It's impossible to discuss the work of Manoel de Oliveira without acknowledging his longevity (he hits the century mark this December), or his equally incredible productivity (at least a film a year since 1990). But there's a less-often remarked and perhaps more significant aspect to his peculiar filmic career: the relative artistic silence of his first six decades. Aside from a handful of short films (including the acclaimed DOUTO, Faina Fluvial) and two isolated features (1942's Aniki Bobo and 1963's Rite of Spring), Oliveira was a filmmaker more in theory than in practice until weil into his sixties. Stymied by the authoritarian Estado Novo regime of Antonio Salazar, he was forced into a prolonged reflection on the nature of cinema, a process that ultimately exerted a profound influence on his art. Embarking on his career in earnest at a time when many artists are coasting towards retirement, Oliveira is a filmmaker whose films emerged belatedly, but fully formed, with an unapologetically peculiar style and a resolutely personal set of thematic preoccupations. Thanks in no small part to the support of the legendary producer Paolo Branco, Oliveira has made up for lost time with a vengeance-but while the films have come fast and furious, few other fiimmakers have made movies with such a serene disregard for the demands of the marketplace, or for that matter the pressures of critical or scholarly attitudes. Despite the frequency with which they appear, his films feel anything but rushed. It's a well-known phenomenon for filmmakers to produce films like this in the twilight of their careers-but Oliveira's career is unique for having taken place almost entirely under the cover of twilight.

Oliveira is a profoundly paradoxical film artist: deeply invested in the (increasingly vanishing) traditions of Western civilization, but a committed modernist as well; unwavering in his faithfulness to the literary and dramatic texts he so often founds his films upon, but with a sublime visual sense and a distinctive conception of what constitutes the "cinematic;" ostensibly apolitical, but preoccupied with history and the decline of Western civilization. These contradictions and conceptual difficulties may well stem from the uniqueness of Oliveira's trajectory-the fact that his ideas and attitudes enjoyed such a long period of gestation, in (relative) isolation from surrounding trends and fads.

Although his first two features are anything but negligible-Aniki Bóbó is a striking, if atypically sentimental, precursor of neorealism, shot on the streets of Oliveira's native Porto, while The Rite of Spring is a fascinating anomaly within his body of work, a Jean Rouch-like document/reenactment of a village Passion play-Oliveira came into his own with the Tetralogy of Frustrated Love (as it's come to be known): The Past and the Present, Benilde or the Virgin-Mother, Doomed Love, and Francisca. It's in these films, and especially in the last three, that Oliveira's art truly revealed itself. All four are based on texts (the first two on plays, the last two on novels), to which Oliveira practices extreme fidelity; these are not adaptations of the source texts, but monuments to them. And all four see him simplifying his style, deemphasizing editing and camera movement, and draining the stories of the trappings of conventional drama (expressive acting, subjective camera work, an emphasis on the visual over the verbal).

Indeed, the most striking illustration of Oliveira's unapologetic distance from most contemporary filmmaking is his subversion of the conventional wisdom that to qualify as "cinematic" means to favor montage and motion, and to tell stories visually. Oliveira is forever asserting that the prolonged, unadorned, and steady gaze is not only valid but every bit as cinematic as an approach that favors the dynamic interaction between shots, or the shifting spatial relationships generated by a moving camera. Perhaps because he boasts a perspective that encompasses the cinema not only as an art form but as an invention, Oliveira's films foreground the most basic function of the movie camera: as an instrument of recording. Time and again throughout his films, Oliveira simply and unobtrusively focuses the viewer's attention on objects, faces, and above all on actors in conversation, asking the audience to reflect on the words being spoken, or the significance of an object, building, or monument. To draw attention to his editing or his camera movement would be to emphasize the film's own surface and texture. But Oliveira is not interested in asserting himself stylistically, or even in enacting a drama, but rather in opening a space for contemplation and reflection, a space in which certain perceptions and revelations can occur.

The object of these reflections is as much the texts Oliveira chooses to adapt as it is the material world he photographs. The majority of Oliveira's films have been based on literary sources-from works by his contemporaries, the playwright José Régio and the novelist Agustina Bessa-Luis (with whom Oliveira has collaborated frequently), to classics by Camilo Castelo Branco, Âlvaro do Carvalhal, Antonio Vieira, Paul Claudel, and Madame de Lafayette-with other films paying homage to or borrowing from works by Flaubert, Ionesco, and Dostoevsky. These texts ultimately take on as great a materiality (if not more) than the people and objects charged with embodying them. In Oliveira's hands, each text is not a starting point or inspiration but an inviolable element-its language appears unmodified, as dialog, voice-over narration, or intertitle. And rather than penetrate and interpret the text, the actors simply deliver it, stripped of melodrama, expressiveness, or affect. The actors may give body to the text, but the text itself conveys the drama, the emotion, the ideas.

