The verses above, famously cited in Glauber Rocha's Terra em transe (Entranced Earth, 1967), offer two important clues to the director's work as a whole. In the first place, they encapsulate his cosmic ambition, announced in the poem as much as in the iconic aerial shots of the rounded, all-encompassing sea that open the film. Second, they expose intermediality as a key procedure in the director's mode of filmmaking. Poetry, in diegetic and extradiegetic form, is the language adopted by Terra em transe's protagonist, poet-cum-journalist Paulo Martins, whose extended sacrificial death atop white sand dunes is combined with his voiceover, reciting:

The pathos contained in these words, themselves a poem by Rocha, are further emphasised by the dramatic Prelude (Ponteio) of Villa-Lobos's ‘Bachianas Brasileiras no. 3’ on the soundtrack. The poet's tragedy is bigger than the failed revolution symbolised by the rifle he raises against the sky, bigger than the political turmoil of his allegorical country of Eldorado, bigger than his love for the revolutionary Sara: it is the primordial detachment from the cosmic whole, the irreversible banishment from paradise now tainted with his blood.

As much as a cosmic yearning, Faustino's verses reflect Rocha's voracious appropriation of poetry to patch over the film medium's deficiencies in dramatic expression. Appearing as poetry – that is, as handwriting on the white page of the sand dunes (Figure 19.1) – they join a whole plethora of arts and media that constitute the director's output. In so doing, they place intermediality on a par with the cosmogonic impetus that propels the director's work. The aim of this chapter will be to demonstrate the radical aesthetic and historical consequences of this fact.

As is well known, Rocha was extremely proficient in poetry, fiction writing, theatre, drawing, journalism and television, all of which found expression in his cinema. As Ismail Xavier (2011: 16) has aptly summarised, art, for Rocha, ‘is a foundational experience, a gesture of rupture that responds to a historical (and cosmic) condition in its totality.