Portuguese cinema is experiencing a strange paradox: trapped by the hardships of the crisis and by government cutbacks, it shows an extraordinary creative vitality that is welcomed all over the world. The Seville European Film Festival brings this to light with a major retrospective.
Caiman Cuadernos de Cine asked me to write a text on the current situation of Portuguese cinema with regard to its main aesthetic features, but without having a particular impact on the economic state of the sector or, rather, on its deplorable and absolutely poor situation. I could try to do so, but I cannot. Knowing that Manoel de Oliveira, on his way to his 105th birthday, yet showing an impressive vitality and desire for cinema, is at home in Porto, standing, watching time go by (but with an ambitious project in his hands ready to go), unable to continue with one of the most valuable works of the 20th century because of these crises and these troubles, it is necessary to show indignation.
It is important to remind readers of Caiman CdC that the history of Portuguese cinema, as well as its unique diversity, was born from the actions of a group of filmmakers who, from the beginning of the 60s, at the dawn of modern cinema, learnt to become "snipers", complete auteurs who shot from their points of view, in solitude as usual. What brought them together? What continues to unite, for example, the generation of Fernando Lopes and Paulo Rocha, who made Cinema Novo, with a new group of young filmmakers like João Salaviza, João Vladimiro or Gabriel Abrantes? Perhaps a mysterious 'blood transmission' (it was Oliveira who said he believed that memory is transmitted through blood) in which the true self is part of the genetic code.
There have been many crises since then, not only economically speaking (Portuguese cinema has always been a small, subsidized, a local market with little money available), but also aesthetically speaking (the general incomprehension of Oliveira's absolute debut film, Amor de Perdição in 1978; the scandal of the release of João César Monteiro's 'cursed film', Branca de Neve, in 2000), but those "snipers", good or bad, overcame these obstacles. They survived the hardships of an illusory industry that wished them extinct over the last two decades and which, unfortunately, never had and never will have the conditions to coexist in the region it shares with Spain in the Iberian Peninsula. They radicalized their production methods with the emergence of the virtual world (it is still too early to measure the real extent and influence of what can now be considered the decisive film on the subject: No Quarto da Vanda, made in 2000 by Pedro Costa). They have, especially in the last ten years, and sometimes with remarkable enthusiasm, brought to light all the marriages and divorces between documentary and fiction, feeding their greatest ambitions and breaking through the major frontiers that today mark contemporary cinema. Moreover, films have not ceased to emerge, some of them more affluent and others less so, and they have not prevented them from touring, with foreign admiration, to the major international festivals, still giving meaning to the warning given by Serge Daney, when he suggested, in a piece called "Le Pôle Portugais", that Portugal was the country with the greatest number of good filmmakers per square metre.
Here is this text regarding the "Focus on Europe: Portugal" launched by the Seville European Film Festival. However, in November 2013, we arrive at an absurd irony: Manoel de Oliveira is at a standstill, just as all Portuguese film productions in 2012 were, and continue to be, at a standstill ( victims of brutal 100% cuts by the government in this legislature), there is a Film Law that has been approved but is not being enforced, there are legal obligations with private audiovisual operators who, in a state of impunity, refuse to pay what the law requires of them, but when we see the programme that Seville prepared, we do not notice the suffocation in which Portuguese cinema is living.
It is not noticeable because, by bringing together some of the best Portuguese production of the last five years (a large part of it generated in the post-crisis period), Seville finds itself with an extraordinary range of proposals that not only do not denounce, but also overcome the very poor production conditions in which they were created. The case of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata, a duo united in life and collaborating for almost two decades (João Rui is responsible for the artistic direction of all of João Pedro's films, and has already co-directed some of them as well as debuting solo last year with the short film 'O Que Arde Cura') is an exemplary case of perseverance. In the last two years, and while they wait for the green light to finish João Pedro's new feature film (it will be called O Ornitólogo), they have made six films, two of them in Macau, benefiting either from limited support for documentaries (which later gave rise to fictional films) or from commissions (such as Guimarães 2012; European Capital of Culture), showing a surprising audacity and capacity to work which can be used as an example: In 2013, being a filmmaker in Portugal did not just mean claiming the right to exist from the state; it also meant not getting discouraged, or giving up, finding new ways of working. It was in this context that Mahjong was born, another commissioned and a ''miraculous'' film (by Estaleiro; Vila do Conde) at the production level, and even richer because it manages to enter the field of thrillers, which is rare in Portuguese cinema.
Time, both in movies and in life, is a pressure, but in movies it can be a luxury when productions are adapted to it: another principle derived from Pedro Costa's films. Luxury in the time invested by Salomé Lamas with the character of 'Tierra de nadie', an ex-military and ex-mercenary whose story, mythomaniac or real (we'll never know), takes us on a terrible journey that concurs with the end of the history of Portuguese colonialism; luxury in the time invested by João Canijo with his actors in the melodrama 'Sangue do Meu Sangue'; luxury in the time invested by João Vladimiro, alone with his super 16mm camera, devoted to the mysteries of nature and to the movements of life in a remote Portuguese village lost in time in Lacrau, to the extent of making that time a sensory adventure, and therefore intimate. Romantic dramas that draw on a spectrum of science fiction ('A Zona', Sandro Aguilar's debut feature). Romantic dramas that create the illusion of a period melodrama, suggested by sumptuous cardboard scenarios, such as the one that Rita Azevedo Gomes, on the basis of a novel by Barbey D'Aurevilly, extracted from the magnificent 'A Vingança' by Uma Mulher. Intimate journals, now focused on first person, but with a global desire to grasp life (Joaquim Pinto described his debut opera, 'E Agora? Lembra-me', as "a film with a bat"), now projected, in retrospect, in the labyrinths of a major film, like Paulo Rocha's, in 'Se Eu Fosse Ladrão Rouba- va...', the posthumous film by the great filmmaker from Porto. Daring to leave the comfort of a short film model and start wandering around the narrative world, subtly carrying in the luggage the lament of a goodbye to adolescence, in a hypothetical pirate film (or better: with pirates): 'A Espada e a Rosa', João Nicolau's first feature film. Going through cartographic cinema, sometimes rescuing the memory of a personality, the one of the journalist and critic Novais Teixeira ('O Fantasma do Novais', by Margarida Gil), or the experience of an encounter with a mythical city, 'Guimarães de Torres & Cometas', by Gonçalo Tocha. Back to the "snipers". To one of the most daring, Miguel Gomes, who in 'Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto', a surprising mise en abyme, had the courage to share with us the adventure (but also the affliction) of what it is to make cinema in Portugal, exposing in this film the entrails of his own production, incorporating in the narrative 'the other side'. The same Miguel Gomes who told us in 'Taboo', through the eyes of a melancholic crocodile, that "the memory of the world is eternal and no one can escape it". I believe that a great deal of Portuguese cinema exists mirroring that prehistoric animal that seems to have crossed all times, all historical boundaries, and which Gomes transforms, let's admit it with some freedom, into a character. A desire for poetry from a country of filmmakers who mysteriously insist on the right to be different and who could not, nor would know, how to do so from any other part of the world. Part of that mystery is now widely revealed by the Seville European Film Festival.
FRANCISCO FERREIRA is a film critic for the Lisbon newspaper Expresso and an occasional contributor to magazines such as Cahiers du cinema and Cinema Scope.
This article was originally published in the special issue of Caiman Cuadernos de Cine dedicated to the Seville European Film Festival 2013.
