“Um sonho lindo que acabou…”

The Confederation (1977), directed by Luís Galvão Teles and inspired by a short story by Amadeu Lopes Sabino, is a rare specimen in Portuguese cinema: a science-fiction film. Aside from certain films by António Macedo, Portuguese cinema had until recently avoided going down this stylistic route.

The action unfolds in an imagined future, in a dystopian version of what we recognise as Portugal. The country is made up of a confederation of states — North and South — each with its own army and television channels, which ensure order and obedience thanks to high levels of repression and effective propaganda. The plot centres on Lisbon, a militarised city under heavy surveillance, where Maria and António, workers for the regime, form a subversive romantic relationship — the password they use for their encounters being “the confederation is a rotten fish”. The film’s opening is ingenious, as it is the official television channel that decides, amid an avalanche of official communications, to show the film The Confederation, with the objective of “curing” the population of what it calls its “leftist and anarchist deviations”.

There is no doubt that we are watching a militant, interventionist film. The whole rollercoaster of the PREC (Ongoing Revolutionary Process), which followed the April Revolution, is summoned up and reflected through a collage of documentary images and sounds from the era, drawing on the comic strip designed by Jorge Varandas and the cinematographic fiction itself. The perspective is clearly that of the Marxist and revolutionary left, who believed in cinema as a driver of political and social change. Therefore, this film translates all the frustrations of those who saw their utopias/dystopias defeated in the military coup of 25 November 1975. This event can be seen as a counter-revolutionary act of revenge, the kind that could have produced the society dreamt up in this film.

One of the most interesting things about the film is as a document of a generation that was, impatiently, trying to take part in a revolutionary fight for a new country, and was willing to use cinema in that fight. This work was produced by a cooperative, Cinequanon, and involved a variety of intellectuals and artists from different areas who were very active in politics in the 1970s. Of course, this all results in a proselytising tone, ideologically simplistic and absent of much complexity and serious inquiry. It centres the use of “real” sounds and images, such as the omnipresent microphone of television reports and news. Many may see this as weaking film’s cinematographic aesthetic, and for me this dystopian version fails to explore the subversive force of Maria and António’s love in the face of the totalitarian machine — something that could have really anchored the film. The protagonists insist on being mouthpieces for revolutionary ideological principals.

Yet this collage of images and sounds, which at times trip over each other in a way that may seem incoherent to today’s viewers, nonetheless makes sense for those who lived and/or know well that turbulent time and are thereby able to find cohesion in the film. We recognise the ghosts that haunt us, of fascism and its symbolic figures — the general, the judge and the cardinal — of the utopias that so many thought were possible following April, of PREC and the possibility of a civil war and, in the end, when November came around, of the revolutionaries’ defeated dreams. This is a film of a painful pilgrimage and a post-revolutionary hangover.

And it is impossible not to feel the aesthetic and political force of the documentary images from this revolutionary period and the beautiful soundtrack including its main theme, “I Saw the People Fight” by José Mário Branco, and the “Anthem of the Confederation” by Sérgio Godinho and Fausto. The political power of this interventionist song stands shoulder to shoulder with its artistic and poetic musical quality. And it is through music that hope surprises us at the end of the film, when the television broadcast is abruptly interrupted by images of an uprising of the people accompanied by the phrase “It’s the people who make history”, the subtitle of the film.