Seixas Santos, Alberto

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

12 Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. III · no. 6 · 2015
DOCUMENTS · Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. III · no. 6. · 2015 · 12
A certain tendency in Portuguese cinema
Alberto Seixas Santos
 There is a certain tendency in Portuguese cinema 
that is characterized, despite the diversity of its ways, by the 
modernity of its thoughts and proposals. This cinema insists 
firstly in the performance’s criticism, which is due to, on one 
hand, the exhaustion of the model that served as support and, 
on another hand, the proliferation and trivialization of the 
images that television has brought. 
In this group of authors’ films, the ‘naturalist’ tendency—
marked by mimesis, authenticity and transparency—, that has 
fueled for many years cinema’s figuration, becomes denied, 
distanced or put in parentheses. 
Clarity gives way to a relative opacity that is expressed in a 
different manner: in the refusal of concluding and ending 
the film, in the abrupt and violent eclipse that runs through 
the film, in its incomplete and fragmentary aspect, or in the 
destruction of its narrative thread. 
This attitude brings another one. Cinema, which is based in the 
action and drama that come from literature and theatre, sees 
itself confronted with a clear choice of being less dramatic, as 
if the authors were more interested in that which constitutes its 
purely formal essence. Reading an adventure is replaced by the 
adventure of reading. Art separates itself from performance, 
entertainment. The shadow of modern cinema’s father, Roberto 
Rossellini, floats in the air. 
As Adriano Arpà has already said, the hard core of Rossellinian 
thinking is organized around a series of topics: the rejection of 
the performance ideology, of the star system, of the novelistic 
fiction, of the ‘theatrical’ relationship with the public. And, 
therefore, the end of the studio praise. 
In this sense, and bearing in mind the diversity of ways that this 
tendency in Portuguese cinema creates, it is not less significant 
that, for every filmmaker, Rossellini is a cornerstone, an 
essential reference point. Naturally a filmmaker can resume 
the theatrical issue and confront it with reality, but this 
passage through theater is a way of positioning oneself in the 
distance, an exposure of the narrative system as it is. And this 
task is eminently modern. It is also a cinema without logic or 
psychological motivation, which is the reason why characters 
do not have any kind of depth. They are creatures that remain 
external to the texts they pronounce, letting the words come 
out their mouths with the materiality of rocks, searching for a 
possible music, but crude; or they are beings that are more or 
less apathetic and are helplessly and without remission exposed 
to our gaze. In other cases, we assist to the stubborn choice of 
an infighting with the actor with the hope of snatching a second 
of authenticity or achieve a controlled improvisation, although 
productive. 
This cinema is not on the spectator’s side. It invites him to work 
more than feel pleasure, or, to be more precise, to the pleasure 
of working. 
This tendency in Portuguese cinema, in which inventors of 
forms with different concerns coexist, does not do other than 
inscribe itself in the field of the symbolic revolutions that have 
marked almost all modern arts. The fact that its legitimation 
comes more from festivals and critics than from the audience’s 
success—just like modern painting, in its first phase, has 
obtained its benefits from galleries and museums, and not the 
market—is the price to pay by those few that adventure in an 
unknown territory.   
Edited in: TURIGLIATTO, Roberto, FINA, Simona (ed.) 
(1999). Amori di perdizione: storie di cinema portoghese: 1970-
1999. Torino. Lindau.


A certain tendency in Portuguese cinema

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