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 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.