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3.2.08 - 4.27.08
THE TALKING PICTURES OF MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA The Archive is grateful for the generous sponsorship and in-kind support of the following organizations that have made this series possible:
The UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese
UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies
Cinemateca Portuguesa-Museo do Cinema
Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira will celebrate his 100th birthday in 2008. Incredible as it sounds, the nonagenarian not only remains an active filmmaker but is one of the most vital and unorthodox directors working anywhere in the world today. Oliveira directed his first film, the lyrical documentary Douro, Faina Fluvial, in 1931, and the 45 films he has made since are marked by an astonishing rigor, erudition and wit. Collectively they span the silents (his aforementioned debut) to the present. He has won plaudits at major film festivals such as Cannes and Venice, and while lesser-known in the United States, is recognized in Europe as a film master on a par with such artistic giants as Roberto Rossellini and Robert Bresson. 
Oliveira's opposition to António Salazar's Estado Novo dictatorship reportedly resulted in his making only three features between 1931 and the fall of the regime in 1974 when he was 66, but he explains that he used that time to "engage in a long process of reflection." Those years of thought about the cinema gave rise to a hypnotic, intellectually exhilarating body of work that is preoccupied with questions of representation and reflexivity, authoritarianism, empire and the perils of love, memory and mortality. His dazzlingly intertextual, highly verbal films continually interrogate the boundaries between literature, theater and cinema, adapting texts (sometimes with scrupulous fidelity, at other times with audacious freedom) that range from the Bible to Samuel Beckett to Madame Bovary. As Oliveira has commented, "I appeal to my education—an education that belongs to Western civilization—and I question it." UCLA Professor Randal Johnson, author of a book on Oliveira, describes the director's work as "deeply moral but never moralistic." Others like actor and frequent Oliveira collaborator Michel Piccoli have remarked that "he is light and shadow together," a master at the art of being at once enigmatic and provocative, ineffable and self-reflexive, poignant and cerebral. In the words of Cahiers du Cinéma, Oliveira is "a filmmaker who can permit himself anything. He is sovereign, free, unique, perched high on a tightrope that no one else can reach, defying the laws of gravity and above all the rules of cinematic decorum and commerce."
Special thanks to: UCLA Professor Randal Johnson for sharing his expertise as the program advisor for this series; and Antonio Pedroso, for his indefatigable efforts as the Archive's program liaison in Lisbon.
Additional thanks to: Manuel Silva Pereira—The Embassy of Portugal; João Bénard Da Costa—Cinemateca Portuguesa-Museo do Cinema; José Pedro Ribeiro, Filomena Serra Pereira—ICA; Adrienne Mancia, Florence Almozini—BAMcinematek. Thursday March 27 2008, 7:30PM ( Online Ticket Sales Ended )
VOYAGE TO THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD
(VIAGEM AO PRINCÍPIO DO MUNDO)
(1997, Portugal/France) Directed by Manoel de Oliveira 
This supremely elegiac road movie stars Marcello Mastroianni, in his last screen role, as Oliveira's alter ego, a Portuguese-born film director on a farewell tour of his native land, wistfully recollecting his past for some younger traveling companions. Visibly frail but still possessed of an impish wit and flirtatious charm, Mastroianni expatiates on bygone days and engages in playful philosophical dialogue with his entourage as they stop to visit key sites from his privileged youth. Oliveira's pacing here is stately, the tone gently reflective, each unhurried episode punctuated with an extended shot through the car's rear window to emphasize the backward-looking view. But then the narrative focus shifts and Mastroianni's character fades into the background (along with Oliveira's semiautobiographical musings). Ultimately the film becomes a much darker, more urgent meditation on the search for origins and the plight of Portugal's rural dispossessed, their difficult history and vanishing way of life.
Introduced by Randal Johnson, UCLA professor and author of Manoel de Oliveira.
