His movies were loquacious, elegant, faintly soigné works, a little stately – comedies and tragedies of manners, but never anything other than intriguing. His career is a devastating rebuke, apart from everything else, to the kind of ageist assumptions that I’m afraid I fell prey to at first. This remarkable Portuguese film-maker was a virtual folk-memory of cinema history – from 2008 onwards he was the oldest working director, a man whose active career began in 1927, in the silent age, and continued to the present day – although interrupted by periods of enforced inactivity and retirement due to critical indifference and to the philistinism and hostility of the repressive Francoist government of Salazar. Later, a friend showed me a publicity still from the set of the film that he was currently working on: having apparently supervised an aerial shot, De Oliveira was athletically leaping from a lowered camera-crane to the ground.Īniki Bóbó, De Oliveira’s 1942 film following children on the streets of Porto De Oliveira was bald, tanned, vigorous-looking – like a retired bull-fighter in his early 60s. Would he be a tiny, wizened figure, dwarfed by the tanned Eurotrashy demi-monde that always seems to collect at Cannes occasions like these? Would he walk with a stick? In a wheelchair? Prostrate on a gurney with a nurse in tow? I craned my neck to get a glimpse of this near-legendary director. The great man was announced by name as he entered the Grand Théâtre Lumière with his équipe for the official black-tie gala - part of the festival’s auteurist tradition. It was at the Cannes film festival, where he was presenting his film, The Letter, in competition. T he first time I laid eyes on Manoel de Oliveira would have been way back in 1999 he was just 90 years old.
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January 2023
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