Film Performance: from Achievement to Appreciation (Klevan, 2005)

Andrew Klevan. Film Performance: from Achievement to Appreciation. London and New York: Wallflower, 2005.

There is a field of commentary that examines performers as 'stars' and addresses their significance from a range of contexts and cultures -fandom, economics, technology, studio strategy and publicity. Another field, not quite as mined, places the emphasis on 'acting', exploring, for example, the influence of Melodramatic, Vaudeville

(or Music Hall), Continental Cabaret, Stanilavsky or Method techniques. Both these fields draw on external evidence to assess a performer's effect, but they tend not to pursue the complexity of a performers internal relationship with a film. This book places the emphasis differently, treating performance as an internal element of style in synthesis with other aspects of film style and explores the achievement of expressive rapport.

1. Position and perspective (the relationship of the performer to the camera, and their position within the shot).

2. Place (the relationship of the performer to location, decor, furniture and objects)

3. The plot (the relationship of the performer to narrative developments)

It demonstrates how films instruct us in ways of interpretation and ways of viewing. Because the films wish us to take responsibility for coming to moments and meanings in particular ways, they may hide their best view of themselves: the apparent simplicity or 'ordinariness' of Hollywood films that obscures their significance; films develop visual or aural patterns that open up alternative lines of viewing, but these alternatives are deliberately less salient than, for example, the straightforward dynamics of the plot; mundane elements of films (aspects of everyday) may remain undramatic and yet, because of their arrangement within a film, unexpectedly reveal a wealth of significance. Fresh aspects of even familiar films emerge when we attend to gestures, postures, expressions and voice - and how they are situated.

Interpreting performance - Astaire preferred wide-shots, rarely allowing the camera to separate the various parts of his body from each other.

Integration of performance and space - photographs are of the world, in which human beings are not ontologically favoured over the rest of the nature, in which objects are not props but allies(or enemies) of the human character. Camera sequence in Chaplin's City Lights explores 'construction of visibility' and his ontological equality with flowers, street corners and window. panes.

This book concentrates on individual scenes or sequences from films so that it may be responsive to their unfolding. Attending the moment-by-moment movement of the performers also enhances our understanding of film characterisation. It encourages us to attend to a character's physical and aural detail and reminds us, because we are prone to forget in our literary moods, of their ontological particularity in the medium of film. A living human being embodies a film character.

Attending to sequences is preferred to ranging across a performer's career, or simply extracting instances of performance from across a whole film. such extractions miss the presentness of the performance. Naremore points the way in this kind of study but according to Klevan he fails to exemplify the complexity of relationship between performer and object in the cinema.

"The shot is held somewhat longer than it is expected", Klevan suggests that "a viewer's engagement with a performer depends on him or her communicating aspects of their character's conciousness"(p.9), "appreciating the performer's capacities for revealing and withholding aspects of the character's sensibility", "the eloquence of the moment is achieved by the performer's bearing in conjunction with the position of the camera" (p.10).

Placement and relationship with the room and furniture around the performer. Performance may enhance the density of our interpretations because we are responsive to physicality and texture, "our intensity is no longer satisfied by thin interpretations based on general themes or summaries of narrative strands." (p.11). The moment exemplifies the performer's ability to keep alive the various options which have emerged from the world that the film has established.

Close-up: cut away from the surrounding environment it signifies the personal dimension. It tells us how a performer feels by defining the private thought against the public display. The cut into close-up carries a sense of special truth isolated by the camera's knowing eye. It clarifies by a sudden reduction of our space for though and wonder. The film's scenes are often constructed so that the viewer has a more privileged view than the other characters.

When the film asks too much of the apparatus and almost nothing of the performer we have a good example of aspects out of balance. The effort to maintain the various elements in productive tension and neither to push them into symmetrical alignment. Description is seen as something far from self-evident, or simple, but central to critical practice... description is a matter of how to bring into existence, how, in the course of analysis, to evoke for a reader that lost object.

Editing: the film then switches between closer shots and views over the shoulder. This technique of editing cuts them apart while they stand together and emphasises the separateness of their views of each other. A conventional technique of editing, over-the-shoulder shots, becomes very distinct, precisely conjoined to a particular moment (rather than being an inevitable continuation, or a requirement, say, of clear syntax.)

He plays his character with casual panache. We would not expect their movements to have specialist expertise, or virtuosity, but they achieve and enviable quality of simple improvisation, genial and convivial.

Voice without a body: dislocated from the performer in space and by tone, the voice seems celestial.

