The inaugural exhibition of the Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira explores multiple representations of the house in the director’s films, focusing in particular on the film, Visit, or Memories and Confessions (1982), that was produced at a time when Oliveira, already in his seventies, was forced to leave the house where he had lived with his family for over forty years. The director decided that Visit should only be presented posthumously. It was thereby predestined to have a paradoxical statute: as a work of memories and confessions, in which the filmmaker remembers the past while discussing his own cinematographic convictions, while also providing a preview of themes explored in his subsequent films — the most substantial part of his oeuvre — which unexpectedly was still to come. The film’s overall tone revolves around saying farewell to a place, and to his own life, but it actually turned out to be more prophetic than testamentary.
The film harbours an eloquent expression of the importance of the house in Oliveira’s films, as revealed in the many houses featured in his work: those facing the street, as in Aniki Bóbó (1942) and The Box (1994) or those which, on the contrary, enclose spaces, as in Convent (1995), revolving around the diabolical dilemmas of the intimacy of a couple. The house-theatre of bourgeois farce in The Past and the Present (1972), the house-prison in Benilde or the Virgin Mother (1975), the two rival houses that lead to a tragic conclusion in Doomed Love (1978) or the romantic disenchantments of Francisca (1981). The ruined houses, offering views over the prosperous vineyards of the Douro, which stir up social eroticism in Abraham’s Valley (1993) or incendiary behaviour in The Uncertainty Principle (2002). The house-stage of My Case (1986), in which cinema is theatrically compelled to face itself, or the house-tomb of The Day of Despair (1992), in which the director theatrically stages his personal identification with Camilo Castelo Branco. The house-ship of A Talking Picture (2003), the house-island of Party (1996) or the house-world, an asylum for alienated persons, in The Divine Comedy (1991). The house from which one flees, in Gebo and the Shadow (2012), or to which one inevitably returns, in I’m Going Home (2001). The strange case of the house that is traversed between Journey to the Beginning of the World (1997) and Porto of My Childhood (2001), which simultaneously constitutes a beginning and end, halfway between memories and ruins. These are some of the houses which can be visited during this exhibition and its accompanying film series. They either serve as grounds for a social portrait of Portugal and an inquiry into the state of the world, or for a biographical construction of the director, as a space that embodies the origin and centre of gravity of his entire oeuvre, while also opening doors towards questioning the act of filming and the nature of cinematographic art.
As a film set, theme, symbol, dramatic entity or stage, the house is the territory that underpins the relationship between the private and the public, and the individual and the collective. It is no accident that Visit rehearses themes that were explored a decade later in NO or the Vain Glory of Command, the great fresco with which Oliveira questioned the entire history of Portugal — from Viriato to the 1974 Revolution. This contrast of scales is extended, in Visit, to the tension between the word and image, between documentary recording and fictional recreation, between the visible and the invisible that, in addition to making space a condenser of different epochs, makes this film — and in this regard it resembles a house — a dense place, that accumulates dialogues and crossed various gazes between the past, present and future.
A film of beginning and return, Visit, or Memories and Confessions, demonstrates, like no other film, that cinema is a spectral art. A phantasmagorical device that Oliveira shows us — and in which he shows himself — in order, in a final word, and a final image, to demonstrate that it is possible to inhabit a film in the same way that we inhabit a house.
