Seleção Nacional: Subsoil

All art is endless, renewable, surprising in its plasticity. Cinema is just one example of this bottomless creativity. On being faced with the need to consider a single field — for example, Portuguese cinema — there arises the search for a common thread without binding together the whole community, for the communicating vessel that bears the sap of vital connection. What is it that unites Portuguese cinema?

Having observed the concept behind the first Seleção Nacional programme — which was organised in constellations — we have decided to propose a counter shot (and argument) to its relational logic. Rather than looking up at the stars, we suggest looking around down here. In (re)discovering Portuguese films, this curatorial gesture counters the extractivist rationale of space exploration with a rationale of turning over the soil and other material, of “re-pollinating” and “redistributing” the creative seeds and themes of our cinema.

These exploratory journeys, inspired as much by the young Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883) as by an experienced gamer playing Final Fantasy VII, will seek treasures and other items to keep our life bar above 90%. The aforementioned commonality in Portuguese cinema, this vast and fascinating territory, resists and is immune to indoctrination, canonical domestication and polite, prescriptive readings. Thus, alongside other film lovers, we are left to learn how to “see better”, “hear more” and understand “what the images say to each other”.

On this journey of rediscovery and renewal, we hear the echo of Rachel Carson in Silent Spring, as she emphasised the constant metamorphosis of matter and energy in an endless cycle: “The soil exists in a state of constant change, taking part in cycles that have no beginning and no end.” Just like that soil, Portuguese cinema — here viewed as a living, changing organism — is part of a constant flux, in which the past and present co-exist.

Our task is not to unearth treasures or rarities, but rather, like Aby Warburg, to organise our curatorial thought according to the “law of the good neighbour”, by which the films themselves can speak to each other (and to our viewers), drawing on the best they have to give and receive from their fellow films and screenings. We place no particular focus on either chronology, duration, genres, themes or even aesthetics. Our logic is at times sensory, occasionally anarchical, deriving from that counter-extraction that challenges what is considered useful and productive. The experience of watching these films in the auditorium, discussing them before and after, the latent hypotheses and potential dialogues, will all extend the imaginary cartography of our programme.

First stop: Subsoil

The first stop on our journey will be in the earth, in the subsoil. The Subsoil programme will traverse a range of territories and transgressions in Portuguese cinema from different eras. In this opening chapter, we seek to address the idea that, in territory traditionally underexplored by Portuguese film — fantasy, horror and the supernatural — various Portuguese filmmakers have sought to sow, in the codified subsoil of this genre, themes that are fundamental to understanding Portuguese communities, social dynamics and the national psyche. This segment begins with the screening of a “hallucination” of Portuguese silent film, The Dance of the Paroxysms, with a live soundtrack by Ilusão Gótica and a presentation by researcher José Bértolo, who has written about the film. Directed by Jorge Brum do Canto at the age of 18, the film adapts the poem “Les elfes” by French poet Charles-Marie Leconte de Lisle, thus seeming to enter into dialogue with the French avant-garde of the time, while also acting as a bucolic Wagnerian fantasy. However, of interest to this programme is the film’s subsoil, its filigree, the places and people of which it is made, the earth of rural Portugal, its legends and love affairs.

In a similar fashion, the following two screenings seek, in sites of hidden trauma and superstition, to address latent violence against women in rural Portugal: in Misbegotten, by João Canijo, we find the classical figure of Electra in the subsoil of a village in Trás-os-Montes, holding a mirror up to a nation of silences and emotional repression; in O Crime de Aldeia Velha, by Manuel Guimarães, folk horror is used to explore themes of superstition and witchcraft, revealing how configurations of femininity and men’s “ownership” of women was (and is) expressed in Portuguese life.

If there is one filmmaker who inhabited the subsoil of Portuguese cinema, it was António de Macedo. Our fourth screening belongs to him. The Magic Springs of Gerenia is a film about a librarian’s disappearance and a mystery involving folk traditions, a secret passage and an old treasure, but also a film about how a life can only be lived once, and the relationships that can, suddenly, become locked away in infinity.

In our fifth screening, we revisit the only surviving section of Três Dias sem Deus, by Bárbara Virgínia, a gothic film that was also the sound feature to be directed by a woman in Portugal. As a complement, we will show an episode from the series Contos Fantásticos Portugueses, directed for RTP by Noémia Delgado. The selected episode is titled “O Visconde”, the third film in the series, in which Noémia adapted the short story “Os Canibais”, written by Álvaro do Carvalhal and published posthumously, and which was also the source for Manoel de Oliveira’s film-opera of 1988.

In the sixth screening, we revisit part of filmography of Luís Noronha da Costa, with two of his most emblematic films. In both O Construtor de Anjos — an atmospheric, romantic, gothic dream — and D. Jaime ou a Noite Portuguesa — a film of incandescent, sensory magic, centred on a tragic amour fou and clearly inspired by German and British romanticism — we can see how his love of pictorial figuration, and of allegorical phantasmagoria, allowed for a subtle commentary on religion, desire and boundless love.

Closing the programme, and to use Ricardo Vieira Lisboa’s phrase, we encounter the “horror of parenting” in a film by Solveig Nordlund, A Filha. In this descent into madness (with a stunning performance by actor Nuno Melo), an unexpected day-to-day absence contains, in its depths, a powerful vision regarding excesses of vanity and power, with strong repercussions in the heart of a family relationship.