by ·Comments Off on Francisca (1981, Manoel de Oliveira)

The last in Oliveira’s Tetralogy of Frustrated Love is the third I’ve seen (Benilde, you’re next). Either this is the most eccentric of the bunch, or I’ve just forgotten how eccentric Past and Present and Doomed Love were. Each scene is a single-take diorama, and whole dialogue exchanges are repeated from different camera setups. Memorably in a late scene, the camera is between the characters, so each one speaks directly to us. Rigidly composed, more subtly dreamlike than Ruiz. Very writerly dialogue, “We live torn to pieces, in search of our bodies scattered all over the earth.” Also my second movie of the weekend with operatic singing, Balzac mentions and an unbalanced, punitive love triangle.

Camilo (Castelo Branco, the Doomed Love writer!) and Jose Agusto are both after “Fanny” Francisca. She is Teresa Menezes of the Non, Camilo is Mário Barroso with the thickest mustache (better known as a cinematographer, he’d shoot four of Oliveira’s 90’s films) and Jose Agusto is Diogo Dória with a droopy mustache (his first for MdO, he’d become a regular). Jose is with Fanny’s sister Maria, but he steals Fanny from his “friend,” eloping with her in the night (she falls off her horse immediately), then spends no time with her, leaving her alone in their new house. When Fanny dies, Jose thinks he’s to blame, becomes morose and obsessive, orders an autopsy and keeps her heart in a jar. Jose dies under suspicious circumstances soon after. Camilo was in his late twenties at this point – it’s set during the year he wrote Mysteries of Lisbon.

Doomed Lovers:

Dave Kehr:

In 19th-century Portugal, a rising young novelist falls in love with the daughter of an English army officer, provoking the obscure envy of an aristocratic friend, who resolves to marry the girl himself and make her suffer for her betrayal. The baroque plot is presented in a series of single-take tableaux, which do not attempt to embody the drama as much as allude to it, leaving the dense and passionate feelings to take shape entirely in the spectator’s mind. Oliveira limits himself to showing only what can truly be shown: not the story but a representation of the story, not the emotions but their material manifestations as they have crossed the decades.

Carson Lund in Slant:

Filming in immaculately dressed and lit rooms and separating his single-take sequences with matter-of-fact title cards that address, often with subtle wit, the actions about to take place, de Oliveira presents Francisca’s narrative progression as something of a foregone conclusion. The experience of watching the film feels akin to surveying a series of museum paintings and periodically pausing to digest the museum label beneath them; at times, de Oliveira will even play a scene twice, back-to-back, from two different angles, reinforcing the stuck-in-time nature of the storytelling. In the place of narrative transformation and suspense is a deadpan air of judgment that recalls the amused omniscience of Stanley Kubrick’s depiction of Enlightenment-era narcissism, Barry Lyndon, which charts another roguish gentleman trying to rise above his station via a marital engagement.

Glenn Heath Jr. called it “one of the greatest films about wasted time.”

by ·Comments Off on Porto of My Childhood (2001, Manoel de Oliveira)

“It is really inelegant for a man to let himself grow old.” A late film to be sure, an old man looking back at his debut from 70 years ago, remembering his young life. How was anyone supposed to know that Oliveira, in his 90s, would make ten more features after this?

Sometimes it’s a fun story of artistic discovery, but there’s a rueful thread of disappointment since all these good times took place with his friends, all artists, exiled and dead. Some old film clips and photographs, as expected. The movie centers around a series of real-time scenes: an opening overture with the camera behind the conductor… a drive through the streets at night… a poem… a song.

by ·Comments Off on Visit, or Memories and Confessions (1982, Manoel de Oliveira)

The camera prowls a nice house full of artworks and memorabilia, two visitors conversing on the soundtrack, their footsteps clomping through the halls, but never seen, as a piece of music comes and go in scraps.

Then Manoel de Oliveira introduces himself (“Cinema is my passion”), speaking directly to us. He walks to a new room, the color of his sweater changing and a small picture of the Mona Lisa following him into every camera angle, then shows us home movies with loud projector noise.

Back to the visitors, who were supposed to be meeting someone at the house and feel self-conscious about their intrusion, but not enough to leave… back to Manuel, and so on. Manuel’s deliberately-paced stories of the past in plain language feel like a school report, conflicting strangely with the poetry and superstition of the visitor segments. He eventually tells us that he’s a visitor here himself, having sold his childhood home to pay for his films.

Halfway through, we interview Manuel’s wife Maria Isabel, only the second person we’ve seen in the film. Manuel gets less narrative and more philosophical after this break. He talks about his recent films (and the one he was writing: Non), and we head unexpectedly into reenactment territory with the story of his arrest by the fascist government soon after the premiere of Acto de Primavera.

