Contents Nº 6

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Nº 6 THE POETRY OF THE EARTH. PORTUGUESE CINEMA: RITE OF SPRING

Editorial. The poetry of the earth
Gonzalo de Lucas

DOCUMENTS

A certain tendency in Portuguese cinema
Alberto Seixas Santos

To Manoel de Oliveira
Luis Miguel Cintra

The direct experience. Between Northern cinema and Japan
Paulo Rocha

Conversation with Pedro Costa. The encounter with António Reis
Anabela Moutinho, Maria da Graça Lobo

ARTICLES

The theatre in Manoel de Oliveira's cinema

ABSTRACT

Based on his experience as both an actor and spectator in Manuel de Oliviera’s films, the author reflects about the relation of the filmmaker with theatre, and his way of working the space, the texts, the actors and time. From Acto da Primavera, conceived as a truly poetic art, this essay visits Oliveira’s filmography to show the way in which his films are based in documentary to reach the actor, and how artifice and representation is constructed from there as the best way of capturing the truth of a mysterious reality: the human life.

Luis Miguel Cintra

An eternal modernity

ABSTRACT

The ascendency of Acto da Primavera (1962-63) by Manoel de Oliviera, in different generations of filmmakers, places the film in a privileged place in the history of Portuguese cinema. This influence, which transcends time and individual poetics, is here clarified with the notion of pedagogy –applied by the critic Serge Daney to the cases of Godard and Straub, and theoretically broadened later by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze– that followed the war trauma in the mid-20th century and the consecutive deterioration of the idea of the cinematic classic. Therefore, certain precepts assumed by Oliviera in this film, such as the ethnographic respect and the archaeological will towards a lyrical transcendence through imagination and memory games, can be followed in the work of some of the main modern and contemporary Portuguese filmmakers such as Paulo Rocha, António Reis y Margarida Cordeiro, António Campos, João César Monteiro, Joaquim Pinto, Pedro Costa or Manuela Serra. However, Acto da Primavera, whose baseline is the registration of the annual representation of the Passion of Christ according to an auto from the 16th century, staged by the inhabitants of Curalha themselves, also teaches that cinema is rather related to the arts that precede it –a repository of forms, ideas, gestures and affects- than to any attempt of assimilation of a language or grammar. Following, for example, the fertile concept of collage as a work that assembles different elements and overcomes the illusion of originality by highlighting the difference in what seems a repetition, Oliviera’s proceeds could be related to that of other filmmakers such as Paulo Rocha, António Campos or João César Monteiro.

Alfonso Crespo

Scenes from the class struggle in Portugal

ABSTRACT

Between April 1974, when the Carnation Revolution started, and 1982, 116 films were produced in Portugal. The Film Series Despois de abril. Cine portugués 1974-1982, gathers together and relate 11 of these films to study those post-revolutionary years of upheaval. The author shows how the series not only enables a panoramic view of the cinema of those years, but projects it on the present, on Portuguese cinema of the following decades and on certain questions of representation of that cinema. One of the purposes of the film series was to show the extreme vitality of Portuguese Cinema of the time, the variety of filmmakers who coming from very different generations (that of the sixties, that of the seventies, besides from Oliviera) converge in a concrete historical moment sharing both interests and concerns around the notion of mise-en-scène, and configuring a possible national style. In the same way, the paper observes that the radicalization of these first revolutionary moments will decrease with the years, while the cinematographic radicalization, by contrast, will be accentuated.

Jaime Pena

Aesthetic Tendencies in Contemporary Portuguese Cinema

ABSTRACT

Contemporary Portuguese cinema has become a privileged meeting point for several aesthetic tendencies inherited from film modernity. Filmmakers such as Pedro Costa, João Canijo, João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata, Miguel Gomes, João Nicolau, Susana de Sousa Dias and Gonçalo Tocha, among others, have developed new forms of storytelling away from mainstream conventions, in which they suggest the possibility of joining national identity and transnational links. This paper, therefore, aims to discuss some of the main aesthetic features shared by these filmmakers, such as the experimentation with genres, the mixture of documentary and fiction, the critical revision of archival footage and the aesthetics of distance. These links have strengthened the position of Portuguese cinema in the interconnected network of reciprocal influences that has recently replaced the old paradigm of national cinemas. Arguably, then, contemporary Portuguese cinema addresses national issues as part of an ongoing dialogue with other film industries.

Horacio Muñoz Fernández, Iván Villarmea Álvarez

Susana de Sousa Dias and the ghosts of the Portuguese dictatorship

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to investigate Susana de Sousa Dias’ work as one of the exponents of the Portuguese cinema made about the Salazar dictatorship. 48 (2009) and Natureza Morta (2005) utilize portraits of political prisoners and found footage from the police in order to criticize and reflect upon the regime and its consequences on people’s lives. Thus, the director produces a discourse that resists from the inside, turning government material into her own weapons. Describing Sousa Dias’ work in editing and sound design (for instance the change of speed of the images, the lighting, the slow fades, the soundtrack composed of dissonant noises), the paper argues that these films set a phantasmagoric atmosphere and seem to be part of what we call “horror documentary”.

Mariana Souto