Seleção Nacional

by Daniel Ribas and Paulo Cunha

Portuguese cinema is vast and complex. Its historical development is marked by continuities and breaks ­— political, aesthetic and social — that are both interesting and productive. When we began thinking about the idea made explicit by the Seleção Nacional programme, our intention was to answer a question as seminal as “What is Portuguese cinema?”. We wanted to provoke, challenge, open up and suggest unexpected and spontaneous relations. As such, we have not been interested in an overly historicist or pedagogical relationship (in the simplest of meanings) as a response to that question. Portuguese cinema contains many things at the same time.

Disparate thoughts accumulated, evolved and transformed in ways that were not always linear. We wanted to avoid any canon of the history of Portuguese cinema, instead seeking readings that were more open, broader and, above all, surprising. Indeed, we are already familiar with the canon that has been established by some (good) histories of Portuguese cinema. This canon excites us too, but prevents us from looking further in the labyrinth of passing time.

One day, João Bénard da Costa — memories of whom have also created many mythologies — wrote a text about the history of Portuguese cinema, giving it the title: “A short history, poorly told, of a barely seen cinema”. Despite Portuguese cinema being more widely studied in the past two decades — indeed, as never before —, the idea that it is under-appreciated persists. We are not much concerned to explain these poor interpretations and hasty judgements of Portuguese film here. Rather, we are more interested in taking account of why cinema has always been (and always will be) a portrait of the pulsation of day-to-day life, of the transformation of societies, of the impossibility of inventing a tradition. And we are concerned that it becomes a ‘more’ and ‘better’ viewed cinema, in the sense of offering a first look at these works — in an auditorium, in their original medium (wherever possible; if not, then in digital restorations) — and highlighting their history. That is, allowing these works to move us for what they are, with their unique qualities and structural deficits (technical deficiencies, production errors), and as cinema that awaits a viewer. Portuguese cinema deserves to be seen because it also speaks about us as a community that has been and is still to come.

Unexpected reactions are more important to us than expected responses and, as such, we organise ourselves around constellations of films whose connections are suggested by an external programmatic view, always implying a less direct association than a simple chronology of the history of Portuguese cinema. For us, the responses will always be subtle and provocatively ambiguous, precisely to stimulate new readings and associations. Our starting point is always an idea — a theme, an image, a technique, a form. In other words, we don’t privilege or establish any kind of canon.

We have programmed constellations of films that build unexpected dynamics within an idea. And we also want to feel comfortable with our choices: they are films that we like, that seduce us with a particular idea, or with something potent to say or feel. They may come from the less explored regions of Portuguese cinema. They may not have been seen very much before. But our effort remains focussed on provoking new associations and, for that reason, these programmes promise circumstantial relationships, be it in the running order in each session or the screenings of complementary feature and short films. No genre is greater or lesser than another; no format or length more worthy. In this programme of Portuguese cinema there will always be space to challenge our perceptions — of time, space, style or historical relevance.

While a weekly programme of Portuguese cinema may seem like a celebration, we do not want it to be canonical, expected, predictable. We only hope that the constellations prepared for the first year of Batalha Centro de Cinema will act as our calling card; our own canon, that is up for discussion like any other. What is Portuguese cinema, really?

Constellation #1: Before the Future

During the 1980s and 1990s, Portuguese cinema underwent profound transformations. But not just Portuguese cinema: society as a whole was also moving, instigated by a desire for a future both unknown and promising, and pursued by a past that was, above all else, traumatic. In various Portuguese films of the period, this movement acted as a first step in a kind of wandering — between despair and solitude; between promise and disillusion. It is a movement expressed in the journeys (physical and internal) of various characters; in what they search for within and outside of themselves. It is also expressed in the tracking shots that populate many of these films; or in the brusque ellipses that make us oscillate between a past (colonial war; dictatorship; oppression) and a future (roads; Europe; money; the promise of happiness). We can even feel it in the sound: of a plane, of a car, a train, the wind.

Modernity, which has always been a kind of backdrop for Portuguese cinema, at least since Os Verdes Anos (1963), by Paulo Rocha, opened a crater in cinema’s relationship with society. In that film, Júlio and Ilda dreamed of spending the weekend visiting the airport, and it is to the sound of an aeroplane that they fall in love[JO1] , with no notion of what their future brings. Much passed between the advent of Novo Cinema and the promising years of Portuguese society’s democratisation. Freedom was on its way.

But if freedom, in fact, motivated a new way of living — with the explosion of new ways of exploring the body, desire and the night —, it also opened a gap between generations. This gap exposed one of Portuguese society’s latent traumas, which authors such as Eduardo Lourenço diagnosed so well when they referred to the absence of trauma in the April revolution and an ongoing kind of repression.

