Up until last year, my understanding of Portuguese cinema was rather limited. I’d encountered the work of contemporary directors such as João Pedro Rodrigues and Catarina Vasconcelos over the years, as well as more prominent figures like Pedro Costa and Miguel Gomes, but the truth of the matter remained that I had not done a deep dive on what seemed like a somewhat peripheral, or provincial, national cinema in my eyes. That changed last year with the Museum of Modern Art’s comprehensive series “The Ongoing Revolution of Portuguese Cinema,” which I wrote about in a past edition of “Feedback Loop.” In fact, Screen Slate covered quite a few of the films included in the series. This was due in part because their presentation in New York represented a rare celebration of an under-seen and unfamiliar form of cinema. But it was also the result of the numerous passionate pitches I received about the films included in the series. At first, this sudden interest in Portuguese cinema seemed mysterious to me. Yet as I became more acquainted with the nature of the nation’s idiosyncratic cinematic tradition, it became clear that there was something incredibly attractive about the poetic and political character of the films being shown at MoMA as many countries, including our own, spiralled into disrepair, and as mainstream cinema became more and more distant from the plight and interests of real people.
Many months have passed since MoMA’s Portuguese cinema series ended, but interest in Portuguese cinema itself remains at an all-time high in New York. In late February, Metrograph presented their António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro retrospective in collaboration with Theater of the Matters. And this weekend marked the start of BAM’s “Mirror of Life: Manoel de Oliveira 1996-2004,” a mini-retrospective focused on the eponymous Portuguese filmmaker whose career spanned eight decades. The former retrospective was extremely well-attended, and the latter just received a New Yorker spot, as well as attention from The Current and one of our own regular contributors. At the same time, Miguel Gomes’s newest film, Grand Tour (2024), has generated an outpour of interviews and reviews on the occasion of its states-side release.
“Portuguese cinema is having this moment,” said Ed McCarry, who co-programmed Metrograph’s Reis and Cordeiro retrospective as part of Theater of the Matters. “At the same exact time we were doing António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, the Chinese premiere of their films was happening in Wuhan, where they were doing a huge series on Portuguese cinema.” And both of these series followed the publication of the recent book In the Midst of the End of the World: António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro in Belgium. There’s an obvious serendipity to this series of events, but there also remains an unacknowledged source behind their suddenness.
According to Francisco Valente, Curatorial Assistant at MoMA, “what’s happened is that the Cinemateca Portuguesa has been working hard.” In 2020, the Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema embarked on a project to restore and digitize 10,000 minutes of national cinema in collaboration with the Norwegian Film Institute of Oslo. The project’s funding came courtesy of EEA Grants Portugal and sought to make Portuguese cinema more accessible while strengthening the nation’s economic ties with Norway. “The folks at the Cinemateca told me they’ve been working at a rate of one film restoration per day,” said McCarry. Although I could not corroborate this fact ahead of publication, the fact remains that the Cinemateca Portuguesa has been working at a dramatic rate.
While this explains the sudden influx of Portuguese restorations that have hit New York theaters, the positive reaction on behalf of local audiences speaks to a distinct set of political frustrations and historical interests that have become more prevalent among American cinephiles in the last fifteen years or so. In a conversation we shared over the phone, the research and writer Jonathan Mackris, who has covered multiple Portuguese films for Screen Slate, told me that his introduction to the nation’s cinema came “through Pedro Costa and his ability to not only represent his own films on the international stage, but also those of [João César] Monteiro and António Reis.” Costa worked with Monteiro, but also studied under Reis, like many other prominent contemporary Portuguese filmmakers. (If you are interested in reading more about this, I recommend looking into the Harvard Film Archive’s 2012 film series “The School of Reis: The Films and Legacy of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro,” which went on to screen at Anthology Film Archives and marks an early chapter in the renewed attention the Iberian nation has received states-side.) “I also remember when Oliveira died in 2015 because he had always had a steady reputation internationally,” Mackris continued. “This was around the same time Haden Guest [Director of the Harvard Film Archive] was doing a lot of promotion around Portuguese films.” There is not an exact throughline between Harvard’s promotion of Portuguese cinema, Costa’s outspokenness about his predecessors, and the sudden attention the nation’s cinema is receiving here in New York. That said, both figures’ persistent work championing the nation’s cinema remains instrumental in bringing said legacy out of the cultural periphery and into the spotlight.
Of more immediate relevance is the number of young viewers in attendance at MoMA’s Portuguese series, as well as the more recent Metrograph and BAM retrospectives. “There’s a lot of young people who watched a lot of films during the pandemic, are very knowledgeable, and are coming to these screenings with a very unique sense of history,” said McCarry. “They can spot these continuities between Straub-Huillet, Ford, and Renoir.” Perhaps, against what is commonly expected of young people, who are so often derided as “screen-agers” and consumers of slop produced by streamers, there is an increased appetite for challenging films with political backbones, what McCarry referred to as “serious cinema” in our conversation. Or, what Notebook’s Deputy Editor Chloe Lizotte referred to as “rigorous” filmmaking and criticism when we spoke about Film at Lincoln Center’s series “Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s” last year. Naturally, Daney was a huge proponent of Portuguese cinema and visited the nation after the fall of António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship. It all comes full circle and, as far as I can tell, young people are not only interested in, but in need of, serious cinema to contend with a dismal future.
