Crespo, Alfonso

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

30 Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. III · no. 6 · 2015
ARTICLES · Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. III · no. 6. · 2015 · 30-34
An Eternal Modernity
Alfonso Crespo
ABSTRACT
KEYWORDS
Manoel de Oliveira, Acto da Primavera, pedagogy, Serge 
Daney, Gilles Deleuze, Alois Riegl, Paulo Rocha, António 
Reis, Margarida Cordeiro, António Campos, João César 
Monteiro, Joaquim Pinto, Pedro Costa, Manuela Serra, collage, 
archaeology, ethnography, transcendence.
The ascendency of Acto da Primavera (1962-63) by Manoel 
de Oliviera, in different generations of filmmakers, places 
the film in a privileged place in the history of Portuguese 
cinema. This influence, which transcends time and individual 
poetics, is here clarified with the notion of pedagogy –applied 
by the critic Serge Daney to the cases of Godard and Straub, 
and theoretically broadened later by the philosopher Gilles 
Deleuze- that followed the war trauma in the mid-20th century 
and the consecutive deterioration of the idea of the cinematic 
classic. Therefore, certain precepts assumed by Oliviera in this 
film, such as the ethnographic respect and the archaeological 
will towards a lyrical transcendence through imagination and 
memory games, can be followed in the work of some of the 
main modern and contemporary Portuguese filmmakers such 
as Paulo Rocha, António Reis y Margarida Cordeiro, António 
Campos, João César Monteiro, Joaquim Pinto, Pedro Costa or 
Manuela Serra. However, Acto da Primavera, whose baseline is 
the registration of the annual representation of the Passion of 
Christ according to an auto from the 16th century, staged by the 
inhabitants of Curalha themselves, also teaches that cinema is 
rather related to the arts that precede it –a repository of forms, 
ideas, gestures and affects- than to any attempt of assimilation 
of a language or grammar. Following, for example, the fertile 
concept of collage as a work that assembles different elements 
and overcomes the illusion of originality by highlighting the 
difference in what seems a repetition, Oliviera’s proceeds could 
be related to that of other filmmakers such as Paulo Rocha (A 
Pousada das Chagas), António Campos (Gente da Praia de 
Vieira) or João César Monteiro (Veredas).
31Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. III · no. 6 · 2015
An Eternal Modernity1
 Whatever the tail with which one begins unravelling 
the skin of the best contemporary Portuguese cinema, it seems 
to lead Acto da Primavera (1962-63), ‘the film where everything 
started’ in words of João Mário Grilo (GRILO, 1999: 129), 
to that place where a filmmaker recovered his dignity and 
two others, Antonio Reis and Paulo Rocha, received some 
kind of first communion. But what was started with Acto da 
Primavera? It seems difficult to define. Perhaps Oliveira, one of 
the filmmakers who cited it the most, would like to hear or read 
it in Deleuze’s concepts. Based on the idea of modern cinema as 
the fracture of the ‘beautiful totality’ of the classic  – whose mise 
en scène was undertaken by the totalitarian states-, Deleuze 
once referred (DELEUZE, 1986: 381-389) to the ages of cinema 
by relating them to Serge Daney and Alois Reigl, the 19th and 
the 20th century, cinema and painting. This provides a tabula 
rasa that forces to return to the origins. Deleuze said: ‘Start by 
seeing’, start by perceiving one image, one sound, by reading 
them… because it is necessary to recover from a blindness, a 
deafness, both which hindered to realize that the concentration 
camps were the secret behind the door.  This pedagogy, which 
was famously applied to the cases of Godard and Straub by the 
film critic, corresponded in Reigl’s periodization of plastic art 
to the purpose of ‘spiritualizing nature’, making reference to 
an eye that assumes the flatness of the image and becomes a 
psychic eye, a spiritual eye.  When Joao Bénard da Costa was 
asking himself –in Cinema Português?, Manuel Mozos, 1997– 
about that familiar look that makes the best Portuguese cinema 
some kind of fragile and anonymous uninterrupted film 
composed by images with no depth, stories without phycology 
or recurrent thematic motives, he probably had in mind this 
primitive  and modern overture by his friend Oliveira.
