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At 93, Manoel de Oliveira Makes Each Word Count
"Oliveira, sit!" commands Leonor Silveira, the tall, elegant actress who has been an emblem of femininity in 13 of Mr. Oliveira's films since 1988. She also seems to function as his wrangler, letting him know in forceful terms when it is time to stop schmoozing and take his place for a television interview. In 2001, the Cannes festival presented Mr. Oliveira's "I'm Going Home," a beguiling comedy-drama about an aging actor, played by Michel Piccoli, who must care for his grandson when the boy's parents are killed in a car accident. Mr. Oliveira's films are generally more forbidding they are often long, unusually structured and performed in a declamatory, deliberately theatrical style and it was a surprise when "I'm Going Home" became a significant popular success in Europe. It opens in New York on Wednesday at the Film Forum, and will roll out nationally this fall. Mr. Oliveira made his first film, a documentary short called "Labor on the Douro River," in 1931. For the next 50 years he was able to work in film only sporadically, creating a first feature in 1942, "Aniki B・ and then nothing until the mid-50's, when "O Pintor e a Cidade" ("The Artist and the City") began gathering notice at film festivals. His breakthrough came at the age of 70, when his 260-minute adaptation of the classic Portuguese novel "Amor de Perdi鈬o" ("Doomed Love") became a hit on the festival circuit. Since then, Mr. Oliveira has averaged one film a year, an amazing pace for a filmmaker of any age, and has become the godfather of a new Portuguese cinema, inspiring a generation of directors, including Jo縊 Bothelo ("A Portuguese Farewell") and Paolo Rocha ("River of Gold"). "I'm 93 years old," Mr. Oliveira said, his television interview completed, "and my whole life, from when I was very young, is still in my head. I just turn on the faucet and let it run out." The results hardly seem as simple as that. Often beginning with a classic text ・such as the Passion play behind his 1972 "The Past and the Present" or the 19th-century French stage play "The Satin Slipper," which Mr. Oliveira filmed in 1985 ・he grounds his films in the sanctity of the written word. His actors stand facing the camera, like performers on a proscenium stage, speaking in a slow, deliberate rhythm stripped of overt emotion. There is seldom a musical underscore, and the sound effects ・creaking floorboards and squeaking doors ・are often recorded with a striking clarity. Everything, in short, is there to remind the viewer that he or she is watching actors acting, yet the cumulative effect of Mr. Oliveira's cinematic literalism is to lead the viewer into another realm. By underlining the process of representation, he neutralizes it; instead of manufacturing illusions, he seeks to discover a documentary truth, founded on the hard facts of words. "There is a special quality in his films that is often experienced as slowness," Ms. Silveira said. "But what he is suggesting is that there is a certain time required to speak and a certain time required to listen. If films give you time to look at the image, they must also give you time to hear the text. He wants you to `see' the words." Mr. Oliveira, speaking a mixture of French and Portuguese, said: "The cinema is my passion. Not the camera, not the special effects, not the studio. It's the people ・the actors and the public." As in many of Mr. Oliveira's films, the theater plays an important role in "I'm Going Home." The central character, Gilbert Valence (played by Mr. Piccoli), is a celebrated performer on the Paris stage who is playing the doddering old monarch in Ionesco's "Exit the King" when he is informed of the deaths of his daughter and son-in-law. Valence retires from the stage to spend more time with his orphaned grandson ・they enjoy playing video games together ・but when a famous American filmmaker (John Malkovich) asks him to play Buck Mulligan in the adaptation he is filming of Joyce's "Ulysses," Valence accepts the role, even though it obliges him to perform in a language he doesn't speak. The genesis of the project was an experience that Mr. Oliveira had with an aging Italian actor some years earlier. Called upon to read a lengthy passage in Old Italian, the actor faltered, and rather than try again simply announced, "I'm going home." He left the studio, never to return to acting. When words fail, Mr. Oliveira suggests, it may be time to slip away. MR. OLIVEIRA shows no signs of preparing a similar exit for himself. Though his hearing is not perfect and his gait is slightly unsteady, his energy on the set is undiminished. "He hasn't changed at all," said Ms. Silveira. "He's only become more perfect in his specificity. He sees the whole film in his head. He knows exactly what he wants, he knows his objectives, he has absolute confidence in his actors and his actors have absolute confidence in him. If you don't feel that confidence, you might not feel close to him ・you might not feel `directed.' But that's directing, too ・to demand a complete, blind trust." Mr. Oliveira maintains that it is the faces that matter. "There are faces that lend themselves well to certain characters. If you're wrong in that choice, maybe the performance will still work technically, but something will be missing." "The next most important thing is the position of the camera," he continued. "For my first five or six films, I did the photography myself. Now, I can tell by looking at the camera what it sees. I never look through the viewfinder." Nor does he use the video playback monitors that are now standard on film sets. Mr. Oliveira's latest work, "The Uncertainty Principle," is based on a novel by the contemporary Portuguese author Agustina Bessa-Lu﨎, a writer whose work Mr. Oliveira has filmed five times before. Ms. Bessa-Lu﨎 is the grandmother of the actress Leonor Baldaque, who stars in "The Uncertainty Principle" as Camila, a woman caught up in the rivalry between two boyhood friends. "The Uncertainty Principle" hasn't been acquired for American distribution, but it will make the round of festivals this fall, including the New York Film Festival. "The subject of the film is intelligence," Mr. Oliveira explained. "Without intelligence, beauty is worth nothing." "I don't have a precise model that I follow for every film," he said. "Each movie is different, and I am different on each movie. Every time I make a film, I feel like I'm starting all over again, only it doesn't bother me. By now, I know I'm not going to spoil everything." Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging
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ANNES,
France