I have now seen enough of Rocha's work to know that I dislike it for its own sake, and not for the unfamiliarity of its locale and people or for the ritual obsessiveness of its themes.

One of the later entries (1966) in Brazil's short-lived Cinema Novo movement, applying New Wave pyrotechnics to popular and political mythology.

Rocha's frenzied mise-en-scene, which borrows from Fellini, Antonioni, and European avant-garde theater, is so stylized and self-referential that it probably appealed less to the masses than to the left-wing intelligentsia it scrutinizes.

It is right when he abandons any notion of plausibility or concern for accuracy, when he returns to allegory, and then opera, that Glauber Rocha seems the most gifted.