Many Hollywood films - especially heavily generic ones, such as westerns, thrillers or horror movies- base their drama on heavily-plotted scenarios and some may appear over-determined and contrived (Secret Beyond the Door, Fritz Lang, 1948). Beyond a standard needed for generic plot conventions, it looks to have an attachment to cliché that is without irony (and an earnestness that brings it close to comedy).

This study presents a method for sustaining attention to a performance, and has appreciated the achievement concentrating on a sequence or a succession of sequences from a film directing our attention to the moment-by-moment development of the performances. It enables an exploration of the tight-knit relationship of the performances to the surroundings aspects of film style. Continuous attention to sequences also brings out the realtionship between appreciating a performance and understanding a film's meaning as it develops - the unfolding of an interpretation- undermining our inclination to condense and compress meaning of films, often to the point of banality.

Horror, the Aurum Film Encyclopaedia (Phil Hardy, 1985)

Phil Hardy. Horror (Aurum Film Encyclopaedia). London: Aurum Press Ltd. 1985 (496 pp)













-------------------------------1966

Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadaver aka Tonight I Will Paint in Flesh Colour aka Tonight I Will Make Your Corpse Turn Red.

(IBERIA FILMES; BRAZIL) b/w and col 105 min

Based in São Paulo, Marins embarked on a controversial career as a director with the, as yet, unreleased Sentença de Deus in the early sixties. He organized his own studio in an abandoned synagogue and achieved notoriety with nightmarishly sadistic, brutally pathological horror movies featuring amateur performers often recruited from the city's sub-proletariat. at the heart of these fantasies stands Zé do Caizao [sic] (literally, Joseph the Grave), a megalomaniac master of ceremonies played by Marins himself. The character was established in the cheap, nasty and successful A Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma (1965) and in this picture, its follow-up.

The story simply provides an excuse to indulge in an endless orgy of gore and torture, which produces the occasional surreal scene but more often leaves an impression of a very sick man's home movies. In search of an ideal woman worthy of bearing his child, the mad Zé abducts a series of women and subjects them to hideous forms of suffering. Most of his victims fail to impress him and are killed, while the one who manages to survive the torture and the horrors dies in childbirth. Sinking into a psychotic delirium, he them goes totally berserk in a frenzy of barbarous carnage.

The film is barely watchable as its 'amateur' actors are subjected to attacks of live poisonous spiders, are thrown into real snakepits, have their heads crushed in a press, and so on. Nonetheless, the shoestring production exudes a genuine sense of madness both in his imaginings and in the treatment of its participants, with the eccentric, seemingly out-of-control staging veering from the pathological to the surreal. The climactic scenes offer bloodcurdling visions of hell: a cave filled with crucified, near-naked men and women, some upsidedown (sic), others arranged in irregularly angled diagonals, with the crudely fashioned white (plaster) walls and pillars while Zé attacks them with heinous savagery. Marins' next released picture (some were banned by the censors) extended the series with O Estranho Mundo de Zé do Caixao (sic) (1968) and his Delirios de um Amoral (sic) (1978) included scenes from these and earlier Zé do Caixao (sic) pictures.

d/p/co-s José Mojica Marins co-s Aldenora Sá Pôrto c Giorgio Attili lp José Mojica Marins, Tina Wohlers, Nadia Freitas, Tania Mendonça, Mina Monte, Esmeralda Ruchel, Roque Rodrigues, Lya Lagutte, Carmen Marins, Antonio Fracari. (página 179)


-------------------------------1968

O Estranho Mundo de Zé do Caixao aka The Strange World of Zé do Caixao (sic)

(IBERIA FILMES; BRAZIL) b/w 80min

After the disturbing Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadaver (1966) and his contribution to the omnibus movie Trilogia de Terror (sic) (1968), Marins here again features his megalomaniac alter ego, Zé do Caixao (sic). This time the brutally sadistic Zé merges with the image of the director as he presides over the framing of three different stories. One tells of a doll-maker (Cacador) (sic) who uses real human eyes. The second episode features a hunchbacked sex maniac (Michael) obsessed by a girl (Bruzzi) who ignores him but dies on her wedding day, giving the monstrous creature the opportunity to dig up her body (?) and consummate his passion. The last story reverts to Marins' usual terrain as he hideously tortures a couple (de Souza and Reis) to prove the triumph of instinct over reason. The production is amateurish, the narrative sloppy and disjointed and the acting unmentionable as the film wallows in rape, necrophilia and visceral savagery, predictably accompanied by the 'hero' (Marins) indulging in infantile posturing and routine blasphemy.

