18° TORINO FILM FESTIVAL
Tribute to Manoel De Oliveira

O DIA DO DESESPERO

THE DAY OF DESPERATION

Country: India
Year: 1992
Duration: 75'


The last years of the life of the romantic author Camilo Castelo Branco, the author of Amor de Perdição and one of Francisca's main characters. We see the man tormented by encroaching blindness, by economic difficulties, by the mental illness of one of his children and by Ana Plácido, his governess whom he married without love. The day the doctor declares that his blindness is irreversible, the author shoots himself in the head.

"I totally respected the documents of the epoch. By filming agony 'objectively', one retains the mystery, all its pain. All my films tell of agony, in the Greek sense of the word, the Fight" (Manoel de Oliveira).

Biography

film director

Manoel De Oliveira

Manoel de Oliveira was born in Porto on December 11, 1908, to a rich upper middle-class family of industrialists. He went to secondary school at the Jesuit College in La Guardia, Galicia. In 1928 He enrolled in Rino Lupo's school, the Escola de Actores de Cinema, and appeared as an extra in Lupo's Fátima Milagrosa (1928) as well as Cottinelli Telmo's A Canção de Lisboa (1933). However, his real calling was to be a filmmaker. When he was sitting watching the screens of the most important movie theaters of Porto, he was getting his real lessons. He watched films ranging from those Griffith to the avantgarde films of Gance and L'Herbier. He watched German expressionistic films and as well as the films of Ruttmann, Dreyer, Vigo and Eisenstein. A great film lover, he was also an accomplished athlete. He was a high jump champion and trapeze artist. He also won a cup in Brazil for an automobile race. His encounter with cinema began at the end of the 1920s when he began to shoot Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931) with a rudimentary portable 35mm movie camera. This film was a short visual and poetic homage dedicated to the Douro River and its everyday life. The style of this film combined the linguistic experimentation of the 1920s with the type of documentary filmmaking that was coming of age just at the beginning of the 1930s. Portuguese movie-goers and critics of that time cried out their scorn for a film that dared to show the humble labor that went on along the river. After this experience, Oliveira shot three more documentaries — Hulha Branca (1932), Os Últimos Temporais Cheias do Tejo (1937), Portugal Já Faz Automóveis (1938), Miramar, Praia das Rosas (1938) and Famalicão (1940). However, the 1930s and 1940s were marked with many never-completed projects. In 1942 he made his first feature film, Aniki-Bóbó, but the press and public did not accept this work either. After Aniki-Bóbó Oliveira left the movie business to dedicate himself to his family. Sadoul called Aniki-Bóbó "an exceptional success in the Neorealistic style." In fact, many critics subsequently have mistaken this film for a direct precedent for the cinema of De Sica. Oliveira's return behind the camera is due, above all, to his being discovered by the film club of Porto, which screened his long-forgotten first feature film in 1954. The person who was overlooked for years had then become a myth. Oliveira represented the single valid ethical and aesthetic point of reference for the Portuguese cinema of the past. His cinema was experienced as a need and a necessity, something that the young people of the film club defended to the hilt. It was Oliveira whom the youths of the Cinema Novo movement looked to as their spiritual father, their Portuguese Renoir. In 1955 he travelled to Germany to study the latest color photography techniques and then made the short film, O Pintor e a Cidade (1956). This opened his era of unquestionably beautiful documentaries — O Pão (middle-length, 1959), Acto da Primavera (short, 1962), A Caça (short, 1963) and As Pinturas do Meu Irmão Júlio (short, 1959-65). Acto da Primavera can be defined as a key film in Oliveira's production. The most intense instance of tension between objectivity and subjectivity is overcome in this film. What is unveiled is what his work essentially had been up to that moment — a "documentary" genre continually profaned by the ghosts of the imagination. Starting with Acto da Primavera, his cinema has been a stage where all the different kinds of reality and all the actors turn into fiction. In effect, this is the film where Oliveira articulates the film theory of his subsequent work. He denies that cinema has an artistic form endowed with a specific territory. Instead, he sets up a kind of vampire aesthetics that is expressed through the contamination of cinema with literature, painting, and theater as the synthesis of all the arts. In the 1960s he reached international notoriety. Many retrospectives were dedicated to his films, which were screened at numerous festival and received numerous awards. While he was shooting O Passado e o Presente (1971), Oliveira conceived of the idea of making a cycle of four discourses about love. This is the birth of his "tetralogy of frustrated loves," which includes O Passado e o Presente, Benilde ou a Virgem Mãe (1975), Amor de Perdição (1978), and Francisca (1981). (When Amor de Perdição was broadcast as a television series, wasn't appreciated from portoguese critic, but immediatley later was successfully "discovered" in Paris). These four films have a very rigorous style based on the control of spaces, dialogues, acting, and set design in which everything seems so controlled and chilled. The cinema of the tetralogy expresses a universe of absolute and extreme emotions, where the women figures consume themselves in love unto death as they cannot live through a metaphysical experience of love and life. Francisca also marks the encounter with Paulo Branco, who from then on was to produce most of Oliveira's films. Oliveira then made other masterpieces, including Le Soulier de satin (1985), based on Paul Claudel's work. In this film, the film time coincides with the time of the reading of the text (almost seven hours screening time). Mon cas (1986) is another moment when the cinema of Oliveira reveals itself, as happened with Acto and as was to happen with Mon Cas and Os Canibais (1986). In Non ou a Vã Glória de Mandar (1990) Oliveira — the filmmaker of the passions — does not hesitate to film the sentiment of saudade that his people nurture in relation to their own past. This is followed by O Dia do Desespero (1992). Vale Abraão (1993) features another splendid portrait of a woman. It is based on the novel by Augustina Bessa-Luis, author of Fanny Owen, the novel Francisca is based on. There followed Inquietude (1998) and A Carta (1999). Furthermore, he worked as supervisor for Paulo Rocha's Sever do Vouga — Uma Expêriencia (1970) and actor in João Botelho's Conversa Acabada (1981), in Wim Wenders' Lisbon Story (1994) and in Divina Comédia.
Oliveira has won a myriad of national and international awards during his long career. In 1964 Acto da Primavera won the Gold Medal at the Siena Film Festival. In 1981 this film won the Interfilm Special Mention of the International Jury of the Protestant Churches at the Berlin Film Festival. In 1971 O Passado e o Presente won the Prémio da Casa da Imprensa award for best direction and best cinematography (Arácio de Almeida) as well as the Prémio da SEIT (State Department of Information and Tourism) for the best actress (Manuela de Freitas). In 1975 A Caça won the jury's special mention and short film award at the Festival of the International Federation of Film Clubs in Toulon. In 1979 Amor de Perdição won the jury's special award at the Figueira da Foz Film Festival. In 1980 De Oliveira won the C.I.D.A.L.C. gold medal for his career at the Figueira da Foz Film Festival. In 1982 Francisca won the IPC award and the gold medal at the Sorrento Festival. In 1985 he won a Golden Lion for his career at the Venice Film Festival, where Le Soulier de Satin won the Golden Ship and the Critics' Award. In 1985 he also won the L'Âge d'Or award from the Cineteca in Brussels. In 1986 Mon cas won the RDP/Antena 1 award. In 1988 Os Canibais won the critics' special award at the São Paulo Festival and the L'Âge d'Or award from the Cineteca in Brussels. In 1990 Non, ou a Vã Glória de Mandar won the jury's special mention and the FIPRESCI award at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1991 A Divina Comédia won the jury's special award and the FIPRESCI award at the Venice Film Festival. In 1992 he won the Leopard of Honor at the Locarno Film Festival. In 1993 he won the Golden Jaguar at the Cancun International Film Festival. In 1993 Vale Abraão won the jury's speical mention at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs and the CICAE award at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1997Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo won the FIPRESCI award at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1999 A Carta won the jury's special award at Cannes Film Festival.

