Seeing Change of Life (1966) in the copy restored by Cinemateca Portuguesa is an overwhelming experience, like a homecoming. The substance of its spaces, characters, architecture, and the lighting work, the accents in its grey, misty skies, the contrast between the sea and the edge of the pine forest, all contribute to a journey that recalls mythical images of certain archetypes, an original arcadia. However, this film shot in Furadouro — a fishermen’s beach where, metaphorically, the sea gradually conquers the land — represents from the start a certain present, with its busses, factory life, the presence of the city. At the centre of the drama are the emotional relations, both difficult and ambiguous, which unite the fisherman Adelino (Geraldo Del Rey), back from the war in Africa, and two women, Júlia (Maria Barroso), a woman of the sea, and Albertina (Isabel Ruth), a mysterious, independent factory worker. Returning from overseas, Adelino meets Júlia, his old girlfriend, now married to his brother. According to the film’s blurb, “the struggle for survival, against the sea and tradition, marks this romantic conflict and the passion reborn in Adelino when he is drawn in by the young Albertina’s wild nature. Land, sea, Man and progress interconnect in sustained drama.” A documentary approach can be a powerful cinematic device for playing with the ‘real’, and in this film in particular: the scenes of the Arte-Xávega fishing tradition shot from the perspective of the rowers, the interiors of the houses, the São João celebrations, all create a strangeness and exoticism that, at the same time, elicits the thought that, even for those who live with these daily routines, it is in life itself that we find moments of escape from the world. We realise and feel in our skin our fascination for the world of these fishermen, in contrast to our brief incursions into the world of the workers, with their basic aptitude exams to determine who can work in the factories, like in the scene where Adelino attempts to escape the world of the seaweed harvest. There, in the factory, he reencounters Albertina, a striking Isabel Ruth, who in the film corresponds to the prototypically urban woman, something of an outsider, while Júlia corresponds to the model country woman, hard-working, loyal, dedicated to house and family, with a kind of fatal destiny that binds her to her work, her body a tool. Albertina wants to leave, emigrate, get away, “change her life”, while Júlia belongs to this place, stays put, manages a household. The backdrop to all this is emigration, which in the 1960s profoundly affected the social and cultural fabric of Portugal, but the film is also an early Rocha and, as he himself said years before his death, this is a story of “certain giant men, Viking conquerors, ruthless, stinking of liquor”. “I was fascinated by them. My cousins thought the ordinary people were stupid, but to me they were so beautiful and, at the same time, so powerful, that I wanted to leave a monument to it all, because it was dying out. My father was a farmer, he carried corn and, when the harvest was over, he would go to the sea, that stunning calm, and watch the ocean and the sun. Later, my father emigrated to Brazil. From 1960 until now I have returned over and over to the theme of S. João. The S. João that I experienced is always there. For me, documentary and fiction are like left hand and right hand, you need both of them.” The film thus plays between fiction, documentary and autobiography. But it is also part of a long and personal through-line in our cinema, a sequence beginning in the early 1930s with Nazaré, Praia de Pescadores and Maria do Mar, by Leitão de Barros, then, in the 1940s, with Ala-Arriba! and, breaking with that gaze, Nazaré (1952) by Manuel Guimarães and Almadraba Atuneira (1960), by António Campos. These are all films in which a dependence on the sea characterises a certain newly radicalised gaze, revealing a form of life seen almost as subsistence. Associated with this idea is that of communities that depend on the hard natural world and, thus, become represented by a discourse about strength and courage. If, in the first case, the figure of the simple, honourable fisherman is prized by the official discourse and ideology of the regime, in a kind of epic representation of past maritime grandeur, in the other cases the fisherman can be a figure of fragility, existential doubt, pain and love. And the characters in this film are complex, lost, searching for meaning in their lives.

Thus, the film seems rooted in the experience of being with the fishermen and the memories of a childhood spent by the sea. In the same way, the appeal to a certain archaic mood, the contentment transmitted by the natural landscape, a movement closer to this symbolic landscape, can all be understood as a refusal of décor, of an artificial world. The film transforms the pure illusion of peace and harmony inherent to the landscape into a more complex experience, of industrialisation, a world more real than the idyllic vision of that same world, a counterforce. The ideas of nostalgia, a return to a golden age, and of a harmonious relation between nature and people in a community, here contrast with these tragic figures and their hard way of life, in a tension between dreamlike or poetic cinema and another more realistic, documentary cinema. The film operates on the field of the imagination from a basis in the real world, in order to access a kind of anteriority of the life of the people. Change of Life was shown at Berlin, Venice and Cannes, and will endure as an example of independent, marginal and subversive Portuguese cinema.