Lecture & Film

Neville D'Almeida's Mangue Bangue: limit situations, hygiene rituals and the delirium of everyday life

Mangue Bangue

Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz

April 12, 2018 20:15 h

Neville D'Almeida is the outsider of the outsiders, the enfant terrible of the Cinema Marginal. For the big intellectual filmmakers that disputed amongst themselves the throne of the Brazilian underground, D'Almeida was always too much on the limit of what was measurable according to the standards of their own symbolic economy. Too successful commercially, too uncommitted to the dogmatic approaches of the "political author cinema", D’Almeida went beyond even what could be described as a textbook approach "outlaw cinema" in developing his own position as a filmmaker. His 1978 "A Dama do Lotação" was a huge commercial success, and his film "Rio Babilônia" became an instant classic. "Mangue Bangue" is a rarely discussed early work by D'Almeida's, and a prime example of how he developed his own language and position as a cinematographer of borderline situations of everyday life.