Third session of the Film and Talks Programme A Talking Picture: Oliveira and the History of Cinema, conceived and moderated by Anabela Mota Ribeiro. This film programme, dedicated to the relationship between various significant moments and trends in the history of cinema and the work of Manoel de Oliveira, continues with the theme of Melodrama, with a screening of Douglas Sirk's All that Heaven Allows (1955). After the screening, there will be a conversation with economist Vítor Constâncio and the professor of philosophy Pedro Duarte, moderated by Anabela Mota Ribeiro.

3 MAY | SAT | 5PM

MELODRAMA

ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS

Douglas Sirk | USA | 1955 | 89’

Douglas Sirk is the greatest name in American melodrama, and All that Heaven Allows is one of his most superlative examples. The drama of Jane Wyman, a middle-class widow, who falls in love with Rock Hudson, a young gardener, ignites a love that weaves a web of moral prejudices and increasingly suffocating social codes that push her to her emotional limits, and has given rise to countless imitations and homages – most notably Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) and Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven (2002). An eloquent example of the Technicolor weepie in which the German-Danish Douglas Sirk specialized at Universal, All that Heaven Allows is an exquisite model of his elegant mise-en-scène, which confirms him as one of the authors who most assertively captured the American mental landscape of the 1950s.