The real is opaque, its meaning escapes us. The visible is incomprehensible. Unable to touch it, we have to interpret it, extract images, visual or verbal, that will carry meaning. With his small Super 8mm camera, Ângelo de Sousa filmed the objects and events he saw. To leave traces, but also images — to later give them meaning. In these four short films, preserved and digitised, the simple recordings of an amateur, we see the artist move along the great aesthetic and functional tracks of what we call documentary cinema.

1. The Witness

On 7 January 1976, a bomb exploded at the premises of Árvore, an artists’ cooperative. On the following day, Ângelo de Sousa, founder and active member of the cooperative, went to the location to film images of the destruction. First, the large exhibition room, whose roof had collapsed to reveal the sky between the beams. The handheld camera moves through this space which now resembles the skeleton of a whale. Next, it passes through a meeting room in which the intact remains of a few chairs stand amid the debris. Finally, the frame shows a sign next to the inscription “a bomb exploded in Árvore, and so it exploded all over the country”, an affirmation of the enterprise’s continuation despite the attack it was victim to. The Carnation Revolution is known in history as a revolution that occurred without blood being spilled. Ângelo captured proof of the violent reaction that followed. A duty of memory.

2. The Interrogation

Over several weeks, perhaps months, Ângelo filmed the poster-covered hoardings around a building site across the street from his apartment, on the corner of Rua da Alegria. The posters advertise Ambre Solair, with a tanned woman in a red swimsuit, seemingly lying on a surfboard but positioned vertically on the poster, wielding the bottle of sun lotion like the Statue of Liberty. Furthermore, the poster is repeated, covering all of the hoarding, with the woman’s erotic invitation being multiplied all the way to the corner. Ângelo films the passers-by who walk past the hoardings without stopping. Most of them mark a contrast with the advertisement: women carrying bundles on their heads; elderly bourgeoisie with meticulously curled hair. Some pedestrians stop at the corner, immobile and apparently indifferent. The captured images follow one after the other, unchanging, from day to day, until the series of posters is replaced by another model — advertising the same brand — a slightly more tanned woman, in an orange bikini, with blonde pigtails that contrast with her skin tone. Only children seem to pay her attention, though her figure must have elicited some reaction, as the posters have clearly been ripped and then enthusiastically mended, one half at a time, by a poster fixer who must be proud of having restored her beauty. To compare this display of almost celestial bodies with hard-working citizens is, itself alone, to question the environment and the state of society.

3. The Participation

Conservative and dictatorial governments have always used the alleged “silent majority” as an alibi. On 28 September 1974, an attempted reactionary coup very nearly succeeded in interrupting the revolutionary process. The next day, a throng took to the streets to defend the revolution and its victories. Ângelo, a veteran anti-fascist, took part in the demonstration. He filmed the rally that began in front of the Câmara Municipal do Porto before moving on to the barracks at Praça da República. The filmmaker makes sure to show that the various parties on the left — the MDP, Partido Comunista and Partido Socialista — were able to join forces, uniting their flags before the national flag (indeed, the flags introduce an almost abstract red motif in the images of the flowing crowd) and raising their fists in unison. So the geringonça (coalition of the left) was already possible back then… No sound was recorded but the viewer can see that the demonstration takes place peacefully. Onlookers at their windows seem to share the crowd’s enthusiasm, even the soldiers lean out of the windows of the barracks. Ângelo also makes an effort to show, in shot and reverse shot, the soldiers’ reactions to the throng, at first proudly and rigidly maintaining their posture as guards, and then letting some protestors pass by, allowing them to speak to the crowd from the top of the terrace above the main barracks gate. Ângelo ends this short film with shots of children running and playing in the park, a happy image that conveys the relief and hopes of a population yearning for the end of dictatorship.

4. The Inspiration

On 29 January 1975, a Danish tanker coming into port ran aground and sank. The engine room below deck exploded and part of the cargo caught fire — over the following days, the remains turned the nearby beaches black. The hull ended up breaking and the prow drifted as far as Castelo do Queijo, coming to rest in front of the old edifice. Ângelo immediately went to film the disaster. He began by recording the spectacle of the ship in flames, from which issues a column of black smoke as wide as a building, reaching about 100m into the sky. Later, when night falls, the flames form a frieze above the water, completely losing their material reality and becoming an abstract pictorial motif that dances, red and yellow, against a black background. The day after, Ângelo heads to Castelo do Queijo, in front of which the broken prow now stands, and he films the onlookers on the sand gawping at the unusual spectacle of this steel pyramid jutting out of the water — structurally, it recalls the artist’s own sculptures, in which irregular rings cut from metal sheets simultaneously evoke faintly cylindrical bodies and their decomposition into slices. Then he lingers over the black film of naphtha spilling across the pebbles. Surprisingly, and perhaps unconsciously on the author’s part, this small film maps a movement from real life to iconic representation, from figuration to abstraction, and from identifiable objects to strictly pictorial elements — shapes and blurs of colour — in line with the aesthetic that Ângelo developed along his career, which can also be discovered in the retrospective of his work at Museu de Serralves: from sketch to sketch, the representation of a tree evolves from a simple assemblage of lines, to a leaf, to a constellation of colourful blots. That is, from figuration to abstraction, from matter to idea.