O Bandido da Luz Vermelha

A unique synthesis of high and low, nihilistic, satirical, and ironic towards everything and everyone. It is one of the founding films of the so-called marginal cinema, a purely Brazilian category of films on the border between (deliberate) ignoble and underground. Similarly, this film, which is primarily an anarchic burlesque, playing in a free-thinking and unrestrained way with form and content, to which nothing is sacred, situates itself on the edge of pop art and avant-garde. It mocks (just like the entire marginal cinema "movement") the left-wing intellectualism and snobbery of the legendary Cinema Novo, as well as the police, criminals, and terror to guerrilla and army or officers, which only shows that, unlike its purely commercial Western counterparts, this film is not a genre film for its own sake, but with its undisciplined nihilism, it is an authentic statement by a 21-year-old director about the state of his country - after all, the country was ruled by a military junta since 1964, and by the end of the 60s, the country slowly but surely found itself in the midst of political violence of state and guerrilla terror. But what primarily attracts attention is the form, which, with its deliberately (but thoughtfully) chaotic combination of two main storylines, a barrage of editing combining various visual and sound sources (fictional story, fragments from period films, music from classics to contemporary pop, fake TV shows, etc.), and comedic coloring, creates a film that is, especially for foreigners, a unique, although of course highly subjective, source for understanding the reality of Brazil at that time. It is precisely the unusual combination of image and sound of the film that gives it a new dimension and, above all, new meanings, mostly of a cynical and humorous nature. /// Despite its irony and self-irony, the film is truly a smart testimony of the social situation at that time - the feared bandit who asks "Who am I?" throughout the film is ultimately shown as a powerless, uncertain, and insignificant person-symptom of a society that projects its own fears onto him like a projection screen (communists see in him "a man from the highest stage of capitalism," while right-wingers see him as a criminal and terrorist who takes from the rich and gives to the poor), and the ending shows how the all-powerful bandit is just a temporary affair in a time of the country's descent into unnecessary violence on a much larger scale. (04.03.2015)