Valley of Abraham
I think the most important intellectual discovery I’ve made in the past year came from the early pages of Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991. In a way, it’s an observation so obvious that I wonder why it never occurred to me before: “Unlike the ‘long 19th century,’ which seemed, and actually was, a period of almost unbroken material, intellectual and moral progress …there has, since 1914, been a marked regression from the standards then regarded as normal in the developed countries and in the milieus of the middle classes and which were confidently believed to be spreading to the more backward regions and the less enlightened strata of the population….Since this century has taught us, and continues to teach us, that human beings can learn to live under the most brutalized and theoretically intolerable conditions, it is not easy to grasp the extent of the, unfortunately accelerating, return to what our 19th century ancestors would have called the standards of barbarism.”
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Hobsbawm’s book affords a view of the 20th century framed by the viewpoint of the 19th–the period in which Hobsbawm as a historian clearly feels most at home. The same could perhaps be said of Manoel de Oliveira, probably the oldest filmmaker anywhere still working, whose “difficult” cinema is at once archaic and modernist. Born in 1908 in Porto, Portugal (where many of his films are set), de Oliveira is almost certainly the only living director whose first film was a silent one. One might think that this alone would make him an internationally celebrated figure, especially during this year’s “centennial of movies”; but actually, outside of Portugal, he’s celebrated only in old-fashioned countries like France that value noncommercial art and believe in state funding. (In fact, 1995 isn’t the centennial of movies, it’s the centennial of movie exhibition–which is why, as Jean-Luc Godard has pointed out, all the recent movie-centennial posters show projectors, not cameras. But in the world of movies, as we all know, estimated gross literally precedes existence, not merely essence.)
The son of a prominent industrialist–the first Portuguese manufacturer of electric lamps–de Oliveira was an athlete, a prizewinning race driver, and a college dropout who helped run his father’s factories or went into farming when he wasn’t trying to make movies. (The censorship imposed by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, who ruled from 1932 to 1968, put many obstacles in his way.) De Oliveira’s interest in movies and in the living conditions of the poor came together in his first completed film, a silent documentary called Hard Labor on the River Douro. He finished it when he was 23, though he’d been involved with movies since the age of 19, both as an actor and as an aspiring filmmaker. But apart from making a few minor documentaries and acting in the first Portuguese talkie, he didn’t make any further inroads in movies until his first feature, a 1942 children’s film, Aniki-Bobo. A whopping 21 years later he made his second feature, Act of Spring, a poetic rendering of a passion play. (In between he made two color documentaries.)
I assume that de Oliveira’s sprawl and slow pace account for the fact that his films haven’t been distributed in the United States. Those qualities are also what I cherish most about them–the fact that they allow me to muse about what I’m listening to and watching, which is almost invariably beautiful. One academic I know who’s written a book about French philosopher Jacques Derrida and works as a stringer for the New York Times saw No or the Vainglory of Command and told me he found de Oliveira impenetrable. If a Times writer considers de Oliveira tougher than Derrida–something that doesn’t correspond at all to my experience–one can rest assured that Michael Medved won’t find his films congenial either.
Ema de Paiva, c’est moi, de Oliveira seems to be saying. His modernism–the necessary complement to his 19th-century digressiveness–resides partly in the casual disjunctions he creates between words and images, partly in foregrounding the arbitrary nature of the visual representation. Young Ema is played by one actress (Cecile Sanz de Alba), grown Ema by another (Leonor Silveira), and rather than attempt to minimize or rationalize their different appearances, Oliveira rubs our noses in the discrepancy, even to the point of having Silveira twice gaze at a photograph of de Alba as her younger self. The solo piano music that provides the score (apart from a jazz record at a party and a violinist performing Bach) recalls silent-movie accompaniment, though other facets of the film, like the color and the sound effects, make it clear that this is anything but a period piece.
Because of their richness and depth….