Thus, it could be said that Acto da Primavera starts above all a 
pedagogy, a discipline, which marked and still marks Portuguese 
cinema. Therefore, to begin with, we are here encoding a 
‘before the style’ which translates what the poet Reis found 
romantic about the film (REIS, 1964): ‘its very allegoric, very 
symbolic, even laic and realistic mystic thematic’, ‘the colour 
scheme as symbolic, chaste, ‘cut’ with no relief or mannerism in 
relation to the natural colours’, ‘the monody of the word and its 
plasticity’, ‘the appreciation of the archaic, of the anachronism, 
of a certain medieval alchemy, even of magic’, ‘the simplicity 
of the film, […] its immature state’, ‘a pictorial atmosphere 
that substantially returns to a primitive sphere, where there is 
something angular, somehow barbarian and bittersweet’…We 
could complete, together with Deleuze, Daney and Riegl, that 
what Acto da Primavera finally announces is that once cinema 
looses its capacity to embellish nature, it has to humbly admire 
again the beauty of things, which mysteriously is placed upon 
the world, the words and men. 
In this process, the cinematic machines reveal themselves, 
gaining the trust of the inhabitants of Curalha for a project 
that explicitly transcends the ethnographic component and 
finds its essence in the penetration of archaeological layers: 
Christ’s life, his representation according to a 16th century 
auto sacramental, the anachronistic backlash that inaugurates 
the cinematographic medium that contains and merges all. 
Talking about documentaries and fiction reduce the debate 
and domesticates a combat.  When António Reis accomplishes 
his project for the Museu de Imagem e Som, germ of Trás-os-
Montes, he will point out the difficulty of prefiguring the results 
of some cinematic works based on similar collisions (REIS, 
1974: 24-25): ‘They implied a hand-to-hand combat with 
ancestral and modern forms, between wolves and a Peugeot 
504, between Neolithic ploughs and gas bottles2’. Ideologically 
far from Oliviera, Reis and Cordero will simply go beyond the 
perforating gesture, which in his own words (REIS, 1977) will 
stop to see Christians and begin to see druids. 
Assuming that this latency, as a form of maieutic exercise, 
was awakened by Acto da Primavera, the team of filmmakers 
enriched the educational practice, which they concentrated and 
poetically incarnated, by reinforcing the idea of the reencounter 
and resurrection of the real before its transfiguration. A look 
that thinks, again, rather than a style [‘António Reis was 
explaining nothing, he was not analysing. He was looking, and 
it is a look of huge intensity3’, comments António Bélem Lima 
(NEVES, coord., 2014: 177)] that Reis and Cordeiro highlighted 
in their cinema with the movement of children who discover 
life –the astonishment towards the world- in some ludic and 
thrilling sequences which lead to the  redolent visit-invasion 
of the Observatorio astronómico da Ajuda in Rosa de Areia 
(1989). Ana the matriarch, in the homonymous film made in 
1982, precisely mentioned the stars that continue to illuminate 
once extinguished: their light enlightens us without being our 
destiny. However, this will no longer be Reis’ and Cordeiro’s 
night, but that of Pedro Costa, who, with his elders, will find 
in other latitudes his particular way of being contemporary 
(AGAMBEN, 2009: 18-29): navigating in the darkness of the 
present and interpolating other times to his own –pasts which 
never stop passing- in order to read History against the grain. 
1. This text would not have been possible without the generosity of Francisco 
Algarín Navarro and Lumière’s friends.
