Opening session of the film cycle A Talking Picture: The Themes of Oliveira, with conception and moderation by Anabela Mota Ribeiro. This film cycle, dedicated to several themes featured in Manoel de Oliveira's filmography, opens with the theme Woman, with the screening of Ernst Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933). It will be followed by a conversation between professor of literature Clara Rowland and dramatist José Maria Vieira Mendes, with moderation by Anabela Mota Ribeiro.

HUMOR

DESIGN FOR LIVING

Ernst Lubitsch | USA | 1933 | 91’

Guests: Clara Rowland (professor of literature) and José Maria Vieira Mendes (dramatist)

Ernst Lubitsch was one of the most important filmmakers working in American comedy. Design for Living is one of his first incursions against the work he had been developing in musical comedy, due to the emergence of sound in film. Design for Living follows the relationships between a woman and two men, namely the dynamics of the woman, Gilda, who can't decide between her two friends George and Thomas, who are both in love with her. Therefore, they engage in a three-way relationship, conjugal, friendly and problematic in equal ways. Loosely inspired in a Noël Coward play, Design for Living presents several key elements of the famous ""Lubitsch touch"", with its elegant mise-en-scène, his ability with actors and sharp dialogues. The film's candid, progressive openness on sexual morals, clearly demonstrating Lubitsch's modernity, was only possible because the Production Code, Hollywood's self-censorship system, was only enforced one year after the film's release.