PLEASE NOTE A CHANGE IN THE PROGRAM:
The previously schedule book-signing that was to follow the screening has been cancelled. We regret any inconvenience. Screenwriter: Manoel de Oliveira. Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Leonor Silveira, Diogo Dória, Jean-Yves Gauthier. Presented in French and Portuguese dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 95 min. Saturday March 29 2008, 7:30PM ( Online Ticket Sales Ended )
AMOR DE PERDIÇÃO
(DOOMED LOVE)
(1978, Portugal) Directed by Manoel de Oliveira  Made in two different versions, for television and the big screen, Amor de Perdição flopped when broadcast, but the theatrical version (the version being shown in this series) brought Oliveira his first serious international recognition as a radical inventor of cinematic language. The film is an adaptation of Camilo Castelo Branco's 19th century novel about the ill-fated love between Teresa and Simão. For this hyper-romantic tale of feuding families, arranged marriage, posthumous kisses, amour fou and murder, Oliveira nevertheless uses lengthy voiceover, notably static framing and aggressively theatrical frontality. According to Randal Johnson, the film "comes as close to being a literal adaptation as possible." Oliveira himself commented, "Cinema is all tired out. All its tricks and technical virtuosities are worn out. I thought about this while making Amor de Perdição and decided… to forget everything and go back to the beginning, as if I were making primitive cinema." Screenwriter: Manoel de Oliveira. Cast: António Sequeira Lopes, Cristina Hauser, Elsa Wallenkamp. Presented in Portuguese dialogue with English subtitles. 16mm, 262 min. Friday April 4 2008, 7:30PM ( Online Ticket Sales Ended )
MON CAS
(MY CASE)
(1986, France/Portugal) Directed by Manoel de Oliveira  Oliveira's dizzying version of the play by Portuguese modernist José Régio echoes Jacques Rivette's Out 1 as a series of wildly different "rehearsals" for a staging that never takes place. Each new rehearsal in this rarely screened but essential Oliveira title brings on more modes of media and art, and accretes more layers of meaning and intertextuality. A man disrupts the first rehearsal, announcing that theater does not matter—all that matters is his own "case." The play is then performed as a silent movie, with speeded-up motion and only Samuel Beckett on the soundtrack. Live dialogue returns in the third rehearsal, but played backwards in an unintelligible babble. In the final rehearsal, actors portray Job and his wife while God "appears" via giant loudspeakers. For Oliveira, Mon cas describes "a questionable world, where humans don't understand each other and where God, if He exists, remains silent, dead or off-screen as a spectator." Screenwriter: Manoel de Oliveira. Cast: Luís Miguel Cintra, Bulle Ogier, Axel Bougousslavsky. Presented in Portuguese dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 88 min. ACTO DA PRIMAVERA
(RITE OF SPRING)
(1962, Portugal) Directed by Manoel de Oliveira  Considered by many to be Oliveira's first fully mature work, this documentary reenacts a yearly passion play in the small village of Curalha. As achingly stark and deeply felt as Pasolini's The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Oliveira's film also raises provocative questions about the boundaries between the secular and sacred, documentary and fiction, asking if it is ever possible to precisely delineate between a performance in a play and the ongoing performance of being human. For instance, does restaging the passion play for the camera in the same location with the same actors make Oliveira's film fictional? The director complicates things even more when he self-referentially films his own camera crew, then crosscuts scenes of war, particularly the war in Vietnam, with shots of the final moments of Christ's agony, or rather the final moments in the performance of agony by the non-professional actor playing the man whom many believe to represent God. Screenwriter: Manoel de Oliveira. Cast: Nicolau Nunes da Silva, Ermelinda Pires, Maria Madalena. Presented in Portuguese dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 90 min. Saturday April 12 2008, 4:15PM* ( Online Ticket Sales Ended )
NON, OU A VÃ GLÓRIA DE MANDAR
(NO, OR THE VAIN GLORY OF COMMAND)
(1990, Portugal/Spain/France) Directed by Manoel de Oliveira A war film with almost no combat, Non takes place mostly on the back of a jeep barreling through the West African jungle, while a troop of reluctant draftees to Portugal's last colonial frontlines talk about conquests and empire, mosquitoes and love. As their memory turns back to the great Portuguese defeats of the past—dealt to the spear-throwing Lusitanians and King Sebastian, among others—these battles are recreated onscreen. Acting as poetic counterpoint, the film's opening shot encircles a pendulous African tree, and the mythical Isle of Love turns up mid-film, complete with winged cupids and nymphs, harking back to Portugal's long-gone Age of Discovery when maritime voyagers brought knowledge of "new worlds, new people, new seas, and new skies." This rigorously cerebral film ends on an eminently human note—in an army hospital with the harrowing death of the anti-colonialist lieutenant, on the day of Portugal's 1974 Carnation Revolution that would finish its colonial empire.
