Sundays at the House of Cinema: Manoel de Oliveira Spectator

Revisiting some of the films that marked Manoel de Oliveira as a spectator, this cycle offers an overview of his cinephilic references, starting with the most remote. When, shortly before the First World War, the young Oliveira went to the cinema for the first time, not even twenty years had passed since the first public screening of the Lumière cinematograph, presented in Paris at the end of 1895. If the babbling language of what would become the "seventh art" was still in its infancy, many of these films that marked the beginnings of cinema were also formative for Oliveira in his vision as a filmmaker. Others, more recent, reveal elective affinities with works and directors who, in some cases and in different ways, took on, like Oliveira himself, the challenge of testing both the formulas crystallised by classical cinema and the aesthetic expedients that defined modern cinema.

It is well known that one of the singularities of Oliveira's relationship with cinema, whether as a spectator or director, is the extraordinary longevity of his career. Having spanned more than a century and produced a filmography that began in 1931 and developed over more than eight decades of work - thus accompanying the transition from silent to sound, from black and white to colour, from film to digital... -Oliveira's work cumulatively synthesises the entire history of cinema, just as his spectatorial experience summarises what can be understood as a history of cinephilia.

This first review of Manoel de Oliveira's cinematographic preferences, while necessarily personal and lacunar, is a good reflection of the eclectic taste of a director who, having seen it all (and seen it all happen), understood better than anyone the tension between the transitory and the immutable, between technical passadism, the ephemerality of fashions and the persistence of what defines us as human. The selection of ten films presented in this cycle ranges from Max Linder's comic burlesque in Seven Years of Bad Luck (1921) to the political avant-gardism of Glauber Rocha's God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun (1964); from the modernism of Marcel L'Herbier's The Inhuman (1924) to Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria (1957), that "hymn to life", as Oliveira called it; from the asceticism of Robert Bresson's Mouchette (1967) to the lyricism of Abbas Kiarostami and his The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). In addition to the possible links that can be established between these titles and the films that Manoel de Oliveira made or would make, this is an authentic and very personal history of cinema. A dialectic between the director's personal taste and the work he himself created, proven proof and full demonstration of the inseparability between seeing and doing.