On the overgrown grounds of an abandoned and dilapidated health resort ironically called The Grand Hotel of Pezo on the outskirts of the Portuguese town, the aging filmmaker, Manoel (Marcello Mastroianni) recounts a familiar tale by a Brazilian author named Catulo Searence of a poet living in a hut overlooking the river who would diligently […]
A genial country doctor, Carlo Paiva (Luís Miguel Cintra) strikes up a polite conversation with a privileged widower named Paulino Cardeano (Ruy de Carvalho) at a dining hall and is immediately captivated by the beguiling, almost forbidding presence of Cardeano’s mannered, but inscrutable adolescent daughter Ema (Cécile Sanz de Alba). But Carlo is neither the […]
Inasmuch as Manoel de Oliveira’s films convey what Randal Johnson describes as a cinematic hybridity that illustrates the amorphous nature of representation, No, or the Vain Glory of Command also reflects a temporal hybridity, where time is presented as a conflation of seemingly arbitrary, but integrally connected history. Opening to a long take of a […]
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 […]