Please note: Discounted flat-rate parking at the Hammer Museum is not available until 6pm! Screenwriter: Manoel de Oliveira. Cast: Luís Miguel Cintra, Diogo Dória, Luís Lucas. Presented in Portuguese and Spanish dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 111 min. * Please note the early start time. Sunday April 13 2008, 7:00PM* ( Online Ticket Sales Ended )
DOURO, FAINA FLUVIAL
(LABOR ON THE DOURO)
(1931, Portugal) Directed by Manoel de Oliveira  At the age of 21, Manoel de Oliveira borrowed money from his father to make his first film, which he edited on his family's billiards table. Inspired by Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Oliveira drew on the oppositional aesthetics of modernist cinema to depict the arduous lives of workers on the Douro River, in his beloved hometown of Porto. Oliveira's fiercely unsentimental vision enraged many Portuguese critics. After a screening at the 1931 International Congress of Film Critics in Lisbon, one of them wrote: "He has shamed us by showing foreigners these raggedy, barefoot women who carry heavy coal on their heads… the vile back alleys of Porto… and leprous tenements of Barredo!" But foreign critics present at the Congress, notably Émile Vuillermoz and Luigi Pirandello, felt differently, bringing home favorable reports of this bold and promising young filmmaker. with Portuguese subtitles. 35mm, silent, w/ music track, 21 min. ANIKI-BÓBÓ
(1942, Portugal) Directed by Manoel de Oliveira  Though Aniki-Bóbó has been called a Portuguese precursor to neo-realism, this effortlessly engaging film about schoolyard romance contains many of the themes and philosophical concerns that would preoccupy Oliveira for the next 66 years and counting. Two Porto schoolboys are both enamored of their fetching classmate Teresinha, prompting the shyer boy Carlitos to steal the doll the girl covets from the Lojas das Tentações ("Shop of Temptations"). Lurking under this tale of a children's love triangle are darker undertones—like the menace of authoritarianism connoted in the words "Always follow the right path" stenciled on Carlitos's schoolbag—that have led many critics to read it as an implicit critique of the Salazar regime. Novelist and frequent Oliveira collaborator Agustina Bessa-Luís comments: "Aniki-Bóbó is one of Manoel de Oliveira's most perfect films. And one of his most disquieting, because it takes such pride in its candor." Screenwriter: Manoel de Oliveira. Cast: Nascimento Fernandes, Fernanda Matos, Horácio Silva. Presented in Portuguese dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 70 min. A CAÇA
(THE HUNT)
(1963, Portugal) Directed by Manoel de Oliveira  In Oliveira's most Bunuelian film, two boys set out for a hunt. Strange omens accompany them on their journey. A fox savagely tears into a chicken. The boys torment a small dog. In the thick of the woods, one boy falls into quicksand. Local hunters attempt to pull him out, but bickering prevents them from saving his life. Made under Portugal's oppressive Salazar dictatorship, the film caught the attention of censors who demanded changes to its bleak ending. The director obliged but in 1988 restored his original finish with a twist: He retained the censor-approved, happy ending as a coda, underscoring the film's ironically dark and pessimistic vision. Screenwriter: Manoel de Oliveira. Cast: António Rodrigues Sousa, João Rocha Almeida. Presented in Portuguese dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, (1988 Restored Version), 20 min. * Please note the early start time. Wednesday April 16 2008, 7:30PM ( Online Ticket Sales Ended )
ABRAHAM'S VALLEY
(VALE ABRAÃO)
(1993, Portugal/France/Switzerland) Directed by Manoel de Oliveira  "In Abraham's Valley… things have happened… that belong to a world of dreams, the most hypocritical world there is." Fitting words to open Oliveira's sensuous, dream-like epic based on a novel itself inspired by a novel about the perils of dreaming (Agustina Bessa-Luís's Portuguese adaptation of Madame Bovary). Ema is a child of the provincial haute-bourgeoisie, so beautiful that the mayor of her town threatens to throw her in jail because of the numerous traffic accidents she causes each time she appears on her veranda. When she marries an older doctor, Ema's exuberance abruptly shrinks to a dark inner claustrophobia, then reemerges as a ravenous quest for erotic fulfillment. Beauty suffuses Abraham's Valley, from its Vermeer-like light and the voluptuousness of its actors and landscape to the lyricism of its voiceover narration. But even as Oliveira seduces, he dismantles the fiction, for Ema defiantly asserts, "I am not the Little Bovary! Nor am I Flaubert." Screenwriter: Manoel de Oliveira. Cast: Leonor Silveira, Cécile Sanz de Alba, Luís Miguel Cintra. Presented in Portuguese dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 203 min. Saturday April 19 2008, 7:30PM ( Online Ticket Sales Ended )
O DIA DO DESESPERO
(DAY OF DESPAIR)
(1992) Directed by Manoel de Oliveira  Considered Portugal's greatest 19th century novelist, Camilo Castelo Branco led a life so tumultuous with scandal and passion that Oliveira fondly refers to him as the closest Portuguese equivalent not to Cervantes, but to the character of Don Quixote. O Dia do Desespero traces the last days of Branco's life before encroaching blindness led him to shoot himself in his rocking chair. No conventional biopic, the film's ghostly lighting and breathtaking attention to material objects draws us powerfully into the desperate love affair between the writer and death. One of the film's actors, Luís Miguel Cintra, has commented that in O Dia do Desespero, "the dead things are filmed to speak of the life that they hide. Living actors are filmed to speak of the dead." Ultimately, the state of uncertainty that Oliveira imposes—between actor and character, history and fiction—leads to a film of rare hallucinatory power, one that Randal Johnson calls "perhaps Oliveira's most spectral and phantasmagoric." Screenwriter: Manoel de Oliveira. Cast: Teresa Madruga, Mário Barroso, Luís Miguel Cintra. Presented in Portuguese dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 75 min. I'M GOING HOME