It's an approach that many have found perverse-anticinematic, static, pretentious, coldly distant-but it has its roots in the work of filmmakers like Dreyer, Bresson, and, certainly the closest contemporary practitioners, Jean-Marie Strab and Danièle Huillet, all of whom have demonstrated the great possibilities-intellectual and emotional-of this mode of filmmaking. Oliveira's approach is not a denial of drama or emotion, but a faith in the power of the text, and the drama and emotion inherent in it; his goal is to penetrate to that power as directly as possible. And this means honoring the (literary) mode in which the text expresses its meaning, rather than reconceiving the text in terms of a naturalism (the prevailing approach to narrative cinema) profoundly alien to it. Oliveira strives to find a place where the literary and the cinematic meet and enrich each other. In his eyes, this is not a matter of translating the text into the language of cinema, but of allowing the text to live and breathe, and above all of endowing the text with that special weight and immediacy that the theater, and a materialist cinema, can bestow.

The supreme example of this approach is the four-and-a-half-hour-long Doomed Love. Despite its length, it's hard to imagine any viewers, or at least any viewers willing to commit themselves to it, finding this a cold, distant, or anticinematic film. An adaptation of Castelo Branco's classic Portuguese novel about the thwarted love between Simão Botelho and Teresa de Albuquerque, whose union is forbidden by their mutually hostile fathers, Doomed Love features all the hallmarks of Oliveira's high-modernist style-explicitly artificial painted sets, radically blank performances, theatrical staging, and frequent explanatory intertitles-but it attains an uncanny, hypnotic power, and ultimately an overwhelming emotional force. Doomed Love was originally commissioned for television-a comical idea, since its reliance on long-shot compositions and the obscurity of its cinematography must have rendered it nearly incomprehensible on the small screen. But on the big screen, where it unquestionably belongs, it nevertheless retains some of the quality of a miniature. Shot on 16mm, and mostly in medium-to-long-shot, it's at once deeply engrossing and yet an object of contemplation-the images feel far away, like illustrations rather than concrete realities in their own right. Doomed Love may be Oliveira's most fascinating experiment with the balance between sound and image: the words have perhaps a greater weight than the visuals, but, precisely because of the images' instability, the viewer has to reach into them, as it were. The contrast between the materiality of the language and the twodimensional, ghostly quality of the imagery has a deeply mysterious, seductive effect.

The theme of unattainable love is one that preoccupied Oliveira throughout the Seventies and Eighties, providing him with a perfect vehicle for exploring the unfathomable contradictions and mysteries of human nature-its follies and madnesses, but also its capacity for the transcendental. The theme takes different forms in each film: dark comedy in The Past and the Present (the protagonist's perverse devotion to her deceased ex-husband drives her current spouse to suicide, but when the ex-husband miraculously rematerializes, the roles are switched); supernaturally-tinged drama in Benilde (in which the protagonist sacrifices worldly love for a forbiddingly religious one); and tragedy in Francisca (in which the protagonist is slowly destroyed by the cruel indifference of her husband, whose remorse and guilt come too late).

But only in The Past and the Present is the desire for the unattainable depicted as absurd-the later films are pervaded with a much richer, more confounding ambiguity, where the line between the inhuman and the transcendental is constantly blurred. Finding herself pregnant seemingly by means of a miracle, Benilde embraces an unwavering, uncompromising faith in God that leaves little room for worldly love, to the great distress of her devoted admirer Eduardo. Possessed by faith, she takes her renunciation of earthly pleasures to an almost monstrous extreme; but her repudiation of the compromised, hypocritical morality of those around her, and the intensity of her faith, are impossible to dismiss. And Doomed Love represents an even subtler treatment of the theme, since here the impossible loves are doubled. The farther apart Simão and Teresa are forced, the greater their devotion to each other; but their love from afar is paralleled by the equally all-consuming devotion of Mariana, a peasant girl who cares for Simão throughout his struggles. The suggestion that Simão, in pursuing his idealized and unattainable love, is overlooking the more prosaic, less glorious, but no less precious one within reach, is all the more powerful for remaining unspoken. And the dynamic never becomes schematic, as Oliveira continues to portray the love between Simão and Teresa as transcendent and sublime.

If Oliveira's preoccupation with language in its most literary forms contrasts with the modernism of his style, so too does the theme of unattainable love itself, evoking attitudes, esthetic and social, that have become increasingly rare in contemporary culture. In the decades since the appearance of the Tetralogy of Frustrated Love, Oliveira has pursued thematic paths that have taken him even further from the esthetic and ideological mainstream (leading him to destinations that are sometimes difficult to fathom). History has become an increasingly dominant concern, and in particular the history and legacy of the Portuguese nation. In No, or the Vainglory of Command, Voyage to the Beginning of the World, Word and Utopia, A Talking Picture, Fifth Empire, and most recently, Christopher Columbus, the Engima, Oliveira has demonstrated an obsession with the role of Portugal in the world, focused on the fifteenth- to seventeenth-century voyages of discovery which, to his mind, constitute the country's great contribution to world culture, and on the myth of the Fifth Empire, which prophesied that the sixteenth-century King Sebastian, whose defeat in battle in Morocco marked the decline of Portugal's power, would return to unite the world, spiritually and culturally, under the nation's auspices.