It was left to Portuguese cinema to explore new pathways — alternatives to the founding fathers of new Portuguese cinema, with Manoel de Oliveira at the helm and Paulo Rocha, Fernando Lopes, António de Macedo, João César Monteiro and José Fonseca e Costa in leading roles. That’s why this first Constellation also explores an orphan future, evident in the family narratives that feature in almost all these works; where younger characters — who are omnipresent in these films — feel abandoned in a difficult world that systematically puts them to the test.

We begin with the enigmatic figure of Glória, a girl who lives in an adverse, masculine world. A haunting parental and patriarchal influence is another marker of these films, and women as dangerous and fragile characters, in a twisting of the subliminal violence to which they are often subject. Many of the films feature adolescents or young adults as main characters seeking their place in a world that is hostile towards them, or simply doesn’t understand them. For that reason, they learn to “breathe underwater”, they dare to cut their hair or dream of New York via large posters, immersed in the contagious contentment of infancy and adolescence, fighting against figures of power — parents, godparents, etc. — who continually push them away or curtail their freedom. They want to be different, to live their lives. These “in transition” characters, who partake in ferocious initiation rites, are also a metaphor for Portugal’s transition and for its cultural and emotional geography: from a worldwide empire to the stillness of a small garden on the Westernmost point of Europe.

This is also why the dialectic between countryside and city persists in these films, since it is on this journey (country-city; city-country) that our collective imagination is shaped. In most cases, characters wish to escape smaller, claustrophobic communities but are rejected when they arrive in the city, where they are not understood. It is almost as if Portuguese cinema repeats its “green years” ad infinitum. Frequently on a train — which one day will reach its destination —, these characters dream of the world through the journey, they hear it in the trembling carriages. The faces of these characters, hair blowing in the wind, is a sign of the fresh air they desire, and which will help them learn how to live. Could Portuguese cinema inhabit the city? Strike out into the dark night in search of salvation? Before the future, we question what it is that impels us forwards and what obliges us to stop.

It was our aim, precisely, to begin these Seleção Nacional screenings with a series of films that challenge us to understand the diverse narrative and aesthetic codes of Portuguese cinema. We moved away from the canon so that we could come closer to delicate adventures in search of the future. This is the reason why we finish this first Constellation with a film that dramatises the end of the world, sentimentally, dancing and drinking, proposing a spectacle of celebration of life.

This is a beautifully creative documentary in which sound and images enter into a dialogue under an Afrofuturist aesthetic; where Afrofuturism is the link in communication between the African Diaspora and its ancestrality through technology.

Afrofuturism may act as a fictionalised reality for displaced Black bodies that, due to colonial and post-colonial oppression, are without lived experience on the African continent. Africans may also associate it to reality, given the ways in which technology develops and is experienced in that context.

Aesthetics becomes fictionalised when it enters the field of digital media and visual arts, as practices are carried over into theory and science.

Directed and produced in Britain, this film addresses Afrofuturism in the Black diaspora in the context of science fiction and digital reality. The film aims to reclaim technology as an element of communication in African societies, reflecting on the ways Black artists in the diaspora use Cyberculture as a statement and as part of the decolonisation of knowledge; and, I would say, to deconstruct the preconception that bodies like theirs do not possess intelligence or the ability to use science and technology.

There is a phrase spoken in the film that really caught my attention: “Africa is a continent lost in the past and alien to the future”. This phrase could be subject to a thousand and one reflections, but I will focus on the one that is also proposed by Afrofuturism, which is allowing ourselves to imagine Black bodies in the future.

Black people are constantly being removed from the future, when they are whitewashed or when they are neglected and left to die. Whitewashed in the sense that most Black people who achieved great things in history are erased, silenced and substituted by white people or characteristics associated with white people. Indeed, the film The Last Angel Of History gives the example of Black astronauts who were erased from history. In no news items on outer space, the moon voyages, do we hear, read or see references to those astronauts. History, the media, have no interest in emphasising the achievements of Black people, especially in the scientific field. Beyond science, in the art industry, various authors have addressed this question of erasure and whitewashing. And how does this affect our lives? We are not used to seeing Black people in the future, it’s as if the future were not accessible for those bodies. In this future idealised by a racist system, we continue to perform secondary and tertiary roles. In the racist and colonial mindset, Black people only exist as servants for white people.

The film reaffirms and documents resonances that go beyond time, from the African diaspora and the rest of the world, outlining achievements by Black people in the history of music, science and technology. Black artists, creators and thinkers have been involved in science fiction from its roots to its most contemporary works. In the audiovisual sphere: from Thriller by Michael Jackson to the Cyberculture of pop’s new generation of music videos. In cinema: from the utopia of Touki Bouki by Djibril Diop to the chimera of Atlantique by Mati Diop; in literature, from Audre Lorde to writers of my generation; in music, from the ferrinho of Cabo Verde to the sound of the technological revolution heard in Funk and electronic music in this film. The meta-narrative of this film contains so many references to Black creators and critics that it leads us to conclude that the Afrofuture is the present, that Black people in all their complexity are in the future as much as they are part of this present.