O Ataque das Araras is a Hawksian adventure. The story of an invasion, as a film crew from Boca do Lixo, São Paulo’s low budget film industry, gets on a boat passing through Rio Negro in the Amazon. The destination is a meeting with filmmaker Marcio Souza, who is there directing a play with locals, but along the way Ferreira finds time for many digressions. Numerous names from Boca do Lixo are present with different agendas: João Calegaro, whose excellent gangster film O Pornografo was co-written by Ferreira, is shooting a commercial, while the more low-brow Osvaldo de Oliveira is leading a second unit crew with Carlos Reichenbach at hand as cinematographer. And there’s Souza himself, the one player who is not there as an outsider, who got his start in the São Paulo underground scene. All these multiple views and agendas – plus those of Ferreira himself – in order to explore the Rio Negro, thus underscoring the way in which the more inventive avant-garde cinema from São Paulo has a curious incestuos-commercial relationship with the low-brow industry. More than any other of his films, O Ataque das Araras collapses the distinction between written word and filmed world, as well as that between the possibilities of film analysis in an avant-garde essay-film and the thrills of a narrative. Ferreira’s off-screen narration is a tour de force in which he comments, jokes, narrates and finds meaning in the most unexpected situations. It is a true film of exploration, a laboratory to examine exploitation, and a celebration of inventive cinema.

Ferreira is at his freest in his hour-long films. O Vampiro da Cinemateca and O Insigne Ficante are blunt, direct works that take us by surprise with their candidness. One feels they were intended only for an audience of friends. Like the best work of a Raúl Ruiz or a Monte Hellman, one never knows what will show up in the next shot; the film’s tone shifts between every sort of emotion. In one of the great scenes of Vampiro the poet Orlando Parolini is giving a passionate reading, when the sound starts to get worse and Jairo, in a rage off-screen, announces that the sound is crap due to Kodak attempting to cheapen its product by using a low quality sound range. There is a fragile quality to those films in how home-made they feel; when Paulo Sacramento – the young filmmaker to whom Ferreira left his films and who was at the time working on a limited DVD edition of Jairo’s complete oeuvre – presented a special screening of O Insigne Ficante, he told the audience that this would be the first time the film would ever be project by a different projectionist. This says a lot about how private these films were. Later, at the end of the screening, the previous projectionist showed up to talk with Sacramento, and told him that he might not be up there in the projection booth, but that did not mean he would let the film be shown without him – and that which says a lot, too, about the passion these films can generate.

Vampirism is a central concept to Vampiro, as Ezra Pound and the ideogram are for Insigne Ficante. The vampirism concept haunts Ferreira’s film work as a sort of filmic update of modernist writer/theoretician Oswald de Andrade literary anthropophagy – one of the many refreshing things about Ferreira’s work is that, although he is a hardcore cinephile, he takes just as many ideas from poets like Andrade, the Campos brothers, Pound, Blake, Lautreamount and Mayakovsky as from other films. So, if Andrade talked about how the Brazilian poet had to become a cannibal in order to eat European modernism for his own ends, the cinephile has to learn to become a vampire in order to deal with our expansive audiovisual memory. Ferreira’s vampirism is nothing if not democratic: Citizen Kane (1941), F For Fake (1974) and Fuller’s Underworld USA (1961) are key texts, but so is Robert Fuest’s The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971), which pops up again and again throughout. The vampire filmmaker learns to suck the blood from his influences and puts it back into the streets of his city, as he literally does in a great montage where Fuller’s film loses itself inside São Paulo’s own underworld. Earlier on, the film announces itself as ‘notes left in a napkin’, and that is how it proceeds. Julio Bressane’s O Rei do Baralho (1973) turns into a Bruce Lee film, and the Marquise in The Towering Inferno (1974) becomes a symbol for the Brazilian filmmaker’s state of mind.