Oliveira spoke like he was at the end of his life, not realizing that another 22 years and half his body of work was still ahead of him. His final narration, “and I disappear,” then a quick slideshow from the family album until the film runs out of the projector. This was withheld from public release until after the maestro’s death, a fitting finale.

by ·Comments Off on Summer Shorts 2015

La Luxure (1962, Jacques Demy)

Demy’s segment on lechery from The Seven Capital Sins anthology. Nice long takes, light musical feel, made right after Lola. Unshaven Jean-Louis Trintignant (My Night at Maud’s) tells his relentless ladies-man buddy Laurent Terzieff (La Prisonnière) about his early misunderstandings of the word lechery, feat. flashbacks and hell-sequences. Jean Desailly (The Soft Skin) and Micheline Presle (The Nun, A Lady Without Camelias) play flashback-Trintingnant’s parents. Quite a bit of rhyming and wordplay that’s probably not coming through in the subtitles.

Terzieff:

Puppy Love (2003, Michael Colton)

Watched some clips from the Illegal Art comp, similar to the shorts that Craig Baldwin showed in Atlanta. In this one, a dog is in love with a pikachu.

Black Thunder (2001, Brian Spinks, Bill Wasik & Eugene Mirman)

Short series of campaign ads for animals running for office.
I’m voting for the bear.

Incident by a Bank (2009, Ruben Ostlund)

Single take recreation of a comically failed bank robbery.

O Velho do Restelo (2014, Manoel de Oliveira)

Actors playing Don Quixote, author Camilo Castelo Branco and two others discuss Portuguese culture, with flashbacks to Oliveira films such as Doomed Love and Non.

Stardust (2013, Mischa Rozema)

Some beautiful celestial effects.

Haiku (2009, Frederick Wiseman)

Lion / Waiting / Legs

Haiku (2009, Naomi Kawase)

Cicada / Sunrise / Flower

Haiku (2009, Alain Cavalier)

Train / Poster of bearded man / Bearded Man
Nicely done, in one take.

Idem Paris (2013, David Lynch)

While art prints of a Lynch painting are being pressed, Lynch stalks the press, enamored with the clanking gears and spinning wheels.

by ·Comments Off on Doomed Love (1978, Manoel de Oliveira)

Simao loves neighbor Teresa and Teresa loves Simao, cousin Balthasar also loves Teresa, servant Mariana loves Simao, Joao loves his daughter Mariana, and all these loves are doomed, doomed, doomed. Simao and Teresa’s families hate each other, Simao kills Balthasar and is sentenced to prison, old enemies of Joao kill him, and finally Teresa wastes away in a convent, Simao dies on a prison ship and Mariana jumps into the ocean during his sea burial.

Teresa:

So it’s quite unhappy, and reminiscent of Mysteries of Lisbon since they’re by the same author, but also an idiosyncratic movie, with different stylistic tics than the Ruiz. Some notes I took:

– Mirror dissolve to scene of mythology
– Lots of mirrors
– Narrator, rushing through backstory
– Tadeu stomps around yelling insults but all we hear are his footsteps
– Night scenes are just a black screen with subtitles
– Letters are filmed, narrated in their entirety, or their writer will recite into camera
– Flatly delivered dialogue
– Sometimes narrator tells us what would easily have been shown
– Actors stand by patiently waiting for the narrator to finish, like in a Peter Watkins movie.
– Narrator describes Simao killing Balthasar right before it happens

Simao kills Balthasar:

Set in the early 1800’s. Each episode opens with Simao’s younger sister Rita summarizing the previous episode into camera. There are other characters and events – Simao’s brother Manuel, who runs off to Spain with a married woman, and Simao’s mom, a former queen’s lady who misses the splendor of her old life and pulls strings to get her condemned son preferential treatment, and Joao, who gleefully murders Balthasar’s men in order to help Simao – but these are secondary to the whole doomed-love thing.

I used to think of convents as good places before this and Mysteries of Lisbon, The Devils, Mother Joan of the Angels, The Nun, Les Anges du peche, Don’t Touch The Axe, Black Narcissus, and so on. There’s little religion in the convent where Teresa is committed by her family – she’s immediately told not to trust the mother superior, and all the nuns run around gossiping about each other.

There have been at least eight film adaptations of Doomed Love, plus there’s a mysterious 2006-07 series on IMDB with Branco as writer, listing all the Doomed Love characters as well as Father Dinis, Angela and Eugenia from Mysteries of Lisbon – a Branco Universe crossover?

