Manuel de Oliveira

I have only met Manoel de Oliveira once in my life. It was 10 years ago, in 1998, a few days after the death of the Japanese teacher Akira Kurosawa .. With a youthful impetus, I took the floor at a press conference and questioned the filmmaker, taking the lead from the death of the great filmmaker, to refer to Kurosawa and himself as “snipers” within the often tame cinema that is made in Hollywood and its surroundings. , that they should “throw into the woods a bit” to make a different and humanist cinema. I thought he had used a successful simile, but I will never forget the disappointment I got when Oliveira said that he had not liked that comparison at all. He was against any kind of violence, and therefore my words had displeased him greatly. I got out of the mess as best I could, trying to explain to him that there was nothing pejorative in my way of saying, that what I had wanted to say was that… But anyway, the blunder was there,

Manoel de Oliveira was born in Porto on December 11, 1908. He received a Catholic education at the Jesuits, and from a young age he showed his taste for cinema. As he himself explains, in his early years there were no film schools, “but I did attend a school, to which my father took me by the hand, the one for movie theaters. This is how I saw Lumière, Méliès, Max Linder and, in his films, the three cinematographic formulas: realism, the imaginary and the comic.” And in case there were any doubts, he stated: “I have learned cinema by looking at the screen.” In his article “Rethinking Cinema”, published in Traffic magazine in 2004, he compared cinema as a total art capable of capturing movement with man’s historical desire to fly. If there was a desire, a true obsession, to fly like birds in the sky,

Oliveira’s film career is almost as extensive as cinema, and in fact he made his screen debut as an actor in a silent film, Miraculous Fatima (1928), by the Italian Ringo Lupo; his uncredited appearance was a mere extra; he also took part in the first Portuguese sound film, A canção de Lisboa (1933). His first work as a director is documentary, Douro, fluvial fauna(1931), twenty minutes that with lights and shadows address how urban transformation affects the fishermen of the Duero River, the life of the city for 24 hours. Thirty years of production would follow where Oliveira continued to show his interest in the documentary field, where he was influenced early by the cinema of Robert Flaherty and the films of the Soviet Union. At that time there was only one fiction film, Aniki Bóbó (1942), a sensitive look at childhood, the boys from the streets of Porto, indebted to Italian neorealism.

The filmmaker said that a personal experience would greatly affect his career. It was commissioned by the family of a friend, who died in her youth, to photograph the deceased. Apparently Oliveira, when developing the photos, saw that these images could give an illusion of movement, as if the dead person were alive. And he began to be interested in the duration of the shot, which will give a particular tempo to each of his future films. In the same way Acto de primavera (1963), filming the representation of the Passion of Christ in a Portuguese town, meant another discovery for him: that of the charm and value of the word, within a disposition of theatrical artifice, features that will mark thereafter his cinema.

João Bénard da Costa cleverly said that Oliveira was “born” at the age of sixty, meaning that it was almost from the seventies when he began to carve out a career as a director of feature films. In his filmography, the look at works from his native country stands out, such as Amor de perdición (1979), which adapts a novel by Camilo Castelo Branco from the 19th century, La caja (1994), based on the work by Pistra Monteiro, Francisca (1981) . ,  The Convent (1995) and The Magic Mirror (2005) based on Agustina Bessa-Lluís. His literary interests have led him to approach Gustave Flaubert ( The Valley of Abraham ) andMadame de La Fayette ( The Letter (1999) ). Titles such as Benilde, virgen y madre (1975), invite us to compare him with Carl Theodor Dreyer , due to his contemplative zeal and his religious themes. I’m Coming Home is a reflection on death and the things that matter, through the eyes of an elderly actor. And it is even allowed to pay homage to Luis Buñuel in Belle toujours (2006).

The vicissitudes of history, and the validity of morality through the centuries are part of his films Word and Utopia (2000) and The Fifth Empire: yesterday like today (2004). Although his most lucid look at history and civilization, and my favorite Oliveira film, is A Talking Film (2003), a delicious film-journey that exposes with astonishing simplicity, through the character of a teacher, the Greco-Latin roots and Judeo-Christians of Europe, the possibility of understanding between different cultures and the dangers of fanaticism.

Oliveira celebrated his many birthdays by making movies. Just fifteen days before his centenary, filming began in Lisbon for Singularities of a Blonde Woman , which adapts a story by Eça de Queiroz. A tireless worker, a storyteller, an explorer of the lights and shadows of the human spirit, he is one of the filmmakers on whom one could bet, a sure bet, that he would die with his boots on. And so it has been.