Cine-File on Manoel de Oliveira
December 11th, 2008 by PatrickCine-File contributor Ben Sachs’ coverage of the Gene Siskel Film Center’s retrospective on Manoel de Oliveira earlier this year:
The Films of Manoel de Oliveira (Retrospective)
In a culture given to nearly constant update and revision, the films of Manoel de Oliveira offer a much-needed sense of permanence. Writers are quick to impart significance to Oliveira’s age (He turns 100 this fall, which makes this mini-retrospective double as a celebration), but more valuable are the intimations of eternity that mark his best work. Continuing a Modernist tradition in which a work of art becomes a personal repository of various aesthetic, historic, and philosophical legacies, Oliveira achieves with moving images what James Joyce and T.S. Eliot did with the written word—illuminating the present moment with the light of antiquity. This ambition is already apparent in Oliveira’s first film, DUORO, WORKING RIVER (1931, 18 min, 35mm), a short city symphony about the director’s home town of Oporto, Portugal. Juxtaposing the city’s modern architecture with the daily activities of working men, the film ponders the complex relationship between Civilization and the individuals who inhabit it. DUORO is, appropriately, the first in the Film Center’s series; it screens with Oliveira’s equally hard-to-find first feature ANIKI-BOBO (1942, 70 min, 35mm), a tale of impoverished children which the program notes describe as “a playful precursor to neorealism.” Also playing this week is VALLEY OF ABRAHAM (1993, 187 min, 35mm), an epic work from Oliveira’s magisterial late period. Inspired by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary though retaining only the novel’s basic structure, the film is actually a thorough dismantling of the ethos of Flaubert’s era. As with other films in this stage of Oliveira’s career, the film abounds with subtle absurdism—or what the critic Michel Chion calls “cinematographic irony,” in which significant and insignificant action are both presented iconically. The effect is similar to traditional painting or the processional style of pre-Modern theater, but the unforgettable aura that Oliveira creates is eerily timeless. Of all seven films screening this month, VALLEY OF ABRAHAM is the only one available on DVD in the US, which makes this series of critical importance.
The Films of Manoel de Oliveira: Week 2 (Retrospective)
The Film Center’s celebration of Manoel de Oliveira continues this week with more screenings of the director’s hardest-to-find work. Of particular interest is Oliveira’s second feature, RITE OF SPRING (1963, 94 min, 35mm), which is said to be radically different from the director’s recent films with their cards-to-the-chest style. According to former Village Voice critic Michael Atkinson RITE OF SPRING anticipates the beguiling naturalism of Abbas Kiarostami, as a northern Portuguese village recreates their annual Passion Play for Oliveira’s camera. The result is not a document of religious ritual but a more insidious look at a ritual’s construction. As Atkinson writes, “It’s one of the best films about Christ, because… it reflects on the dramatic impulse behind religious feeling.” Made the same year, Oliveira’s short THE HUNT (1964, 20 min) also looks to rural life for inspiration—in this case, with a fictional story about a young villager trapped to his neck in a bog. Little is known about this work outside of Portugal, although the Internet Movie Database notes that Totalitarian censors forced Oliveira to give this cynical tale a happy ending. THE HUNT screens with Oliveira’s more recent DAY OF DESPAIR (1992, 75 min, 35mm), a short feature about the last days of the 19th century author Camilo Castelo Branco. (It should be noted that Oliveira previously adapted two of Branco’s novels, Francisca and Doomed Love, the latter of which screens later in this retrospective.) One should never expect an Oliveira film to follow generic conventions, and DAY OF DESPAIR is no exception: In keeping with the director’s perversely literary style, the film’s text comes entirely from Branco’s personal letters. Those familiar with Oliveira’s late-period style—at once ruminative and slyly satirical of highbrow staidness—should look forward to this film, which surely presents a new side of the director’s love-hate relationship with 19th century mores.