Mariana with Simao:

J. Rosenbaum called it “The Masterpiece You Missed” in his review, reprinted in his collection Placing Movies, which I read at the beach thirteen years ago and I’ve been seeking this movie out ever since. I’m still seeking it… hopefully a better copy surfaces on video someday. I think there are different versions, and I saw the television (color) miniseries. The great Oliveira died between my watching this and finally writing it up, but I’ve got about forty more of his films to watch, so his art lives on.

Rosenbaum:

Intricate dovetailings of narration and dialogue produce some elegant displacements and overlaps in and on the sound track. When the heroine’s father shouts at her in close-up, the sound of his voice ceases at the precise moment that the male narrator announces that the (off-screen) daughter doesn’t hear him because she’s left the room. Much later, the imprisoned hero responds in person to the narrator’s off-screen report of Mariana’s blacksmith father’s announcement (visible but not heard) that his daughter is delirious — a scene much easier to follow than to describe.
…
Watching this classically wrought example of controlled madness for 270 minutes … I was reminded once again of the battles between narrative and nonnarrative cinema that used to be waged in this room. (Today the battles are over, the warring tribes shipped off to separate schools or summer camps, and a mongrel like Doomed Love, doomed by its own integrity, has to walk the night without the sponsorship of either ghetto.)

Duarte de Almeida of City of Pirates and Past and Present as the ship captain:

P. Cunha in Senses of Cinema:

In Portugal, the film’s critical reception was very hostile. It was also devastating for its director, who was accused of wantonly producing the most expensive Portuguese film made with public subsidy at a time of serious financial crisis. Oliveira was also criticised for moving away from the naturalistic language mandated by television, undermining the legacy of author Camilo Castelo Branco, and not being concerned with the reality of the class struggle Portuguese society was undergoing in the aftermath of the socialist revolution. The debate about Oliveira’s work was so intense that it was even discussed in the national Parliament and inflamed arguments about public financial support for Portuguese cinema.
…
Doomed Love belongs – along with [Past and Present, Benilde and Francisca] – to the “tetralogy of frustrated loves”, a series of four films that are adaptations of works by some of Oliveira’s favourite literary authors (Vicente Sanches, José Régio, Camilo Castelo Branco and Agustina Bessa-Luís).

by ·Comments Off on I’m Going Home (2001, Manoel de Oliveira)

“Deliberately paced, lacking narrative momentum” reads a positive review. I found it very strange (even having seen some of Oliveira’s other films) in an exciting way. It would be easy to write an accurate plot description for netflix, something like “a respected old actor (Michel Piccoli) becomes the guardian of his grandson after losing the rest of his family in an accident, and begins to redefine his life’s priorities.” But that wouldn’t begin to convey the film itself. For instance, Oliveira opens on Piccoli starring onstage in Exit The King alongside Catherine Deneuve and Leonor Silveira. Piccoli plays this scene facing almost entirely away from camera. We see the men backstage who’ve come to deliver the news about his wife and daughter’s fatal car accident, but the men speak to nobody and the scene keeps playing out, watching the back of Piccoli’s head, for about the first fifth of the movie’s runtime. So it’s clear that “narrative momentum” is not what Oliveira was going for.

A while later, Piccoli’s actor has kept working since the accident, a nanny caring for his grandson most of the time. Then he’s (badly) cast in a film of Ulysses directed by John Malkovich. After fumbling a few passes at the English dialogue, he speaks the title and ditches the movie.

R.I.P.

by ·Comments Off on The Strange Case of Angelica (2010, Manoel de Oliveira)

Isaac (Ricardo Trepa, star of Eccentricities) is called to a rich estate in the middle of the night to take final photographs of a just-deceased girl (Pilar Lopez de Ayala, star of In the City of Sylvia), whose image he falls in love with, then it starts coming to life in his photographs (if MdO can embrace digital sfx then anybody can). Isaac spends his days photographing field laborers and his nights dreaming of Angelica, to the concern of his meddling landlady Justina. Excellent shot at the end: sick Isaac rises trance-like from bed, pushes the doctor aside then collapses, as his spirit continues out to the balcony and flies away with Angelica.

Mouse-over to hallucinate like Isaac does:

There are few indications that the movie is set in any recent decade until we see cars in the last half hour. This is by design: old-fashioned, simple-living photographer Isaac seems overly interested in old-fashioned things. I’m not sure of the significance of his being Jewish, but it’s mentioned a lot.

Film Quarterly explains:

As a Jew, Isaac is a stranger to the community, but he’s fascinated by Portugal’s religion, dying agricultural traditions, and quasi-mystical, late-romantic literature. (The Strange Case of Angelica grew out of a film Oliveira wanted to make in the 1950s, dealing with Jews who migrated to Portugal after World War II.)

