BARATINADOS A TRIBUTE TO ROGERIO SGANZERLA

The first time we saw a Rogério Sganzerla’s film at the “Torino Film Festival” we felt astonished, (baratinados!) and we thought about all the possibilities the cinema offers and what it means to make a film, why make a film. We perceived the freedom of an idea, the implications that the idea brings to the film language, to cultures.
The rupture Sganzerla produces mainly inside Brazilian cinema is making all absent people protagonist, Brazilian people that are not only samba cachaça and football. This is not just one of the elements of his cinema: it is his cinema. It is the camera, the craftsmanship of the means disposable for an idea, its independence from the market laws, the pain and pleasure of independent cinema.
Thanks to the collaboration with “Torino Film Festival”, some of Rogério Sganzerla's films are screened at the “Tekfestival: at the boundaries of the world, inside the west”. The presence of the Brazilian director in this fourth edition is due to the need of giving spaces of visibility to the experimental, independent cinema. The work of this artist had been hidden by the Brazilian dictatorship and by the hostility of the "Cinema Novo" group that was having a privileged relationship with the European critics; especially the "Cahiers du Cinèma" which did not know the work of these experimental directors defined udigrudi (underground) by Glauber Rocha who is one of the most famous authors of "Cinema Novo". A cultural production is only possible with the diffusion of ideas. This is why during the mid nineties, Marco Melani worked with the group that refers to "Fuori Orario" in order to discover the missing elements of the rich and heterogeneous mosaic of the Brazilian cinema. Finally, here is the possibility to know the works of Sganzerla one of those authors who anticipate their own time as it usually happens to the ones who dare to experiment.
The Tekfestival exibites four films by Rogério Sganzerla.
In O Bandido da Luz Vermelha Sganzerla presents fragments of the life of a bandit (a true story).
Through the voices of news reporters and the opinions of commentators and policemen re-echoes the problem of the true identity of the man in question: who is the bandit really? In this game of reconstruction and refutation of facts the director faces the complicated relationship between the individual and the State, between truth and lie, a tension that approaches his film to the world of Orson Welles, who is considered by the Brazilian director, the greatest western filmmaker.
In A Mulher de Todos (1969) the protagonist, Angela (Helena Ignez), called flesh and bone, is an unprejudiced woman who has numerous love affairs on the pleasure island until her husband, the powerful nazi Dr. Plirtz, arrives and punishes her severely for her transgression. Sganzerla disguises reality using allegorical figures; he simplifies the story of his film without breaking the relationship with the Brazilian population, mocked and reduced to starvation by the powerful and dictators.
In 1970 Sganzerla, together with Helena Ignez and Júlio Bressane, starts the Production BelAir, which in a few months produces 7 films ( three by Bressane and three by Sganzerla). Copacabana Mon Amour (1970) is the only film produced by BelAir and recently restored that will be screened at the Festival. It is the story of Sonia, a prostitute on Copacabana beach.
O Signo do Caos (2003) is the last film produced by Sganzerla, shot to demonstrate that it is possible to make high quality films in Brazil with low budget. But this is an anti-film, as stated by the director himself, polemical with political censorship and the big producers and distributors who have never dared to defend the work of the real makers of Brazilian cinema. The director gets his inspiration from the material shot in Rio by Orson Welles, but never utilized by the same, and builds a distressing analogy with his own filmmaker story in Brazil. Sganzerla dies at the beginning of 2004 leaving this masterpiece which expresses all the courage of his creativity and experimentation.
After the film it is impossible to listen to The Black Saint and the Synner Lady by Charles Mingus (sound track of the film together with Aquarela do Brasil by Ary Barroso) and not think of the images of a Lolita (Djin Sganzerla, daughter of the director) smiling in the nights of Rio while looking into the camera.

Arianna Isidori