No or the Vain Glory of Command / Non, ou A Vã Glória de Mandar

Manoel de Oliveira

Manoel de Oliveira was born in 1908 in Porto, a city to which he remains faithful all his life. His film Porto of My Childhood (2001) is the best illustration of this. He completed his secondary studies in Galicia in a college run by Jesuits, Portuguese refugees in Spain, after their expulsion by the Republic established in 1910. He evokes this period in Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1997). He then worked in the father’s textile factory and in the maintenance of the family vineyards. He made his film debut in 1931 with an avant-garde short documentary, Douro Faina Fluvial, which attracted the attention of French critic Emile Vuillermoz, who urged Oliveira to pursue a film career. But, Portuguese pole vault champion and car racer, Oliveira is a man of many facets, who devoted much of his time to managing family affairs. He still made a few short-form documentary films in the 1930s until he directed his first feature fiction film, Aniki Bóbó (1942). The film was not very well received at the time, but is recognized over time as a great classic of Portuguese cinema, anticipating in several ways Italian Neorealism. More than twenty years later, he directed his second feature, Rite of Spring (1963). It was not until the 1970s, after the end of the Salazar censorship, that he followed the films at a steady pace: The Past and the Present (1972), Doomed Love (1979), The Satin Slipper (1985), The Divine Comedy (1991), The Convent (1995), Anxiety (1998), and Belle Toujours (2006). He has received numerous awards throughout his career, including the Golden Lion for the body of work in 1985 in Venice, the Golden Age Award in 1985 and 1988, the Globo de Ouro Portuguese for best director three times and the Palme d’Honneur in Cannes in 2008. He died in 2015, leaving behind him more than 50 films.