Centenarian Director’s Very Long View
By DENNIS LIM
WHEN referring to the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, it is now — and has been for some time — customary to affix the phrase “world’s oldest active filmmaker.” The operative word is “active.” Mr. Oliveira, who turns 100 in December, has made at least one movie a year since 1990 (when he was 82). His late-career surge, a gratifyingly long goodbye, defies preconceptions of what an artist’s twilight period should be. Mr. Oliveira’s undaunted productivity is remarkable, as is the undimmed creative vigor of his films.
The cultural critic Edward Said, in his writings on “late style,” identified two versions of “artistic lateness.” One produces crowning glories, models of “harmony and resolution” in which a lifetime of knowledge and mastery are serenely evident. The other is an altogether more restless sensibility, the province of artists who go anything but gently into that good night, turning out works of “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction.”
Mr. Oliveira, force of nature that he is, represents both kinds of lateness, often in a single film. In this, as in so many other respects, he is his own special case. What are we to make of an artist who hit his stride in his 70s, and for whom “late style” is in effect the primary style?
Many of Mr. Oliveira’s films have the pensive, melancholic quality of memento mori. But whether grappling with mortality (in “Voyage to the Beginning of the World” and “I’m Going Home,” both of which feature elderly protagonists) or with the birth pangs and death throes of empires and civilizations (“ ‘Non,’ or The Vain Glory of Command,” “A Talking Picture”), he poses many more questions than he answers.
His movies, full of backward glances, are too eccentric or perverse to be considered nostalgic. While it’s tempting to liken his inquiring spirit to that of a man a quarter of his age, his longevity is hardly incidental to the work. In his richest films Mr. Oliveira creates the impression of a one-man century of cinema, a living link between old and new: the ideals of the Enlightenment, modernism and European high culture on the one hand, the uncertainty and multiplicity of the present age on the other.
Regarded as a modern master in Europe, on a par with Buñuel, Dreyer and Bresson (filmmakers to whom he is sometimes compared), Mr. Oliveira is a more marginal figure in the United States. Despite regular appearances at the New York Film Festival, only a few of his films have received domestic distribution. BAMcinématek’s centennial retrospective, which opens on Friday and continues through March 30, is an opportunity to take stock of a singular career and to catch some rarely screened films: 18 of his 28 features will be shown, along with four shorts, including his first, “Working on the River Douro,” from 1931. (Mr. Oliviera is scheduled to make an appearance on Friday after a screening of his most recent film, “Christopher Columbus — The Enigma,” completed last year and shot partly in New York. The series will tour the United States in the coming months, stopping off at the Harvard Film Archive, the Film and Television Archive at the University of California, Los Angeles, and other locations.)
The peculiar shape of Mr. Oliveira’s filmography — he made only three features and a smattering of shorts in the first 40 years of his career — is partly a function of Portuguese history. Born in Oporto to a well-off family, he competed in the pole vault, raced cars professionally and even performed as a trapeze artist in his youth. He had just turned to filmmaking when the dictator Antonio Salazar came to power in 1932. It took Mr. Oliveira years to make his first feature, the neo-realist street-kid parable “Aniki-Bóbó” (1942). The decades that followed were no more hospitable, especially since he did not conceal his opposition to the authoritarian regime.
“I was never a political man,” Mr. Oliveira said in a recent e-mail message from Portugal. “But my obsession is with humanism, and I reject all action which is damaging to man.”
During the period of enforced inactivity, Mr. Oliveira tended a farm and vineyard that his wife had inherited. “It was an enormous lesson, in terms of agriculture and human dealings with the farmers, even in regards to the laws of the land ruled by the immutable laws of nature,” he wrote. For years he acquired almost no experience as a filmmaker but was accumulating insight: “I had time for a long and profound reflection about the artistic nature of cinema, which transformed my previous certainties into new concepts between hesitations and doubt.” The ruminations led him to a guiding principle of sorts: “the simplicity of old Greek tragedies and the realism of Renaissance.”
In 1931, when Mr. Oliveira made “Working on the River Douro,” a poetically edited documentary of riverside activity, the Soviet theories of montage were a big influence. Over the years, as his cinema became more cerebral, his style grew starker and more subdued, moving away from what he called “a distracting expression wherein shots succeed each other ceaselessly.”
His second feature, “Rite of Spring” (1963), was pivotal. Ostensibly a piece of filmed theater, showing an enactment of the Passion of Christ in a peasant village, it is also a self-conscious making-of documentary with elements of political allegory. The tension between fiction and documentary — between different levels of reality and forms of representation — would prove central as Mr. Oliveira jump-started his career, quickly making up for lost time after the Salazar regime was overthrown in the Carnation Revolution of 1974.
