Constelação #4: Lagutrop

Constellation #4

Lagutrop

Lagutrop emerges from the entrails of the end of the world, from an apocalypse foreseen in all modern civilisations. Lagutrop is also the sign of a country that, cyclically, sees itself as a failed nation. A self-awareness so strong that it produces a recurring depression. Lagutrop is also a way of looking at dystopia in Portuguese cinema.

Historical analyses of Portuguese cinema often include the observation that genre films have always been disparaged or ignored here, to such an extent that some even claim Portuguese cinema constitutes a genre all to itself. In step with this exceptionalist discourse, others have looked at Portuguese cinema as almost a kind of science fiction. However, due to limited capacity for film production, neither science fiction nor fantasy have ever found substantial expression within Portuguese cinema. This doesn’t mean, however, that dystopian themes have not been present at various points in our filmography. In this constellation, we will show a selection of less well-known or even neglected examples, where the screens of primitive computers encounter the wild ruins of futuristic architecture, and themes such as the threat of nuclear warfare, human infertility and eschatological theories about the end of the world circulate.

In post-25 April cinema, a number of films played with the hopes and fears of the revolution. They are clear examples of dystopias — some of which have already been shown at Batalha over the past year, such as Os Demónios de Alcácer Quibir (1976), by José Fonseca e Costa, and A Confederação (1977), by Luís Galvão Teles — but it isn’t these frustrations that we wish to explore. Rather, we want to highlight films that make a clear connection to the genres of science fiction and fantasy, or films that, thanks to their narrative structure, present alternative universes, of madness, delirium or magic.

Some filmmakers were made for this journey, and it is hard not to highlight António de Macedo and his almost cursed position in the history of Portuguese cinema. His work — and his life, given his love for eschatology — produced countless films of science fiction and fantasy, interpreting many myths and tales from Portuguese history. Macedo’s worldview was very much influenced by the onset of nuclear paranoia. Indeed, this subject features in many of these films: a kind of preparation for the imminent end of the world. Films by Solveig Nordlund and Pedro M. Ruivo (and we could also name José de Sá Caetano, who is absent from this constellation) are better known instances of “classic” dystopias in genre film. The work of Edgar Pêra, another example, is also a recurring reference in this game of Kafkaesque, eschatological labyrinths (we will show one of his earliest short films). We also make space for Margarida Gil, who raised the question of gender in the film we have selected.

Experimental and amateur cinema are also fertile terrain for testing other worlds. In a screening bringing together a set of short films (including works by António Campos and Patrick Mendes, whose films, in their times, form a consistent body of work), we present experiments that play with magic rituals and the desire for escape from totalitarian regimes. In a different field, and in a different screening, we bring together films dealing with altered states of consciousness, promising an exchange between decay and splendour. Some of these films also represent the last gasps of cinema made on physical film stock, on the eve of the turn of the century.