The Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, who died in 2015, at the age of a hundred and six, is the Benjamin Button of filmmaking, precocious in reverse. He made only two features before the age of sixty and then made thirty more—twenty-two of them between the ages of eighty-one and a hundred and three. But their quantity is far less significant than their artistry. A prime sample—ten films, made between 1996 and 2004—is screening at BAM, in new restorations, from March 28th to April 3rd. As they reveal, Oliveira is the creator of a cinematic world of his own—an exemplary modern director, albeit in a historically infused mode that reflects his age, his background, and the era of his youth.
Let Oliveira tell his own story, as he does in “Porto of My Childhood,” a docufiction from 2001. The movie is a quietly exuberant outburst of self-revelation, a coming-of-age tale full of passion and gratitude for the cultural and natural splendors of his home town. He starts his story with what’s been lost—a plain but stately house on a hill, with a panoramic view of the city, now windowless, unused, boarded up. Oliveira’s father was a wealthy industrialist, and a view from the old house’s perspective invokes the comforts that his family’s prosperity afforded, and, with these, the inner vistas, the aesthetic initiation that opened up to him in his urbane youth. He recalls a boyhood with his family at the opera—especially, in their box at the theatre—and he dramatizes a scene of the adolescent Manoel (played by Jorge Trêpa, a grandson of the director) gazing down raptly at an operetta about a musical bandit breaking into a wealthy woman’s house and singing his way out of a jam. (The nonagenarian Oliveira himself plays the suave intruder.)
Oliveira remembers the family’s chauffeur: recalling an enchanting ride home late at night, the filmmaker gets the twenty-first-century Porto to stand in, through the windows of an antique car, for the city of his youth. He remembers and re-creates the high-styled sarcasms of “bohemians,” as he calls them, who lounged elegantly outside a bakery, and he shows his young-adult self (Ricardo Trêpa, also Oliveira’s grandson) flirting with women in a louche night club and learning about pimps and sugar daddies. He remembers the pastries that he loved (the shop is now a clothing store), the promenade that teemed with ritualized social life (there is archival footage of its festivities), and the chaste first love that he experienced at his cousins’ elegant house. He recalls the young artists who were his friends, including a poet who was persecuted by the Salazar dictatorship and chose political exile in Brazil.
He remembers his initiation in the cinema, the rowdy audience at the ornate theatre where he saw silent films. Using footage from 1896, of seamstresses leaving a workshop on a street in Porto that he knows well, he inscribes the origins of Portuguese cinema into his own youth. His artistic vocation is inseparable from his comfortable home life: “In this house I wrote and imagined many films that I could not direct,” Oliveira says. Then, in 1931, he made one—a short documentary, called “Douro, Faina Fluvial.” Working on a scant budget, he developed much of the footage in his family’s garage and edited it by hand on a billiard table. The project, he says, “stole” him from “sport,” which had in turn taken him out of “the bohemian life.” (He’d been a prolific athlete and even, briefly, a race-car driver).
The associative freedom of Oliveira’s recollections in “Porto of My Childhood” is matched by an intricate and elegant intertwining of many kinds of cinematic material—from archival documentary footage and still photos to contemporary documentary shots and dramatic scenes—all of which evoke the vitality and the theatricality of the city where he was raised. As he recalls a climber scaling an ornate tower and scampering up its flagpole, Oliveira intercuts black-and-white documentary footage of the event with a color dramatization of a crowd of spectators gawking upward from the street, young Manoel among them. But there’s an extra dimension in Oliveira’s reminiscences that expands the reach of these endearingly picturesque memories beyond immediate experience and local charm: he unites them with the mighty currents of history. Oliveira recalls his youthful fascination with Porto’s monuments, its statues, its squares, and its street names—and their meanings. In these landmarks, Portugal’s historical figures and major events (including, of course, its extensive colonial history) are silently—but openly and constantly—commemorated. Reminiscing about such artifacts, he reveals what and who they stand for, official political heroes and political changes that formed his country and its national mythology—and that shaped his own identity.
In form, in substance, and in tone, “Porto of My Childhood” is the toolbox for Oliveira’s career, and its materials wind through the other films showing at BAM, however varied their stories, themes, and settings may be. The comforts and luxuries of Oliveira’s childhood, and the education that came from his relationship to the sumptuous city around him—the opulence of architecture, the grandeur of its civic infrastructure, its bountiful public arts institutions and decorative formal gardens—determine the stories that dominate his work. The films in BAM’s mini retrospective focus on the wealthy and ostensibly refined circles of the aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie. It is a realm of beautiful objects and leisured, decadent charm, of rarified intellectual lovers’ games conducted in highly rhetorical language (which is to say, essentially, literature), and it provides the basis for many of Oliveira’s films.
In “Porto of My Childhood,” a woman in the louche night club says that “without misdemeanors, there is no culture,” and it is the vanities and seductions of the leisured class that spark Oliveira’s artistic imagination. Yet his delighted fascination with lavish superfluities comes with a built-in skepticism, as in “The Letter,” from 1999, his adaptation of Madame de La Fayette’s 1678 novel “La Princesse de Clèves”. Oliveira updates the story—about an aristocratic socialite (Chiara Mastroianni) who endures a loveless marriage to a wealthy man (Antoine Chappey)—to contemporary France. But, despite the latest cars, current street life, and a TV news reference to Bill Clinton, the world of the movie seems sealed off from the modern world at large. The titular princess is immured in her dated manners and duties, rites, and formalities—until the pop singer Pedro Abrunhosa (playing himself and performing at length onstage) bursts the bubble and throws her rigidly ordered life into turmoil.
