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Portuguese film director Manoel de Oliveira, who died in 2015 at the age of 106, was the Benjamin Button of cinema, having made a belated debut. He had made only two feature films before turning 60, and then went on to make 30 more – 22 of which were released between the ages of 81 and 103. But the quantity of his films is not as important as their quality. The finest examples of his work – ten films made between 1996 and 2004 – will be shown at BAM in new restorations from 28 March to 3 April. These films highlight Oliveira as the creator of a unique cinematic world and an outstanding contemporary director, albeit in a historically rich style that reflects his age, his roots and the time of his youth.
Let Oliveira tell his story, as he does in The Port of My Childhood, a 2001 documentary. It’s a quiet but turbulent torrent of self-disclosure in which he shares the story of his coming of age, filled with passion and appreciation for the cultural and natural beauty of his hometown. He begins with a story of loss—a simple but majestic house on a hill with a panoramic view of the city, now windowless, abandoned, and boarded up. Oliveira’s father was a wealthy industrialist, and the view from the old house evokes the comfort that his family’s wealth brought, as well as the aesthetic education he received in his youth. He recalls spending time with his family at the opera, especially in their box, and dramatizes the scene where young Manoel (played by Jorge Trepa, the director's grandson) watches with rapture an operetta about a musical bandit who breaks into a rich woman's house and escapes thanks to his singing. (Oliveira himself, now in his nineties, plays the suave intruder.)
Oliveira reminisces about the family chauffeur: he describes the charming ride home late at night, and makes 21st-century Porto come alive through the windows of a vintage car, imagining the city of his youth. He also recreates the high-class sarcasms of the “bohemians,” as he calls them, who lounge elegantly outside a bakery, and shows himself as a young adult (Ricardo Trepa, also Oliveira’s grandson) flirting with women in a sleazy nightclub, learning about the world of pimps and sugar daddies. He remembers the pastries he loved (now a clothing store), the promenade where the ritualized social life was in full swing (there is archival footage of its celebrations), and the chaste first love he experienced in the elegant home of his cousins. He also remembers the young artists who were his friends, among them a poet persecuted by the Salazar dictatorship who chose the path of political exile to Brazil.
He recounts his first encounter with cinema, a rowdy audience in an ornate theater watching silent films. Using footage from 1896 of seamstresses emerging from a workshop onto a Porto street he knows well, he connects the origins of Portuguese cinema to his own youth. His artistic vocation is inextricably linked to his cozy home life: “In that house, I wrote and conceived many films that I couldn’t make,” Oliveira says. Then, in 1931, he made one, a short documentary called Douro, Faina Fluvial. Working on a shoestring budget, he developed much of the footage in his family’s garage and edited it by hand on a pool table. The project, he says, “stole” him from “sport,” which in turn had snatched him from his “bohemian life.” (He was a prolific athlete and even, for a time, a racing driver.)
The associative freedom of Oliveira’s memories in The Port of My Childhood is combined with a complex and elegant interweaving of different types of cinematic material, from archival footage and photographs to contemporary documentary footage and dramatic scenes, all of which convey the vitality and theatricality of the city where he grew up. Recalling a mountain climber scaling an ornate tower and ascending its flagpole, Oliveira alternates black-and-white documentary footage of the event with a colour dramatisation of the crowd of spectators watching from the street, including the younger Manoel. There is, however, an additional dimension to Oliveira’s recollections that extends the reach of these pictorial memories beyond their immediate and local charm: he connects them to the powerful currents of history. Oliveira recalls his youthful fascination with Porto’s monuments, its statues, its squares and street names – and their meanings. In these landmarks, Portugal's historical figures and key events (including, of course, its extensive colonial history) are silently – but openly and permanently – commemorated. In recalling such artefacts, he reveals what and who they symbolize, the official political heroes and policy changes that have shaped his country and its national mythology – and that have shaped his own identity.
Sourse: newyorker.com
