Shot without any screenplay, using actors (Juliet Berto, Carmelo Bene, Louis Waldon…) and real people walking in the streets of Rome, Claro is Rocha’s most experimental film (with his great and last masterpiece A Idade da Terra): it seems to me a junction between Straub/Huillet’s Othon, Carmelo Bene’s Capricci and Franco Brocani’s Necropolis. It’s an absolute masterpiece, marginal and udigrudi such as Bressane’s and Sganzerla’s best films.
A film against social-economical-cultural imperialism and colonialism, set in a hallucinatory Rome where past and present epochs cross their space-time: a young brazialian hippy shouts his hate about wild urbanization, war for petroleum, corruption… a mix of opera (Bellini and Villa-Lobos), documentary, essay, fiction: beyond cinema!!!
Interview with Glauber Rocha about CLARO
Why this title?
Because I wanted to see clearly the contradictions of the capitalist society of our time.
Are you sure that this clearness will be also transmited to the public?
I am not a prophet. I believe honestly that I have made a film with no ambiguities, I mean, no ambiguities in the political level. For instance, it seems to me to be very clear the moment in which, at the end of the film, the poor people occupy the screen: the people must occupy the space that was pulled out from them in centuries of oppression. As to my relation to the public, I can say that I do not have, indeed, a paternalistic regard in relation to the public. My film is, on the contrary, an openwork, which leaves a broad space to free interpretation, but, I repeat, never being ambiguous.
Say something about the woman protagonist and about the meaning of the initial sequence.
The protagonist is a myth too, a myth that goes through the film. It coud be the myth of innocence, of naïveté, in relation to the hostile, repressive world. The musical dialogue in the beginning between the lady and the voice in off is some sort of exorcism, a ritual fact, a chat between past and present, anguish and hope. It is also a way of fighting neurosis, which I believe is a typical product of the capitalist system.
Glauber Rocha - Claro (1975).avi 
This post is dedicated to the great Italian underground filmmaker Alberto Grifi, who left this world yesterday... We love you!!!
