In 2021, while I was working on the research for Rogério Sganzerla’s book for the Cadernos de Cinema collection, I came across an article published in Manchete magazine, which told of the meeting, in the 1990s, between the filmmaker and João Acácio, the mythical Red Light Bandit who was the subject of Sganzerla’s debut feature film, in 1968, considered one of the great classics of Brazilian cinema. It was a gem! I reproduce here the excerpt from my essay in the book, which recounts this meeting between one of the most brilliant filmmakers we’ve ever had and the man who inspired him in his greatest work. [Sergio Cohn]
In the 1990s, Sganzerla had already made three short or medium-length films: Anonymous and Uncommon, about the visual artist Antonio Manuel (a contemporary who has parallels with the filmmaker, as in his series “Clandestinas”, where he uses parodic and imaginary headlines to be inserted into newspapers, such as “Chupava sangue dando garhadas”), Isto é Noel, again about Noel Rosa, in partnership with the editor Silvio Rinoldi (the same as in “Bandido da Luz Vermelha”), and Perigo Negro (Black Danger), based on a script by Oswald de Andrade, published in Revista do Brasileiro in 1938, and taken from the novel Marco Zero, a fiction filmed in a more classic tone, which portrays the rise and fall of a soccer player as seen by a fanatical fan and his fickle wife, dazzled by the “cartola” Moscosão, who ends the star’s career.
It was also a period of reunions. In 1994, Rogério was invited by Manchete magazine to visit João Acácio, the Red Light Bandit, in prison, accompanied by journalist Celso Arnaldo Araújo. This is how Celso recounted the meeting:
He arrives for the meeting, in the gallery that gives access to Pavilion 1 of the Carandiru Penitentiary, with his face closed and suspicious – very much like an irredeemable bandit. But he soon softens. He remembers my name and surname, eight years after another interview, and, of course, he knows that Sganzerla is the director of his movie. He starts talking compulsively – the words come out in spurts, mixing religiosity with elucidations on power. It’s hard to bring him back to reality, especially the reality of the bandit’s genesis, 27 years ago. The scarf on his face? As a child, he frequented the matinees of the masked hero series, such as Durango Kid, Captain Marvel and Zorro. “As Captain Marvel, I had to destroy the army in a movie.” It’s just one of the many plots that Acácio imaginatively scripts, films and shows. Rogério tries to direct him: “Speak more slowly, don’t mix God with these things”. To no avail. João Acácio’s cinematographic mind is as fertile and prolix as a Hong Kong studio making tapes on an assembly line. At times, it thrills the audience. His description of his first murder is exquisite. “It’s a complete movie sequence ready to shoot” – Rogério would later say. Imagine the scene: the son of the housewife he was about to rob comes out of the window, startled by the noise, takes aim with his lead shotgun and misses his target. Acácio retorts and hits the target. He hears the sirens of the police. Wearing a suit and bare feet, he walks out calmly, as if he were a neighborhood executive, humming Roberto Carlos. The car passes him, slows down, but keeps going – meters later there’s a desperate mother, mourning the death of her son. At this point, Acácio – already transformed into the Red Light Bandit – is far away. Just as far away as today, 27 years later, when this 51-year-old man has only three more years to serve in a cell lined with chocolate wrappers. Would he make a Red Light Bandit II? “It just might,” sighs Rogério. Now there’s an idea to boost the country’s ailing movie industry.
Sganzerla’s long article about his meeting with the legendary Bandido, published on January 15, 1994, is also a celebration of marginality, in response to the country’s systemic corruption:
A mythical, monomaniacal character from our times is being sought alive, the one who was, still is and always will be the Red Light, a character from our fearful times.
A name of war that echoed in every mouth, from the mouth of luxury to the mouth of the garbage dump, as well as in the mouths of rifles and machine guns.
Fame never fully corresponds to the truth.
Has Brazil changed or has the bandit changed?
Who was that Arsène Lupin of the poor? Robin Hood or the national Zorro? Always with the Bible within reach, this criminal who has spent more than half his life in jail is reminiscent of the mystical saga of Antônio Conselheiro and Lampião, as he is nothing more than an anti-hero of the tropical kleptocracy.
At first haughty and self-absorbed, when he hears the word Manchete he loses his mask and reveals himself to be cordial and even affable. The out-of-place “facies” is reminiscent of Mick Jagger and even the actor Paulo Villaça, who revived him in the police film I directed, narrated by a sports commentator in 1968. A typical representative of a generation with its feet on the ground, about to serve the maximum sentence in the country, like all of us he has two sides. One side we know. The other, only God knows. It’s not even worth talking about his crimes. It would be like lying to God, what’s the point?
