SUNDAYS AT CASA DO CINEMA: MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA E O CINEMA PORTUGUÊS 2

Between the 1970s and 1980s, Portugal underwent profound social and political changes. For example, the 1974 Revolution – which not only overthrew the Estado Novo regime, ending forty years of dictatorship, but also ended the Colonial War and initiated a turbulent process of decolonisation – or, just a decade later, the country’s accession to the EEC in 1986. During these two decades, Portuguese cinema did not remain indifferent to the transformations underway and experienced important changes in terms of its aesthetic approaches and production models. By fostering the creation of filmmakers’ cooperatives or the emergence of very distinct authorial voices, aligning with what was happening ‘outside’ or in the identity affirmation of a ‘Portuguese school’, whether militant or more allusive, the country – this changing landscape, amidst Histories, contradictions, and uncertainties – has always been the focus of this revolutionary cinema.

Manoel de Oliveira and the Portuguese Cinema 2 – the second instalment of a series of three film programmes – follows on from the cycle that, a year ago, focused on Portuguese film production from the period 1929-1969. Then, as now, Oliveira’s work is placed in context and confronted with other Portuguese films being produced while he was working. A panorama that probes affinities and differences, relationships of complicity and dissension, in what is, for the director, one of the phases of his career in which he most radically questioned cinema (forms, language, meaning, scope) and, unexpectedly, established himself – both at home and abroad (or to be more precise, abroad and at home) – as a key reference. An author who, internationally counting among the most unclassifiable creators in the history of cinema, also became one of the main inventors of what is understood today as ‘Portuguese cinema’ and even of what is understood today as ‘Portugal’.