Marins also published a comic strip and his films have often been compared to horror comics, but such a reference overlooks the fact that comic-strip imagery requires a degree of stylization and attention to design. His films rarely betray any such concerns as cheapness and speed appear to win out over aesthetics and professionalism every time. Watching his work is distinctively disturbing, not simply because of the activities depicted, but because his films convey an overwhelming sense of looking at a genuine psychopath's private fantasies, pathetically proffered as a plea for help to which viewers are unable to respond. His next offering, the unreleased O Ritual dos Sadicos (1970), extended the quasi-documentary chronicling of mental illness and he regressed even further to a regime of infantile megalomania with Finis Hominis (1970) in which the director plays a mad but 'inspired' saviour of the world performing miracles, and its sequel with the same character, Quando os Deuses Adormecem (1971).

d/co-p/s José Mojica Marins co-p Jorge Michael Sakeis c Giorgio Attili lp José Mojica Marins, Luiz Sergio Person, Rosalvo Cacador (sic), Jorge Michael, Iris Bruzzi, Osvaldo de Souza, Nidi Reis. (páginas 195-196)



Trilogia do Terror aka Trilogy of Terror

(PRODUCTORA NACIONAL DE FILMES/ PRODUCOES CINEMATOGRAFICAS GALASY/FRANCOBRASILEIRA; BRAZIL)
scope 99min

Based, like the Brazilian Incrivel, Fantastico, Extraordinario (1969), on a radio series, this is an omnibus movie with three directors fashioning their own screenplays from stories supplied by Marins. The first, Pesadelo Macabro, tells of a man who fears being buried alive and resorts to macumba to cure himself. When one night he sees his girlfriend being raped, he suffers a cataleptic fit and is promptly buried alive. In O Acordo, a prostitute-mother makes a deal with the devil to force a marriage between her daughter and the village boss. In the last story, a boy finds a dead soldier in the bushes and eventually his father decides to confront those responsible for the killing: phantom guerillas. The picture ends with an ambiguous call to arms, implicitly acknowledging that the military regime in Brazil generated a veritable army of ghostly guerillas. Spanish-born Marins (?) made pornochanchadas (a peculiarly Brazilian form of sexploitation movie) under the pseudonym J. Avelar. Brazil's most prominent and prolific director of horror movies (O Estranho Mundo de Zé do Caixao, 1968; Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadaver, 1966), he also played something of a Roger Corman role in Brazil, supporting new directors.

Pesadelo Macabro: d/s José Mojica Marins c Giorgio Attili lp Vany Miller, Mario Lima, Ingrid Holt, Nelson Gasparini
O Acordo: d/s Ozualdo Candeias c Peter Overback lp Lucy Rangel, Regina Celia, Alex Ronay, Durvalino de Souza
Rocissao dos mortos (sic): d/s Luis Sergio Person c Osvaldo de Oliveira lp Lima duarte, Cacilda Lanuza, Waldir Guedes, Lenoir Bittencourt. (páginas 200-201)



Incrivel, Fantastico, Extraordinario aka Incredible, Fantastic, Extraordinary

(C. ADOLPHO CHADLER PRODUÇOES CINEMATOGRAFICAS; BRAZIL)
scope 90min

A spin-off from a popular Brazilian radio series, this pedestrian film contains four short stories. The first episode, A Ajuda, tells of a woman (Clara) who pleads with a motorist (Farney) to save her son after a bad car crash, in which she died. The next story, O Sonho, has a hooded schoolgirl predict the deaths of her classmates, but also foresee her own eminent death of a heart attack The third one, A Volta, tells of a widow (Rocha), who is haunted to death by a guilty knowledge of having killed her husband. The final episode, O Coveiro, shows a gravedigger (Sabag) who dies of fright as the corpse he is robbing appears to grab him. Da Costa is a minor director, producer, scenarist and actor who worked in Hollywood and in Europe. He also produced O Impossivel Acontece (1970) directing the episode based on a story by Richard Matheson (uncredited), Disappearing Act, which had been used for a Twilight Zone TV episode in 1959, entitled And When the Sky Was Opened.

d/p/co-s Adolpho Chadler (Cicero Adolpho Vitorio da Costa) co-s René Martin c Roberto Pace lp Cyll Farney, Sonia Clara, Glauce Rocha, Fabio Sabag, Wnada Oliver, Big Jones, Marcia Tania, Alzira Silva, Nira Clara. (páginas 206-207)

