In Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s “Macunaima,” no individual can be fully labeled a victim. The original 110-minute version of the 1968 film has been restored and is screening tonight as part of the 42nd New York Film Festival.

Filmed at a time of increasingly violent military dictatorship in Brazil, “Macunaima” is absurdist cinema at its best. It pulls no punches in its portrayal of First World capitalism as a caustic system utterly connected to Third World malaise. But rather than merely lay out a moral framework of good and evil, director Joaquim Andrade crafted a hilariously complex picture of Brazilian society and its hefty 20th-century project of constructing a national identity.

The film is an updating of Manoel de Andrade’s 1928 novel of the same name. Arguably the central work of Brazilian literary Modernism, this novel is widely perceived as anticipating the magical realism found in later Latin American masterpieces like Isabel Allende’s “The House of the Spirits” and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The novel is much more surreal than the film, but both attempt to fashion a Brazilian identity that incorporates folklore and indigenous culture into the unstoppable European and North-American influences.

Yet between novel and film, almost 40 years had passed, and Brazil had moved from a defunct economy to a military coup d’etat. The new political regime had provoked a cultural return to the nationalistic project of the 1920s among whom, but now with self-critical eyes. Weary of simply labeling one thing popular and another erudite, Mr. Andrade brought the idea of cannibalism to the foreground of his film and turned magical realism into social criticism.

Set in a fictional Brazil of the 1960s, the films tells the story of a black baby, the movie’s namesake, born fully grown into a small clan of cannibals in the jungle. Macunaima, played by comedic legend Grande Otelo, is forced to migrate to Rio de Janeiro after his uncanny laziness and his obsession with the opposite sex becomes a drawback for his indigenous family.

In one of the film’s funniest scenes, after Macunaima has been permanently transformed into a tall white man, he dares to display a third identity: wearing a bright pink dress and a five-cent Barbie wig. Since realism is not Macunaima’s forte, he struggles even to qualify as a disheveled drag queen. However unconvincing it might be, Macunaima’s female facade grants him an invitation to an intimate dinner with the upper-class Venceslau Pietro Pietra, an entrepreneur who happens to be the film’s most unforgiving cannibal.

Aware that his life is in danger, Macunaima cuts through unnecessary dialogue and asks Venceslau for the Muraquita, a precious gem which once belonged to Macunaima’s lover, Ci. (A female guerilla fighter who was accidentally killed after staging an unsuccessful terrorist attack against the state.) Macunaima and Venceslau somehow conclude that a strip-tease should be worth the value of the stone, and as Macunaima clumsily sheds each layer of clothing, the camera dances to a wide shot that shows the bitter excess of the leftover republican palace that seems to be Venceslau’s house.

The room, like the country Brazil (some would claim), is filled with beauty and disparity. The tiger-stripe decor – a clear reference to Exxon’s animal mascot – faux-Egyptian tiles, and live mannequins inside glass display cases are all filmed in highly saturated colors. Their images clash, yet they come together into a conceivable portrayal of a nation.

The curators of the 42nd New York Film Festival are screening “Macunaima” one day before “Viva Pedro!” – a one-night discussion with the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. They not only invite us to compare films and national cinemas but to find commonalities between the ex-colonizers and ex-colonized. (Brazilian cinematographer Affonso Beato, who filmed Mr. Almodovar’s “All About My Mother” and “Live Flesh,” took over the camera work in the last quarter of the shooting of “Macunaima.”) But mostly, this Brazilian film shares with Mr. Almodovar’s oeuvre an outstanding capacity to mourn any injustice and laugh at any misery.

– Rodrigo Brandao

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At the end of the 1940s, as the Neorealist renaissance entered high summer, Jean Cocteau penned an open letter to budding cineastes, encouraging them to take up cheap, flexible 16mm cameras and release their dreams. “You young people,” he wrote, “who go into the shadow theater and emerge with your heads buzzing, you should express yourself with this light pen and not fear the barbed-wire fence that that has been set up around a pseudo-mystery. The mystery is in yourselves and writing with pictures will let you expel it if it is stifling you.”

Jonathan Caouette is the latest Young Turk to answer this call. Wielding the newest light pen, a computer mouse, he has written “Tarnation,” an experimental memoir, an exorcism of demons, a mystery in pixels. After a sensational debut at the MIX festival (New York’s forum for avant-garde gay and lesbian filmmaking) last year, “Tarnation” dazzled Sundance and razzled Cannes before returning home for a slot in the New York Film Festival and a theatrical run, starting today, at Film Forum. At each stop along the way, this startling video has exploded on the scene with the force of something new yet inevitable, the scratching of a cultural itch.

A psychedelic montage of texts, photographs, home movies, voicemail recordings, pop songs, and found footage, “Tarnation” is a landmark of Hard Drive Cinema. Mr. Caouette is the iProust, editing, inputting, digitizing, and shuffling the entire archive of his memories in Control-F search of lost time. From Jonas Mekas to Ross McElwee to the Chris Marker of “Sans Soleil,” the cinememoir occupies a well-established niche at the margins of cinema practice. “Tarnation” hacks the form; more than memoir, it downloads the zeitgeist.

Like “Russian Ark,” another multi-gig milestone, “Tarnation” boots up from a crisis. From his apartment in Greenpoint, Mr. Caouette receives a call that his mother has overdosed on lithium. As he prepares to visit her, the movie initiates its loose chronology. Through a densely layered mix of visual and audio materials, he rewinds the heart-wrenching story of Renee LeBlanc, a bright and beautiful young girl who one day fell from a roof without bending her knees. Convinced that her ensuing paralysis was psychosomatic, her parents subjected her to shock therapy. When she emerged, all traces of her former personality were gone.

What follows is a family chronicle of nearly unbearable anguish. Maturing into a still beautiful but deeply damaged woman, Renee gives birth to Jonathan. By his fourth birthday he has witnesses his mother raped and imprisoned, bounced through foster homes, and suffering at the hands of terrifying abuse. By age 11, he has become an effeminate, alarmingly precocious boy; in “Tarnation’s” most riveting scene, he records himself in the shattering role-play of an abused housewife. His first taste of marijuana, given to him by a friend of Renee’s, leads to the first of eight hospitalizations of the film, the two joints having been laced with PCP and dipped in formaldehyde.

A screen text notes onset of “depersonalization disorder”: “persistent or recurrent episodes of feeling detached from, and as if one is an outside observer of, one’s own mental processes or body (feeling like one is in a dream).” Mr. Caouette, who exposes all, never elaborates on this subject; whether a genuine medical condition or not, the diagnosis lends “Tarnation” enormous resonance. Through the distortions of his angry kaleidoscope, the filmmaker’s experience reflects that of an entire generation; pop culture as sickly lifeblood, the irrational experienced as matter-of-fact, identity mediated through technology, a floating sense of dislocation from “reality.” Extreme as it is, “Tarnation” stands with “Donnie Darko” as a precise and telling document of post-Warhol youth culture.

– Nathan Lee