A recurring motif throughout is showing filmmakers who act as if possessed by an unknown entity – the exception being José Mojica Marins, who can reign supreme as the creator of avant-garde horror, both a popular filmmaker and a true inventor of cinematic forms. In one of its most inspired moments, as the narration tells us that what we are seeing is a homage to the very popular Brazilian sex comedies of the period, we get a close-up of a man masturbating – an act of extreme provocation to be sure, but also registering as a genuine gesture towards an audience which critical discourse usually only condescends to. Whenever Jairo finds time to turn away from cinema and back to the street, the film – for all its anger – breathes as a sublime São Paulo movie, with a great eye and ear for the city’s everyday movement.

O Insigne Ficante, on the other hand, is a film haunted by the idea of meaning. Ferreira’s most reflexive work, it begins as a discussion of Pound’s ideas about literary criticism and how they can relate to film criticism – but soon becomes something else as it takes one detour after another in a sea of digressions. The film keeps getting interrupted from excerpts that came from nowhere (a scene from Ozualdo Candeias’ AOpção with Ferreira himself as a crazy preacher who ends up naked, a Speedy Gonzales cartoon, a making-of a Julio Bressane picture), or a conference with Werner Herzog. In the film’s centerpiece, a trip to Europe is illustrated by a lengthy analysis of Bressane’s early work and critical reception. As the discussion goes on, we start to understand that we are hearing a letter that Ferreira received from a friend, and with this the meaning changes: the sequence ends with the revelation that this friend – film critic Inácio Araujo – was hospitalised at the time and that Ferreira was meeting him in Paris, which again shifts the focus by adding context to the letter and explaining why it had been juxtaposed with random images of London and Paris. A later scene, in which Araujo talks about Jorge Luis Borges and cinephilia, is shot in such a way as to underline its theatricality: one begins to suspect that maybe the letter was a ruse, or maybe not – but that it does not really matter. Insigne Ficante is less angry and more contemplative than Vampiro, but it has time for some unforgettable images, and finds its centre in the notion of the critic as inventor. And while the previous film found its peace in São Paulo’s streets, this one carries a portrait of Jairo’s milieu and friends, who get much more screen time than in any of his other films.

Ferreira finest and most political film is Horror Palace Hotel. This forty-minute piece does many things at once: it is an essay about the state of Brazilian cinema, which unfortunately has not yet dated enough; a spot-on look at how film functions within a film festival; a haunted house movie; and a contagious narrative. It was shot during the 1978 Brasilia Film Festival, where a small horror sidebar is going on, in the hotel where everyone that works around the festival (filmmakers, journalists) is staying. This most angry of Ferreira’s films, it is his most focused on achieving, through close observation and a perfect structure, both physical precision and an ambitious allegorical tendency. Using Rogério Sganzerla as a guide and José Mojica Marins as a main object, Horror Palace Hotel slowly arrives at its central targets by transgressing all borders. The horror sidebar becomes something much larger, thanks to Ferreira’s camera: it becomes whole repressed history of Brazilian cinema. Horror, we learn, is not just a genre there anymore, but everything that does not fit into official history; the film thus restages an invasion of the official event by those who represent the repressed. A new history of cinematic forms takes over.

Ferreira always exhibited a taste for the supernatural, and he puts it to great use here, as horror becomes both the main metaphor and general state of things. The Hotel becomes a true haunted house, but the ghosts here are those of Brazilian cinema’s failure. Off-screen is put to fine use, as the film concentrates on what is usually never shown – whether those filmmakers who are ignored, or life at the hotel rather than the movie theatre. Horror Palace Hotel is Ferreira’s most negative work, its bleakness much greater than its small victories. Its dissatisfaction works like a contagious disease. Late in the film, Ferreira asks respected mainstream critic Francisco de Almeida Salles and Rudá de Andrade – Oswald’s son and then one of main administrators of Brazilian cinemateque – to play dog for the camera; as an almost possessed Andrade happily throws himself into the task, the film’s mad logic seems to finally take over everything. The repressed get their victory; the horror sidebar devours the main selection; Mojica Marins can take his place as the total genius which the film promises.

Jairo Ferreira lived for cinema, including Brazilian cinema; his filmic and written work can be seen as a vast map that involves the richness of Brazilian culture, movies and life – and the path one must take in order to turn it all into what Ferreira valued above all else: invention.