Happy 100th birthday, Manoel de Oliveira

Manoel de Oliveira turns 100 today

According to the IMDb, Manoel de Oliveira is currently working on a new film. What makes this remarkable is that, on December 11 of this year, the Portuguese writer-director turns 100. He’s been one of my favorite filmmakers ever since I saw Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo (1997), and in celebration of this milestone I offer the following.
    It’s a discussion between Oliveira and Jacques Parsi, who worked on several of Oliveira’s scripts, aiding in the French translation and dialog on Party (1996), Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo and O Princípio da Incerteza (2002). For Je rentre à la maison (2001), Parsi worked on the screenplay and played a small role. Conducted for its presskit, the two men discuss Je rentre à la maison, sex, Buñuel, and James Joyce:

Manoel de Oliveira — Je rentre à la maison [“I’m going home”] is almost a non-story, as simple as its title suggests, which takes place in “fairytale” Paris at the beginning of the year 2000. The city of lights, center of all our complex western civilization, where the superfluous seems to take precedence over the essential. It is like a game played by innocent naughty children, and its results, may be, or rather, not be, a pathetic and unexpected socio-ecologic eclosion of tomorrow’s world, where to say “I’m going home” has lost its meaning. But no, this is not the story.
    In fact, although the action of the film is divided between the city and the theatre plays, etc., we should look at it as a whole. It is certain that we are dealing with a personal drama, undergone by a famous old actor, who is the innocent victim of an unexpected betrayal. The initial idea may seem exaggerated or even out of place, but in truth I must confess that it was exactly that which gave me the urge to write such a simple story.

Jacques Parsi — In filming Paris you create two pictures: one, the Paris of lights, the cafés, the expensive shops, and the other, that of Paris by night, dark and threatening. Why did you make this choice? Why Paris?

Manoel de Oliveira — Answering your two questions together I would say that the first is a sketch of the life of the city as it is today while the second shows it as the Center of Western Culture, which Paris is. Then, there is this globalization of all that is brilliant and satisfying, but there is also the other side, the dark threatening night as you call it, with its drugs, its ethnic, religious and political conflicts which are rife everywhere: in Eastern Europe in the Middle East, in Africa, Indonesia, without mentioning what is going on in Asia, or with the Indians in the Americas.

Michel Piccoli and Manoel de Oliveira

Jacques Parsi — We get the impression that the old famous Gilbert Valence [Michel Piccoli’s character in the film] is a negative personality. He says no to Silvia. Turns down his golden proposal . . . Is it experience? Is it age? Or is it the ethics that he invokes when faced with his agent?

Manoel de Oliveira — I think it is the result of the wisdom he has gained by experience. Just as I don't think his ethics were negative. It is from these same ethics that come the commandments ‘thou shall not kill, steal, exploit, discriminate,’ etc. . . These are the ethics written on top of the plinth in the “Place de la Republique” which holds up a bronze statue, and when we look on the back we can read the words carved in stone, “Labor, Liberdade, Fraternidade.”

Jacques Parsi — He doesn’t want to take part in the telefilm because of the “scenes of sex and violence.” Nevertheless there are great works which contain sex and violence. Joyce’s Ulysses was forbidden for years because of its pornography. What is it in your opinion that explains Gilbert Valance’s attitude in the today’s world?

Manoel de Oliveira — I respect his ethics, professed by the character himself. Whether as an actor or as a man. I think ethics are fundamental for the rules of human relationships. But I can’t see where there are great works confined to pornography. Sex, the source of all pornography, is an abysmal thing and this abyss perverts and attracts man’s animal instincts. It dehumanizes him. I say man’s animal instincts, because in animals pornography does not exist, nor does shame, while in Man the excesses of pornography pervert him and make him like a kind of assassin, the attraction of which may be similar or even confused with this other type of abyss. Pornography and assassination are outside the law, outside the bounds of morality. They spring from the confines of human nature and become absolute in themselves.
    Ulysses by James Joyce has value in itself not because of pornographic speculation, which is not an accessory to the content, as neither are the psycho-definitions that he gives some of the characters at the end. In both cases, however, they are no more than an exercise in seduction. In the second case they are what the author believes, or wishes his characters to believe. Going back to the first, this could be the overwhelming need of the narrator himself to expel his erotic libido. Here we could find reasons due to the author’s personal urge for a need to exteriorize out of context, whereas “I'm going home,” is still the basis in Joyce’s Ulysses, after Homer. What we find in the hurried and “modern” literature of today, is an elevated multiplication to the seventh power by many opportunist authors in repetitive works of violence and pornography for their own sakes, just because they are in fashion and sell well, which has nothing to do with the writings of Joyce. In this, the public things pass to the private and most intimate, without them, however, becoming mixed. In the case of the cinema, an irreverent director as aggressive as he is genial, I’m speaking of Buñuel, never showed the sexual act or pornographic scenes, things of an intimate nature which other, uninhibited directors in their search for audiences make public, as is especially the case on many television programs. Despite this, the violence in Buñuel’s films is more powerful because Buñuel, strange as it may seem, was, deep down, a modest man, and his films suggest more than they show, and the suggestion is more powerful than the act in itself, whatever that may be. The Greeks in their great tragedies held back from showing scenes of abominable acts “Kill the Children but not on stage,” they said. Anyway showing in public what should be done in private is always a lack of decorum. Today, however, the barriers are down and decorum is out-of-date, nothing shocks and “everything goes.”

Jacques Parsi — At the end, the camera doesn’t focus on Gilbert, who disappears, but on his grandson who up to now has only played a secondary role. Why did you suddenly focus him?

Manoel de Oliveira — Because up to now the grandson was secondary. But children have a sixth sense and a perception of disaster, he sees in his grandfather a model who represents a past free of wisdom and stability which collapses before his eyes; a tragedy which, consciously or not, the child applies to himself. It was not only affection which placed him there to witness the collapse, but the presentiment that the responsibilities of life will now fall on him in the same way his grandfather had reached the top of the ladder and fallen, defeated. Is life not a passing on of the baton, whether it is natural or acquired, stolen or won?


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