AN ETERNAL MODERNITY
32 Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. III · no. 6 · 2015
Save what is condemned to disappear –since cinema allows 
it- to later highlight that faded and sepulchral copy of the real 
through montage, which pulls out from the irreversible time a 
very different one, made out of survivals and anachronisms, so 
human that it disassembles, lyrical intensifier of the games of 
imagination and memory. This time recalls the spectator of the 
initial perplexity of the filmmaker towards the ancestral rite, 
which has been wounded to death. The description would work 
for such different movies as Acto da Primavera (1962-63), Mudar 
de Vida (1966), Vilarinho das Furnas (1970), Trás-os-Montes 
(1976), Veredas (1978), O Movimiento das Coisas (1985)…: for 
Oliveira, Rocha, Campos, Reis/Cordeiro, Monteiro, Serra… All 
of them, and some others, are related through certain primary 
gestures of the camera, the panoramas, which introduce a world 
rather than a story, the rituals, and the unconscious poetic 
heritage, which transmits a virginal speech, as if it had been 
recently segregated from the natural noise. Of such attentive-
to-time and against destruction cinema is known to draw 
physical and metaphysical maps. Its main subjects acted within 
a strange and recidivist secret society that constantly seemed 
to send encoded messages to one another through Acácio de 
Almeida. The existence itself of a film such as Encontros (Piere-
Marie Goulet, 2006), where all this inaugural grammar is 
concentrated and windows are slightly opened over a landscape 
assaulted by the testimonies and the voices of the passeurs and 
voyageurs filmmakers (EISENSCHITZ, 2011: 48-52), explains 
better than any discourse the alliance between pedagogy and 
poetics, which characterizes this structural trace of Portuguese 
Cinema that offered eyes and ears for those who were not seen 
or heard (even though the relation between the filmmakers and 
the locals was one of lights and shadows).
We are thus not far from an idea of transmission, mainly of an 
attitude. Perhaps deep inside of a miracle, which is necessary 
to see with one’s own eyes, as happened to Reis and Rocha 
in Oliviera’s shooting or to Joaquim Pinto in the beaches of 
Furadouro, and later to Giacometti while facing the images 
and songs of Mudar de Vida. Witnesses, like Monteiro of the 
seminal teachings of Jaime (António Reis, 1974) regarding the 
way of preserving a singular fate and lead it to the collective 
history of the forms, and further in his career, of the contagious 
naturalness of Uma Pedra no Bolso (Joaquim Pinto, 1988). Were 
they chances rather than influences? Probably, but chances, as 
João Bénard da Costa tells in O Som da Terra a Tremer (Rita 
Azevedo Gomes, 1990), are required to be deserved. Were they 
fulfilled desires? Certainly as well, like that of Paulo Rocha 
while shooting the loads dragging the fishing boats as he had 
seen in his childhood, and that only could be accomplished 
later, last minute rescue, by António Campos in Gente da Praia 
de Vieira (1976). The key could simply lay on the fact that such a 
will of regeneration of the primary potentials of cinema always 
summons the notions of community, considering that the 
efforts of a single individual can not cover it completely, and of 
communion, joint pleasure as that enjoyed by an autonomous 
part of the same body.
Regarding the style, however, we would be missing another 
fertile consequence of Acto da Primavera where Oliviera 
attempted the restitution to the sacred and the mysterious 
through the image (the word included, as it is known); An 
ambiguous supplement of epiphany and ascension, but of 
seduction and deception as well. We are talking about another 
edge of the same pedagogy, which notices that cinema existed 
before its own invention, below other forms, in the experience 
of one who contemplates and conceives the world in its 
constants of movement and fixity – matter and memory, this 
is to say that cinema was preceded by a vast repository of ideas 
and gestures, which would be later transfigured and praised. To 
be able to start again, it was therefore necessary to nourish from 
the legacy of other arts rather than from a decadent concept 
of cinematographic representation. Thus the fact that all acts 
and affections had already been fixed on centuries of theatre, 
literature or painting, was not an obstacle for cinema to blow 
into them a last breath, as similarly proposed in films such as O 
Pintor e a Cidade (1956) by Oliviera or O Construtor de Anjos 
(1978), by Luís Noronha da Costa.
