MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA
AND WORLD HISTORY.

Recently re-discovered by mainstream media in North-America, mostly due to the theatrical success of his 2001 feature film “I’m Going Home,” Manoel de Oliveira is commonly referred to as the "oldest film director in the world." Without diminishing the merits of 96 years of active engagement in the arts, Mr. Oliveira’s age is certainly the least interesting aspect of his current stand in the international film scene. 

Winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival with “The Letter” (1999), Oliveira has brought to his homeland Portugal dozens of film festival awards, including a lifetime achievement at the 2004 edition of the Venice Film Festival.

Highly regarded by film critics (Stuart Klawans refers to Oliveira as a "cinematic Olympus") and A-list actors (John Malkovich and Catherine Deneuve have taken leading and supporting roles in many of his films), Manoel de Oliveira has written and directed 20 films in the last two decades, making an average of one movie per year between the ages of 76 and 96.

Born in 1908, Manoel de Oliveira started his film career in 1931 with a silent-film documentary about the harsh life conditions of river-workers in his hometown Porto. Seen now as a classic of avant-garde cinema, “Working on the Douro River” was nevertheless coolly received when it was first screened in Lisbon.

Oliveira’s career blossomed in the mid-1970s after two decades of relative low productivity––he directed only three feature films between 1940 and the late 50s. The sparseness of this period is commonly attributed to the abrupt reduction of federal funds allocated to film production and to effective censorship laws that curbed freedom of speech in all arts.

Implemented by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (the minister of finance who ascended to the post of prime minister in 1932, and became the civilian mainstay of Portugal’s military dictatorship) these drastic budget cuts and censorship laws were orchestrated in order to stabilize Portugal’s economy during the 1930s.

Salazar did more than decrease funds for national film production; he was responsible for re-strengthening links between the state and the Catholic Church and swiftly (and often brutally) pacified independent movements in Angola, Guinea and Mozambique, three of Portugal’s most important African colonies.

In 1960, Portugal’s military government dismissed the UN’s call for all colonial powers to relinquish control of colonized territories and by the mid-1970s, Portugal had committed 80 per cent of its available military force to control insurgencies in African colonies.

This history of economic subservience and struggle has been a constant theme in several of Mr. Oliveira’s movies (“The Letter” and “A Talking Picture” peripherally deal with issues of colonization). But it was in “No or the Vain Glory of Command” (1990) that Manoel de Oliveira made his most personal examination of Portugal’s excursion in African territory.

Written and directed by Oliveira, “No or The Vain Glory of Command” is, like “A Talking Picture,” a spoken meditation on the legacy of western history. Set during the latter days of the colonial wars in Africa, “No or The Vain ...” follows a group of Portuguese soldiers on their way to battle in Angola, in 1974.