It’s nothing less than a miracle that restorations of Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis’ criminally underseen Tras-os-Montes, Ana, and Rosa de Areia are making their way around the world. That João César Monteiro has an upcoming full career retrospective is manna falling from heaven. These are films that, like most Portuguese arthouse cinema from the 20th century, have been worshipped even in their 480p .avi files that only hinted at their greatness, and, until the past few years, were expected to remain in such formats like crude idols forged in the memory of long-lost gods. And now, finally, they have returned.
But this is an all-too-common story for Portugal, a country that, despite fostering a community of radical filmmakers, never quite found the international prestige they sought until very recently. It’s thanks to producer Paulo Branco’s good rapport with Cannes and penchant for co-production with France that the world is now familiar with the works of Manoel de Oliveira and Pedro Costa. But their contemporaries — Manuel Guimarães, Paulo Rocha, Fernando Lopes, Manuel Mozos, and Teresa Villaverde — have hardly seen their work distributed outside their initial festival run. How could that be?
In Portuguese Cinema (1960-2010): Consumption, Circulation and Commerce, the only book on recent Portuguese cinema available in English, André Rui Garça describes the nation as one that enthusiastically supports its directors in the production stage but has no plans to help with distribution. Portuguese filmmakers since the ’60s have had no problem finding state assistance for their films, as even the authoritarian Estada Novo thought this could be used to gain prestige with the richer European states. But, half by accident and half by design, this assistance has only helped austere arthouse “festival” films that were geared to an international audience, thus poisoning the entire concept of “Portuguese film” in the minds of Portuguese audiences who overwhelmingly turned to American Hollywood imports. The government didn’t see any benefit to subsidizing distribution to a domestic audience that refused to watch these movies, nor did Portuguese movies fare well enough at these festivals to justify distribution to nearby markets where the films would compete against richer countries and festival winners. Nearly every minor change in this financing structure has brought an additional host of problems, and only in the past few years has this problem of unprofitable distribution changed.
One of the most outspoken critics of Portugal’s film financing system was José Fonseca e Costa, a founding member of the country’s Cinema Novo. Born in Angola, he, like the rest of his generation, apprenticed under filmmakers outside Portugal (Costa himself trained under Michelangelo Antonioni in Italy) and brought back a midcentury arthouse sensibility. Under the guidance of António da Cunha Telles (the Paulo Branco of his day), these young filmmakers forged a collaborative production network that rebelled against the Portuguese musical comedies of the past and the Hollywood films that had been creeping into Portuguese cinemas for the past decade (thus forcing Portuguese films out). And — though they were mostly trained in the modern, neorealist style — they also sought to Lusofy these techniques to make a distinctly Portuguese cinema. Even if the group was composed of a bunch of left-wingers, this last factor gave even the totalitarian Estado Novo regime a reason to support them, so long as their politics weren’t apparent. They were officially subsidized by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation as an official cooperative called the Centro Português de Cinema (CPC).
Then, 1974: the Carnation Revolution was filmed by a collective of Cinema Novo’s finest as As Armas e o Povo (1975). Though one may think that this deposing of Estada Novo would have lead to a flourishing of politically and formally radical films from the CPC, the group now found themselves without a common enemy and split due to the internecine differences that fester in any group of artists. Without this network, only the most successful directors and those who had already cozied up to the new government could find appropriate funding. But José Fonseca e Costa did not give up. His The Ghosts of Alcacer-Kibir (1976) was the first instance of politically radical cinema in Portugal.
The film follows an anarchistic troupe of actors and miscreants through the golden fields of the Alentejo as they’re hounded by the military police. In the background, an agricultural strike keeps the police busy while the actors mosey through the village and find their interests aligned with these workers. Lianor (Ana Zanatti), a proto-hippie noble donning a wedding gown, decides on a mischievous whim to invite the troupe back to the castle of her father, Dom Goçalo (João Guedes). He’s a drunk, obsessed with the near-mythical figures of Portugal’s past, especially King Sebastian. For him, visiting nobles, and a cardinal, the troupe plays out key scenes from Portuguese history, satirizing and lampooning Goçalo’s beloved ghosts. Lianor kills her father and joins the troupe, who arm themselves with the dead lord’s guns. A shoot-out with the police implies only one survivor; the end credits are dedicated to African liberation.
Since he was born in Angola, Costa likely felt, more than his compatriots, that the fall of the Estada Novo regime did not mean liberation for all people in the Lusophone world. And this, one of the few explicitly political films made by a Cinema Novo filmmaker during the Carnation Revolution, hints at what a particularly Portuguese radicalism looks like. Formally, the film goes even further than the 1960s emulation of urban neorealism or even the ethnographic filmmaking of Cordeiro and Reis. Costa’s shots last for five minutes or longer, they crane up and down to hide action offscreen, and they introduce entire groups of horsemen by simply having them run in real-time as dots in the distant fields all the way to the foreground. Nearly every sequence reminds of the mobile, patient camera of Miklós Jancsó; though the farce in the castle shifts to the patent artificial staging of Monteiro’s Silvestre or Éric Rohmer’s Perceval. Politically, Costa’s main target is the romantic portrayal of Portuguese history that justified its colonial expansion; here, he deals with a uniquely Portuguese topic, but one that would have never found favor with the nationalist government.
Though The Ghosts of Alcacer-Kibir played Cannes’s Directors’ Fortnight, it, like many Portuguese films from this time, could neither garner respect from a wider Europe who saw them as marginal, nor, since he was not smuggling this out from a totalitarian regime, sympathy. It was not distributed internationally, and, without a native arthouse audience and without government support for domestic distribution, it played the bare minimum number of screens in Portugal, then fell into obscurity. For every forgotten Portuguese masterpiece, and there are so very many, a similar story appears. If the recent restorations of Cordeiro, Reis, and Monteiro’s works are indicative of the Cinemateca Portuguesa truly opening its vaults and sharing its country’s treasures, then the world is about to be much richer.
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