Manoel De Oliveira

Understanding the iconoclastic work of a lifelong cinematic pioneer Manoel de Oliveira's eighty-five year career made him a filmmaking icon and a cultural giant in his native Portugal. A lifelong cinematic pioneer, Oliveira merged distinctive formal techniques with philosophical treatments of universal themes--frustrated love, aging, nationhood, evil, and divine grace--in films that always moved against mainstream currents. Randal Johnson navigates Oliveira's massive feature film oeuvre. Locating the director's work within the broader context of Portuguese and European cinema, Johnson discusses historical and political influences on Oliveira's work, particularly Portugal's transformation from dictatorship to social democracy. He ranges from Oliveira's early concerns with cinematic specificity to hybrid discourses that suggest a tenuous line between film and theater on the one hand, and between fiction and documentary on the other. A rare English-language portrait of the director, Manoel de Oliveira invites students and scholars alike to explore the work of one of the cinema's greatest and most prolific artists.

Publisher description

Manoel de Oliveira is the only filmmaker whose career spans from the silent era to the digital age, and yet there is little written in English about his extensive filmography. This volume, the first to discuss Oliveira's later works in English, fills this incredible gap in scholarship on the director with fresh and original analysis of over 50 of Oliveira's films, ranging from 1963's Rite of Spring to 2009's Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl. Organized by tropes and topics, rather than chronological order of release, The Cinema of Manoel de Oliveira creates a unique lens through which to consider the director and the ways in which his work links cinema, literature, and other artforms. Hajnal Király sheds new light on Oliveira's filmography with new readings of his work in relation to 20th and 21st century history.

Manoel de Oliveira is the only filmmaker whose career spans from the silent era to the digital age, and yet there is little written in English about his extensive filmography. This volume, the first to discuss Oliveira's later works in English, fills this incredible gap in scholarship on the director with fresh and original analysis of over 50 of Oliveira's films, ranging from 1963's Rite of Spring to 2009's Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl. Organized by tropes and topics, rather than chronological order of release, The Cinema of Manoel de Oliveira creates a unique lens through which to consider the director and the ways in which his work links cinema, literature, and other artforms. Hajnal Király sheds new light on Oliveira's filmography with new readings of his work in relation to 20th and 21st century history.

In Bion in Film Theory and Analysis: The Retreat in Film, Carla Ambrósio Garcia introduces the rich potential of the thinking of British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion for film theory. By so doing, she rethinks the space of the cinema as a space of retreat, and brings new insights into the representation of retreat in film. Presented in two parts, the book seeks to deepen our understanding of the film experience and psychical growth. Part I places Bion’s view on the importance of the epistemophilic instinct at the heart of a critique of the pleasure-centred theories of the cinematic apparatus of Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz and Gaylyn Studlar, proposing an idea of cinema as ‘thoughts in search of a thinker’. Garcia then moves from Bion’s epistemological period to his later work, which draws on mysticism, in order to posit an emotional experience in the cinema through which the subject can be or become real (or at one with ‘O’). Part II examines representations of retreat in four European films, directed by Ingmar Bergman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Georges Perec and Bernard Queysanne, and Manoel de Oliveira, showing them to articulate a gesture of retreat as an emotionally turbulent transitional stage in the development of the psyche – what Bion conceptualizes as caesura. Through its investigation of the retreat in cinema, the book challenges common understandings of retreat as a regressive movement by presenting it as a gesture and space that can also be future-oriented. Bion in Film Theory and Analysis will be of significant interest to academics and students of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and film and media studies, as well as psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.