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Norma Bengell controversies (photo: Norma Bengell in Walter Hugo Khouri’s ‘Eros’) (See previous post: “Dead at 78: Norma Bengell, First Actress to Go Full Frontal in Mainstream Films.”) Norma Bengell found herself embroiled in numerous controversies throughout her life. For instance, besides her not infrequently "scandalous" anti-establishment screen roles of the ’60s and ’70s, she took to the streets to protest against both censorship in the arts and Brazil’s military dictatorship. At the 1985 edition of Rio de Janeiro’s Fest Rio, Bengell got into a verbal match with American actress and fellow jury member Ellen Burstyn (Oscar winner for Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) following alleged improprieties at the festival’s awards ceremony and Bengell’s role in the jury. Presumably to justify her worth as a jury member, the native Portuguese-speaker Bengell bellowed in Spanish: "I am a great actress!" Norma Bengell: Controversial filmmaker In later years,...

The Aesthetics of Garbage, Part 1 can be found here.

Above: O insigne ficante (The Inisg Nificant, 1980).

“Make films to occupy run down, low class theatres and be subsequently forgotten” —Rogério  Sganzerla

One of the quintessential traits of Cinema Novo was the firm rejection of anything Hollywood; films like The Red Light Bandit and O pornógrafo (The Ponographer, 1970) by João Callegaro on the contrary, eagerly cannibalized popular American culture. Cultural appropriation is manifest throughout Callegaro's film, which openly references noir flicks whose aesthetic codes and conventions are borrowed and subverted by the director. While retaining an unmistakable Brazilian flavour these films openly boast their spoofy hybridism, combining high and low culture at a time when the term post-modernism had yet to be coined. True inheritors of Oswald De Andrade’s Anthropophagic Manifesto, these were metropolitan indians suffocated by the orthodox traditionalism of the left on one side and by an increasingly oppressive regime on the other.