According to the program, a series dedicated to Portuguese cinema, covering 50 years of history, from director Manoel de Oliveira to Miguel Gomes, will be held in October-November at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
The series, entitled “The Continuing Revolution of Portuguese Cinema” (loosely translated), will run from October 17 to November 19, starting with the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, which “put an end to four decades of fascism in Portugal,” recalls the text about the event published on the museum’s website.
The series is organized by Francisco Valente, a film critic, director and programmer, assistant curator of the MoMA film department, who has collaborated with the National Archive of the Moving Image and the Portuguese Cinematheque.
“Under the influence of Manoel de Oliveira, who constantly questioned the boundaries between life and its representation, the Cinema Novo generation expanded the innovations of the international New Wave of the 1960s, in the midst of a suffocating social environment in the country and a brutal colonial war in Africa,” says the text introducing the series.
Inspired by the French New Wave and Italian neorealism, Portuguese New Cinema emerged in the 1960s, still during the Estado Novo regime, and with its innovative language broke with the canons of traditional cinema.
The series, which has no specific program announced yet, “reveals an aesthetic tradition in which filmmaking—and watching—becomes a political and existential gesture, creating a space of resistance to the homogenizing and repressive forces that hold us back in our lives—in short, a search for freedom,” MoMA says.
The same text contextualizes that in 1974, “another revolution took place: a wave of films that, under the weight of censorship, destroyed the distinctions between reality and fiction on screen.”
“Before the concept of ‘hybrid cinema’ gained traction worldwide, Portuguese cinema used documentary tools to create fiction (and vice versa) and offered a new realm of the senses; like a revolutionary process, it established a connection between everyday life and the political conjunctures that influence its course,” he adds.
The museum also recalls that after the revolution, the movement it sparked “focused on working-class communities with renewed dignity and attracted foreign filmmakers such as Robert Kramer and Thomas Harlan to convey Portugal’s feverish political atmosphere.”
“The independent spirit of Portuguese cinema will continue to break new ground thanks to the works of João César Monteiro, inspired by fables, and the documentaries of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, Manuela Serra and António Campos, who have redefined the art of reality and influenced directors such as João Pedro Rodrigues, Pedro Costa and Miguel Gomes,” he also notes.
In addition to its exhibition program, MoMA, which houses a contemporary art collection of more than 150,000 works and an archive of some 70,000 artists, organizes parallel cultural and educational events.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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