Please note: Parts III and IV of The Satin Slipper will be presented on Sunday, April 19 at 1:30 p.m. Admission April 19 will be $1.00 for returning viewers. Manoel de Oliveira is the dean of Portuguese cinema and one of Europe's most innovative film stylists; uncompromising, resolutely individualistic, at 78 he is probably the most obscure "master" in world cinema. Doomed Love and Francisca (shown at PFA in 1981 and 1984) introduced us to the rich and rigorous de Oliveira style, at once passionate and austere, intensely artificial in a manner influenced by Japanese theater. These films also signaled de Oliveira's preoccupation with the theme of frustrated love, a motif that runs throughout the seven hours of The Satin Slipper as well. Paul Claudel's epic play, written between 1919 and 1924 (although it was not staged until 1943, when it premiered at the Comedie Française under the direction of Jean-Louis Barrault), seems a natural subject for de Oliveira in many ways. Claudel was greatly influenced by No theater in this play, which was perhaps his consummate expression of an idea that earthly passions-love, sensual pleasure, exploration, even conquest-may not be in conflict with, but may eventually lead one to, a joyful mystic union with God. Set at the end of the fifteenth century-"the age of discovery"-The Satin Slipper follows the fate of two lovers, Don Rodrigue, a Spanish knight shipwrecked on the shores of Africa, and Doña Prouheze, wife of an elderly local governor. Rodrigue and Prouheze vow to meet again in Spain, and before setting out Prouheze offers one slipper to the Virgin so that she may not run toward sin. But the rendezvous is not to be, and over the next two decades the lovers become for one another an inaccessible dream, objects of inexhaustible desire. Their passion is traced against a backdrop of political upheaval as Don Rodrigue figures in the colonization of the New World and Asia, and a complex plot to set Mary Stuart on the throne of England. The exoticism, by fifteenth century standards, of locations such as Morocco, Mexico, Japan and the Philippines is magically evoked in de Oliveira's entirely studio-shot interpretation. And his treatment gives visual voice to Claudel's cryptic poetry; as the narrator exhorts us, "Listen carefully...it is what you fail to understand that is the best...it is what you will not find amusing that is the funniest." Part I: 97 min Part II: 93 mins