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 #2: El Dorado

Decolonisation was one of the most fracturing transformations heralded by the Revolution of April 1974. On top of Democratisation and Development, the country placed in its own path a structural task that not even the first political revolutions lived through by Portugal had proposed, be it the Liberal Revolution of 1820 or the Republican Revolution of 1910. The myth of El Dorado had been fuelled in the institutional and public imagination over a number of centuries, becoming an unchallengeable pillar of a succession of Portugal’s strategic projects, from the Conquest of Ceuta (1415), through the “discovery” of Brazil (1500) and up to the ambitious Pink Map, in 1890.

As a result of this historical burden, the decolonisation process has been one of the most often recurring transversal themes in Portuguese cinema produced post-25 April, with particular intensity in the past two decades. The colonial wound is more visible in the African territories of the old empire, above all due to the violence of the “pacification” campaigns (which, in reality, were extermination campaigns) in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, followed by the colonial wars that precipitated the fall of fascism.

We recover fundamental anticolonial works, such as Deixem-me ao menos subir às palmeiras, by Joaquim Lopes Barbosa, the late filmmaker from Porto who built a career in cinema in Angola and Mozambique, Monangambeee, by artist and intellectual Sarah Maldoror, who called for the death of the white man through this adaptation of a short story by Luandino Vieira, or Catembe, a work by Faria de Almeida that was ruthlessly mutilated by the fascist censors. We also look back at trans-historic, allegorical reflections that emerged from the revolutionary period, such as Os Demónios de Alcácer Quibir, by José Fonseca e Costa, Paraíso Perdido, by Alberto Seixas Santos, and Acto dos Feitos da Guiné, by Fernando Matos Silva. We mark the turn of the 20th century via two statements from women directors about real people confronting colonial memories: Natal 71, by Margarida Cardoso, and Fato Completo ou à Procura de Alberto, by Inês de Medeiros. From the younger generation of directors, such as João Salaviza, Welket Bungué, Filipa César, Carlos Conceição, Hugo Vieira da Silva and José Miguel Ribeiro, we choose works from the past decade that explore diverse aspects of the enormously complex questions of post-memory, seeking to find a reverberation of a colonial wound that stubbornly fails to heal. And we finish this constellation with an iconic film that functions both as a new beginning for this same constellation and a transition to the next: Um Adeus Português, by João Botelho, based on a poem by Alexandre O’Neill, which in two different time periods presents a portrait of intergenerational trauma in a family in Lisbon during the 1980s, and their mythologised memories of the colonial war.

The way each session is organised also enables further dialogues — at times unexpected and at others more immediate — between the works, their creators, the territories in which they take place and the historical periods in which the were produced. Meanwhile, the order of sessions also sketches a trajectory of accumulation that allows approximations and relations between settings, characters and spaces from different films. This is the game we propose to the spectator with each of our constellations, so that they themselves may trace these dynamics along the imaginary lines joining each film within the constellation and the ones that have gone before it.