Affective disorder

Abstract

Caetano Veloso claims that the outrage—‘trauma’—Glauber Rocha’s Terra em transe ([Entranced Earth] 1967) provoked, particularly amongst Brazil’s leftwing intelligentsia, precipitated the varied forms of counter-cultural production known collectively as Tropicália. This article examines how the film articulates its ‘traumatic’ political and ethical agenda through the manipulation of sensation and emotion, especially through its unlikely insistence on love in the midst of the depiction of political turmoil. It maintains that by espousing what might be termed an affective art of relationality, Rocha appears less concerned with representing transcendent ideals and more with generating affects, qualities of feeling or sensations, which resist categorical interpretation. This resistance to, or disruption of, representation and epistemological conventions through affect in Terra em transe constitutes an attempt to intervene ethically and politically in the world in a non-partisan fashion. In so doing, the essay redresses gaps in existing and widely accepted readings of one of the most important films in the history of Brazilian cinema. It also seeks to expand the discussion of affect theory in the context of cinema.