Boca do Lixo

Boca do Lixo - it means "Mouth of Garbage" in Portuguese, and it's one of the sleazier and most crime-ridden parts of Sao Paulo (the name is a play on a much swankier and wealthier part of town, Boca do Luxo, "Mouth of Luxury"). It's also the neighborhood where some of Brazil's sleazier cinematic offerings were shot. Consider these films to be the moist and grimier flipside to Brazil's Cinema Novo, a homegrown movement that borrowed from neo-realism and ethnographic films to address the country's political and social ills. Boca do Lixo films instead took their cues from the avant-garde and popular culture. Among the favorites of the Cinema Marginal crowd (as they were known) was Jose Mojica Marins, who starred and directed a series of lurid and primitive horror films in the early '60s as the grimly Nietzchean Ze do Caixao (Coffin Joe).

The signature film of this underground movement was Rogerio Sganzerla's O Bandido da Luz Vermelha (The Red Light Bandit), which seems to be an amalgam of underground and popular tendancies. Its subject matter makes the movie seem like classic gindhouse and drive-in fare: a man breaks into women's houses, illuminates their faces with a red flashlight, talks to them, and then rapes and kills them. Beyond this exploitative aspect, the film also addresses issues of cultural identity, and parodies Brazilian popular culture (this is all based on descriptions of the film -- sadly, this film is not available in the States).

While Sganzerla had aspirations to art and used the "aesthetics of garbage" to make commentaries on the state of Brazil, other films made in the Boca do Lixo had no such pretensions. Taking advantage of the loosening of moral strictures (and in spite of the military dictatorship), these filmmakers started churning out sleazy sex pictures like pornochanchadas, an indigenous form of sex comedy (which borrowed the name chanchada from another uniquely Brazilian cinematic genre, the samba-musical). These movies were cheap and easy to make, and they were big hits at the box office. Some of the higher-end of these vehicles even crossed over to the US like Lady on the Bus and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (the latter of which is not a pornochanchada per se, but an adaptation of a literary novel by Jorge Amado that neverthless carries many of the sexy and ribald trappings of the pornochanchadas). These two films, featuring the talents of the statuesque and often nude Sonia Braga, were often shown on late-night Cinemax in the '80s.

But Boca do Lixo films generally did not make it beyond the Brazilian borders. They were homegrown entertainments from the heady days before globalized cinema (i.e., Hollywood dominated). The graphics used to market these pictures would put your garden variety American pornographer to shame (particularly the one advertising Ou Da... Ou Desce).

You can also listen to some of the music of these kinds of films, via streaming audio (Windows Media) courtesy of Phono 70, an excellent online radio show that specializes in Brazilian rarities.