(VOU PARA CASA)
(2001) Directed by Manoel de Oliveira  Oliveira continues his magisterial reflections on art and aging in this profound portrait of a distinguished actor coping with the aftermath of late-life tragedy. Michel Piccoli stars as the vigorous old stage lion who, when his wife and daughter are killed in a car accident, buries his grief in work while seeking solace in daily routine and doting on his young grandson. Oliveira's detached, elliptical style eschews big dramatic scenes in favor of quotidian moments, often laced with wry humor, and lengthy sequences of Piccoli practicing his craft onstage as well as in a disastrous film shoot supervised by John Malkovich (priceless as a pretentious American art-movie director bent on adapting Joyce's Ulysses for the screen). But emotion eventually bleeds through the exquisitely subtle, muted surfaces of I'm Going Home, culminating in Piccoli's climactic epiphany, a devastating yet also liberating recognition of fading powers and impending mortality. Screenwriter: Manoel de Oliveira. Cast: Michel Piccoli, Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich. Presented in French and English dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 90 min. Saturday April 26 2008, 7:30PM ( Online Ticket Sales Ended )
A TALKING PICTURE
(UM FILME FALADO)
(2003, Portugal/France/Italy) Directed by Manoel de Oliveira  Working in his masterful valedictory mode, Oliveira surveys no less than the whole of Western civilization when a young girl sets out from Portugal on a cruise to Bombay, accompanied by her mother, a history professor well-equipped to expound on the myriad questions posed by her precocious daughter. Their voyage becomes a guided tour of the glories (and contradictions) of the histories and cultures along the Mediterranean, with each stop along the route another occasion for dialogue and disquisition. As the luxury liner's American captain, John Malkovich presides over a central setpiece in which mother and daughter join a table of impossibly chic women—Catherine Deneuve, Stefania Sandrelli and Irene Papas—for some marvelous multilingual repartee. The tone appears celebratory, a paean to pan-European liberalism, but Oliveira soon enough undercuts the feel-good mood with a shocking turn that inflects this otherwise serene film with the brutal reality of modern-day terrorism. Screenwriter: Manoel de Oliveira. Cast: Leonor Silveira, Filipa de Almeida, John Malkovich, Catherine Deneuve. Presented in Portuguese, French, English, and Greek dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 96 min. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, THE ENIGMA
(CRISTÓVÃO COLOMBO—O ENIGMA)
(2007, Portugal/France) Directed by Manoel de Oliveira  In 1989 amateur husband-and-wife historians Manuel and Silvia da Silva published a book entitled Columbus Was Portuguese, which set out to prove that the famous explorer was actually the scion of a Portuguese noble family—born not in Genoa but in the Portuguese town of Cuba, who named his Caribbean landfall after his birthplace. Opening with Manuel's post-WWII emigration to the US with his brother, the film is concerned with the glory and adventure of Portugal's great era of exploration, with the idea of exploration itself, and especially with the ways in which historical memory is conditioned and recalled. For this road movie unlike any other, the director cast his grandsons as the young da Silva brothers, and his wife and himself as the elder da Silvas, delivering a deeply personal and tender meditation on love, family, identity and nationality—in essence the human ties that bind across miles of ocean and centuries of time. Screenwriter: Manoel de Oliveira. Camera: Leonor Baldaque. Cast: Ricardo Trêpa, Manoel de Oliveira, Maria Isabel de Oliveira. Presented in Portuguese and English dialogue with English subtitles. DV, 75 min. Sunday April 27 2008, 7:00PM* ( Online Ticket Sales Ended )
INQUIETUDE
(DISQUIET)
(1998, Portugal/France/Spain/Switzerland) Directed by Manoel de Oliveira  Oliveira deftly weaves together three very different literary works to compose a sumptuous cinematic sonata that, in his own words, forms "a tripartite expression of the desire to attain immortality." In the first sardonic episode, a nonagenarian professor attempts to convince his son to commit suicide before senescence and oblivion set in. The second spins an Ophulsian romance in the cafes of 1930s Porto where a young dandy yearns to possess the heart of a courtesan whose body he has already conquered. The third is a bewitching fable featuring Irene Papas as the Mother of the River who turns a young woman's fingers to gold. Cinematographer Renato Berta's startling imagery and Papas's powerhouse performance anchor this intricately structured film, but it's the appearance of Oliveira himself, dancing the tango of a lifetime with his wife Maria Isabel in a nightclub scene, that steals the show. Screenwriter: Manoel de Oliveira. Cast: Irene Pappas, Leonor Silveira, José Pinto. Presented in Portuguese and Greek dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 114 min. * Please note the early start time. |