Resumen

The films of Edgar Pêra are, more often than not, characterized as marginal in the Portuguese context. Responsible for more than a hundred projects in different media (Cinema, Television, Comics and Transmedia) for three decades, Pêra has been active working on several projects that, in a certain way, make him “an artist who cannot be defined by way of facile comparisons and generalisations, explained through simple similes, boxed into this genre or that aesthetic” (Moller, 2019). In Pêra’s films, the screen is usually invaded by a frenetic visual panoply that combines both the serious and the comic, the ridicule and the grotesque, as well as the documentary and the fictional all in a seemingly unique anarchic movement. This is the case of Delírio in Las Vedras (2017), a film commissioned by the Torres Vedras Council where the director films Carnival – and the carnivalesque – in a movement that blurs the distinction between the real and its altered state (the surreal?). From this exercise emerges a film that explores both the Torres Vedras’ Carnival within Portuguese culture, but also how this tradition is used as a place of inquiry of the national culture. Taking this into account, the purpose of this study is to look into how Edgar Pêra uses Delírio in Las Vedras – both a documentary and a fiction film – and the Carnival as a transgressive space, both geographic and filmic.