Manoel de Oliveira died last Thursday, April 2. Oliveira was 106 years old, the oldest film director active, the last living film director who started his career in the silent era and, in The MacMahonian´s reckoning, the second longest living person in the film industry ever, after Dutch-born actor and Nazi Germany heartthrob Johannes Heerstes, who died in 2011 aged 107.
Oliveira´s career spanned a staggering 9 decades, from 1931, date of his first release (Douro, Faina Fluvial, a documentary on the now extinct riverboat traffic which transported port wine barrels from the northeastern mountains where the grapes were grow to the city where the wine was aged – and actually his only film I admire) to 2014 (O Velho de Restelo, premiered just last November).
Honesty compels to admit that the consensus around Oliveira´s genius always baffled me. In my days of militant cinephilia, in which tried to see everything that was screened, I sat through Amor de Perdição (1978), Francisca (1980), Os Canibais (1988) and Non, ou a Vã Glória de Mandar (1990). His films seemed to me, to paraphrase an World War I saying about war, interminable boredom punctuated by moments if intense involuntary humour. Still, sedated, effete, literary, with preciously delivered dialogue, Oliveira´s films made Visconti look like Peckinpah. After falling asleep about 40 minutes through Non I decided that there were limits to the benefit of the doubt and desisted on Oliveira, a decision I haven’t revised in the last quarter century.
Which means I don´t know much about Oliveira´s films. But this I know: his career was made very difficult (think Orson Welles with less than 10% of the money) during the dictatorship period (1926-1974) and he only got recognition in his early seventies. Undaunted, at 83 years of age he started his most prolific and widest distributed period, directing at least one film a year until he turned 100, at which age he switched to the more leisurely pace of about one film every 2 years (that is, not counting shorts and documentaries) until shortly before his 106th birthday. That alone is something to admire.
Oliveira´s career spanned a staggering 9 decades, from 1931, date of his first release (Douro, Faina Fluvial, a documentary on the now extinct riverboat traffic which transported port wine barrels from the northeastern mountains where the grapes were grow to the city where the wine was aged – and actually his only film I admire) to 2014 (O Velho de Restelo, premiered just last November).
Honesty compels to admit that the consensus around Oliveira´s genius always baffled me. In my days of militant cinephilia, in which tried to see everything that was screened, I sat through Amor de Perdição (1978), Francisca (1980), Os Canibais (1988) and Non, ou a Vã Glória de Mandar (1990). His films seemed to me, to paraphrase an World War I saying about war, interminable boredom punctuated by moments if intense involuntary humour. Still, sedated, effete, literary, with preciously delivered dialogue, Oliveira´s films made Visconti look like Peckinpah. After falling asleep about 40 minutes through Non I decided that there were limits to the benefit of the doubt and desisted on Oliveira, a decision I haven’t revised in the last quarter century.
Which means I don´t know much about Oliveira´s films. But this I know: his career was made very difficult (think Orson Welles with less than 10% of the money) during the dictatorship period (1926-1974) and he only got recognition in his early seventies. Undaunted, at 83 years of age he started his most prolific and widest distributed period, directing at least one film a year until he turned 100, at which age he switched to the more leisurely pace of about one film every 2 years (that is, not counting shorts and documentaries) until shortly before his 106th birthday. That alone is something to admire.