------------------------------- 1969

Um Sonho de Vampiros aka A Vampire's Dream

(SER-CINE; BRAZIL)
80 min

Cavalcanti's second feature tries to offer a carnivalesque equivalent of Roman Polanski's The Dance of the Vampires (1967). Dr Pan (Ankito), a nonentity, is visited by Death and given the choice between dying or becoming a vampire. Opting for a vampire's life which allows him to indulge all his dreams of power he proceeds to vampirize all the city's notables including the vicar, a soldier, a factory owner, and so on, and orgiastic pandemonium takes hold of the town. A young couple (Chermoni and Costa) provide the focus for audience identification as they try to escape the vampiric advances made to them. Played as a grotesque comedy, the picture loses whatever satiric thrust it may have had and disintegrates into a succession of exuberantly played, usually sexist and rarely funny gags. Direction and cinematography are equally inhibited, as is Carlos Prieto's makeup of the undead.

d/p/s Ibere Cavalcati c Renato Neumann lp Ankito, Irma alvarez, Janet Chemoni, Soneli Costa, Augusto Mala Filho, Robson Bob, Janira Santiago, Zuza Curi, Tuna Espinheira, Jorge Dias, Simon Khouri. (páginas 211-212)

--------------------------------1971

O Homem Lobo aka The Werewolf

(PINHEIRO FILMES; BRAZIL)
91 min

In this cheap film, Rossi blames paternal neglect of lycanthropy among the younger generation. The father in question, a professor (Braga), is provided with excuses: he has a terribly possessive wife (Cerine) and his son, Roberto (played by the director), was adopted -his mother died in childbirth- and sent to a boarding school where, with the onset of adolescence, the boy began to grow into a werewolf. Roberto indulges his cravings in such a way that suspicion always falls on his father, who accepts the blame until he is forced to face up to his responsibilities and sets out to discipline his son, armed with a gun and a silver bullet. This call for fathers to reassert their authority over wives and sons sells its macho message with long sequences showing scantily dressed women in the woods being attacked by the director-werewolf. A more interesting Brazilian werewolf picture was made by Elyseu Visconti Cavalleiro (sic), O Lobisomen (1974). São Paulo based Rossi returned to the them of paternal authority four years later with Seduzidas pelo Demonio (1975)

d/s Raffaele Rossi p José Pinheiro de Carvalho c Antonio Bonacin Thome lp Raffaele Rossi, Claudia Cerine, Lino Braga, Juliana Pitelli, Tony Cardi, Osmano Cardoso. (página 235)



O Macabro Dr Scivano

(NATUS PRODUÇOES CINEMATOGRAFICAS; BRAZIL)
b/w 72 min

Promoted as the first Brazilian science fiction film, this is in fact far closer to a horror cheapie. The plot tells of Dr Scivano (Calhado), a failed politician, who returns to his village where he becomes an object of ridicule. Dabbling in Macumba, he receives a piece of gold each night from a ghostly figure and thus becomes rich. One night he turns into a vampire and starts preying upon the local women until he is killed and reduced to ashes in front of a crucifix (echoing Terence Fisher's famous ending of Dracula (1958), which was also repeated in the Japanese Chi o Suu Me (1971) and numerous other pictures). Taking its cue from Psycho (1960), the film ends with a psychologist discussing the case of Dr Scivano and diagnosing him as paranoid. which, according to the experts in the film, is confirmed when they discover a shop-window mannequin in his bed. For publicity purposes, the co-director and star of the film adopted the name Scivano in the cast list, imitating José Mojica Marins gimmick of appearing in public as Zé do Caixao, the central character of many of his most unpalatable films.

co-d/co-p/co-s/co-c Raúl Calhado co-d Roasalvo Cacador (sic) co-p Faustino Correia Campos, Laercio Silva co-c Wanderley Silva se Josef Reindl lp Edmundo Scivano (Raúl Calhado), Luis Lema, Oswaldo Souza, Henricao (Henrique Filipe), Lauro Sawaya, Genesio Aladim, Ester Brasil, Cleber Holanda. (página 236)


Quando os Deuses Adormecem
(NELSON TEIXEIRA MENDES PRODUCTORA E DISTRIBUIDORA DE FILMS (sic); BRAZIL) 82 min

