IFFR's Mouth of Garbage programme challenges and stimulates audiences with a radical mix of themes and genres from a forgotten era of street-level Brazilian moviemaking, discovers Ben Walters.
“There’s a programming line that says we want to promote good values and ethics and have the audience identify with films and characters in a positive way,” observes IFFR programmer Gabe Klinger. “With some of these films, we want the audience to be repelled. Is that such a bad thing? It’s a different emotion to bring out of the theatre.”
Klinger, who divides his time between Brazil and Chicago, has been the driving force behind The Mouth of Garbage: Subculture and Sex in Sao Paulo 1967-1987, a strand in this year’s Signals programme. Boasting 18 titles, mostly in new prints, it’s named after the Brazilian city’s Boca Do Lixo district, a down-at-heel neighbourhood that became the location of a thriving and unapologetically trashy grass-roots film industry at a time of considerable upheaval in the country. Dynamic for two decades, its output has been largely overlooked ever since.
Radical diversity
“In Brazil, these are films that are widely disparaged and forgotten because they’re thought of as lowbrow,” Klinger notes. “At the time, people were focusing on Cinema Novo and high-end studio production; Boca do Lixo films were thought of as trash and most had no life beyond their original release. But the high-end studio model failed and to a greater or lesser degree Cinema Novo failed as well. These are films that found an audience.”
The scene is perhaps most closely associated with exploitation genres – its breakout figure, Coffin Joe (screen name of filmmaker and actor Jose Mojica Marins) delivered provocative doses of sex, drugs and violence in films like
Awakening of the Beast. But Klinger asserts that Boca filmmakers were interested in other areas, and generally celebratory rather than simply provocative. “Today’s audiences can appreciate their high artistic quality and their radical diversity – there’s porn, Westerns, horror films, crime movies, social satire, Super 8 diary films, weird experimental hippie films, even Catholic films. The Boca do Lixo represents this very rich, full spectrum of what cinema can do.”
These filmmakers often lived in the area, developing a miniature studio system that bloomed against a backdrop of repression at the end of the 1960s. “They really promoted that idea of camaraderie. There was a bar where they all met. Ozualdo Candeias [whose work is shown in the season] was a real chronicler of this community. In one of our shorts, ‘Party in the Boca’, they do an informal ceremony on the street where they give out prizes to their favourite people: starlet of the year, electrician of the year. There’s a guy perched on top of a truck throwing out medals in between drinking cachaca and dancing capoeira.”
Celebrating sexuality
The films’ liberated approach certainly struck a chord. “They’re good-natured, like Radley Metzger or Russ Meyer - films that say ‘We like sex and there’s nothing wrong with that’. This was a call to a new era, an explosion of freedom. For the most part, sex is presented very tastefully [at festivals like IFFR]. I think it’s going to be so cool, man, to see these hardcore porn films with a big audience, especially something like
Oh! Rebuceteio. It’s one of the few hardcore films of the era that manages to be interesting in terms of mise en scene and how it plays with spectatorship. The first scene develops into this massive orgy where all the actors in a stage play have sex other on stage in front of their director and producer and finally the audience joins in. It creates this sense that you’re part of the scenery.” Might Rotterdam audiences feel the urge themselves? “That would be the ideal, in fact, if we broke on through to the other side, and people thought, ‘Yeah! Why not?’ Let’s celebrate sexuality.”
Career climax
Klinger acknowledges that some Boca films have misogynistic elements. “Brazil is still today a pretty retrograde culture in terms of how women are treated – also homosexuals, blacks, different social classes – so you see a lot of horrible depictions. But they’re more honest as cultural documents. Most of the films that get shown at festivals like Rotterdam have some kind of introspective or critical outlook. You don’t usually get to see a film that embodies the biases and prejudices of a culture. If we cut ourselves off from that then we don’t really know what’s out there and we become poorer as spectators.”
By the late 80s, Boca filmmaking was in decline. Cheaply imported American titles were dominating and the market for sexually explicit titles had shrunk to “a bunch of perverts in trenchcoats,” as Klinger puts it. “These films were part of a zeitgeist, for sure. In the late 70s, sex in film was a novelty. Couples were going to theatres, people were really curious. By the mid-80s, it was just smutty crap. Also politics were more lenient by then,” leaving less demand for on-screen escape.
The Mouth of Garbage provides a chance for audiences to revisit that era – as well as some unexpected pleasures for Klinger, whose duties included translating the absurd comedy
Sit on Mine and I’ll Enter Yours, which features a head-mounted penis and other unusual organs. “This will be the pinnacle of my life as a subtitler,” he notes, “having to subtitle talking vaginas and anuses. Everything will be downhill from here…”
More about The Mouth of Garbage here.