Schooling in Ruins

Abstract

This chapter centers on Glauber Rocha’s Claro (1975). Shot in Rome during the director’s exile from Brazil, Claro aspires, like Salò, to the condition of “ritual fact.” Like Pasolini, Rocha asks viewers to repeat the past in the interest of working through it. In order to displace “democratic imperialism,” Claro teaches, we must first return to the dead center of empire and instruction. That is, we must return to—in order to reckon with—Rome. In this way, Rocha revises his own early liberationist position and offers a corrective or key supplement to the more familiar understandings of education and emancipation found in the progressive educational writings of Paulo Freire. In Claro, Rocha makes the surprising case for an anticolonial old school. With onscreen history lessons, voiceover lectures, actors’ rote movements, and the camera’s pans, which compel returns, Claro turns its own opacity to pedagogical profit. The film complicates, rather than clarifies, easier narratives that treat emancipation as a matter of linear progress. But at the same time Rocha insists that a return to the past can enable, rather than thwart, radical change, even revolution.