Discussion of Brazilian-born filmmakers who have worked in Britain is generally limited to the work of Alberto Cavalcanti. However, an extension of government crackdowns in late 1960s Brazil led to the exile of Brazilian artists and musicians, including the experimental cinema marginal director Júlio Bressane, whose Memórias de um Estrangulador de Loiras ( Memoirs of a Strangler of Blondes ) was shot in London in 1971. This article addresses how this little-known and barely released film, influenced by an all-night screening of strangler-themed films at London’s Electric Cinema, presents an investigation and systemization of genre tropes with regard to its director’s contemplation of, in his own words, ‘the cliché’s inappropriate and imperfect nomadism’ and ‘the pathos of experiment’. It also considers Bressane’s film in relation to exile, genre, the iconography of the blonde in Hollywood and Hollywood-adjacent cinema and in the context of British experimental and genre cinema of the period, together with its position in Bressane’s own self-referential and ongoing filmography.
Philip Todd (Sat,) studied this question.