The avant-garde is dead, long live the avant-garde: Glauber Rocha’s rereading of Brazilian Modernismo and Di Cavalcanti

Abstract

This article examines Glauber Rocha’s Di-Glauber as a filmic rereading and interrogation of Brazilian Modernismo and Emiliano Di Cavalcanti’s position in the Brazilian artistic tradition. Di-Glauber transforms Di Cavalcanti’s funeral into an anthropology of images, exploring established and possible relations between art, death, and society. Its unorthodox cinematic approach deconstructs Modernismo and Di Cavalcanti’s canonisation within Brazil’s “official” and transcendental national identity. First, Di-Glauber presents an affective account of Rocha and Di Cavalcanti’s friendship, diverting the painter’s institutionalisation through an immanent prism. Then, the film deconstructs its own representational status, self-reflexively exposing itself as an audiovisual artefact and hindering its eventual utilisation as part of an essentialist Brazilian identity. Di-Glauber paradoxically draws upon avant-gardist means to question the avant-garde’s canonisation: Rocha’s anthropophagy devours Di Cavalcanti and Modernismo to reclaim the political potential of the Brazilian artistic avant-garde.