Like most prolific filmmakers, Oliveira had a system: he had a go-to producer (Paulo Branco) and a virtual stock company of actors (including his grandson Ricardo Trêpa, Michel Piccoli, Leonor Silveira, Luís Miguel Cintra, Isabel Ruth, and Irene Papas). Three of these regulars are on hand for “Party” (1996), which probes the hermetic romanticism of a different sort of aristocracy—an artistic one—by way, once again, of docufictional intertwining. The movie’s titular gathering is held in the lush garden outside the spectacular island mansion of a rich and elegant young couple, Leonor (Leonor Silveira) and Rogério (Rogério Samora). Leonor has misgivings about holding the bash, but once it gets under way she approaches it as a sort of play, however improvised.
The guests include another, older couple, Michel (Michel Piccoli) and Irene (Irene Papas); as Rogério chats with Irene, Michel and Leonor flirtatiously wander off to a waterfront nook. The extensive, sharp-pointedly aphoristic high-society chitchat, the very soul of theatre, threatens real-life consequences. The sea air inflames the revellers with the natural force of desire, but a deus ex machina, a comically absurd windstorm, breaks up the festivities before desires are acted on. Five years later, when the foursome is together again in the palatial home, amid the overwhelming historical force of its art collection and its weighty heritage, the new torrent of high-flown words becomes power, as the earlier flirtation threatens to detonate, with heartbreaking implications. Yet another deus ex machina, this time an altogether abstract and bureaucratic one, takes over and spares relationships while again definitively bursting a stiflingly luxurious bubble.
Oliveira’s films shudder with the mighty currents of history, whether long-ago conflicts that leave their traces in cities or ones, in Portugal or elsewhere, that leave their marks in living memory. “Voyage to the Beginning of the World” (1997) is another blend of documentary and fiction that makes the quest for memory—and its paradoxes—its subject. Here, Oliveira indulges in a romantic fantasy of his own, casting Marcello Mastroianni as an elderly director named Manoel. (It was Mastroianni’s last movie, and he fills it with his hearty presence.) Manoel travels from Paris to his native Portugal with three younger actors: Judite (Leonor Silveira) and Duarte (Diogo Dória), who are Portuguese, and Afonso (Jean-Yves Gautier), who’s French but whose late father was a Portuguese émigré who left his home country to fight in the Spanish Civil War. They’re heading to the remote village where Afonso’s father is from, so that the young man can learn more about his family’s background and, in particular, what happened there during and after the war.
The premise of the movie is documentary—it’s based on the experiences of the real-life French actor of Portuguese descent Yves Afonso—as is the style in which it is filmed. The actors visit sites of historical interest and discuss what the places bring to mind: a combination of personal experience, family lore, and things they’ve read about. Afonso struggles to give voice to his memories, but Manoel’s memories are teeming, and he regales his companions with their bounty. “Voyage to the Beginning of the World,” for all its investigative curiosity and loosely structured plot, is as richly and finely literary as Oliveira’s other films; a visit to Manoel’s family home foreshadows the freewheeling confessional authority of “Porto of My Childhood.” Yet there’s also a surprising theatrical element, which comes to the fore when the troupe reaches Afonso’s ancestral village and has several absorbing, extended historical discussions—ranging from the First World War to Portugal’s colonial wars and the birth of the European Union—with his elderly great-aunt, whom he’d never met. The film also offers perhaps Oliveira’s most sublime visual metaphor for memory at work: the view out the rear window of a fast-moving car.
Oliveira’s long absence from feature filmmaking had a political basis—he was out of favor with the Salazar dictatorship—and, as a result of this absence, he remained, in the best sense, something of an amateur. Though he relied on conventional techniques, there was nothing conventional about his results, which are grandly conceived but artisanally crafted, feeling almost handmade. His filming of actors in conversation tends toward the sculptural—action counts less than posture, and the speakers are often isolated statically against their surroundings. In his tableau-like compositions, with their classical-painterly lighting, his characters declaim, bringing a blunt candor to a refined and abstracted sensibility. His narratives often seem spontaneously discovered to the point of digressive fascination, yet his works and scenes of nonfiction are no less craftsmanlike or refined than his fictional ones. There’s nothing raw-edged or rough-hewn about Oliveira’s documentary elements; whether he’s filming staged action or probing real-world locations, his images are always graceful and elegant.
Perhaps the height of Oliveira’s elegance comes with his boldest blend of fiction and nonfiction, of theatre and the theatre of street life, the feature “I’m Going Home,” which was made the same year as “Porto of My Childhood.” It stars Michel Piccoli (born in 1925) as an actor named Gilbert Valence, who, even in his advanced years, is at the peak of his art. When Gilbert suffers a grievous personal loss, he throws himself into work while also savoring, as if with a renewed vigor and a heightened sensitivity, the ordinary pleasures and simple luxuries of daily life—which include time spent with his young grandson, Serge (Jean Koeltgen). He also accepts a role in an artistically ambitious film by an American director (John Malkovich), only to discover that, while his artistic sense is as keen as ever, his abilities are waning.
The movie’s intense focus on a single character gives Oliveira the chance to develop a rare and fine variety of cinematic subjectivity. “I’m Going Home” is filled with the joy of grand language—it features extended scenes of Gilbert performing in Ionesco’s “Exit the King,” Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” and a film adaptation of Joyce’s “Ulysses”—but its delicately ecstatic sequences of the actor on the streets of Paris are inventively wordless, with views through storefront and café windows revealing a happenstance urban ballet. The bereaved Gilbert finds himself cultivating his solitude, which he even names (using the Italian word solitudine) as if it were a new friend, and Oliveira shares in the contemplative pleasures of his echoing silence. Here, the director of some of the most voluble of all films exalts immediate experience and rarefied perception to grand historical dimensions—Oliveira condenses a lifetime of artistic striving into infinitesimal flourishes of overwhelming power. ♦