“Not to make a generalization, but I think this new generation is radicalized in a way many people are not dealing with. They are dealing with a world in shambles,” McCarry said. As I noted in my previous assessment of Portuguese cinema, the nation’s films are remarkable for their distinct blend of politics and poetry. Their existence attests to an alternative vision for the world, one that is supported by state-funding and built around a respect for art and labor, as well as skepticism of popular dramatic models that propose stories that start and finish; Portuguese cinema, as I have come to understand it, is inherently protean, and interested in pushing audiences to take the ideas and emotions generated viewing each film out into the world, such that cinema—its fervor, furor, and dreams—spill out from the screen onto the streets. “Monteiro thought of his films as an intervention in public life—he would want you to watch his films and go out into the street afterward and throw a brick through a window,” said McCarry.
Of course, these propulsive feelings are not the sole property of Portuguese cinema. I have felt similarly at L’Alliance New York recently, and at Spectacle always, though my bias as a volunteer merits mentioning. The recent spate of screenings organized by the touring members of the Parisian cinema La Clef marked another intervention upon our social scene, both as a demonstration of what the sustained advocacy of independent cinemas looks like and a reminder that there exists a whole trove of excellent MidEast films that New York audiences rarely get the chance to see. As far as the topic of omission goes, it would be careless of me not to mention that while de Oliveira is receiving a retrospective and Monteiro renewed notice, the fact remains that female Portuguese filmmakers have not received the same attention as their male counterparts.
Speaking to Mackris, who discusses how Cordeiro’s career came to a halt once her partner passed in his most recent dispatch for Screen Slate, I was made aware that Monteiro’s partner, Margarida Gil, released a film last year that popped up at Berlinale Encounters and soon disappeared. When I mentioned this disparity to Valente, he pointed me to a series he organized at Anthology Film Archives a couple of years ago titled “New Tales from Portuguese Cinema,” which primarily focused on queer and female filmmakers whose voices are now at the forefront of the nation’s cinema. He also informed me that one of the oldest festivals in Portugal is Queer Lisboa, stating that Portugal has been able to develop “a strong faithful audience for cinema in terms of gender, even though much has yet to be done in terms of race.” Aside from the well-known greats, it seems that there’s much more for Americans to discover when it comes to this evolving national cinema. And even within the nation’s classic cinema, Mackris argued that there’s “much to be known about the Portuguese filmmakers who were working under the conditions of fascism.” If Portuguese cinema is multifaceted by design, then so should its exploration; as with all of cinema, there is no exact point of entry and no point of exit—there is a sea of sudden, passing, intersecting currents. Again, I must thank Mackris for sharing this quote from the French writer Raymond Bellour with me:
He is, I believe, the only film-maker who knows how to tell, in a single film, the history of his country from its founding through a melancholy myth up to the end of its empire (No, or the Vainglory of the Commander, 1990). For de Oliveira is his country; it’s enough to see The Artist and the City, a short from 1956, to understand what it means to live in a town where one is born (Porto), and to grasp the true limit between the games of art and of life. To know how to make red run with a mad but discreet mastery across some fifty shots of everyday life in a documentary on a minor figure of neo-Impressionism—now, that denotes a formally sure sensibility and humour. Thanks not only to the extreme beauty of the images and a stunning vision of the capacities of the shot and of editing, de Oliveira shows in all his films a profound sense of culture and art, of their place in everyday life as well as in collective memory.
And so, for those who were not able to attend MoMA’s series last year or the recent Reis and Cordeiro retrospective, this latest series dedicated to de Oliveira presents viewers with the perfect portal to enter the labyrinth of Portuguese cinema that continues to captive audiences across the city. It should come as no surprise that the series came about through happenstance, which is not to discredit the terrific work the film critic and programmer Nick Newman has done organizing this series at BAM, but to emphasize how much of Portuguese cinema is the product of fortuity and pleasurable shock. “I interviewed Paulo Branco [Portuguese film producer] five months ago in Tokyo and casually mentioned I did some programming in New York,” said Newman. “After our interview, he came up to me and said, ‘I have 10 films by Manoel that nobody in North America wants to show.’ I was flabbergasted because it was the sort of thing I would normally ask him about, it was kind of a dream come true.” In fact, it was “dreams” and “utopias” that Valente most associated Portuguese cinema with when I first spoke to him, and perhaps it is through these screenings, scattered around town bits at a time, that audiences can tap into their dreams to steer the world away from catastrophe and toward—if not utopia—a better place.
Feedback Loop is a column by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer reflecting on each month of repertory filmgoing in New York City.
Correction: This article previously stated Queer Lisboa was the oldest film festival in Portugal. That honor belongs to Festival Internacional de Santarém, which was founded in 1971 and ran until 1989 before it was revived in 2023. Queer Lisboa was founded in 1997, and remains one of the most storied and important queer film festival in Europe.
Thanks to Jonathan Mackris, Ed McCarry, Nick Newman, and Francisco Valente.