The deepest movement of cinema only arises between shots, 
leit motiv of Acto da Primavera, which is transmitted by 
Oliviera while opening the distant proximity between past and 
present, the ordinary and the fantastic, life and death. It this 
sense, it is significant that this autocratic and marginal Oliviera 
is described by Paulo Rocha and António Campos as an artist 
pursuing for the exact trace. Curiously, they didn’t realize that 
they were simultaneously explaining themselves, facing the 
future, concurrently describing their own exile and their desire, 
similar in intensity, of colouring fiction with the real. ‘Being 
simultaneously as concrete as formal4’, thus Rocha validated 
the plus he admired in the Oliveira of O Pão, Acto da Primavera 
and A Caça, by enclosing a place beyond transparency, which 
indicated that a filmmaker should not be content with being 
an illusionist, because his destiny was rather related to that of a 
demiurge, opened to chance and vertigo towards the materials 
within its reach, ‘A bizarre number of possibilities5’ (ROCHA, 
1995: 125-6).
A fertile sense of collage here resounds, when dispossessed 
of semantic vices and historical restrictions, since the work 
combines elements of different origins, overcoming the illusion 
of originality through a work that highlights the difference 
of what is apparently a repetition. In Acto da Primavera is an 
impurity projected to the future, time of conjugation of its 
ALFONSO CRESPO
33Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. III · no. 6 · 2015
end, bud of life, Godardian resurrection of the image through 
the remnants of the intractable archives (a threatened future 
like that of the new born in Veredas or the couple of Mudar de 
Vida). According to this more aesthetic than spiritual creed, one 
could better conceive the ostensible turn that Rocha begins in 
A Pousada das Chagas (1972) –the ‘modernist auto’ (ROCHA, 
1995: 135) that revitalizes The Museu de Óbidos through texts, 
spaces and suffering bodies distilling their humours, desires 
and energies-, and concludes in Si fosse ladrão… roubaba 
(2013). It is about a free celebration of the virtuality of filmic 
legacy itself, with its broken sutures and already inserted in the 
indistinguishable amalgam of work and life from which one 
continues to learn; also in the reappropiation of the popular 
culture as resistance in the early Monteiro; or when using him to 
consider the illuminations of José Manuel Costa who observed 
that the films by Campos ‘are made of everything’, ‘a cinema that 
affirms and denies itself as cinema6’ (COSTA, 2000: 67, 48). It 
was precisely Campos, who in the also pioneer A Invenção do 
Amor (1965) would expose, with a similar critical and modern 
sense as Oliviera, the rest of machines that accompanied the 
camera, those sound recorders which the daring lovers were 
spied with, the resonant sources from which the counterpoints 
of some of his richer and more fertile films, such as Gente da 
Praia de Vieira, were orchestrated, where cinema appears as 
the bifrontal Janus that it is: on face fixed to the present, the 
testimonies, the denunciations, the opinions, the staging; the 
other, turned towards the past, exhuming the memories of the 
inhabitants of a zone based on the remontage of the cinema of 
Campos, almost as lost, distant and fragile as the memories of 
the earliest pioneers.
What is, then, started with Acto da Primavera? Nothing 
that had not started already. In this film, cinema is publicly 
celebrated, its discipline, its labour, the generosity of its intimate 
functioning when it is covered by an overflying morality; its 
inviting vocation as crucible of the most diverse materials. 
Hence, it congregates a myriad of inclinations and its spectators 
feel fortunate, almost destined. •
AN ETERNAL MODERNITY
34 Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. III · no. 6 · 2015
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ALFONSO CRESPO
Film critic. Degree in Audiovisual Communication at the 
University of Seville and Master in History and Aesthetics of 
Film in Valladolid . He is the author of Un cine febril. Herzog 
y El enigma de Kaspar Hauser (Metropolisiana, Seville, 2008) 
and he coordinated El batallón de las sombras. Nuevas formas 
documentales del cine español (GPS Editions, Madrid, 2006). 
He writes about cinema, literature and theater in Diario de 
Sevilla, where he worked since 2000 and where he publishes the 
blog ‘News from Home’. He is contributor in several magazines 
(Letras de Cine, Cámara Lenta, Lumière, So-Film España) and 
specialised books (Claire Denis. Fusión fría).
ALFONSO CRESPO


An eternal modernity

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