Seleção Nacional: In Every Gaze, An Outsider

In an essay by André Rui Graça titled Portuguese Cinema as “National Cinema” (2016), the researcher states that: “The lack of belief in the idea that it’s possible to depict something as complex as a nation — a term, moreover, in crisis in post-modernity —, and the suspicion that any effort put towards representing the identity of a country would merely result in a construct (a term connoting artificiality and fabrication of authenticity) of that same identity, have led to the systematic dismantling of the concept of national cinema.”

Starting from this same idea of deconstruction, this series seeks to show that, beyond categories and beyond genre, Portuguese cinema — and, by extension, the cinema of any country — derives from an accumulation of independent gazes that see through cultural boundaries and traits; that, ultimately, know no country, leader or border.

To turn this juncture into something that can be seen and discussed, In Every Gaze, An Outsider proposes a dialogue between foreign directors who have filmed in our country and Portuguese filmmakers who have done the same abroad. Each of these Portuguese co-productions, these various gazes, proposes a journey that challenges us to question what we see and how we see. What Portugal is revealed by a foreign gaze? And from what perspective have the Portuguese filmed overseas? Who is the foreigner? Doesn’t cinema always film a place that exists but that, at the same time, reveals itself only as a non-place, an ideal, a utopia?

The word “utopia” comes from the Greek and means precisely “no place”, referring to a non-existent society. It brings to mind the book by Thomas More, Utopia, published in 1516, which depicts a utopian island as the antithesis of 16 th century European society: a deeply humanist tract that opens up the possibility of a new world.

We must consider, then, how a national cinema may require certain anchoring points — often material in form, be it production or commercial recognition — while, at the same time, raising that more complex question of how certain gazes have the power to turn real places into places for utopia and dialogue. From the other, ours, and from ours, the other. All the films shown here do nothing if not call into question the notion of “national cinema” while, simultaneously, demonstrating the fertility of such dialogues.

The first screening brings us Wim Wenders’s gaze at the artistic process as it faces the very adversities that cinema itself tends to revere. It’s a narrative symptomatic of cinema’s own fragility, a kind of Waiting For Godot. The State of Things (1982) is a film about cinema that transports us to a zone of menace and contemporaneity. The film begins on the set of a remake of Roger Corman’s film The Day the World Ended (1959), now titled The Survivors, which portrays a group of survivors of a nuclear war hiding out in a valley — a strange landscape, with the Portuguese ocean as a backdrop. During the filming, the producer disappears, and the crew is forced to interrupt the shoot when they run out of film stock.

The Murmuring Coast (2004), by Margarida Cardoso, is based on the eponymous novel by Lídia Jorge. The film recreates the setting of the Mozambican War of Independence and is one of the few Portuguese films that addresses that conflict from a woman’s perspective. The film’s gaze is critical, intimate, eschewing any heroic or exclusively masculine view of the war, exploring instead themes of loss, guilt, the end of the empire and the deconstruction of military masculinity.

In Foreign Land (1995), by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, we experience the fateful years of the government of Fernando Collor de Mello and the imposed exile of many Brazilians in search of better living conditions. Portugal, on the edge of Europe, is the setting. The film culminates with ear-splitting sounds on a beach with a great ship running aground to the sound of Gal Costa, who sings “Vapor Barato” (“Cheap Steam”) by poet Waly Salomão and Jards Macalé.

It is via these encounters — between geographies, languages and preoccupations — that this chapter reaches through time. In April, these dialogues will continue through a new selection of films that will deepen this idea of cinema as shared, unstable territory, always in motion. The films to be shown will be announced throughout March, in conjunction with the rest of the programme at Batalha Centro de Cinema.