A film is not a thesis, but it can be an epileptic fit. A short circuit that floods with light, for a blinding and painful instant, the synapses of a nation in the throes of convulsions. Glauber Rocha’s "Entranced Earth" is not a story, it is a febrile fit; it is not a political analysis, but the delirium that precedes and consumes it. To grasp its baroque and desperate fury, one must abandon the comfortable coordinates of linear narrative and allow oneself to be sucked into its operatic vortex, a maelstrom of ideas, faces, sounds, and furies that embodies the tragedy of the 20th-century Latin American intellectual, and perhaps of every intellectual when faced with power.

Its epicenter is Paulo Martins, a poet and journalist, an alter ego of Rocha himself and an archetype of the Byronic hero transfigured in the crucible of the Third World. Martins is not a character; he is a battlefield. Within him, revolutionary idealism clashes with the most corrosive cynicism, the urgency of action with the paralysis of reflection. He is a tropical Hamlet, whose hesitation stems not from metaphysical doubt but from the nauseating awareness of the futility of every choice. His pilgrimage between the two forces vying for control of the fictitious republic of Eldorado—the conservative technocrat Porfirio Díaz and the messianic populist Felipe Vieira—is not a journey of self-discovery, but a descent into the inferno of political consciousness. Just as Kafka's Joseph K. gets lost in a bureaucratic labyrinth that mirrors an inscrutable guilt, so Paulo loses himself in an ideological labyrinth where every corridor leads to the same, identical room: that of power which legitimizes itself, which devours and corrupts every language, even that of poetry.

Rocha orchestrates this ordeal with a cinematic grammar that shatters convention. His camera, often handheld, does not observe: it participates, it trembles, it accuses. It launches into furious tracking shots, frames faces in deforming close-ups that expose their grotesque masks, and abandons them in desolate long shots. The editing is a discharge of haywire synapses, a collage of jump-cuts, almost subliminal inserts, and speeches addressed directly to the viewer that tear through the veil of fiction. If Godard, in those same years, used discontinuity for an intellectual and Brechtian deconstruction of cinematic language, Rocha uses it to simulate a state of shock, a collective trauma. This is not a cold analysis; it is the chronicle of a panic attack. The score, which merges the liturgical chants of Villa-Lobos with ritual drums and strident declamations, does not accompany the images: it besieges them, creating a sensory cacophony that is the perfect acoustic translation of the political chaos.

The two poles of power, Díaz and Vieira, are not simply Good and Evil, Right and Left. They are the interchangeable faces of a ravenous Leviathan. Díaz, with his rhetoric of order and tradition, embodies an ancestral, almost divine authoritarianism, a Dostoevskian Grand Inquisitor who offers stability in exchange for freedom. Vieira is his mirror image: a tribune of the people who embodies their most visceral hopes only to betray them with the same, inexorable logic of power. His rise and fall are a Shakespearean parable on the fragility of charisma, on demagoguery as the opiate of the masses. When Paulo, in a fit of desperation, tries to assassinate him, it is not a political act, but an attempt at exorcism, a violent rejection of the last illusion. The scene, with its hieratic choreography and almost unbearable tension, has the power of a sacrificial rite gone wrong, an auto sacramental play derailed into the grotesque.

"Entranced Earth" is the most complete manifesto of what Rocha called the "aesthetics of hunger": a cinema that does not hide its poverty of means but turns it into a weapon, a scream. A cinema that is "not digestive, but asks the audience to take a position." It is a work that dialogues in spirit with the expressionist fury of early Eisenstein, but it inverts his teleological faith in revolutionary progress. Where the Soviet director constructed a dialectic of images to lead to a certain synthesis (the victory of the proletariat), Rocha accumulates antitheses without resolution, fragments of a discourse that can no longer cohere, reflecting the crisis of an entire generation of intellectuals who had believed in History as a rational process and instead found themselves navigating a sea of irrationality.

The film is steeped in the spirit of its time, the Brazil before and after the 1964 coup, yet its scope is universal. Eldorado is every country trapped in an endless cycle of betrayed promises and masked authoritarianism. Paulo Martins's crisis echoes that of Marcello in Bertolucci's The Conformist, both characters in desperate search of a belonging that will absolve them of individual responsibility; but while Marcello chooses the anonymity of bourgeois normality, Paulo immolates himself on the altar of an impossible coherence, becoming a martyr to a cause that no longer exists. His failure is the most lucid and ruthless diagnosis of the 20th century's malady: the faith that culture and art can, by themselves, redeem politics.

There is a deeper, almost meta-textual analogy that runs through the film. "Entranced Earth" speaks not only of the failure of politics, but also of the potential failure of political cinema itself. Paulo's final scream, "They cannot understand the power of poetry!" as he runs, armed, towards the seat of power, is Rocha's own cry. It is a desperate assertion of cinema's power against the brutality of reality, a gesture that is at once heroic and suicidal. The film closes on this mad dash, on this suspended image, leaving us in the most agonizing doubt: can cinema truly change the world, or is it destined to remain a magnificent, impotent cry in the void?

To watch "Entranced Earth" today is an exhausting and necessary experience. It is like reading Virgil's Georgics during the fall of Rome or listening to Free Jazz during a bombing raid. It is a work that refuses all consolation, that shoves complexity, contradiction, and failure in our faces. It offers no answers, but carves the most urgent and painful questions into our conscience with the violence of a burin. It is a febrile masterpiece, a visual poem on the bankruptcy of ideologies, a world-in-itself of a film that, like the great novels of Faulkner or the symphonies of Mahler, attempts to contain all of existence's chaos within an artistic form. A form that, in the end, can do nothing but explode, leaving us amidst its ruins to contemplate the perennial trance of History.