The Filmoteca pays tribute to the colossal Portuguese director with an exhibition of his photographs, many of them, unpublished
Gerard Moliné
07 march of 2023 at 01:53h
Manoel de Oliveira (Porto, December 11, 1908 – April 2, 2015) was one of the most important directors in European cinematography and the most popular, prolific, and acclaimed in Portugal. Of a wealthy background, he was influenced, even from silent cinema, by names such as Eisenstein, Dreyer, Ford, Rossellini, and Tati. Interested in the evolution and customs of the Portuguese upper class and aristocracy, with whom his family maintained close contact, he developed his cinema as a contrast between the hardships of the rich and the evident suffering of the lower classes. A social stratum that, at times, he placed in his films as a mere stone guest.
His films, a mix of naturalism and neorealism, with high doses of expressionism, are sprinkled with social satire and contain a very personal and subtle irony. Notable among them are Francisca (1981), Le Soulier de Satin (1985), and Os Canibais (1988), in what could be called his golden age. The long-lived director lived to be 106 years old, being the only one who could premiere a film after turning 100, specifically four: Singularidades de uma rapariga loira (2009), O Estranho Caso de Angélica (2010), O gebo e a sombra (2012), and O velho do restelo (2014).
Eight years after his death, the Filmoteca exhibits more than 100 photographs taken between the late 1930s and mid-1950s. Coming from the director’s personal archive, most are completely unpublished. This facet of the Portuguese, unknown to many, reveals a new perspective on his work as a filmmaker.
His snapshots establish a clear dialogue between pictorialism, constructivism, and the experimental aesthetic of the Bauhaus, halfway between classical composition and the modernity of his early films.
The director’s interest in still images is due to the figure of Antonio Mendes, a photographer for the Portuguese Photography Association and a member of the International Salons of Photographic Art. Mendes was the director of photography for Oliveira’s first five titles as a filmmaker, among which stand out:Douro, flu andAniki Bóbó(1942), both in black and white
Manoel de Oliveira took over the photographic direction of his films after an internship he did at the AGFA headquarters in Leverkusen (Germany) in September 1955. There, he learned the use of color, a fact that finally convinced him until he gave up that responsibility again after O passado e o presente (1972), a title that marked a turning point in the director’s filmography.
The Portuguese’s interest in photographycoincides with the period in which the country’s censorship prevented him from directing his own scripts. It is worth remembering Manoel de Oliveira’s defense of the Salazar regime after being exiled by the Republic, and living a few years as a child with his brother in La Guardia (Galicia).
The snapshots found in the exhibition contain different recurring themes for the director. The photos of the grape harvest would later inspire Gigantes do douro (1934-35); those of a circus theme, O saltimbanco (1944); the funerary portraits of a dead young woman would inspire the film O Estranho Caso de Angélica, conceived between 1952 and 1954, but which would take more than fifty years to carry out. The aviation photos (1937-38) are related to an unreleased documentary about the Aeroclube do Porto, where Oliveira was one of its first students. The Portuguese was also a renowned motor racing enthusiast.
Of his photography, we could say that, influenced by contemporary aesthetic movements, it is characterized by an artistic purpose. The camera, then, becomes an instrument of search and experimentation. In Oliveira’s eyes, photography questions visual language and constructs it with total affinity with his cinema. The marked eclecticism of the exhibition expresses an evident desire to experiment with what the moving image has not been able to capture clearly.
We always move between costumbrista recreations and still lifes, and direct photography, without preparation, which we can classify as social realism or poetic realism.
Manipulations of the positive stand out, softening landscapes, environments, as well as highlighting a certain symbolic, bucolic charge, if you will, that generate tension with the forms, brightness, and marked contrast. Sepia tones, reframing, superimpositions, and the use of inks define this more experimental process.
Portraits are a form of self-reference. To him and to his work as a film director. We find reflections, photography and the act of photographing as a reference theme. His wife, Maria Isabel, also appears, protagonist of some of the snapshots.
Death as a recurring theme for the director. Since O passado e o presente, it is the tragic outcome of most of his films, especially that of the Tetralogy of Frustrated Loves. Death always as a crucial element of the still image. In the words of photographer Gabriel Orozco, collected in Luciano Concheiro’s essential Contra el tiempo (Anagrama): “Photography kills, dissects. It pretends poetry, it is almost cinema, almost painting. It is medicine. Serum. The worst of illusions, legitimized by our blindness and our possessive craving. Photography is not an art. It is an art to walk and know how to see what happens. We see what happens, not the photos (…) To walk and observe; photography is only the record of that art, the art of presence. To walk, to see and to present oneself.” In Oliveira’s case, the trigger of the director’s life and death and his cursed 2010 film about the dead young woman. In this vein, we find images of dead, dry trees. Tombs. Doors. Windows opening to darkness.
There is a marked denaturalization of the works in relation to the constant, in many cases, of his cinema. In some way, Manoel de Oliveira wants to separate them from his visual style in motion, endowing them with a status of unique images.
The exhibited works are a novel and important testimony within the history of Portuguese photography. They show time and space, stillness and movement, narration and presentation, documentation and representation,completely blurring (or redrawing) the line between Oliveira the director and the photographer. The exhibition can be visited until March 19, 2023 and is curated by António Prieto.
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