ABSTRACT
José Mojica Marins’s peers have called him a primitive artist, an “idiot savant,” and even a Brazilian Buñuel (Barcinski and Finotti, 1998: 122). However, despite such accolades, and the fact that he was very productive and successful in the 1960s, major English-language accounts of Brazilian cinema during this period ignore Mojica’s fi lms and focus instead on cinema novo and the related movement cinema do lixo (garbage cinema).1 This is despite the fact that Mojica was a contemporary and, according to Rogério Sganzerla, director of the cinema do lixo classic O bandido da luz vermelha/Red Light Bandit (1968), avowed “father” of the latter movement (Barcinski and Finotti, 1998: 14).Mojica’s low-budget gore and drug fi lms À meia-noite levarei sua alma/At Midnight I will take your soul (1963), Esta noite encarnarei no teu cadáver/This night I will possess your corpse (1966), O estranho mundo de Zé do Caixão/The Strange World of Coffi n Joe (1966), and O despertar da besta/Awakening of the Beast (1969) were unprecedented in Brazil, and like cinema novo, also made use out of an ‘esthetics of poverty.’
