Fifteenth session of the film programme Manoel de Oliveira e o Cinema Português 2, with the screening of Manoel de Oliveira's "Francisca" (1981), presented by the professor and researcher Susana Viegas.

FRANCISCA

Manoel de Oliveira | 1981 | 167’

Based on Agustina Bessa-Luís' novel Fanny Owen, in turn inspired by a 19th century true story, Francisca entangles its plot in a reflection of the two main characters, José Augusto and Camilo Castelo Branco, about life and women, about love, fatalism and misfortune. As the dialogue between these two keeps unfolding, the characters are caught in their own concepts. This equally carnal and ghostly story follows up the aesthetic path that Oliveira was forging ever since The Past and the Present, as he himself states: ""They say that there is no words nor color in dreams... that was silent film, something akin to a dream, ghostly. (...) cinema was still, as they said, the art of silence. After that, it got words and color. These two things, materially speaking, brought a certain realism to cinema that dreams do not have. Even if that ain't real, like theater: theater is material, palpable, the actors and the settings are there. Cinema is immaterial: what we see is nothing but a phantom of a certain reality."" (Manoel de Oliveira, interviewed by João Lopes, 1997).