The Cinema of Manoel de Oliveira
Authors: Király Hajnal 
Published: May 2022

Manoel de Oliveira is the only filmmaker whose career spans from the silent era to the digital age, and yet there is little written in English about his extensive filmography. This volume, the first to discuss Oliveira’s later works in English, fills this incredible gap in scholarship on the director with fresh and original analysis of over 50 of Oliveira’s films, ranging from 1963’s Rite of Spring to 2009’s Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl.

Organized by tropes and topics, rather than chronological order of release, The Cinema of Manoel de Oliveira creates a unique lens through which to consider the director and the ways in which his work links cinema, literature, and other artforms. Hajnal Király sheds new light on Oliveira’s filmography with new readings of his work in relation to 20th and 21st century history.

The book focuses on a relevant aspect of Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira’s cinema that has not been addressed by critics: its affinity with modernity and intermediality, as well as its uncanny effect that can be grasped in both its topics and styles. An aesthetcs built around the stillness-movement dynamics, the relevance of the single, still(ed) image (pictorial or photographic) as a surface of projection of artistic and philosophical ideas and emotions, or as a link between theatricality and film (the case of tableau vivants), also responsible for the ‘literariness’ of Oliveira’s literary adaptations constitute are the main topics that the analyses of the book revolve around. In the light of already existing, Portuguese and non-Portuguese critical material, as well as theoretical writings of the new disciplines of intermediality and cultural studies, the monograph is balancing between approaches incorporating both close analyses and theoretical insights to what I consider the all-pervasive feature of Oliveira’s cinema: the uncanny understood as a spectatorial experience, effect, narrative technique, as well as a personal and artistic attitude. The films analysed in the three sections of the book epitomise the workings of the uncanny, many of them in an evident manner, on the level of the story or topoi, others on a metanarrative level, by creating a tension between past and present, words and images (the case of numerous adaptations) or other media (film and painting, film and theatre, film and music), or by the uncertainty principle that affects the image, rising a series of questions: is it moving or not? is the character dead or alive? Is the idealised woman a doll/machine or human? Is the image revealing or hiding the truth/reality?

The first section is built around the trope of the beautiful automaton, one of the central examples of Freud’s essay that epitomises the uncanny as an effect triggering (just like in its paradigmatic example, Hoffmann’s The Sandman) the uncertainty whether a character, a woman is living (human) or not (a machine), that is, is still or moving. This trope is descriptive of three aspects of Oliveira’s cinema, each to be tackled in separate chapters. The first chapter considers the beautiful automaton as a metaphor of cinema seen in its historical evolution from the classic visual arts to the technologically manipulated, moving image. The second chapter aims to explore further the uncanny effect of the beautiful automaton trope in the context of Oliveira’s obsession with the still(ed) image. The last chapter of this section deals with a specific case of the beautiful automaton, that of the ‘doll in the window’ and its various occurrences in the films of Oliveira starting from Aniki Bobó.

The second section entitled Camões and Don Quixote focuses on another aspect of the uncanny experience: repetition and doubling. Detectable in the artistic strategies of allegory, profanation and parody, as well as cultural mimicri, all these forms of imitation serve Oliveira’s cinematic reflections on Portugal’s cultural heritage, conceived as a tensioned relationship between the global and the local, Western and Southern, as well as official and unofficial/personal discourses. The chapters of this section will illuminate different aspects of the complex discourse of Portuguese national and personal identity. The first, entitled Historical Allegories and Identity Quests tackles the phenomenon of historical/cultural allegory described by Ismail Xavier as a figuration open to moralisation and educational purposes, typical of periods of transition and crisis. The second chapter is built around the concept of repetition as ʻprofanation’ of religious mysteries and miracles. The third chapter turns towards the topic of cultural identity, Portugal’s position in contemporary Europe, its geopolitical liminality that triggers an urge of ʻmimicri’ of the Western cultural colonisers.

The last set of chapters targets a special group of films in the Oliveirian oeuvre, the literary adaptations. The uncanny effects (such as repetition, interruption, stillness) that make the intermedial exchange visible and result in ‘disturbing adaptations’ are analysed in the first chapter. The paradigmatic film Doomed Love are interpreted in detail in a subsequent chapter comparing Oliveira’s version with other three Portuguese adaptations of the novel, in order to explore the underlying Oliveirian discourse on authorship, cinema as writing, fidelity, the word-image relationship, the visible and the invisible, as well as the absence-presence dichotomy. The signifying potential of the interaction between the visible and audible, the letter and the voice, or music, is explored in detail in the last chapter of this section, in connection with two other films that have as their central narrative trope the letter, its writing and reading process (Francisca and The Letter).

The closing chapter aims to reframe the uncanny effects and experiences tackled in the previous sections from a different perspective, arguing that these are related to a real or imagined, even anticipated, individual and national loss: mourning, longing, loss of identity, Portugal’s loss of global prestige, and own death. Melancholia is a common denominator of Oliveira’s films, that, together with the nostalgia for a glorious past (of Portugal, of the Oliveira family and their social class) is the ingredient of saudade, a specifically Portuguese (and Brazilian) form of yearning.