Manoel de Oliveira

Manoel de Oliveira is a name not that widely known outside his native Portugal or the European art house circuit.  I once mentioned him up at the Screen and Media Department and was met by a lot of blank faces from even the normally all knowing lecturing staff.  In someways this is surprising as de Oliveira has been making movies off and on since 1931.  Now in his 101st year he is without doubt the oldest working director that has ever been, or, in all likelihood, ever will be.

Film making aside, there cannot be many cases in the history of the species of a human being becoming more productive in his tenth decade of life than he was in the preceding nine.  Between the ages of 90 and 100 de Oliveira wrote and directed 17 films, 8 more than he produced as a relative spring-chicken in his 80s. 

Admittedly some of these - but certainly not all - were shorts.  There is also some debate as to their quality.  From all accounts the cinema of de Oliveira is an acquired taste, often static and dialogue heavy and burdened with Catholic themes.

I’m tentative about expressing an opinion on the centenarian as until now I have not been able to track down any of his work.  Prolific as he has been in recent times New Zealand audiences have largely been denied the de Oliveira oeuvre.

The release of “To Each His Own Cinema” changes all that.  A so called ‘portmanteau’ in which 33 directors from around the globe each contribute a brief portion on the theme of audience reception, it was produced to mark the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival.  Manoel de Oliveira, at the age of 98, is one of the 33.

De Oliveira’s segment has wit and charm though probably does not rank amongst the most memorable of the vignettes.  It presents a presumably fictitious meeting between Nikita Khrushchev and Pope John XXIII in which the Communist and Catholic dictators trade insults before comparing beer guts.  True to the received view de Oliveira’s style is static, but also assured and confident and he makes his point with great clarity.

There are some real gems contained in the balance of “To Each His Own Cinema”.  Many directors chose the autobiographical route, recreating film going experiences from their youth with often moving results.  Claude Lelouch’s account of his parent’s courtship in the shadow of Astaire and Rogers is one of my favourites and Chen Kaige’s typically sentimental and stylised short about school children using bicycles to power a projector so that they might watch Chaplin’s “The Circus” induces tears.  Roman Polanski’s contribution is a hilarious slow burning joke about masturbation whilst David Lynch again proves himself an inspired and surreal horror minimalist.