I didn’t spot Leonor Silveira, but trusty ol’ Luis Miguel Cintra (Inquietude, Non) stays at the same boarding house. That’s him above with Ana Maria Magalhães of The Age of the Earth.

Mouse-over to awaken Isaac from his dream:

Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931, Oliveira)

The DVD guys have kindly included Oliveira’s first short, documenting workers on the river (as Isaac documents them in the fields – but not precisely). He pulls shots in and out of focus, gets in every striking angle he can muster, edits still and motion shots together in jarring ways. Definitely some staged situations. A truck driver, distracted by a passing plane, bumps an ox cart which then runs over a young man. The man is okay, but starts beating the oxen in anger until a policeman shows up, and he and the beasts make up.

I only played a few minutes of the very good (so far) commentary, instead watched an Oliveira monologue. He is against television, pornography and violence. He is for fantasy, Melies and Avatar. He methodically lists all the well-known great filmmakers, saying they’re the ones who maintain proper separation between the private and public spheres – an ethical discussion that I didn’t follow, then methodically lists the exact same filmmakers a few minutes later as if we didn’t just go over this. Cinema as an art should be “a reflection of the more critical, richer, graver and higher aspects of the human condition.”

by ·Comments Off on Agnès de ci de là Varda (2011, Agnès Varda)

Varda films her own travels for a year or so, as she visits old friends and new, goes to lots and lots of art exhibits and museums, and attends retrospectives of her work. “Now that I’m old, everyone tends to give me awards and trophies.”

I didn’t get tired of the framing story: a tree at her offices is severely pruned, all shot in still photographs. And speaking of photographs, the main excitement in episode one is that she visits Chris Marker at his studio. She shoots the cables behind his computers, “the secret threads of the labyrinth of his art.” A Demy-fest celebrating the 50th anniversary of Lola, featuring Aimee, Piccoli and Varda’s children. Lots of exciting artwork.

Manuel de Oliveira attends Varda’s screening in Lisbon. Somebody explains Oliveira’s cinema: “He says reality is merely the result of certain conventions. It’s very important in Manoel’s films to understand that society becomes the artifice. Cinema is not the artifice. Manoel’s films help us get some distance from this reality imposed on us, so we can interpret it in another way.” Then Oliveira clowns around for Varda, doing his Chaplin impression and miming a fencing match, and my understanding of him changes. When he was a piece of trivia, The Oldest Working Filmmaker, it always seemed like he had very little time left, that each film might be his last (a review I found of Non, over two decades and thirty films ago, suggested that it would be his last), but seeing him in action I suddenly realize that he may live forever.

Varda chills in Marker’s world:

Oliveira:

Ep. Two, she goes to Brazil and meets Glauber Rocha’s daughter and Jeanne Moreau for the Rio film festival. A chair in a gallery prompts a montage of chairs Varda has photographed. Stockholm, and an Ingmar Bergman auction. Agnes is so fascinated by her interviewer, they end up swapping jobs. She calls gallery director Hans Ulrich a “contemporary art detector.” Varda meets Jonas Mekas and Yoko Ono while dressed as a potato. Flashbacks to Vagabond and Beaches. An elephant upon its trunk announces an exibition.

Agnes Potato with Mekas:

Ep. Three: igloos in Basel. Varda’s installation film Patatutopia is a triptych of potato images. Another installation of interviews, each one playing on its own television in front of its own easy chair. “A piece by George Segal attracts my attention. I didn’t know how to film my distress when Jacques died. So I wrapped myself in white, like plaster, and imitated Alice. I listened to music we both loved. Artists invent ways for us to express our emotions.” At the Alliance Francaise she attends a presentation of Beaches and a photo exhibit, including portraits she took of filmmakers (Demy, Visconti, a superb shot of Fellini). She visits the Hermitage and flashes back to Russian Ark, then back in Paris has a fascinating chat with artists Annette Messager and Christian Boltanski.

the Segal piece:

Patatutopia:

Boltanski’s holocaust-metaphor used-clothing installation:

Ep. Four: setting up a Beaches installation, with sand and her shack made of filmstrips. Some visitors to the shack: “Their interpreter murmurs ‘New Wave'”. Digital beaches, a man who collects buttons (and button stories), then a return to La Pointe Courte, where she films the 2010 version of the same jousting tournament she shot in 1954 for her first feature. A Marker grinning cat leads to more museums, including an exhibit by a painter who works only in black. I liked how he displays his paintings, suspended in the middle of a room instead of upon the walls, so you can look past one to compare it with another in 3D. Jean-Louis Trintignant recites poetry in the park – this kind of thing never happens where I live.