Marins' second exercise in mock-religious infantile megalomania stars himself as the admittedely insane but powerful, miracle performing messiah first featured in Finis Hominis (1971). The gods go to sleep and evil - manifested in the form of a sex epidemic and primetively occult practices in the cities~poor quarters - rules the world. Finis Hominis is sent to prevent human sacrifices and restore moral law and order, which he does before returning whence he came, an insane asylum. After gruesome torture and mutilation pictures in which he starred as Zé do Caixao, Marins two Finnis Hominis movies present blatant reparation fantasies with himself as the saviour of the world, revealing (and in a way pathetically designating) where he speaks from: the site of madness. In his next film, O Exorcismo Negro (1974), Marins dramatized the complementary of Zé and Finis by playing a double role: himself, using his real name, and his alter ego, Zé. (página 240)

d/co-s José Mojica Marins p Nelson Teixeira Mendes co-s Rubens Francisco Luchetti c Edward Freund lp JM Marins, Andrea Eryan, Amires Paranhos, Sabrina Marquezinha, Walter Portela, Rosalvo Cacador (sic), Nivaldo Lima, Alzinete Santana

------------------------------1972

Guru das Siete Cidades (sic)

(GURU PRODUÇOES CINEMATOGRAFICAS; BRAZIL)
85 min

The misogynist black-magic story proposes the hardly novel 'moral' that those who do evil will be destroyed by it. The wife (Medeiros) of a millionaire becomes involved with a group of hippies led by a Manson-type guru (Terceiro) who indulge in black-magic session and wander about in picturesque monk's garb with hoods. Since their rituals require human sacrifices, she proposes her husband as a victim. When he has been murdered, the group chose her as the next sacrificial victim. Peddling its moral lesson as a hypocritical cover for luridly sensational sexploitation movies, the picture proposes the usual gutter-press chichés of menacing dissolute 'youth'. Treacherously gold-digging women and other 'silent majority' stereotypes in order to make a quick profit out of the Tate murders. The cinematography by Silva is, as usual, excellent.

d/s Carlos Bini p José Pinheiro de Carvalho c Helio Silva lp Rejane Medeiros, Angelito Mello, Paulo Ramos, Otavio Bustamante, Antonio Severo Neta (sic). (página 255)

-------------------------------1974

Enigma para Demonios

(C.H. CHRISTENSEN PRODUÇOES; BRAZIL)
99 min

In this psycho-thriller in the style of Hammer's Taste of Fear (1960), Lafond is the heroine who, returning home after her child has died, learns of the death of her parents in mysterious circumstances. At her uncle's house, she encounters a friend of the family, the enigmatic Jurema (Barbosa). After a visit to the cemetery where she picks a rose, Lafond is persecuted by menacing phone calls which eventually drive her insane. The cause of the diabolic phenomena is revealed to be Barbosa, who is trying to get the family inheritance. The unimaginative script, which is derived from Carlos Drummond de Andrade's Flor, Telefone, Moça, is enhanced by excellent location photography in Belo Horizonte and Ouro Preto.

d/p/co-s Carlos Hugo Christensen co-s Origenes Lessa c Antonio Goncalves lp Monique Lafond, Luiz Fernado Ianelli, Barbosa, Licia Maggi, Rodolfo Arena, Mario Brasini, Daniel Carvalho, Jotta Barroso, Gerry Dias. (página 290)



O Exorcismo Negro

(CINEDISTRI; BRAZIL) b/w 100 min

The director's alter ego, Zé do Caixao, established as a psychopath in A Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma and Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadaver (both 1966) (sic), was changed to a mad messiah in 1971 with Finis Hominis and Quando os Deuses Adormecem (both 1971). With this black-magic picture, he dramatizes the conflict and the complementarity between these two figures by pitting himself, playing a film director called José Mojica Marins, against the evil Zé, his own fantastic creation (Marins again). The plot has the director go to a friend's house to write a script and his arrival trigger strange and violent happenings among his hosts. Lucia (Gomide), the wife of Alvaro (Stuart), makes a pact with a witch (Kosmo) while others behave as if possessed by the devil. In a torture chamber, a Black Mass is enacted to exorcize the evil influences. The ritual culminates in a savage duel between Marins and Zé. Although obviously seeking to cash in on the recent exorcism boom, Marins nevertheless continued to produce quasi-documentaries thinly disguised as fiction, chronicling the successive phases and crises of an insane person here explicitly designated as himself. The change from the sadistic psychopath (Zé) to Messiah (Finis Hominis) to split personality could be seen as evidence that this therapy-through-film-making was achieving positive results. Subsequent films would bear this out since Marins graduated to cheap, fairly unconventional horror movies no longer testifying to a relentless and uncontainable descent into psychosis such as A Estranha Hospedaria dos Prazeres (1976)

d/co-s José Mojica Marins p Antonio Massaini Neto co-s Adriano Stuart, Rubens Luchetti c Antonio Meliandre lp José Mojica Marins, Jofre Suares, Walter Stuart, Georgia Gomide, Adriano Stuart, Wanda Kosmo, Alcione Mazzeo. (página 291)

