On the scene of the closing ceremony of the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, Geraldine Chaplin must return the special jury prize, the winner was announced by President David Cronenberg: Manoel de Oliveira The Letter. The nonagenarian filmmaker, awarded for the first time in Cannes, on stage almost hopping, cheerful and enthusiastic as a beginner. After all courtesies, he turned to the remitting actress, and voice choked with emotion, told him that touches most is the person to produce to this price is the daughter of his favorite filmmaker, who introduced him and “enchant (a) Childhood” . In this year of XX th ending century, many selected filmmakers could have said these words have had their childhood also “delighted” by Charlie Chaplin . But only one, still in operation, had experienced double delight to discover these films (and film) at hatching.
Born in 1908, Manoel de Oliveira was already 12 when out The Kid ; its existence almost perfectly covered the cinema; sometimes to the point, every discovery of a new film marveled stunning effect, we ended up wondering who would survive that.
This human metabolism miracle that made it for twenty or thirty years the senior filmmakers activity had come to occupy much space in the floor on its cinema. We remember the admiration expressed by Clint Eastwood, in an interview at Cannes in 2008, no one knew if it was about the work on humans or biological entity Oliveira, his miracle preservation This immortal film maker whose dream well how we see he could excite lust of Eastwood yet octogenarian. And, as for nearly twenty years, we had the chance to approach often go several times a few days to him on assignment in Porto, the many images that come back are those of the body, straight and erect up ‘our last meetings, so nimble that even remembers seeing him wiggle with his wife on Sex Bomb Tom Jones at a Cannes party for the presentation of The Letter .
One felt a strong pride in him as to his physical, feeling he could give his interlocutors of always be unimpaired. He had this look piercing which often welled exquisite malice. As a child he was initiated into acrobatics, excelled in swimming, multiplied the prowess of an accomplished athlete. Young man, he was earning auto racing rallies. He plays the same fleetingly playboy actors, particularly in a period successfully, The Song of Lisbon (1933).
In this romantic life with multiple twists (which also passes through the vineyard), is a work entangles itself even surprising metabolism. It originates at the dawn of the talkies, with a first short film in 1931, Douro river work , at the crossroads of formal research of German filmmakers plastic (Ruttman, Fishinger) and rhythmic effects installation of Soviet cinema (Vertov). It runs until last year, when Venice was presented a final short film combining (like the last film by Jean-Marie Straub, Kommunisten ) extracts of four of its previous movies – the sign of an intact want to design but also a growing difficulty in deceiving the distrust of insurance in embark on new shoots.
From first to last short, the work unfolds, but curious jerks, little profuse at source (only two long four decades), constantly increasing rate (seven feature between 1970 and 1988) to finish waterspouts (22 between 1990 – No or vain glory of order , one of its vertices – and 2012, where does Gebo and the Shadow , with a deeply moving Michael Lonsdale smooth old father broken by the grief). It crosses the major currents of film history but gives them amazing inflections (neorealism laughing Aniki Bóbó in 1942, the cinema verite deconstructed by mises en abyme of spring acts 1963).
It draws its progressive profligacy in admiration attributed to it by subsequent generations (in the 70s, young filmmakers called the Cinema Novo Portuguese rent both formal radicalism of the filmmaker and the open hostility of man to the Salazar dictatorship). It comprises, on pure cinema ecstasy, plans a sometimes wild beauty, sometimes ethereal often staggering: a singing head in a chimney fire ( The Cannibals , 1988), the lovers found beyond death flying over the Douro entwined ( The Strange Case of Angelica , 2010), looks camera among the most disturbing ever arranged (so that, flipping, the blind Leonor Silveira in Singularities of a blond girl , 2009), an entrance to the theater in unusual traveling back ( The Satin Slipper , 1985), the entire Western world, the whole XX th century as the Titanic sunk in a terrorist explosion ( A Talking Picture 2003).
A critic and admirer of great filmmaker Oliveira, Jean-Claude Biette had masterminded a subtle lexicon where distinguished directors (those who film what they are told), directors (those who pretend to film what they are asked, but succeed in smuggling the stage to film what they want ), authors (those who are filming what they want). And filmmakers, who believe film only what they want, but filming something that nobody asked, not even them, and they do not know what it is.
More than anyone, Oliveira was one of them. Because few works seem like hers driven by such secret logics, probing as deep mysteries, while keeping a sly duplicity, a cat smile that makes cinema a constant exercise of the art of surprise.
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