Varda street on la pointe courte:

Trintignant:

Ep. Five: a visit to her buddy Zalman King, Richard Pryor’s costar. Towers built by a “hero of outsider art.” Interview with a reluctant participant at the gang violence memorial. She talks about Jim Morrison and visits her old beach house, presumably during the Lions Love era, then toys with blue screens on the beach. Some 15th century angel/Jesus paintings then, more fun, skeletons in Mexico City. Agnes gets her interpreter to play piano and her assistant to pose nude for a photograph. Interview, with clips of Japon, with Carlos Reygadas, before visiting Frida Kahlo’s house. A juice factory that also houses a massive collection of modern art. Matthew Barney, Marina, Abramovic, and the best molé in town.

Zalman:

Agnes and Mexico interpreter Elodie, not nude:

And the series ends with no grand sweeping statement on the travels, just a series of sketches accumulated over a year or two, the time it took for the tree in her courtyard to completely re-grow.

by ·Comments Off on Inquietude (1998, Manoel de Oliveira)

“Men were vulgar. They wanted to forget their history. Only funerals seemed true, as they passed streets of dirty houses, like tombs for the living.”

Almost an anthology film – three stories with no overlapping characters, set maybe in the 1920’s or 30’s. An adaptation of three separate works – a fact I didn’t catch in the opening credits. Very strange, but as magnetic and thrilling as Non.

The Immortals

A burst of music over the opening, then the first line, from a father to his son, is “Kill yourself.” Both father (Jose Pinto of Abraham’s Valley) and son (Luis Miguel Cintra, star of Non) are the most famous scientists of their respective generation. But the father is feeling washed-up and forgotten, and urges his son to die at the height of his fame.

Time out for a picnic with Marta (Isabel Ruth of The Uncertainty Principle), an old student/flame of the father’s, then back to the apartment. The son won’t be convinced, refuses to swallow cyanide, but agrees to fix his father’s curtain rod over the back door, at which time his dad pushes him over the balcony, then jumps after, yelling about immortality.

I’d noted that the movie felt like theater, the old man playing towards an imagined crowd instead of his son, in a single location except for the cutaways to the picnic and a downstairs neighbor’s place as the men fell to their deaths – and it was theater after all. A half hour into the movie, a curtain raises, and we begin to follow a couple groups of friends who have been watching the play, never to return to the scientist family.

Suzy

Square-jawed Diogo Doria of Non and his friend David Cardoso are paying as much attention to a pair of courtesans/prostitutes in another box as to the play. Cardoso meets the girls and reports back, having claimed Gabi (Rita Blanco) as his own, and later, Doria starts spending much time with Suzy (the ever-present Leonor Silveira), though he remains rational when he sees her out with other men.

All along, I’m suspicious that this will be another play, even though the atmosphere has changed – it’s more realistic, mostly shot in long takes (as was the first episode), but still held at a strange remove, with ellipses of undetermined lengths between scenes.

Suzy: “I have wealthy lovers, dresses by the best seamstresses, everything, except happiness.” Eventually she’s seeing Doria less often, though they exchange letters. In the end, Suzy has died in hospital during an operation (“she said: it’s a small thing”), but he keeps writing the letters. Cardoso stops by to visit his pathetic friend, and tells him a story.

Mother of the River

Young Fisalina (Leonor Baldaque, star of The Portuguese Nun) is in love with Ricardo Trepa (who played her husband in Christopher Columbus, The Enigma). But it’s not that simple: there are customs, rules, meddling parents and a small, stifling village. So she sneaks off to see the Mother of the River (Irene Papas, greek singer in A Talking Picture, also star of Z). “I love a boy with pretty teeth. I do not know how to marry him… curse me, but set me free.” So the mother takes Fisalina through a candlelit cavern to the edge of the water.

The next day Fisalina notices her fingertips are golden. She hides them from everyone, but no longer feels urgent towards her boy, and seems at peace with the village. During a candlelight festival, the light shines off her fingers and she is discovered, a witch! “Fisalina, reckless, fated, has chosen to live beside the deep water, where she will wait a thousand years before swapping lives with someone else.”

Goldfinger:

Trepa, despondent:

Oliveira has returned to these writers: his A Caixa was a play by Prista Monteiro (The Immortals), and he’s done at least four major films based on stories by Agustina Bessa-Luis (Mother of the River).

D. Kehr says the segments are “all centered on themes of death and eternity and presented sequentially as social comedy, existential tragedy and lyrical epic,” but Rosenbaum, more correctly I think, says it’s “the theme of existential identity” that unites the stories.