Manoel de Oliveira: Talking Pictures

8/9/08 to 9/28/08

The rich, rigorous work of Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira is at once passionate and austere, gracefully weaving philosophy, literature, theater, and storytelling into a purely cinematic experience. We celebrate the upcoming centennial of this still active director with a major series.

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Abraham’s Valley, September 28

Upcoming
Films
Upcoming
Events
Selected
Objects
Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Films

Voyage to the Beginning of the World
Saturday, August 9 6:30 pm
A film director (Marcello Mastroianni in his last role) tours the Portuguese countryside in this “exquisitely sad and moving reflection on memory and personal roots.”-N.Y. Times
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Aniki Bóbó
Sunday, August 10 5:00 pm
Oliveira's 1945 debut feature prefigured neorealism with a child's-eye view of Porto, the director's hometown. With short The Hunt.
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Rite of Spring
Wednesday, August 13 7:30 pm
A rural Portuguese town's passion play forms the center of Oliveira's prescient mix of documentary, fiction, and re-enactments that “takes on a strange, ancient, hieratic force.”-Sight & Sound
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The Past and the Present
Saturday, August 16 6:30 pm
Oliveira's deliciously Buñuelian satire of the backstabbing rich chronicles a disastrous mansion party. “A caustic comedy.”-NFT, London
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Benilde, or the Virgin Mother
Saturday, August 16 8:45 pm
A young girl's pregnancy may be truly “divine” in Oliveira's Dreyer-by-way-of-Sirk dissection of Portuguese propriety and religious hypocrisies.
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My Case
Wednesday, August 20 7:30 pm
An intruder interrupts a play with his own monologue in Oliveira's Pirandellian assault on the fourth wall. “Nothing other than a great, stylistically opened metaphor for man's entrance upon the world's stage.”-Berlin Film Festival
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Doomed Love
Sunday, August 24 3:00 pm
Young lovers are separated by family feuds and aristocratic mores in Oliveira's update of a classic 1861 novel. “A minuet staged as grand opera.”-Village Voice
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Short Films by Manoel de Oliveira
Wednesday, August 27 7:30 pm
This program of earlier poetic works by the great director includes his first film, Douro, Working River, a 1931 silent classic. Also The Painter and the City; Bread.
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Francisca
Sunday, August 31 4:00 pm
Two men become infatuated with an Englishwoman in Oliveira's masterpiece of frustrated love. “As if Straub had collaborated with Ophuls.”-Dave Kehr
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The Cannibals
Wednesday, September 3 7:00 pm
A lovely maiden falls in love with an upper-class gentleman-but discovers his body is entirely mechanical-in Oliveira's surreal musical collaboration with the Lisbon Opera House. “Perhaps the only genuine opera film to date.”-Toronto Film Festival
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Day of Despair
Sunday, September 7 4:00 pm
Dramatization of the last days of Portugal's famous 19th-century novelist Camilo Castelo Branco. “Cool, stylized, and elegant.”-London Film Festival
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Non, or the Vain Glory of Command
Wednesday, September 10 7:00 pm
Portuguese soldiers in 1973 Angola discuss the history of combat in Oliveira's theoretical treatise on war, destiny, and colonialism. An Apocalypse Now of philosophical ideals.
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Anxiety
Sunday, September 14 5:00 pm
Three stories are combined into one in Oliveira's fascinating examination of death and immortality, filmed in Portugal and Madrid. “A masterpiece with irreverent wit, ironic bite, and anger.”-Jonathan Rosenbaum
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The Divine Comedy
Wednesday, September 17 7:00 pm
Mental asylum inmates take on the personas of Jesus, Raskolnikov, and Adam and Eve in this imaginative combination of cinema, philosophy, and literature. With Maria de Medeiros.
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I'm Going Home
Saturday, September 20 8:00 pm
An actor (Michel Piccoli) adjusts to the tragic death of his wife and son in this leisurely paean to everyday beauty. Costarring Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich.
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Christopher Columbus: The Enigma
Sunday, September 21 3:30 pm
Oliveira's most recent film finds an amateur historian attempting to prove Columbus's Portuguese roots. A fascinating essay on history, nationalism, and the quest for discovery.
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A Talking Picture
Sunday, September 21 5:00 pm
Oliveira offers an appreciation of the birth of Western civilization to contemplate its demise in this “sharply cut gem of a film” (N.Y. Times) with Catherine Deneuve, Stefania Sandrelli, and Irene Papas.
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Belle Toujours
Wednesday, September 24 6:30 pm
Michel Piccoli returns in Oliveira's intriguing “sequel” to Buñuel's Belle de Jour, with Bulle Ogier essaying the Deneuve role. A tribute to Buñuel, eroticism, and unsolved enigmas.
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Belle de Jour
Wednesday, September 24 8:00 pm
Catherine Deneuve is a frigid housewife who indulges her masochistic desires by working in a Paris brothel. A subversive erotic classic from Luis Buñuel.
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Abraham's Valley
Sunday, September 28 3:30 pm
The gorgeous northern Portuguese coast provides the setting for Oliveira's reimagining of Flaubert's Madame Bovary. “As engrossing as a rich 19th-century novel.”-Variety
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Manoel de Oliveira: Talking Pictures

8/9/08 to 9/28/08

It's not often that we can celebrate the centennial of a director who is not only still living, but still working. Such is the case with Manoel de Oliveira. We have called Oliveira the “dean” of Portuguese cinema, but Portugal could never lay sole claim to him: like Luis Buñuel and Raul Ruiz, he is a major European film stylist. He belongs to cinema. Uncompromising, resolutely individualistic, his rich and rigorous style is at once passionate and austere, intensely artificial in a manner influenced by Japanese theater. That said, and it is said often, the grace and wit with which he weaves philosophy, literature, theater, opera, and storytelling into something intensely visual is purely cinematic in a way that negates all those forms. Again, he belongs to cinema.

Oliveira's career is itself a story: having begun in 1929 making poetic documentaries, he remained essentially an amateur filmmaker; blacklisted during the 1940s and...

Oliveira's career is itself a story: having begun in 1929 making poetic documentaries, he remained essentially an amateur filmmaker; blacklisted during the 1940s and fifties, he only managed two features before 1970. Then, from his late sixties, he just didn't stop, and over half of his films were made when he was over the age of eighty. Our series spanning August and September includes, in August, the lyrical, Jean Vigo–influenced Aniki-Bóbó from 1942, and the magnificent “Tetralogy of Frustrated Love” from the 1970s: The Past and the Present; Benilde, or the Virgin Mother; Doomed Love; and Francisca, the film many consider to be his masterpiece from that era.

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Manoel de Oliveira: Talking Pictures is organized by Florence Almozini and Adrienne Mancia, BAMcinématek, with the collaboration of Antonio Pedroso, Tour and Program Liaison, Portugal. It is coordinated at PFA by Kathy Geritz.

PFA wishes to thank the following institutions and individuals for making this series possible: João Bénard Da Costa, Cinemateca Portuguesa-Museu do Cinema; José Pedro Ribeiro and Filomena Serra Pereira; Instituto do Cinema e Audiovisual (ICA); Simonetta Luz Afonso and Rita Sá Marques, Instituto Camões; Antunes João, Nuno Gonçalves, and Fernando J. Santos, Lusomundo Audiovisuais; Turismo de Portugal; Manuel da Silva Pereira, The Embassy of Portugal, Washington, DC; Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Portuguese Studies Program/Institute of European Studies, UC Berkeley; and Randal Johnson, UCLA.