-------------------------------- 1975

Seduzidas pelo Demonio
(E.C. FILMES; BRAZIL) 108min

Like Rossi's previous horror movie, O Homem Lobo (1971), this picture warns against the moral corruption that befalls youngsters deprived of strong paternal authority. Roberto (Cesar) is rescued from devil worshippers as a boy and adopted by Mesquita and his wife. He appears normal until he causes the death of three youths at a party in his uncle's house. Judged to be possessed by the devil, he is incarnated in an asylum from which he escapes. Finding his distraught father is a church, he attacks him but the righteous old man assumes his responsibilities at last and rams a crucifix into his son's gut with the desired results: as the writhing boy dies the wound disappears and the child begins to look his decent pre-demonic self again. As usual in overt exploitation films preaching overtly authoritarian messages, much of the film is devoted to depicting the sinful ways of the wicked.

d/co-p/s Raffaele Rossi co-p Cassiano Esteves c Pedro Luiz Nobile lp Roberto Cesar, Cassiano Ricardo, Shirley Stech, José Mesquita, Alfonso Arrichielo, Ivete Bonfá, Lorenia Machado, Elen Salvador, Marcio Camargo. (página 308)

-------------------------------1976

A Estranha Hospedaria dos Prazeres aka The Strange Inn of Pleasures

(PRODUÇOES CINEMATOGRAFICAS ZÉ DO CAIXAO; BRAZIL)
81min

With this picture and the next one, Inferno Carnal (1976), Marins' films entered the horror mainstream, containing, for the time being, the chilling savage delirium of Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadaver (1966) and the other Zé do Caixao movies. Devised, produced and acted by Marins although directed by Motta, this film tries to combine the religious motif of sinners on their way to hell through purgatory with a more conventional iconography of death (the bowler-hatted skull) and a characteristically Brazilian carnivalesque exuberance. Indeed , the ritual of the carnival, when sacred time interrupts profane time to make way for the logic wishes and fantasy, provides the model for the scenario. During a stormy night, a collection of characters, all of whom are involved in some sort of transgression of the social order, gather in an inn presided over by an enigmatic man dressed black and wearing a bowler hat (Marins). The travellers are intended on indulging their desires, whether simply by making love as a couple or in an orgy, adultery or male prostitution, suicide or murder. In the morning, the nature of the place they have come to dawns upon them as the proprietor is revealed to be Death. Marins later returned to his earlier fantasies with Delirios de um Amoral(sic) (1978), a feature cobbling together buts from his previous films that had been censored, and O Estupro (1978), in which the savagery is even more directly sexual than in his earlier work. Having directed more than 30 features as well as about 130 films for TV, Marins can be regarded the most prolific Brazilian film-maker to date.

d Marcelo Motta p José Mojica Marins s Rubens Luchelli(sic) c Giorgio Atilli lp José Mojica Marins, Caçador Guerreiro, Maribeth Baumgartem, David Hyngaro, Vicenzo Colelia, Tomé Francisco, José Peres Ortega, José Nivaldo, Luiza Zaracausca. (página 312)

-------------------------------1977

A Virgem da Colina aka The Ring of Evil
(DRAGÃO FILMES; BRAZIL)
85 min

This weird variation on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray features a woman (Amaral) who receives an antique ring from her husband (Soares) on her wedding day. The ring causes her to develop a dual personality and while remaining the perfect lady in the evening, she becomes a prostitute by the day. Gradually, her inhibited side, manifested when her husband is at work, begins to leave an imprint of her face, forcing her to wear a mask to cover her luridly monstrous features. Soares eventually calls in an exorcist who reveals that the ring belonged to a prostitute witch. The evil thing in thrown into the water and peaceful domesticity is restored. The horror thus presented, in the form of physical corruption reflecting moral turpitude, is the woman's indulgence in all the desires which a marriage ring is supposed to stifle.

d/p/s Celso Falcão c Afonso Vianna lp Jofre Soares, Christina Amaral, Edson Seretti, Marcos Lyra, Joel Barcellos, Wagner Tadeu, Widemilson Arthur. (página 326)

------------------------------ 1978

Delirios de um Amoral (sic)

