The Films of Manoel de Oliveira

“Citing the filmmaker’s age is not impertinent…Mr. de Oliveira exhibits an Olympian confidence that comes only after having lived, worked, thought and considered for a very long time. He has achieved a freedom denied others. He can break conventions and make his own rules.”--Vincent Canby, The New York Times

The Gene Siskel Film Center’s selected retrospective of Manoel de Oliveira, screening July 4 though 31, represents not only a first for us but also a first for the many festivals and venues celebrating the 100-year-old director’s career this year throughout the world. Never before in the history of the cinema has a director reached the century mark as an active working artist with a career that extends from the silent era to the present. Remarkably, thirty-four of de Oliveira’s forty-five completed films were made after he turned 70, and he currently has two more in production. Even more remarkably, as his career advanced he has continued to outpace the film world’s avant-garde in the challenging freshness of his work.

Manoel de Oliveira was born in 1908 in the Portuguese city of Oporto, a location that figures often in his work. His first film DUORO, WORKING RIVER (1931), was a silent documentary on the city’s industrial waterfront. His first feature ANIKI BÓBÓ (1942), tells a story of street boys in Oporto’s slums. Between obligations to the family businesses of manufacturing and farming and the strictures of a political dictatorship with which he was thoroughly at odds, de Oliveira was not to make another feature for more than twenty years. His career began anew and in earnest with the eccentrically ritualized RITE OF SPRING (1963).

De Oliveira’s mature films encompass ritual and mystery, theater and temporal duration. History, philosophy, metaphysics, literature, and a rigorous sense of cause and effect with regard to moral codes all play a part in his work. Critic Dennis Lim recently observed in The New York Times, “In his richest films Mr. Oliveira creates the impression of a one-man century of cinema, a living link between old and new: the ideals of the Enlightenment, modernism and European high culture on the one hand, the uncertainty and multiplicity of the present age on the other.”

Few of de Oliveira’s films are in distribution in North America. For that reason, we limit this selected retrospective to films that cannot be seen outside the context of this touring exhibition. Regrettably, de Oliveira’s legendary THE SATIN SLIPPER does not exist in an English subtitled print at this time and could not be included. Master works including the magnificent DOOMED LOVE (1978) are being presented, along with his most recently completed film, CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, THE ENIGMA, in which the director and his wife also appear as actors.

For their invaluable assistance the Gene Siskel Film Center thanks: Florence Almozini and BAMcinématek, Brooklyn, NY, for organizing the retrospective; Antonio Pedroso, Lisbon, for international coordination; Manuel Silva Pereira, Embassy of Portugal, Washington, DC; Instituto Camões, Portugal; João Bérnard Da Costa, Cinemateca Portuguesa-Museo do Cinema, Lisbon; José Pedro Ribeiro and Filomena Serra Pereira, ICA, Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual, Lisbon; and Nuno Gonçalves and Fernando J. Santos, Lusomundo Films, Portugal. --

Barbara Scharres

ANIKI-BÓBÓ
1942, Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal, 70 min.
With Américo Botelho, Feliciano David
DUORO, WORKING RIVER
(DUORO, FAINA FLUVIA)
1931, Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal, 18 min.

De Oliveira’s earliest feature, a subtly playful precursor to neorealism, was long his best-known film. The title comes from a phrase used in children’s games, and the game of ANIKI-BÓBÓ, set in the poorest neighborhood of the director’s hometown of Oporto, is life. In a story shaped by the dawning of adult jealousies, fears, and fantasies, a young boy steals a doll to give to the little girl he fancies. In Portuguese with English subtitles. 35mm.

Preceded by DUORO, de Oliveira’s first and only silent film, made in the tradition of the city symphony and documenting the teeming life of Oporto’s river. 35mm. (BS)

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CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, THE ENIGMA
(CRISTÓVÃO COLOMBO, O ENIGMA)
2007, Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal, 70 min.

