Childhood of an art and the end of innocence
The first production company in Portugal, Invicta Film, was founded in Porto in 1910. In the 1920s, it became fashionable to look for foreign directors, especially French ones, to direct local productions: Georges Pallu, Roger Lion and Maurice Mariaud were some of the filmmakers who went to see if the grass was greener in Portugal and who, in so doing, participated in the development of its film industry. The latter is notably the author ofO Fado (1923), a short film inspired by a painting of the same title by José Malhoa. The beginning of Manoel de Oliveira's career coincided, more or less, with the arrival in power of António de Oliveira Salazar. His first film Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931) was dedicated to his native city, Porto, and the river that runs through it, but was already intended as a critique of military and police power. Almost ten years later, Aniki-Bóbó (1942), in which Porto is again the main protagonist through the adventures of a street boy, is his first feature film, and today one of the classics of Portuguese cinema. Amusingly, one of the first Portuguese talkies, A Canção de Lisboa (José Cottinelli Telmo, 1933), is, as its title suggests, a hymn to Lisbon and is another success story of interwar cinema. The sustained production earned this period the nickname of the golden age of Portuguese cinema. The predilection for historical films or subjects related to local folklore can be seen as the effect of nationalist propaganda discreetly maintained by the Salazar regime. Popular comedies featuring a colourful and often jocular population were particularly popular, such as O Pátio das Cantigas (Francisco Ribeiro, 1942), set in the suburbs of Lisbon, which proved that a quality popular cinema still existed, and which was later remade by Leonel Vieira (2015).
The Novo Cinema and the beginning of the Portuguese exception
In reaction to the censorship of the dictatorship, and the soothing productions that it engendered, there emerged in the early 1960s what is now called Novo Cinema, a movement inspired by the French New Wave and the emancipatory impulses that were emerging in Europe. The Green Years (1963) by Paulo Rocha, the emblematic director of Novo Cinema, bears witness to the changes that were affecting both Portuguese society and the city of Lisbon. His second film(Changing Lives, 1966) evokes the war waged by Portugal in Angola by recounting the return of a conscript to his fishing village. The Carnation Revolution in 1974 definitively allowed a Portuguese cinema of personal expression to escape from the margins or allusions to tackle political themes head-on or to break free from the codes of traditional cinema. Portuguese filmmakers, in the wake of Oliveira or Rocha, became festival darlings, following the example of João César Monteiro, a critic turned director of unparalleled eccentricity, but whose God trilogy(Memories of the Yellow House in 1989, The Comedy of God in 1995 and The Marriage of God in 1998) is also typical of this trend towards experimentalism among certain Portuguese filmmakers. As an example of a highly literary cinema, we should also mention João Botelho, whose work was placed under the patronage of Fernando Pessoa from his first film(Moi, l'autre, 1981), and who in 2010 will give a version of The Book of Intranquillity or adapt the classic of Portuguese literature of the 19th century that is The Maia (2014). Oliveira directed what is sometimes considered his masterpiece, No, or the Vain Glory of Command (1990), an ambitious exploration of Portugal's military past, and in particular its most resounding defeats, from antiquity to the colonial wars. The producer Paulo Branco, born in Lisbon and then settled in France in the 1980s, played a key role in the development of this somewhat inaccessible cinema. At the same time, the foreigner rediscovers Lisbon, its port and its special character. In the White City (Alain Tanner) and TheState of Things (Wim Wenders), both released in 1982, show that the city has a new and mysterious attraction. It is also the city where the spy played by Sean Connery has chosen to retire at the beginning of The Russian House (Fred Schepisi, 1990). Wenders, never tired of it, pays a new tribute to the city with Lisbon Story (1994).
Between commercial ambitions and authorial visions
The seventh art continued its momentum in the 1990s, showing a new, albeit timid, desire for a more accessible cinema: Três Irmãos (Teresa Villaverde, 1994) revealed, the same year as Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino), the actress Maria de Medeiros, who was to be seen again a year later in Adam and Eve (Joaquim Leitão), whose 250,000 admissions were an anomaly in the decade. The same Maria de Medeiros dedicated a film, in Hollywood style, to the Carnation Revolution, Captains of April (2000). The names of Pedro Costa, whose filmography is largely dedicated to the disenfranchised and immigrants who populate the Portuguese capital, and João Pedro Rodrigues have been added to this long tradition of slowness and experimentation, divided between realism and baroque flights of fancy, haunted by its colonial past, which is so characteristic of Portuguese cinema and which Miguel Gomes took up again at the end of the 2000s with Taboo (2012) or The Thousand and One Nights (2015). The artisanal or minimalist aspect of these films paradoxically goes hand in hand with the ambition to make works of great length. Les Mystères de Lisbonne (Raoul Ruiz, 2010) offers a less dry version of this by immersing us in a romantic Lisbon full of stories with drawers. Werner Schroeter's Dog's Night (2008) is worth seeing for its fantastic vision of Porto, playing the role of an imaginary city in the grip of a violent coup. Fans of fado and Amália Rodrigues, a huge local star, will gladly see the film dedicated to her in 2008 by Carlos Coelho da Silva, while the success of Variações (João Maia, 2019), a biopic of the eponymous singer who died of AIDS at the age of 39, seems to indicate how fruitful the vein is and that Portugal is now ripe for once again showcasing, in addition to its "auteurist" tradition, a mainstream cinema.