(PRODUÇOES CINEMATOGRAFICAS ZE DO CAIXAO; BRAZIL)
86 min

A rather repetition of a gimmick Marins used in O Exorcismo Negro (1974) in which he starred both as himself and as his creation, Zé do Caixao. Here, a psychiatrist, Dr Hamilton (Peres), becomes obsesses with the figure of Zé and as he studies the character his mind is taken over by Zé, plunging Peres into a delirium in which he hallucinates that Zé is about to take his wife, Tania (Miller). Peres's fellow doctors prove helpless and Miller is forced to call on Zé's creator, José Mojica Marins. Marins, fascinated by the effects of his creation on people's minds, resorts to hypnosis to cure Peres, whose psyche now becomes the terrain of a duel between Zé, the malignant creature trying to possess him and Marins, the creature's inventor. after an exhausting struggle, Marins manages to persuade Peres that Zé doesn't really exist.
The movie presents the fairly transparent fantasy that Marins doesn't need psychiatric help since he can still re-assert control, however great the difficulties, over his psychopathic 'other', Zé do Caixao, the central figure of his sickest and most successful movies as well as of a popular comic strip he devised. By having the doctor hallucinate Zé's exploits, Marins also manages to reduce the picture cost by inserting numerous scenes of his previous Zé do Caixao films, including A Meia Noite Levarei a Sua Alma (1965), Esta Noite encarnarei no Teu Cadaver (1966) and O Estranho Mundo de Ze do Caixao (1968). Marins went on to direct Perversão (1978) in which he mutilates a woman and is castrated by her very vengeful sister, as well as moral fable of sorts, Mundo Mercade do Sexo (sic) (1978), about a journalist who, having found his wife with his boss, kills the before committing suicide and thus, at last, provides a headline story. Subsequently, he returned to his Zé do Caixao world with Encarnacao de Demonio (sic) (1981).

d/p/co-s José Mojica Marins co-s Rubens F. Luchetti c Giorgio Attili lp José Mojica Marins, Magna Miller, Jorge Peres, Lirio Bertelli, Anadir Goe, Valter Setembro, João da Cruz, elza Pereira, Jaime Cortez, Andeia Bryan. (página 327)



A Deusa de Marmore - Escrava do Diabo
(PANORAMA DO BRASIL; BRASIL) 82 min

This mixture of horror e pornochachada - the Brazilian variety of sexploitation cinema - stars its director opposite Marins, the leading Brazilian horror practitioner. Maldonado plays a 2000 year-old woman, Deusa de Marmore, who has a pact with the devil and preserves her youthful appearance by extracting a life-essence from people by means of a fatal kiss during sexual intercourse. A demon, Seu Sete Encruzilhada (sic) (Marins), acting for the devil, requires her to supply ever greater number of victims while he also maintains Deusa's lover (Ramayan) in a state of suspended animation (thereby providing an opportunity for necrophilia scenes as she briefly visits her man after lethal lovemaking bouts). In the end, while Maldonado is seducing Henrique (Paulo), his religious wife (Nunes) intervenes branding a cross, and Deusa reverts to her real age - in a scene reminiscent of Terence Fisher's Dracula (1958) - and dies.

Besides directing, scripting, producing and starring, Maldonado also took care of costume and makeup, making her female counterpart of José Mojica Marins, the one-man production house in São Paulo. The interesting credits were designed by Akira Murayama, who also makes a brief appearance in the movie, as do other members of the production team, including the composer Isnard Simone.

d/p/s Rosangela Maldonado c Giorgio Attili lp Rosangela Maldonado, José Mojica Marins, João Paulo, Luandy Maldonado, Anadir Goe, Anita Nunes, Inaldo Ramayan, David Hungaro, Rubens de Souza, Adeluni Bonfim. (página 328)



As Filhas do Fogo aka Daughters of Fire

(LYNXFILM/EDITORA TRES; BRAZIL) 98 min

This is an interesting elaboration of the often used fantasy situation in which vegetation overwhelms a house, thereby returning it to 'nature' . The plot, set in Rio Grande do Sul, concerns two young women who come under the spell of a female necromancer and begin to experience strange events. Mysterious deaths occur and the women hear voices of dead people. One of the women is found dead and the other kill their tormentor, but she finds herself imprisioned in the house which has been totally enveloped in forest foliage. In the morning, the house and the remnants of the haunting life and death spectacle which occurred there, have all been incorporated by the green Brazilian forest, as if Brazil itself had re-asserted its enduring construction of its history (the necromancer's relation to the voices of the dead). The São Paulo based Khouri, a former critic, became one of the best-know figures in the early sixties with such films as Estranho Encontro (1958) and O Corpo Ardente (1966).

