One of the great films about movie love, failed ambition, and personal destruction, Carlos Reichenbach’s aptly titled Movie Dementia (or the more evocative Filme Demência in Portuguese) really stunned me when I saw it in 2023. Because it has remained a lesser-known commodity in English-speaking cinephile circles, there’s really no option but to present the film to a larger audience: I’ll be screening it on Wednesday, August 27 at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research as part of my series Amnesiascope, for which tickets are now on-sale.
A transposing of the Faust myth to then-contemporary São Paulo, Movie Dementia‘s satire might be placed among a bourgeois malaise prevalent in Brazil at the time, but its social targeting––telling of the heir to a bankrupt cigarette empire who abandons his life while guided by a Mephisto like figure towards doom––has lost none of its import nearly 40 years on. Reichenbach’s film is nevertheless severely underseen, and this forthcoming event is a proper occasion for discovery. As Filipe Furtado said, “A great (the greatest?) São Paulo film and one that also doubles as a long immersion in the city’s film history till the mid 80s.”
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