Oliveira's approach to conveying history is as distinctive and unusual as his handling of literary sources. History seems to represent for him a kind of text, to be handled with the same respect for its integrity and inner logic. In films like No, A Talking Picture, and Christopher Columbus, he takes a frankly pedagogical stance-historical events are conveyed verbally, not visually. Only in No are there dramatizations, and even here they are essentially no more than selective illustrations of the stories recounted to his soldiers by lieutenant Cabrita, a one-time professor now serving in Portugal's colonial war in Angola. And in A Talking Picture and Christopher Columbus, these dramatizations disappear. The first half of A Talking Picture, which demonstrates the approach at its purest, focuses on a mother and child voyaging by ship from Portugal to Bombay. As they encounter various landmarks en route, the mother explains their significance to the child, narrating some of the crucial events in Portuguese (and world) history. Oliveira's art reaches a pinnacle here, a profoundly moving and thematically rich construct emerging from an effortless simplicity of form. We are presented with nothing more than unadorned and unvarying shots of the mother and child on the deck of the ship, alternating with shots of the landmarks they are slowly passing; but these simple elements convey the profound and timeless spectacle of human knowledge being transmitted verbally from one generation to another-the process of maintaining a continuity of human experience, and of a mind learning to understand its surroundings.

And simple as it may be, the imagery is anything but negligible. Oliveira's disinclination to resort to dramatization is not simply an esthetic choice, it's an ethical one, a materialist conviction that the attempt to recreate history is superficial and inadequate. He has chosen instead, above all in A Talking Picture and now Christopher Columbus (which involves an investigation into the mystery of Columbus's roots), to devote himself to the excavation of the past through the present. Oliveira's prolonged gaze, in these later films, is often trained on landmarks, objects, or people who embody some part of the past, and it represents an attempt to penetrate to their historical significance. If Oliveira's style has always promoted the act of looking, this process has come to mean a peeling away of layers of history, a recognition of the stories and meanings that He under the surface of things.

The meanings Oliveira gravitates towards-involving the voyages of discovery and the changing fortunes of the Portuguese empire-have revealed the profound investment he seems to have in the role of Portugal in the world, and more generally in the tradition and legacy of Western civilization. These preoccupations have at times suggested a reactionary sensibility, most notoriously in A Talking Picture's final half hour, when the ship carrying the child and her mother (who represents a kind of repository of Western historical memory) is destroyed in an apparent terrorist attack. It's far from clear that Oliveira, in bemoaning the slow death of the traditions of his own culture, means to characterize the East, or the peoples of the Muslim world in particular, as hostile towards or incompatible with Western civilization. But the lack of evidence in his films of an interest in other cultures raises suspicions of an isolationist attitude-or, at the very least, a nationalistic streak that sometimes undercuts the films' relevance.

Hand in hand with this take on history, though, has been an inevitable (and more universally resonant) engagement with the theme of aging-the past as seen from a personal, rather than historical perspective. Though Oliveira waited until his tenth decade before addressing the subject explicitly, plunging in only with 1997's Voyage to the Beginning of the World, it has since become a recurrent theme (though by no means the dominant one). I'm Going Home, Porto of My Childhood, Belle Toujours, and Christopher Columbus have all confronted the phenomenon of aging with great candor, wit, frankness, and, above all, a near-total absence of sentimentality. Even on a subject that is patently at the heart of his own experience-and even in a film like Voyage to the Beginning of the World, in which Marcello Mastroianni (in his final role) plays an elderly Portuguese filmmaker named Manoel-Oliveira refuses to reduce his work to personal testimonial. In Voyage, the autobiographical figure played by Mastroianni is gradually, and unexpectedly, eclipsed by his companion Afonso, a middle-aged French actor of Portuguese descent, who is determined to take advantage of their trip to seek out the aged aunt he has never met. Though the first part of the film sees Manoel revisiting some of the landmarks of his youth, in shifting its focus to Afonso's story Voyage expands its thematic range to encompass the phenomenon of exile, cultural limbo, the isolation of life in remote rural areas, and the ties of blood. Oliveira is present in Voyage (doubly so-figuratively through the Mastroianni character, and literally in a nonspeaking role as the characters' driver), but increasingly as an observer rather than a protagonist.

If there's an unfashionably aristocratic quality to Oliveira's work-evident from his preference for literary sources, the upperclass milieu of most of his later work, and his refusal to make concessions to an audience unaccustomed to such verbally dense and formally rigorous films-his instinctive deemphasizing of the personal, even after a life and career of such remarkable longevity, is unfashionable in an enormously admirable sense. Oliveira has certainly earned the right to a measure of self-congratulation. But if his achievements and his longevity have resulted in any self-indulgence, it's the kind from which other filmmakers could benefit-one that leads not to arrogance or artistic laziness, but to a confident and unapologetic pursuit of an artistic path all his own, one totally divorced from the uncritically adopted and derivative methods of so much of contemporary narrative filmmaking.

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© Copyright 2008, CINEASTE