study of psychoanalysis and colonialism,
Dark Continents, Fanon discovered in Algeria the ill fit of European categories of psychic disorder to Algerian patients, including their imprecise symptoms when they presented themselves at the hospital.
17 Criticising colonial doctors for their racist politics and patronising address toward their patients, he suggested different explanations: perhaps the patient was faking for the sake of a warm hospital bed when it was cold; perhaps what they suffered was a form of illness unrecognised by the received psychiatric categories; perhaps they were suffering psychosomatic effects of colonial conditions, including cultural confusion and physical displacement. Khanna records how a certain Antoine Porot had formulated ‘a contorted concept’ of ‘pseudomelancholy’ to explain what he identified as a susceptibility to violence among Algerian Arabs, quite distinct from the introspection which supposedly characterised European melancholy; but perhaps, she says, the violent behaviour thus identified can be understood as a form of political protest rather than moral degeneracy. The doctors’ failure to read the signs of political rebelliousness, protest, moral outrage at colonial oppression, amounted to disavowal, even denial.
Khanna takes Porot’s notion of pseudomelancholy and turns it about to arrive at a concept of colonial melancholy. In Freud, melancholia is closely related to mourning, but unlike the work of mourning, it can never be brought even near to completion. Mourning assimilates the loss. Melancholia is an affective state caused by the inability to assimilate a loss, and the consequent nagging return of the thing lost into psychic life. The lost object may be a person, but also an idea – something as abstract as an ideal, a country, or a sense of liberty. Colonial (and postcolonial) melancholy arises from an unresolvable contradiction within the (post)colonial subject. If the melancholy of displacement, expatriation and exile expresses a crisis of identity which begins as a dislocation of the subject’s civic affiliation and nationality (and gives rise to different senses of self), then colonial melancholy is a condition in which the concept of the nation is falsely embedded through the colonial relation, which has created a psuedo-nation-state where none existed before, often dividing cultures with arbitary borders, creating states which betray an alien system of social classification and categorisation. The result is a condition of psychic damage produced by the experience of a discrepant modernity, manifested in a haunting by the spectre of colonialism, an inability to assimilate the ideal of nation-statehood, the ghost of a dimly imagined community which can only remain utopian.
In the meantime there is poetry. As Césaire put it: ‘All the dreams, all the desires, all the accumulated rancor, all the formless and repressed hopes of a century of colonialist domination, all that need[s] to come out and when it comes out and expresses itself and squirts bloodily carrying along without distinction the conscious and the unconscious, lived experience and prophecy, that is called poetry.’
18 But this seems to me an exact description of Rocha’s aesthetics of violence.
6
The dialectic of the image of violence lies in its relation to fear, and this leads to one final difficulty, perhaps the most intractable – the differential position of the viewer in place and time. All viewers are born with the same neurocircuitry, but some are granted comfort and some are granted pain. Judith Butler observes that violence, produces not only fear and grief, abhorrence and anxiety, it also produces the fear of fear, especially in the media,
19 but this depends on where you are, and whether the violence you see in the media refers to your own or another society. While terrorism, above all since 2001, when it came home to the heart of empire, is treated by the mainstream media with moral outrage and public ceremonies of mourning – and the same media regularly whip up hysteria and practice psychological terrorism against dissenters of various kinds – still, it makes a difference whether hunger, homelessness, misery, destitution and deprivation are hidden away or in your face.
Rocha’s position can be seen as an aesthetic wager on the capacity of the image to break out of its own frame, and we should ask how it stacks up against the ubiquity of violent imagery in general cultural circulation. It is frequently alleged that this plenitude brings its own risk, that of desensitisation – the idea that in a world hyper-saturated with such images, they have a diminishing effect, we become callous, there is a deadening of feeling. This is what Susan Sontag believed when she first wrote about photography in 1977, and revisiting the subject 25 years later, she observed that ‘there is a mounting level of acceptable violence and sadism in mass culture: films, television, comics, computer games. Imagery that would have had an audience cringing and recoiling in disgust forty years ago is watched without so much as a blink by every teenager in the multiplex.’
20 Today she would add computer screens of various sizes. The vast majority of this imagery is artificial, unreal, cartoon-like, lacking emotional depth, essentially iconic, but psychologists have indeed found a certain amount of evidence for desensitisation, and the US military nowadays uses first-person shoot-’em-up computer games to condition soldiers to shoot reflexively at human targets.
21 Sontag, however, returning to the subject, now thought that it isn’t quite as it seems, because not all violence is watched with equal detachment.
This is clearly true of the veridical images of documentary and news reportage, which are introduced with warnings that ‘some viewers may find these scenes disturbing’ – damn right! Some of it is seen with morbid fascination, some elicits a deep well of compassion and sincere waves of charitable donations to aid campaigns. Sometimes this leads to political demands for more aid and consumer pressure for more fair trade. Some people turn away, but people don’t become inured to it, says Sontag, ‘because of the quantity of images dumped on them’ – they stop looking precisely because of the responses they call up. The states described, she says, as apathy or moral or emotional anaesthesia, are full of feelings: feelings of rage and frustration, undesirable emotions, which are therefore displaced by a kind of vague sympathy, which disguises the impotence of the privileged viewer.
22 Sontag was speaking from the perspective of Manhattan, but feelings of rage and frustration also populate the mental strife, which Fanon discovered as a practising psychiatrist in Algeria in the psychopathology of the colonial subject. And these of course are the feelings, which Rocha’s aesthetics of violence wishes to liberate.