O Bandido da luz vermelha (The Red Light Bandit). 1968. Brazil. Written and directed by Rogério Sganzerla. In Portuguese; English subtitles. 92 min.
With Paulo Villaça, Helena Ignez, Luiz Linhares. The more obscure but adventurous and taboo-breaking underground, Marginal Cinema, or Udigridi (a deliberate bastardization of the English word “underground”) functioned as a radical continuation of (while also in dialogue with) Cinema Novo and the group of transgressive artists around Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. Sganzerla has said that his film “is principally a formal reformulation within Brazilian cinema. The time has come for films that are dirty and poetic, impure and pretentious, and for new forms for new contents; for cinema that speaks of politics or of banditry without aesthetic respect, to the point of adopting an obscene liberty.” The director’s debut film, based on the police records of a famous bandit, mixes several genres to create a new type of Western about the Third World.