OUTLAW CINEMA (CINEMA FORA DA LEI)
Manifesto by Rogério Sganzerla (written in 1968, during the shooting of The Red Light Bandit), translation courtesy of Tiago.
1 - My film is a western about the Third World. That is, a fusion and blending of various genres. I made a filme-soma¹; a western, but also a musical, a documentary, a detective film, a comedy (or chanchada?²) and science fiction. From documentary, the sincerity (Rossellini); from detective, the violence (Fuller); from comedy, the anarchic rhythm (Sennett, Keaton); from western, the brutal simplification of conflicts (Mann).
₁ - “a film-sum”, being a movie made up from additions of these other genres. ₂ - Brazilian genre of musical comedies made mainly between the 1930s and 1950s.
2 - The Red Light Bandit pursues the police, while the cops make metaphysical reflections, contemplating loneliness and incommunicability. When a character can't do anything, he screws it up.
3 - Orson Welles taught me not to separate politics from crime.
4 - Jean-Luc Godard taught me to film everything for half the price.
5 - In Glauber Rocha I became familiar with a guerrilla cinema based on wide shots.
6 - Fuller was the one who taught me how to dismantle traditional cinema through montage.
7 - Filmmaker of excess and crime, José Mojica Marins introduced me to the furious poetry of the actors from Brás³, to the obscene curtains and ruins and their apparently banal dialogues. Mojica and the cinema of Japan taught me how to be free and - at the same time - academic.
₃ - In 1964, Mojica set up a synagogue in the Brás neighborhood where he experimented with amateur actors and tested their courage and talent.
8 - The solitary Murnau taught me to love the static shot above all travellings.
9 - It's necessary to discover the secret of the cinema of Luis, poet and agitator Buñuel, exterminating angel.
10 - Never forgetting Hitchcock, Eisenstein and Nicholas Ray.
11 - Because what I really wanted was to make a magical, obscene movie whose characters were sublime and stupid, where stupidity - above all else - revealed the secret laws of the underdeveloped soul and body. I wanted to make a picture about a delirious society, threatened by a solitary criminal. I wanted to make this leap because I understood that I had to film the possible and the impossible in an underdeveloped country. My characters are, all of them, uselessly stupid - in fact, like 80% of Brazilian cinema; from the tragic stupidity of Corisco⁴ to the nonsense of Boca de Ouro⁵, passing through Coffin Joe⁶ and the pariahs of Barravento⁷.
₄ - Character (based on the real figure) from the 1964 film “Black God, White Devil”, directed by Glauber Rocha. ₅ - 1963 film directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos. ₆ - Character played by José Mojica Marins in his own films. ₇ - 1962 film directed by Glauber Rocha.
12 - I'm filming the life of The Red Light Bandit⁸ just as I could be retelling the miracles of St. John the Baptist, the youth of Marx or the adventures of Chateaubriand. It's a good pretext to reflect on Brazil in the decade of the 1960s. In this scenario, politics and crime identify characters from the upper and lower world.
₈ - The Red Light Bandit, as well as being the main character of the movie, was also an actual criminal and one of Brazil's most notorious criminal cases.
13 - I had to make this outlaw cinema here in São Paulo because I wanted to make a total effort towards the liberating Brazilian film, revolutionary also in its panoramic shots, fixed camera and dry cuts. The starting point for our films must be the instability of cinema - as well as of our society, our aesthetics, our loves and our sleep. That's why the camera is indecisive; the sound fleeting; the characters frightened. In this country, everything is possible and that's why the movie could explode at any moment.