Keilla Conceição Petrin Grande

THE RED LIGHT BANDIT: A DISSONANT THIRD WORLD POLYPHONY

Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica de Minas Gerais-CEFET/MG, Brazil

The present work aims at studying the screenplay for The Red Light Bandit (1968), based on the multiple voices that form the plot of the narrative and also the composition of the protagonist. In his text, Rogério Sganzerla sets in motion a series of fragmentary, contradictory, dissonant speeches, expressed by no less incongruous enunciators: radio announcers, anonymous characters, electronic billboards, parts of journalistic texts, TV programs, in addition to the truncated speeches of the bandit himself. In this way, the screenplay is created from a game of dissonances, through the excessive accumulation of data, information, facts (unproven), which, instead of leading the narrative to the formation of a broad and well-connected fictional universe, results in a fragmented and dispersive thread, in which it would be useless to join the parts, because they do not correspond to each other to form a cohesive whole. This fractured and disjointed form that the screenplay takes leads us to a reading of The Bandit from the perspective of allegory as conceptualized by Walter Benjamin. For the German theorist, unlike the symbol, the allegory is inorganic and does not compose a unity between its parts; thus, there is no possibility of teleology, and the story does not move towards an evolutionary and redemptive process, it moves simply towards catastrophe. It is within these aspects – a dissonant polyphony and a shattered structure – that we also consider Sganzerla’s screenplay as an allegory of the Brazil that is contemporary to him: a chaotic, fragmented society, with depersonalized individuals and disintegrated institutions. In addition to Benjamin, our theoretical contribution is also based on the studies of critics Ismail Xavier, Jean-Claude Bernardet, and Mikhail Bakhtin.

Graduated in Literature from Centro Universitário do Sul de Minas – Portuguese and English languages and their literature; Master’s degree in Language Studies from the Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica de Minas Gerais – CEFET/MG, whose research was on the relationship between the work of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and cinema. PhD from the Postgraduate Program in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universidade de São Paulo-USP, with research on cinematographic scripts as a literary genre based on the study of three Brazilian scripts: Limite (Limit) (1931), by Mário Peixto; Terra em transe (Earth in trance) (1967), by Glauber Rocha and O bandido da Luz Vermelha (The Red Light Bandit) (1968), by Rogério Sganzerla. Teacher since 2005, with experience in teaching Portuguese Language and Literature; professor at Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica de Minas Gerais – CEFET/MG since 2014. Member of the research group called Script Studies: files, processes and cartography.