Politics, colonization and revolution in <i>Der Leone have sept cabeças<i>

Abstract

An Italian production, filmed in Congo, Africa, in 1970, Der leone have sept cabeças is, according to its director, “a political-cultural act of collaboration with the notion of tricontinental struggle,” theorized by Argentine guerrilla leader Che Guevara. Considered here as an application of the Tricontinental manifesto, the film has become an important historical document whose analysis can reveal not only the cultural symbols and political allegories articulated in the anthropological cinema of Glauber Rocha, but also the ideological visions of the social actors Involved in issues of colonialist and neo-colonialist dependence and resistance in the Third World. From the point of view of a Latin American artist-intellectual, whose political poetics have  however escaped the cultural and economic domain of the market productive forces, whether socialist or imperialist. Taking into account that the filmmaker have made of his mestizo philosophy a problematization of possession, power and violence. Although he does not respond to these problems by constructing a system but by seeking useful fictions, in the double sense as Eisenstein and Brecht did: as didactic and politically active, performed in Der leone under the format of the “African popular theater,” according to Glauber Rocha.