“The film is neither scientific, nor historical, nor truly biographical in nature, but a form of romanticized fiction.”--Manoel de Oliveira, Toronto International Film Festival program

A bottomless trove of lore on the life and travels of Christopher Columbus serves less to illuminate the life of the explorer than to serve as the basis for this latest of de Oliveira’s cryptic fables. The director and his wife play a Portuguese American couple on an extended east-coast and Caribbean trek to prove the husband’s theory that Columbus hailed from Portugal, not Genoa. In Portuguese and English with English subtitles. 35mm. (BS)

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DAY OF DESPAIR
(O DIA DO DESEPERO)
1992, Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal, 75 min.
With Mário Barroso, Teresa Madruga
THE HUNT
(A CAÇA)
1963, Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal, 20 min.

De Oliveira based two of his major films, DOOMED LOVE and FRANCISCA, on the writings of 19th-century Portuguese novelist Camilo Castelo Branco (1825-1890), then adapted a collection of Branco’s own letters for DAY OF DESPAIR. Characteristically this is neither a biopic nor a documentary reenactment but a haunted chronicle of internal conflict, drawing-room love scandals and suicide.

Preceded by THE HUNT, an ambiguous fable involving the attempted rescue of a village boy trapped up to his neck in a bog. Both in Portuguese with English subtitles. 35mm. (BS)

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DOOMED LOVE
(AMOR DE PERIÇÃO)
1978, Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal, 265 min.
With António Sequeira Lope, Cristina Hauser

“A vast and strange symphony composed entirely of chamber music.”--Elliot Stein, Film Comment

One of de Oliveira’s most acclaimed master works, DOOMED LOVE is a rigorously faithful yet eccentrically stylized adaptation of a 19th-century novel by Camilo Castelo Branco, with a theme taken from “Romeo and Juliet.” Feuding aristocratic families separate lovers Teresa and Simao after he kills the cousin to whom Teresa is betrothed. She is sent to a convent and he to a prison ship, but a servant girl follows Simao to swear her own undying love. Critic J. Hoberman of the Village Voice observed, “De Oliveira has a taste for kabukilike performances, painted backdrops, Grandma Moses compositions, oddly matched shots, extraordinarily long takes, and scenes that are played out entirely in mirrors or near total darkness.” In Portuguese with English subtitles. 35mm. (BS)

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INQUIETUDE
(aka ANXIETY)
1998, Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France/Spain/Switzerland
With Jose Pinto, Irene Papas

A quirky contemplation of death links three stories, each an elegant composition exploring philosophical dilemmas and bearing hints of the supernatural. A father and son debate the merits of enduring old age vs. ending it all in “The Immortals.” A beautiful courtesan belatedly encounters a man who truly values her for herself in “Suzy.” A village woman pays a high price for becoming the personification of a legend in “Mother of a River.” In Portuguese with English subtitles. 35mm. (BS)

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RITE OF SPRING
(ACTO DE PRIMAVERA)
1963, Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal, 94 min.
With Ermelinda Pires, Maria Madalena

“Equal parts religious action, masquerade, Kenneth Anger-ish rite, home movie, dissection of moviemaking itself, and, of course, biopic of Christ, performed with sacred, clumsy fervor by hundreds of raw worshippers.”---Michael Atkinson, The Phoenix

A full twenty years elapsed between de Oliveira’s first feature ANIKI-BÓBÓ and his second, RITE OF SPRING. The annual Passion play performed in a village in the north of Portugal is the jumping-off point for a layered film within a film that functions as mysterious ethnographic work, ritualized story, and complex commentary on the violent proclivities of human nature. In Portuguese with English subtitles. 35mm. (BS)

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VALLEY OF ABRAHAM
(VALE ABRAO)
1993, Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal, 187 min.
With Leonor Silveira, Luís Miguel Cintra

“Unique and powerful…The picture feels like a 19th Century novel come to life.”---Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune

Loosely based on Flaubert’s enduring Emma Bovary, de Oliveira’s Ema is in most ways her opposite, a self-directed commanding beauty whose adulteries are imbued with an ironic knowledge of her power over men. De Oliveira leaves nothing to chance; his elegant interiors, symbolic color schemes, and enticing landscapes all support the life-scheme by which the young Ema is knowingly leveraged into marriage with a weakling. Left to her own sensual methods of entertainment with lesser men, she evolves not as a victim, but as a goddess. In Portuguese with English subtitles. 35mm. (BS)

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