Who was Manuel de Oliveira

Manoel Cândido Pinto de Oliveira (Porto, 11 December 1908 - Porto, 2 April 2015) was a Portuguese filmmaker. Throughout his life he produced about 50 films. He was the only director in activity who saw the transition from mute to sonorous and from black and white to color. He directed international actors as renowned as Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich, Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Irene Papas, Chiara Mastroianni and Lima Duarte.

In 1931, he shot his first film, Douro, Faina Fluvial, a short film about the work on the Douro River, premiered in Lisbon, in which he arouses the admiration of foreign critics and the displeasure of the national one.

Almost ten years pass before filming “Aniki Bóbó”. The film is a commercial failure and Oliveira will only shoot again 14 years later, when shooting The Painter and the City (1956), in which he shoots in color.

Manoel de Oliveira's cinematographic work only from 1971 will continue, without breaking, until beyond the end of the century. The immanent theatricality of The Spring Act would assert itself as a personal style. The tetralogy of frustrated loves would par excellence be the "campus" of this long experiment. The stage would be the plateau, the scenic space where the spoken film, in "unspeakable" taken, would become the soul of the show: the pure cinema submitted to the theatre, its reference, its origin, its foundation.

This duality of Manoel de Oliveira is no stranger to his religious education. Doubts about the body of faith, about certain principles of his church, often plague him and this has profound implications in his work. This doubt is reproduced in the frequent philosophising of many of the characters in his films, particularly in the most talked about films, with incarnation of figures from the Gospel and Christian ideas, with numerous biblical references.