Manoel de Oliveira’s DOOMED LOVE (Retrospective)
The much-admired but rarely revived DOOMED LOVE is certainly the piece de la resistance of the Film Center’s Manoel de Oliveira series and one of the year’s most significant screenings as well. Like Jacques Rivette’s OUT 1 (1971)—the Film Center’s most exciting revival of 2007—DOOMED LOVE was shot on 16mm for European television, rejected for broadcast, then blown up to 35mm for festival screenings that secured Oliveira’s place as a major filmmaker. The film is based on an epic 19th century novel by Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco, about separated lovers who choose to live out their lives in confinement, and its towering reputation comes from Oliveira’s equally committed fidelity to the source material. Like many epics of its time, Branco’s novel devotes much space to its characters’ interior lives; the film’s narration recites many of these passages verbatim, thereby challenging perceived wisdom about what is and is not cinematic. Writing about it in 1981, Jonathan Rosenbaum opined, “DOOMED LOVE is a veritable workshop of ideas about the incestuous relationship between novels and movies, and the diverse possibilities of literary adaptation. Most of the so-called avant-garde aspects of the film derive directly from this meditation and problem… [i.e.,] means for expressing an otherwise inaccessible content…. At the center of [Oliveira’s adaptation] is a dialectic between the seen and the imagined, the perceived and the unperceived… Intricate dovetailings of narration and dialogue produce some elegant displacements and overlaps in and on the soundtrack; the collision of the two narrative elements, far from dismantling the scene[s], gives [them] a kind of layered density.” Though such a description makes it sound like a formalist experiment, the film is still attenuated (albeit subtly) to the emotional richness of its epic love story. Our editor Darnell Witt recently saw the film at a New York screening, and he commented: “Unserialized, uninterrupted and blown up to 35mm DOOMED LOVE is immense and immersive… More than helping us appreciate [Oliveira’s] humor and imagery, the theatrical experience enables us to feel the full weight of the doomed lovers’ separation—whether we are sharing the cell with the male protagonist during his years-long prison internment, or observing the female lead’s noble (and tragically futile) attempt to make the most of her life in a convent… The film asks its audience to embrace a similar degree of restraint by sitting through such a long, emotionally muted picture. As such, we’re left feeling intellectually elevated rather than simply emotionally manipulated.” (1978, 265 min, 35mm).
The Films of Manoel de Oliveira: Final Week (Retrospective)
Described in the Film Center’s program notes as “the latest of de Oliveira’s cryptic fables,” CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, THE ENIGMA (2007, 70 min, 35mm) is a documentary of sorts, in which the director and his wife travel across Europe and the Caribbean to better understand the famous explorer. In the film, de Oliveira claims his mission is to prove that Columbus was not Italian, but Portuguese—a bizarre gambit similar to the one John Malkovich’s professor wages in de Oliveira’s THE CONVENT (1996) when he tries to locate the Portuguese origins of Shakespeare—but those familiar with the filmmaker’s Socratic approach should assume he’s after other revelations. De Oliveira’s recent interview with Cineaste magazine may provide a few clues: “CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS is a melancholy film, because it has this nostalgia for what I think was the golden age of mankind, when there was this reaching out, not in order to enslave, to dominate, since this was not the real intent, but rather to exchange… [N]ow it’s the opposite, it’s no longer the state that reigns to extend wealth. It’s like we’re going back to the Crusades, which is horrible…” Also screening this week is INQUIETUDE (1998, 110 min, 35mm), the film Jonathan Rosenbaum has singled out as the pinnacle of de Oliveira’s late period. Writing about the film on the occasion of its Chicago premiere, Rosenbaum had this to say: “[W]hile his modernist and aristocratic sensibility is steeped in the 19th century, there’s nothing old-fashioned about de Oliveira’s work. For INQUIETUDE he daringly combines a one-act play (Prista Monteiro’s The Immortals) and two stories (Antonio Patricio’s “Suzy” and Agustina Bessa-Luis’s “The Mother of the River”) into a single narrative: the characters in “Suzy” attend a performance of the play, and one of them recounts to another “The Mother of the River.” The theme of existential identity links the three works, and de Oliveira’s stately, reflective style fuses them into a seamless and luminous visual poem… Though The Immortals ponders the issues of old age, de Oliveira refuses the conventional pose of the old master looking back on his life and career with equanimity. INQUIETUDE, a masterpiece with irreverent wit, ironic bite, and anger over the vagaries of self-definition, has the decanted authority of Carl Dreyer’s GERTURD and the imaginative splendor of The Arabian Nights.” This rarely screened work—also unavailable on DVD—marks the culmination of the Film Center’s all-too-brief retrospective, certainly one of the moviegoing events of 2008. As for what moviegoers can take away from such an event, perhaps we should defer again to de Oliveira (again from the Cineaste interview): “[My films] aim to give us time to think, bit by bit… The steady shot brings us to another state, to see, as in Da Vinci’s ‘Annunciation’… I stimulate internality. Somebody said that the present is eternal, but the present is immobile. It’s just like the images in celluloid, every single one is still and we only see movement with a succession of them. So that’s what the present is, only a succession of images, one second that’s here and then it’s gone.”