Note: Part II of de Oliveira's 7-hour epic is shown Saturday, April 23 at 2:30. Admission will be $3.50 for returning viewers-please keep your stub. (Le Soulier de satin). Manoel de Oliveira is the dean of Portuguese cinema and one of Europe's most innovative film stylists. He will receive the Kurosawa Award and present a new film at the upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival. Uncompromising, resolutely individualistic, his rich and rigorous style is at once passionate and austere, intensely artificial in a manner influenced by Japanese theater. Paul Claudel was himself greatly influenced by Noh theater in his epic 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 to, a joyful mystic union with God. Set at the end of the fifteenth century, The Satin Slipper follows the fate of two lovers, Don Rodrigue, a Spanish knight shipwrecked in Africa, and Dona Prouheze, wife of an elderly local governor. Rodrigue and Prouheze vow to meet again in Spain, 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 in the "age of discovery." 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. 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."