1968 was a watershed year for Brazil, when the military dictatorship entered its most repressive phase and the fecund leftist culture of the 1960s was extinguished. In the face of that year’s dramatic intensification of cultural censorship and the forced and voluntary exiles of many cultural figures, a wide range of artists, filmmakers, and poets embraced an ethos of aesthetic and social marginality. From 1968 onward, the young underground filmmakers grouped around Júlio Bressane and Rógerio Sganzerla re-vindicated Glauber Rocha’s original theorization of an “aesthetics of hunger” and spliced it with the B-movie horror tradition of São Paulo auteur José Mojica Marins to produce a “cinema of garbage.” In direct dialogue with the marginal film movement, and in continuation of Lygia Clark’s abandonment of the production of “commodifiable” art objects, after 1968 numerous Brazilian artists turned to the moving image as a means for self-exploration and political resistance.

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