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Frankly, we no longer believed. You read that right: we no longer believe in the death of Manoel de Oliveira. Too long fear averted, approached, announced always rejected. It’s finished, the milestone of a hundred past spring by becoming unlikely before seem quite laughable. The filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, still active at the time of death prevailed, was one of those exceptional men whose vitality seemed to push the mower itself in the grave.
Of course, it ended, as usual, by the last word, defeating his opponent Thursday, April 2, 2015, at the ripe age of 106. A win on the wire, inglorious, ending a fight in sensational revenge. Two reasons. The exceptional longevity of a man whose fighting spirit was sparks. And exceptional destiny of this man become in a career that blends with the history of cinema one of the greatest artists of the past century.
Read also “Manoel de Oliveira was both a god and a devil”
Scion of a family of Portuguese bourgeoisie, it is however expected elsewhere. He studied with the Jesuits, jump champion in the pole vault, rally driver, actor apprentice, then manager of the family factory trimmings and wine farmer. Who would have said that this young athlete announced an athlete of the art and the business leader harbored one of the original creators of film history? Manoel de Oliveira has started in pioneer of avant-garde, preventing continued circling the Salazar dictatorship – which paid him well against rotation for short – prior to persevere as the dean of the filmmakers in business , greener in his old age that many beginners, radical anti-Hollywood, coupled with a maverick film modernity.
A fifty films
What was so amazing this man, this great artist born Manoel Candido Pinto de Oliveira December 11, 1908 in Porto, Portugal? Go figure. Like any genius, Oliveira is essentially son of his works and that is their only posterity that we now demand accountability. Or fifty films, including more than thirty feature films, produced between 1931 and 2014. It is otherwise justified, at least convenient to divide this career into three distinct periods
The first -. Douro river work Spring Act (1931-1965) – would take place under the sign of the documentary and testing. The second – which joins Past and Present to Cannibals (1971-1988) – would focus fiction, taking the theater to privileged device and the thwarted love for central motif . The third, inaugurated by the historical epic No, or the Vain Glory of Command (1990) is a kind of fire experimental device that has the dual advantage of disarming the exegetes and nullifying the periodization to which one is beginning to deliver.
Because nothing is simple with Manoel de Oliveira, who has always been hard to surprise is varying with disconcerting freedom genres and approaches. Thus we find, in the first period, an avant-garde poem Douro river work ( 1931), dedicated to the city of Porto on the model of the great film editor Walter Ruttmann and Dziga Vertov a fiction ( Anika Bobo , 1942), which outlines the general pattern upcoming romantic rivalries and disappointments, and a documentary about Porto ( The Artist and the City , 1956 ), deliberately designed as a luminous and serene antidote to prowess Douro .
Diversity tone
Spring Acts (1963) On the other hand, is indeed a pivotal film. This story of the Passion interpreted by Portuguese peasants during the Holy Week foreshadows between documentary and fiction, all the work to come, infinitely renewed variation on the powers and dizziness representation. It is permissible to see in this Mystery – a collaboration of the two future tutelary figures of Cinema Novo, Antonio Reis and Paulo Rocha – the Portuguese matrix film auteur cinema, including the stunning exception of Pedro Miguel Costa Gomes, extends these days.
Immediately after this film, Oliveira performs The Hunt (1963), a short film twenty minutes which is a staging lesson and cruelty, slaying a finding of malice and impotence that fools characterized by low human society. The work will soon be enriched by the famous tetralogy separate loves, outlining the metaphysics of Portugal prey to inconsolable nostalgia for his past greatness. One thinks of Eca de Queiroz, founder of the modern Portuguese novel, creating at the end of XIX th century the group of “losers of life.” Burlesque conjugual ( Past and Present , 1971), bunuélien blasphemy ( Benilde , 1975), romantic exacerbation ( Ill-Fated Love, 1978), melancholic obsession ( Francisca , 1981). these films combine a variety of tone and a progressive counting announcing the conquest of freedom unmatched
This is the encounter with one of the largest European producers compatriot Paulo Branco (also Joao Cesar Monteiro producer, Raoul Ruiz, Chantal Akerman …), which offers the opportunity to filmmaker, under which he made more films in the last thirty years of his life than in fifty-year career prior to this period. Inaugurated by The Satin Slipper (1985), adapted from Claudel, collaboration between the two men was something miraculous in that it gives rise to a series of masterpieces in a background of film production became precisely in the 1980s, more and more prescriptive
.
From the historical epic ( No or the Vain Glory command, 1994) the updated novel ( The Letter , 1999) through the comic fable ( The Cassette, 1994), two hallmarks guide more than ever, cinema d’Oliveira: impurity and dispossession. The first result of a constant confrontation with the monuments of Western civilization, through literature (the Bible to Dostoevsky through Homer and Flaubert), theater, painting and history.
In this maelstrom of references, which should be added those of popular culture and oral literature, a work born less hieratic qu’obnubilée by the impossibility of direct access to reality. In the cinema of Oliveira, the world as such does not exist, that is, its representation in the arts, speeches and beliefs we invite its staging, with a revelation even more power penetrating and pleasing contempt artistic and social hierarchies.
Human Insecurity
The idea behind this worldview is that of dispossession, understood as secret condition of man, operator of the story, and last word of the beauty of the world. The cinema of Oliveira explores this disjunction of sight to the work of man and history, fiction and reality, women and men, sex and love. Like life, but better than life, his work is nothing more but nothing less than an attempt to recapture, especially sublime that it engages on the battlefield of human insecurity.
However, no morbid attraction in this art, on the contrary, a passionate marriage of intelligence and sensuality, a and almost detached elegant tribute to the splendor of the world as expressed exemplarily the mysterious beauty of its female characters. “Women want the sky, the men a home” , is said in Party (1996). Just look Leonor Silveira in this rapid implementation of Madame Bovary what Val Abraham , Catherine Deneuve in The Convent and Chiara Mastroianni in <. em> Letter to be immediately conquered by the religion of Manoel de Oliveira
The dogma which it is based, though not Danish, is simple: it is that of transcendence Art. This is why the romance, which has borne the idea to its climax, is the cornerstone of this work, whose aesthetic primitivism connects to extreme modernity. Two recent films, haunted by the search for origins together by the presentiment of the disappearance – Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1997) and Concern (1998) – reveal this ambition. In the circularity of time they introduce, the beginning and the end of the world seem to touch, as well as the birth and death of men. It is the work itself, as an act of rebirth, which therefore takes care of the mystery of existence to register the number in the consciousness and collective memory. More than a recreation, cinema is a re-creation: no one better than Manoel de Oliveira will have uncovered the link between primordial time and historical time, which reveals the mythological dimension of cinematic ritual
There is no need to wait the judgment of posterity to guess the fall of this story. Separated from Paulo Branco, historic producer since 2005, the old warning continued meanwhile to move forward, bringing Michel Piccoli and Bulle Ogier for malicious tribute to Beautiful Day Luis Buñuel ( Belle toujours , 2006), or imagining the adventures of a Jewish photographer resurrecting his art a beautiful Catholic asleep, the image of the subjugated ( The Strange Case of Angelica , 2010). This Marrano fantasy, drawing the portrait of a dead to commune with her in mind, further evidence of the mystery that has never ceased to celebrate Oliveira in the cinema. An art he called, not surprisingly, the most beautiful and secret definitions: “Saturation beautiful signs bathed in the light of their lack of explanation. “
Other videos are available on the tribute page of the French Cinematheque in Manoel de Oliveira: www.cinematheque.fr/fr/hommages /disparition-manoel-olive.html
Read also: The strange case of the posthumous film by Manoel de Oliveira
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