The Empty Boat: Meteorango Kid and Brazilian Cinema Marginal

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers André Luiz Oliveira’s Meteorango Kid – O herói intergalático (1969), an important yet often overlooked contribution to Brazilian Cinema Marginal of late 1960s and early 1970s. These low-budget, black and white cinematic productions rejected the revolutionary nationalism of Cinema Novo and embraced instead an “aesthetics of garbage” that conveyed a position of marginality and scarcity among the outcasts and misfits of society. Cinema Marginal captured the sense of disillusionment and impotence among middle-class youth during the most repressive phase of authoritarian rule in Brazil. It coincided with Tropicália, a countercultural movement with manifestations in all realms of artistic production, but principally identified with popular music. Playful and dreamlike in some of its sequences, Meteorango Kid also takes nightmarish turns in its exploration of revolt and alienation among a disaffected university student in Salvador, the capital city of Bahia, a mecca for the Brazilian hippies, who dropped out of conventional society to pursue a drug-fueled alternative lifestyle known as desbunde. This article situates Meteorango Kid in relation to Cinema Novo, Cinema Marginal, and Tropicália, while considering its acerbic critique of conservative Bahian society, the nationalist left, and the emergent youth counterculture.