FILMOGRAFIA

Douro, Faina Fluvial (cm, 1931), Estátuas de Lisboa (cm, 1932, perduto), Hulha Branca (1932), Os Últimos Temporais Cheias do Tejo (cm, 1937, Portugal Já Faz Automóveis (cm, 1938), Miramar, Praia das Rosas (cm, 1938, perduto), Famalicão (cm, 1940), Aniki-Bóbó (1942), O Pintor e a Cidade (cm, 1956), O Coração (incompiuto, 1958), O Pão (mm, 1959), Acto da Primavera (1963), A Caça (cm, 1963), Vila Verdinho - Uma Aldeia Transmontana (cm, 1964), O Pão (cm, 2ª versione, 1964), As Pinturas do Meu Irmão Júlio (cm, 1965), O Passado e o Presente (1971), Benilde ou a Virgem Mãe (1975), Amor de Perdição (1978), Francisca (1981), Visita ou Memórias e Confissões (1982), Lisboa Cultural (mm, 1983), Nice - À propos de Jean Vigo (mm, 1983), Le Soulier de satin (1985), Simpósio Internacional de Escultura em Pedra - Porto 1985 (supervisione Manuel Casimiro, 1985), Mon cas (1986), A Propósito da Bandeira Nacional (cm, 1987), Os Canibais (1988), Non ou a Vã Glória de Mandar (1990), A Divina Comédia (1991), O Dia do Desespero (1992), Vale Abraão (1993), A Caixa (1994), O Convento (1995), Party (1996), Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo (1997), Inquietude (1998), A Carta (1999), Palavra e a Utopia (2000).

Cast

& Credits

Regia, sceneggiatura e dialoghi: Manoel de Oliveira.
Plot: dalle lettere di Camilo Castelo Branco.
Consulenza storica: Alexandre Cabral.
Director of photography: Mário Barroso.
Art director: Maria José Branco.
Costume designer: Jasmim de Matos.
Editor: Manoel de Oliveira, Valérie Loiseleux.
Sound: Gita Cerveira.
Music: Richard Wagner, Franck Martin.
Cast and characters: Teresa Madruga (Ana Plácido), Mário Barroso (Camilo Castelo Branco), Luís Miguel Cintra (Freitas Fortuna), Diogo Dória (dottor Edmundo Magalhães).
Voci off: Canto e Castro, Rui de Carvalho.
Production company: Paulo Branco per Madragoa Filmes (Lisbona)/Gemini Films (Parigi).
Menu