Many of his films are based on theatrical or literary texts and often deal with the disjunctions between film and theater, or between film and literature, even as they attempt to merge the respective mediums. Randal Johnson, the author of a new monograph on Mr. Oliveira (the first book in English about him), refers to this process as “palimpsestic writing,” resulting in films that are “consistently in dialogue” with existing texts.
Some are relatively freewheeling riffs. “Abraham’s Valley” (1993) is a contemporary update of “Madame Bovary.” “Belle Toujours” (2006) is a speculative sequel to Buñuel’s “Belle du Jour.” Others, like 1978’s four-and-a-half-hour “Doomed Love” (based on a classic of Portuguese literature by Camilo Castelo Branco, and a title that sums up one of Mr. Oliveira’s favorite themes) or 1985’s seven-hour “Satin Slipper” (based on an epic Paul Claudel play, and one of the few major films not in the BAMcinématek series), are adapted with a fidelity that seems almost ascetic.
“I think of film as a synthesis of all art forms,” Mr. Oliveira wrote. “And I try to balance the four fundamental pillars of film: image, word, sound and music.” He may have started in silent movies, but he is obsessed with language, as is apparent from some of his titles (“Word and Utopia,” “The Letter,” “A Talking Picture”). He layers his movies with intertitles and voice-overs, asserting that the text is as important as the image.
Mr. Oliveira’s movies are often described as painterly or theatrical. His camera frame functions as a proscenium, and his actors tend to deliver their lines with a declamatory stiffness, sometimes facing the camera. This mode of direct address is in keeping with Mr. Oliveira’s notion of interactive cinema. “Each film must be finished by the spectators,” he said. (He also recognizes the comic potential of breaking the fourth wall. In “Abraham’s Valley” someone interrupts a monologue on the fall of Western civilization by tossing a cat at the camera.)
His international profile went up in the ’90s when he started supplementing his stable of Portuguese actors (notably Luis Miguel Cintra and Leonor Silveira) with art-house stars like Marcello Mastrioanni, Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli and John Malkovich. But his movies, steeped in history, philosophy and theology, have never made obvious concessions to the tastes of the art-film marketplace. It can seem that Mr. Oliveira, an artist liberated by age, is, as Cahiers du Cinéma once put it, beyond “the rules of cinematic decorum and commerce.”
But the reality is trickier, even for an almost-100-year-old maverick. “Today the economic situation in our country and around the world has gotten much harder for resistance,” Mr. Oliveira wrote.
“I don’t know if a career like his will ever be possible again,” said Mr. Malkovich, who has appeared in three of Mr. Oliveira’s films. “There’s a sense with Manoel that he feels profoundly he has a lot more to say. I think that still comes across in his movies, and that’s pretty amazing.”
Already Mr. Oliviera is planning his next film, “The Strange Case of Angelica,” which, he said, “will deal with today’s situation in its terrible complexity,” much like the post-9/11 meditation on clashing civilizations, “A Talking Picture” (2003).
As befits a man of his age Mr. Oliveira’s specialty is the long view, and the expanse of Portuguese history has given him plenty to work with. The new “Christopher Columbus” uses the quest of its hero — a researcher trying to prove Columbus was born in Portugal — to contemplate the once mighty empire’s central role in the age of discovery. “It expresses a certain melancholy before the greatness of a past faced with the mediocrity we have come down to today,” Mr. Oliveira wrote.
Most artists are fortunate if they get to make a work with the culminating grace and authority of a final testament; Mr. Oliveira practically has half a career’s worth. (There is also one final film before the fact, made in 1982 and called “Visit, or Memories and Confessions,” about a house where he used to live, which he will only allow to be shown after his death — “for prudish reasons,” he said.)
But he would be the first to caution against making too much of his longevity. “Nature is very capricious and gives to some what it takes from others,” he said. “I see myself being more admired for my age than for my films, which, being good or bad, will always be my responsibility. But I am not responsible for my age.”
The Talking Pictures of Manoel de Oliveira will run at BAMcinématek March 7 - 30. For the March 7 screening of "Christopher Columbus, The Enigma," Manoel de Oliveira will be in attendance for a Q & A moderated by João Bénard da Costa, president of Cinemateca Potuguesa.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
― Dr Morbius, Wednesday, 12 March 2008 19:21 (seventeen years ago)
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