There’s a hidden vanity in Luz’s heart that never tires of fighting against his past, because when he acted in the megalopolis, the brave went to bed early and the women went to bed late… He’s only alive because he suffered more than enough due to a brain short-circuit. His drama is infinite, like Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables:
“- I lived the revolution of national cinema practiced with divine powers and not only through the magnates of cheap cinema. I destroyed the world of appearances and became the God of cinema.”
After 27 years, we met her face to face, after going through the underground of the Carandiru complex, where even the jailers respect her and recognize her fame. But how much youth is lost, how much illusion is wasted! All the prisoners of his time are already out on the street, but his sentence runs until March 15, 2319. He’ll only be released at the mandatory age of 30. He has a theory: the germ of crime is on the street, where anyone who doesn’t have money in their pocket isn’t considered a person, because there are two codes in this land. The civil code for the rich and the penal code for the poor… To live is to learn to think, and if dying means resting, I simply prefer to die tired!
The heavy accent of this southern caboclo, thrown into the middle of a concrete jungle, denounces his gospel, which sometimes sounds like a joke. Medical, legal or social case? The Red Light is not anti-social, but a-social, and when he lets loose he never stops, like the crime movie I directed, which is becoming more and more topical. The excess of information makes him enigmatic, if not hermetic, for those who don’t know his endearing manner.
But he has a word, the cops recognize, even though he doesn’t have much to save inside or outside prison. Or even the filthy third, where everything is illegal and the nearest exit is crime or the airport.
The afternoon was too short for everything he said about being an enemy of human tranquillity. The play of sublimations, identifications of opposites, the rich contrasts and the excess of ideas seemed to confine him to the condition of a monomaniac, willing to accept only his own laws! His explosive cocktail linked totems with fetishes – the famous panty collections, the mania for red roses, the mother-of-pearl handles of his late 38, as well as divine punishment, the shamelessness of sycophants, police station door lawyers, the immutable human stupidity, misery with a lower case, the institutionalized mess and the merciless corporation that tortured him, leaving indelible traces.
Apart from that, he has a good memory and confesses to having felt a lot of fear, without showing it when chased by the police, almost always escaping thanks to his famous straight face. The former gangster of the most heinous crime (rape) traveled this path of no return with cleanliness and even made a point of changing his clothes to be featured in his favorite magazine. The only question he couldn’t answer with ease was my question: why do you comb your hair forward?
“That’s the way I’ve always been and if I’m repulsive to the world, where my songs and plots are a success, I won’t complain, because I don’t tolerate stupid people in suits, dressed and combed according to the Capivarol almanac!”
He’s like that, unpredictable. Probably only the criminal cinema of the great American phase could explain it, or the inverted image of a cinematographic mirror of a Brazil conflicted between its two antagonistic parts. Luz is like the knot of wood that explodes in the fire, leaving us stunned by so many definitive truths about our responsibility.
From gentle thug to Christian boy, you can’t even compare him (or put him in the same criminal recognition room) with the examples coming from above, be it the harmful nettle or the parasitic weeds of our paper-mache politicians. Faced with the reality of the dwarves and other ethical homunculi, he seems to be a physical and spiritual giant, an ethical reserve and a moral holder who only finds resonance in the depth of Conselheiro or the indignation of Lampião – nerves exposed and thwarted by the climate of impunity that makes all logic tremble, but not dogma. If you want to know who Brazil’s greatest living bandit is, Luz himself is a small figure and doesn’t even pay.
In 1997, after serving 30 years in prison, the maximum sentence in Brazil, João Acácio was released. A few months later, he was murdered in a bar fight in his hometown in Paraná. But Sganzerla and Acácio’s career would continue to intertwine over the following years: in 2001, the filmmaker, again in partnership with Silvio Rinoldi, made a short film, B2, with unseen excerpts from the original film, as well as a performance from the time by Gal Costa, accompanied by Jards Macalé and Lanny Gordin and playing the song “Eu Sou Terrible”, by Roberto and Erasmo Carlos. Sganzerla also wrote the script for Luz nas Trevas (Light in Darkness), which was directed in 2010 by Helena Ignez, in partnership with Ícaro Martins and featuring singer Ney Matogrosso in the role of a mature Red Light Bandit, who leaves prison 30 years later to find his son. The film is a successful homage to Sganzerla’s classic.