Series Site
Fifty years ago, the “Carnation Revolution” ended four decades of fascism in Portugal and initiated an experiment that fascinated the Western world: an “Ongoing Revolutionary Process” to bring about a utopian sociopolitical structure. Another revolution was also underway by 1974: a wave of films that, under the weight of censorship, broke distinctions in how reality and fiction were framed onscreen. Before the notion of “hybrid cinema” gained traction worldwide, Portuguese cinema was using tools from documentary filmmaking to create fiction (and vice-versa) and offer a new realm for the senses; like a revolutionary process, it threaded a link between daily lives and the political confluences affecting their course.
Under the influence of Manoel de Oliveira—who was continually questioning the lines between life and its representation—the “Cinema Novo” generation expanded upon the international “new wave” innovations of the 1960s amid a suffocating social environment at home and a brutal colonial war in Africa. After the revolution, the movement focused on working-class communities with renewed dignity, and attracted foreign filmmakers, such as Robert Kramer and Thomas Harlan, to capture Portugal’s feverish political atmosphere.
The independent spirit of Portuguese cinema would continue to break new ground with João César Monteiro’s fable-inspired works, as well as documentaries by António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, Manuela Serra, and António Campos, which redefined the art of the real, and in turn influenced filmmakers like João Pedro Rodrigues, Pedro Costa, and Miguel Gomes. This series brings light to an aesthetic tradition wherein making films—and watching them—becomes a political, existential gesture and creates a space of resistance to homogeneous, oppressive forces that constrict us in our lives—a pursuit, in a word, of freedom.