This 1970 film from Brazilian director Glauber Rocha is an avant-gardist adventurethat offers us a theatre of absurdity and a theatre of cruelty of an obviously Godardian sort, and Rocha arguably had quite as much sense of composition and camera movement as Godard. (Rocha actually has a cameo in a film Godard worked on, Wind From the East, in which a woman with a movie camera approaches him and says: “Excuse me for interrupting your class struggle, but could you please point me the way towards political cinema?”)
The Lion Has Seven Heads is a denunciation of imperialism and an essay in revolutionary thinking that is very much of its time. Opinions may divide now about exactly how well this film has aged; certainly, there is bit of posturing, and the casual use of “Marlene” (Rada Rassimov) – a naked blond woman writhing around and being variously pawed, harangued and imprisoned – as a symbol of colonial desire shows how very male leftist political cinema could be.
