Remembrances of the Yellow House / Recordaçoes da Casa Amarela (João César Monteiro, Portugal, 1989)

The title Remembrances of the Yellow House refers not to one “yellow house” (slang in Portuguese for “prison”) but to any place over the course of a person’s life where one feels confined, humiliated, criminalized. For the character of João de Deus (played by writer/director Monteiro), it’s not just his childhood home, or the very peculiar sanatorium he’s committed to – it’s also the entire country of Portugal. “This country, my sirs, is a bottomless pit” Monteiro announces in voiceover in his first feature-length film, He Who Waits For a Dead Man’s Shoes Dies Barefoot (1970). Four features and nearly twenty years later, Monteiro is still digging himself into the pit, as João, a pensioner who decides to impersonate a Salazar-era military official, is arrested and put into a mental reformatory as a subversive. In this place (filmed in an actual reformatory, now retired), João encounters a character from Monteiro’s first film, Livio, who gives him money and offers these words of wisdom: “Give them [the outside world] trouble!” João, sitting with Livio in a barren courtyard, leaps to his feat and begins to sprint. A 380 degree pan follows João as he returns to Livio, revealing the courtyard as circular and zoetrope-like. João has come back to the same place, his gesture fleeting, worthless. He sits, his hysteria recorded, the audience awaiting his next move…

Familia du Barúlho (Júlio Bressane, Brazil, 1969)

In Bressane’s deliberately formless works of the late 1960′s and 70′s, the order of scenes appear arbitrary and the length of shots seem determined by however many minutes of unexposed film are still running through the camera. Systematically avoiding weighty punctuation – any image that we may find memorable or aesthetically daring or key in unlocking the films’ mysteries – Bressane reaches the apex of his style in Familia du Barúlho (roughly “One of a Kind Family”), a film that nevertheless betrays the director’s normal conventions in one simple but visually assaulting shot: Brazilian Cinema Novo muse Helena Ignez, playing a ferocious dominatrix in an odd family dynamic consisting of her and two scheming male buffoons, stares tensely into the camera for a conspicuous four minutes. This, the most austere scene in the film, abruptly changes into a flash-fusion of European avant-garde imagery and Brazilian Tropicalism as Ignez expels a dark liquid from her mouth which runs down her chin and leaves a stain resembling the characteristic body paint of the Amazonian Tupi-Guarani tribe. Carmen Miranda may have epitomized the exotic South American woman, but Helena Ignez forged something wholly original: the Tropicalist femme fatale.