The dream is over. Revolution is no longer at hand. On his deathbed, a leftist intellectual recapitulates the political process that led to the 1964 military coup d’état. This talk will focus on the film’s allegorical strategies and its convulsive visual style, which articulates a baroque drama performed by grotesque personifications of political forces. As such, the Glauber Rocha’s film, which created a political and cultural earthquake when it first appeared in cinemas and paved the way for the Tropicália movement as well as the Cinema Marginal, offered both a powerful critique of leftist illusions and a very uncomfortable image of the country.