The Artistic Revolution of Portuguese Cinema

“The Ongoing Revolution of Portuguese Cinema,” a month-long series now getting underway at MOMA, does more than just present extraordinary (and extraordinarily rare) movies that happen to share a language and a culture.
It is also the record of an intrinsically political cinema that emerged during a fraught and defining era of the nation’s history, beginning in the mid-sixties.

This period encompassed the final years of the dictatorship of António Salazar, who ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1968; the coup by dissident military officers that displaced his authoritarian successors, in 1974; and the brutal colonial wars, notably in Angola, that put an end to the country’s long imperialist history.

MOMA’s series naturally features Portuguese directors who have made their names on the international scene, such as Manoel de Oliveira, Pedro Costa, and Miguel Gomes, but it also brings to light many others, of lesser acclaim but comparable achievement, and the resulting impression is of a lineage, a transgenerational movement of artists whose shared circumstances, principles, and commitment to the vital modernism of their era produced a body of work in which the role of cinematic form was intimately linked to the urgency of political expression.

In turbulent times, movies that simply bear witness—with almost documentary-like fidelity—to ordinary people’s troubles can have a liberating power. So it was with the first such movement, Italian neorealism, which was central to the country’s postwar reckoning with decades of Fascist rule. Amid censorship and repression, truth is a rare commodity, and stating a humble and obvious truth, like the boy who queried the Emperor’s new clothes, can have a decisive effect. As to the Emperor’s new cinema, its startling yet ingenuous revelation is: we’re making a movie. Reflexivity, far from representing a kind of abstract formalism, as is often supposed, constitutes a confrontational act of radical openness. Consider, for instance, “Chronicle of a Summer” (1960), in which Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin challenged political censorship in France and made a documentary about daily life there during the Algerian War, foregrounding their own practices and artistic principles. In the nineteen-eighties, Abbas Kiarostami and other Iranian filmmakers were propelled onto the world stage with movies that paired quasi-documentary realism and self-referentiality to socially critical ends. This is exactly the pairing that had come to light in Portugal—a full two decades earlier.

Oliveira may be the best known of Portuguese filmmakers, not because he’s doubtless the most enduring—his career ran from 1931 to 2015, the year of his death, at the age of a hundred and six—but because of the refined and forthright grandeur of his movies, ranging from historical pageantry to chamber drama and even self-portraiture. His second feature, “Rite of Spring” (Oct. 17 and Oct. 21), from 1963, blasted a hole in the Portuguese fourth wall that has ever since let the wide world’s daylight in. There’s nothing obviously revolutionary or even especially daring about what’s onscreen for much of the movie’s ninety-four-minute span, which is principally an adaptation of a sixteenth-century Passion play, performed by residents of the village of Curalha. Oliveira films on location, with the actors in costume, declaiming in boldly theatrical tones that seem wrenched whole from the era of the play’s origins. But, before that performance begins, Oliveira presents the modern world in which it’s being staged—two farmers fighting, a local bullfight, a hint of a local protest under military surveillance, a fisherman at work, a man reading aloud from a newspaper about the space race, men and women gathering to get into costume for the play. What’s more, the whole performance takes place in the presence of urbane contemporaries—a Chevrolet sedan bearing members of the well-dressed bourgeoisie, adolescents mocking the pious spectacle, and, in particular, a movie crew filming the action, complete with a slate clapping in front of the camera for a take.