Manoel de Oliveira and Portuguese Cinema: 2. Freedom! marks the second instalment in a three-exhibition cycle. The first exhibition debuted just over one year ago, and it’s part of a long-term project undertaken by Casa do Cinema. This project aims to shift focus towards the filmmaker’s remarkable personal archive, which is entirely deposited at Serralves. The first exhibition, titled Manoel de Oliveira and Portuguese Cinema: 1. For the Good of the Nation, covered the period 

from 1929 to 1969, and this next exhibition continues it up to 1990, in alignment with the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the 25 April 1974 Revolution, continuing the chronological and methodological trajectory set forth by the first presentation, under the moniker of Freedom, and is based on assumptions that can be summarised as two fundamental concepts: that of anachronism and that of the anti-archival.

The former synthesizes an attitude – or rather a deliberate stance towards which much of Oliveira’s work from 1970 to 1990 converges – manifest in his building of an active critical position, by antagonism and contrast, that seemed to be atemporal and oblivious to the events unfolding around him, thus creating a place on the margin of history and with his back turned to the Portuguese cinema of the period. The latter assumption, which is partly a consequence of the former, it unfolds along two fronts. On the one hand, as we can see in Benilde, the freezing of a time is staged: a stifling atmosphere that wasn’t enough to suffocate the Revolution despite its opposition to the winds of change; but was nevertheless unable to notice the aesthetical revolution that Oliveira had unleashed with Amor de Perdição. On the other hand, the second aspect to consider is that of a speculative hypothesis: in opposition to the values of protection and conservation that define the archive, we could ask whether that which is rejected and discarded (that which is no longer valuable or useful, the antiquated knickknack, the wobbly commercially worthless piece of furniture, the outdated, the obsolete remains of an era…) keep in themselves a (frightening) identity, a phantasmatic weight, a smell of their own, a residue of life, a latent and chaotic power that confront us with a type of historical memory that no selectively and aseptically organised archive can ever bring back.

By discombobulating chronological linearity and intensifying the feeling that the present is made by the haphazard accumulation of multiple, complementary, contradictory, disparate pasts, this hypothesis and this question guided a new gaze at Oliveira’s archive and defined certain curatorial options, enriching the exhibition’s backdrop and even defining the dramaturgy of its installation.

António Preto and João Mário Grilo

Exhibition curators

In parallel, Casa do Cinema is presenting a film cycle on Domingos na Casa do Cinema: Manoel de Oliveira and Portuguese Cinema 2.