MANGUE BANGUE
dir. Neville de Almeida, 1971
Brazil. 62 mins.
No dialogue.

SATURDAY, MARCH 16 - 3 PM followed by discussion with Neville de Almeida
ONE SCREENING ONLY!

D’Almeida originally imagined MANGUE BANGUE as a collaboration with Oiticica, but the latter’s transcontinental move led D’Almeida to complete the film himself, editing the project in London to avoid censorship. The silent film’s story loosely follows a stockbroker as he devolves into a primitive creature that raves between Rio de Janeiro’s financial center and Mangue, the neighboring red-light district, before disappearing into the jungle. Blurring the line between documentary and fiction, D’Almeida integrated long sequences of actors and real people performing common tasks, from laundry to drug use, to capture the ordinary lives of criminal and marginalized figures in Brazil. The film was shown for the first time on March 9, 1973, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to a handpicked group of Brazilian and North American artists and critics. Oiticica was taken immediately with the film’s adept visual representation of the minutiae of everyday life, writing that “MANGUE BANGUE is not a naturalist document of life-as-it-is or a search on the part of a poet-artist for what’s fucked up in life: it is rather the perfect measure of the film-sound gaps-fragments of concrete elements.”

The raw authenticity of the film and its extended visual sequences were key forerunners to the Cosmococas, the first of which was created only four days after the screening of MANGUE BANGUE.