d/s Walter Hugo Khouri p Cesar Memolo Jnr (sic) c Geraldo Gabriel se Geraldo Jose lp Paolo Morra, Maria Rosa, Selma Egrei, Maria Huseman, Helmut Hosse, Karin Hass, Rudolph Machalowsky. (página 328)



Ninfas Diabolicas
(PRESENCA; BRAZIL) 85 min

While Rosangela Maldonado's A Deusa de Marmore - Escrava do Diabo (1978) presented a mixture of horror and pornochanchada, this picture combines the indigenously Brazilian sexploitation conventions with a ghost story. A man on a business trip (Hingst) offers a lift to two young women, apparently students (Mueller and Scalvi), and makes love to one of them. He turns to the other who appears to kill her friend before dragging the bewildered Hingst on to the ground with her in a wild embrace. As they drive back, the murdered woman appears on the back seat of the car and causes Hingst to crash. The two women, totally unscathed, are then seen walking away from the wreck and hitching a lift by the side of the road. The story has two morals: happily married man should stay away from loose women and female hitchhikers are sex-crazed predators, which makes it a fairly conventional story. Much of the film is devoted to the carnal encounters with the seductresses. The director, an immigrant from Shanghai, had co-directed a sexploitation film before, O Puritano da Rua Augusta (1966). This was his first solo effort.

d/p/co-s John Doo (Chien Lun Tu) co-s Ody Fraga c Ozualdo Candeias lp Seergio Hingst, Aldine Mueller, Patricia Scalvi, Dorothy Leiner, Misali Tanaka, Joseph Kang Doo, Andre Piacentini, Georgia Carolina. (página 331)

------------------------------ 1982

O Secredo da Mumia (sic) aka Lago Maldito
(MAPA FILMES/ SUPER 8 PRODUÇOES; BRAZIL) 85 min

Not to be confused with Il Secreto de la Momia (1972), this Brazilian picture offers an entertaining although amateurish parody of the traditional mummy, as well as Dr Moreau, motifs. Cardozo (sic) also takes the opportunity to insert spoofs of other genres: the music of Curtiz's The Egyptian (1954) counterpoints the flashbacks to antiquity; a cellar full of captive creatures echoes mad-scientist movies; the ending, as the anything but frightening mummy (Stambovsky) enters a swamp, recalls Terence Fisher's The Mummy (1959), The Robe (1953) and many other films. The best gag of the picture comes when a piece of gauze covers the camera's lens to signify a subjective shot from the mummy's point-of-view. Cardozo (sic) learnt his trade under the wing of Marins, about whom he made a documentary in 1978 and who makes a guest appearance in the picture.

d/p Ivan Cardozo (sic) s Rubem Luchetti c Renato Laclete se Sergio Farjala lp Wilson Grey, Anselm Vasconcellos, Ana Maria Miranda, Clarice Piovesan, Felipe Falcao, Tania Boscoli, José Mojica Marins, Daniel Stambovsky Regina Casé. (página 380)


As Sete Vampiros (sic) aka The Seven Vampires
(EMBRAFILMES/SUPEROITO PRODUCTIONS; BRAZIL) 100 min

This is a Brazilian fantasy-comedy-horror-detective-nudie-musical-nostalgia movie. A carnivorous plant is imported to Brazil in the fifties and gobbles the face of a dedicated botanist before infecting his wife with a mysterious malady. Soon after, Rio is terrorized by a masked killer who drains his victims of Blood, Meanwhile a Monroe-ish blonde poses in and out of dreamy fashion sequences that could stand as a working definition of gratuitous nudity, and bumbling hard-boiled dick ' Raimundo Marlou' is distracted from comic books by a need to bring in the murderer. In a cabaret, vampirettes flounce in lingerie and serve as a warm-up for the hilarious 'bob Rider and His Comets of Rhythm', an authentically pomaded Brazilian Rocker (Jaime) with four out-of-step backing vocalists. The horror is nostalgically reminiscent of continental mad-scientist shockers of the early sixties and the colours are pleasingly garish. The vampire turns out to be the white-faced femme fatale but the mad scientist, hideously deformed behind his cloak, who has been haunting night clubs in search of fresh blood for his experiments.

d/co-p Ivan Cardoso co-p Mauro Taubman, Claudio Klabin, Antonio Avilez, Flavio Holanda s R.F. Lucchetti c Carlos Egberto Silveira se Antonio Pacheco lp Alvamar Tadei, Andrea Beltrão, Ariel Coelho, Bené Nunes, Colé Carlo Mossi, Danielle Daumerri, Dedina Bernadelli, Felipe Falcão, Ivon Curi, John Herbert, Leo Jaime. (página 409-410)