Leo Goldsmith
A MoMA series highlights the capacious tradition of collaboration,
hybrid genres, and centering the peripheral in nearly six decades of films from Portugal.
Still from Silvestre. Courtesy the Cinema Guild.
“The Ongoing Revolution of Portuguese Cinema,” organized by Francisco Valente, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West Fifty-Third Street, New York City, through November 19, 2024
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Talking about a country’s culture is a sticky business. In identifying any coherent “national” aesthetic, one risks trading in the most retrograde notions about cultural identity: at best reinforcing fussy, nationalist ideas about patrimony favored by tourist boards; at worst cosigning the mythologies of ethnic coherence often deployed as cudgels by right-wing politicians.
Still from Rite of Spring. Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema.
Portugal’s cinema, though, is a special case. Close-knit in its personnel and interlinked in its themes, the Portuguese film industry seems remarkably coherent compared to that of larger countries—linked more by a deeply cinephilic community and network of artists, producers, and festivals than by top-down nation-building initiatives or concessions to the European or global film markets. By self-definition, it’s both a cinema of resistance and a peripheral one. This is, first, because of its emergence in full flower after the Salazar dictatorship, which effectively lasted from the 1920s until the mid-1970s, with the Carnation Revolution and the independence of Guinea, Cape Verde, and Portugal’s other African colonies. And it is, second, because of its reluctance to abide by the usual orthodoxies of genre and style: a large swath of Portuguese cinema retains a formal instability that is continually renegotiating the hierarchies of reality and fabulation.
Still from A Woman’s Revenge. Courtesy Basilisco Filmes.
“The Ongoing Revolution of Portuguese Cinema,” a monthlong series now underway at the Museum of Modern Art, charts some of these legacies, spanning several decades from the 1960s Cine Novo to the robust and diverse output of the twenty-first century. From Manoel de Oliveira’s 1963 film, Rite of Spring, to recent works (of which Catarina Vasconcelos’s lustrous and intimate family portrait from 2020, The Metamorphosis of Birds, is the newest), the series reveals a communal project, the work of closely affiliated collaborators and apprenticeships, even as it covers an extensive range of styles. There are avowedly theatrical productions, like João César Monteiro’s lush, proscenium-bound Silvestre (1981) and Rita Azevedo Gomes’s exquisitely appointed literary adaptation, A Woman’s Revenge (2012). And there are films that make the streets of Lisbon their theater, such as Teresa Villaverde’s The Mutants (1998), a ravaging tale of unhoused youth, and João Pedro Rodrigues’s O Fantasma (2000), a hot-and-bothered nocturnal reverie of animal longing, trash collection, and rough public sex. But perhaps Portugal’s most enduring contribution to contemporary cinema is its rich tradition of experimentation between fiction and documentary.
Still from O Fantasma. Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema.
Films that infuse fabricated, even fantastical, elements into nonfiction premises—sometimes categorized as “hybrid cinema” or, even more tautologically, “creative documentary”—have proliferated in the last couple of decades, as recent output by Mati Diop (Dahomey), Jia Zhangke (Caught by the Tides), and Alex Ross Perry (Pavements) make clear. But the roots of the form stretch deep into the soil of the Lusophone film world, largely thanks to António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro. Across a fairly small oeuvre, this husband-and-wife team, a poet and a psychiatrist, practiced an alchemy of genres, dissolving the borders between the real and the fantastic in ways that informed both the work of their contemporaries and collaborators (like Oliveira and Paulo Rocha) and that of their students and aesthetic inheritors. (This lineage was itself the subject of an important film series, “The School of Reis,” mounted by the Harvard Film Archive in 2012.)
Still from Trás-os-Montes. Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema.
Their first and most important feature, Trás-os-Montes (1976), begins more or less with the standard fare of ethnographic documentary. Its opening title card explains that its scenes were entirely enacted by the local inhabitants of the remote region in northeast Portugal—whose name means “behind the mountains”—that lends the film its title. The camera pans across misty rolling hills in varying green and brown shades; a peasant boy herds sheep; and early sequences depict the villagers sitting around the hearth in their stone-and-timber dwellings or waiting on the tiny platform of a dark and mostly empty train station.
Ten minutes into the film, things start to get a little weird. A familiar anthropological scene of a village dance, complete with fiddle and twelve-string guitarra portuguesa, gives way to a flashback, a memory of a departed relative. Later, two boys perform in a medieval fantasia, complete with a Rip Van Winkle time-warp narrative. Elsewhere, assorted rustic characters appear in present-day miners’ gear, monks’ robes, period finery, and ’70s acrylics, all in the same shot. Wasn’t this supposed to be a documentary? How are we to account for these flashbacks and dream sequences, the film’s audacious pitching between dramatic and observational registers, its eccentric alternation of historical, mythical, and geological timescales?
Still from In Vanda’s Room. Courtesy Optec Cinema / Pedro Costa.
Such questions trouble the usual ethical and formal preconceptions of ethnographic film, seeking an aesthetic freedom that would reverberate in many works in MoMA’s series, such as Marta Mateus’s 2017 short Barbs, Wastelands, which approaches the real via a detour through folklore and oral history, staging unrecorded histories of labor and resistance among the forgotten rural inhabitants of Alentejo, in Portugal’s center. But undoubtedly the most conspicuous of Reis and Cordeiro’s inheritors—and likely the best-known Portuguese filmmaker—is Pedro Costa. (Like Rodrigues, Costa was also Reis’s former student at the Lisbon Theatre and Film School.) The director himself has made clear that his 2000 film, In Vanda’s Room, one of the defining movies of this century, owes a considerable amount to his antecedents’ explosion of genre definitions and formal precepts. Shot in Fontainhas, a network of slum dwellings on Lisbon’s outskirts, while the district was being demolished, Costa’s film uses the then-novel format of digital video to capture the shantytown’s marginalized inhabitants—which include migrants from Cape Verde and destitute heroin addicts—in a luminous chiaroscuro. Costa had reverted to shooting on DV, working in a documentary mode with a smaller crew, as a measure of simplicity and control. But what emerges is a portrait of peripheral lives that is unusually sumptuous, dissolving the conventions of poverty porn and gritty realism to offer a degree of beauty seldom afforded to the dispossessed.
Still from What Now? Remind Me. Courtesy the Cinema Guild.
Refusing the binary logic of privation versus luxury has become a feature of Portuguese cinema in the past two decades, as years of European austerity measures have descended on the nation and its arts funding. Made during the first year of the European Economic Adjustment Program for Portugal, Joaquim Pinto’s achingly personal What Now? Remind Me (2013) is an obstinate, messy, euphoric plea for life in the face of penury and death that tracks the filmmaker’s arduous treatment for hepatitis C and HIV in a time of economic and climate collapse. Pinto’s essay film doesn’t so much adhere to Reis and Cordeiro’s model as treat the cinematic form as a notebook, assembling diaristic observations, scraps from personal and official archives, his own films and other people’s. Across the film’s near-three-hour runtime, Pinto continually counters the image of his own exhausted and beleaguered body with reminders of the stubbornness of life: his partner, Nuno Leonel, who feeds him and helps with his medications; their gaggle of affectionate dogs; and the indelible moment late in the film when, after Pinto receives an encouraging medical exam, a wasp alights on his cheeseburger. This wild assemblage of images confronts us with a capacious idea of cinema, one that’s homespun and built from a community rather than a nation-state—a cinema that can contain everything.
Leo Goldsmith is a writer, teacher, and curator based in Brooklyn.