The first feature film by Lisbon filmmaker Marta Sousa Ribeiro, Simon Calls (2002) takes a close look at the final week of school of Simon, played by Simon Langlois. From the starting point of fictionalised elements of the director’s own life, the film, drifting between the present, the past and the foreshadowing of the future, offers a panoramic view of the life of an adolescent growing up on the periphery of Lisbon, against a backdrop of the infrastructural changes the city is undergoing. Under the cloud of his parents’ recent divorce and the departure of his father, Bernardo (Bernardo Chatillon), to France, Simon’s daily life is spent between home — where he lives with his mother, Rita (Rita Martins), and his younger sister, Mariana (Mariana Achega) — college, and his wanderings: physical wanderings, alone or accompanied by his friend Miguel (Miguel Orrico), through a post-industrial Lisbon undergoing rapid gentrification; or imaginary wanderings, via the films he watches on his computer, which lead him to plan a trip, or escape, to the USA.

Simon Chama is a complex piece of cinema on many levels, firstly for its narrative structure, which must be looked at in the light of how it was produced. This feature film is the result of three distinct chapters filmed over five years, between 2015 and 2019, in different formats, following Simon Langlois’ growth — and his physical and psychological transformations. The narrative skeleton — and, in a sense, the formal logic — of the film derives, then, from this long production process, while its episodic composition — recalling the intratextual1 workings of Balzac and the literary genre of the serial, cultivated by the French author as well as Dostoevsky, among other examples — stands in a cinematic genealogy that starts with Les Quatre cents coups (1959), by Truffaut, one of the foundational films of the Nouvelle Vague, and the character Antoine Doinel, played by the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, who the French director filmed through childhood, adolescence and adulthood. However, where the character of Doinel is present in five of Truffaut’s films, the editing of Simon Chama articulates the temporal layers of its three chapters in a single non-linear narrative, intersected by analepses (flashbacks), prolepses (flashforwards) and intercalations.

The lengthy production process of Simon Calls also comes through in the use of different formats, which, besides making visible the material history of the film, is evidence of the historical specificity of cinematic devices themselves and their technological variations. In this way, just as the co-existence of different formats by itself speaks to the different temporalities of the production process, the narrative construction merges into a sophisticated system of analepses and prolepses, passages between the temporal planes of Simon’s life. The representation of the past is here allied to the foreshadowing of the future, the American journey to come, such as, for example, the shots of aeroplanes traversing the clouds, evoking the photographic series Equivalents (1923), by Alfred Stieglitz.

The foreshadowing of the future, in turn, is indivisible from the fabulation and dissolution of the line between the material sphere and the oneiric, mnemonic, invented sphere (note the opening sequence of the slingshot. The figuration of Simon’s dreams, memory and fantasies, and those of others (like his mother), are, in certain sequences, the object of an auto-reflexive reconfiguration of the dimensions of the screen window in 720p, a screen within a screen, also used in the instances of archive materials. The narrative confluence between these different temporalities generates, in specific sequences, a logic similar to free indirect speech, in which a range of speaking positions merge and become indeterminate.

Simon Calls is also, in many ways, a film about the repurposing of archives. The sequences of archive material operate as intercalating vectors between the different narrative blocks, in parallel giving the feature an inter-media tone. On his computer, Simon watches extracts from an eccentric selection of films from different genres, including amateur cinema and documentary film, such as Journey Through A Day (1967), by Dale Johnson, and Children Underground (2001), by Edet Belzberg. The repurposing of these archive films, also in 720p format, consolidates a fantasy — the fantasy of the American Dream and its reverse — connecting Simon Calls, materially and formally, to the lineage of New American Cinema — and, in particular, to the work of Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin, which also featured child and adolescent leads — and of independent American film. The interpenetration between the representational systems of fiction and documentary, which was a stylistic trademark of New American Cinema and its derivations, is indeed one of the formal strategies used in Simon Chama, as it outlines a “real” and imagined cartography of Lisbon and its outskirts.

In parallel, Sousa Ribeiro’s film redefines the relation between margin and centre and between observer and observed. The car in which Simon travels with his mother (and, sometimes, his sister) to school and the city is fundamental for this double redefinition. While the vehicle’s movements decentre the character from the main setting of the film, the family home, and in so doing restructure the relation between Lisbon as the centre and the periphery as margin, it is also during these journeys that the portrayal of Simon’s “panoramic perception”2 as he looks through the window brings together and superimposes on the same plane, through movement and reflexes, the position of the observer and the observed, recalling the photography and certain film works by van der Keuken (On Animal Locomotion, from 1994, for example). Also, the movements of the camera, a performing steady-cam, responding to the characters’ actions, at times improvised, contribute to this redefinition that questions, incisively, the border between inside and outside.

[1] In one of its meanings, the appearance of characters from one work in another produced by the same author.

[2] Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey. The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2014.