The retrospective screening of Manoel de Oliveira’s Acto da Primavera alongside his latest film, The Strange Case of Angelica provided a great opportunity to see the evolution – or rather, reconstitution – of his cinema from documentary to narrative fiction. Indeed, by evoking images from his first film, Douro, Faina Fluvial in Isaac’s (Ricardo Trepa) […]
Inasmuch as Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl returns to Manoel de Oliveira’s recurring theme of doomed love, the film also embodies Oliveira’s preoccupation with subjectivity and modes of representation. On one level is the adaptation of Eça de Queiroz’s literary work into a screenplay, retaining a degree of formalism and dramatic structure associated with […]
Ostensibly an homage to the principal creators of Belle de Jour, filmmaker Luis Buñuel and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, Belle Toujours is, nevertheless, a quintessential Manoel de Oliveira film: formalist, dramaturgic, contemplative, and discursive. Continuing where Buñuel’s film left off 38 years earlier, after the sadistic scoundrel Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli) would whisper an undisclosed secret […]
In Le Quattro volte, Michelangelo Frammartino uses the staging of the Passion Play by the local villagers to bridge the ancient and the modern. This dialectic also provides the connective tissue in the Views from the Avant-Garde program, Station to Station, capturing the ancient tale as it unfolds in the streets of New York City […]
The tawdry, carnivalesque atmosphere of the traveling Mammoth Circus provides the ideal framework for Max Ophüls’s resplendent Lola Montès, serving as both a pungent deconstruction of the cult of celebrity and a demystification of an elusive woman. Revisiting scandalous episodes from her life through a series of kitschy, seemingly incongruous reenactments involving constructed stage props, […]
In March, 2006, after the Iranian team’s victory in a World Cup qualifier match over Japan, seven people were trampled to death and dozens of others injured after soldiers forcibly attempted to divert the large exiting crowd from a military helicopter that had landed near the main gate and blocked it. Only six of the […]