The Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira died – Liberation

In 1990, at the time of the release of No or vainglory ordering, Manoel de Oliveira is already called “young old filmmaker Lusitanian”. He has 82 years, but is still on the threshold of a filmography that will count more than twenty feature films. The great Portuguese filmmaker, intimidating both for its longevity (106 years) that his haughty intellectual stature, was similar to a kind of aesthetic-temporal anomaly.

A walk in the nineteenth ^th century romantic he constantly quoted via the tutelary figure of the novelist Camilo Castelo Branco – suitable (perdition Love) and represented (the Day despair) – rooted in modernism with the radicalism of his choice of staging and the specificity of its directing actors – “with these swings looks that create real connections with false inside the plane and make the space is disorienting and constantly redirects “, in the words of the critic Emmanuel Burdeau.

Born in the silent era, dead now YouTube

“Cinema is like life, a very dynamic thing, it can not stagnate. In any case, I do not belong to the family of filmmakers stagnant … “ said Oliveira, who was known for its sporty look, the way up the stairs four at and exhausting its employees through its vehemence, his energy, even though they all had fifty years younger than him.

Read also portraits published in 2001 and 2008 Liberation.

Here is an artist who was born during the silent era, in 1908 in Porto, and dies at the time of YouTube. A majestic arc covering the Roaring Twenties where he is an actor, sports car driver, where he contacted Marcel Herbarium to land a role, and then the darkness of the tunnel Salazar, the dictatorship for forty years, transforming Portugal cooped State in its authoritarian ideology, conservative, nationalist and Catholic, and then reopen and for the filmmaker, a new youth.

Tempo two outputs per year

Between 1929 and April 25, 1974, Oliveira carries twelve films and only two feature films, including the famous Aniki Bóbó (1942), his first feature filmed with children in Porto. From 1975, the rhythm changes: more than eleven films, including some rivers. Ill-Fated Love (4:25) The Satin Slipper (6:55)

The lost time, Oliveira is hard to catch up, laying with her producer Paulo Branco, a tempo of two outputs per year under the pretext that “the clock is ticking “. His faithful actors, Diogo Dória, Luís Miguel Cintra, Leonor Silveira, become the mouthpiece of the beautiful meditations on the twilight of the empire and the vanities of the war (No or vainglory order ) on the sensitive world of melancholy perceived by the eyes of a woman that life does not fill ( Val Abraham, 1993), or the secret of lassitude, “mortal love for all living” ( Worry, 1998), stormy relationships – desire, hatred – of theater and cinema in the scene and round trips dreams, concrete substance to the glorious ghosts (The Satin Slipper, I’m Going Home).

As if Proust had returned from the dead

The language in Oliveira, large pieces of burned falling prose sentence by sentence at the foot of the plans, is the dizziness vector that unifies his work, gives it its color, its grandiose impression. The voice of the narrator Val Abraham is what we heard more beautiful the last twenty years, as if Proust had returned from the dead to hang a postscript to his film Time Regained .

The Centennial year, he said: “Stop working, is to die. If you take me to the cinema, I die. “ He did a remake of Beautiful Day Luis Buñuel ( Belle toujours, , 2006), signed a contemporary version of The Princess of Cleves ( Letter 1999), adapted repeatedly novelist Agustina Bessa-Luís and engineered postmortem film (which should now be able to get out.)

More to read in the edition of release on Friday.