Cine-File on Manoel de Oliveira
Thursday, December 11th, 2008Cine-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.
