A TALKING PICTURE: (IM)MATERIAL SPACES

In Journey to the Beginning of the World, an old filmmaker returns to the places of his childhood. The facial features and hat are unmistakably those of Manoel de Oliveira. He searches for his place in a succession of political events, in a genealogical chain, looking for roots, traces. The journey — the inquiry — is as external as it is intimate. The car triggers movement and permanence, it transports. The camera is the device that fixates memory, rescues the concrete and the symbolic.

In this 1997 film, Oliveira uses the machines to “speak his speech,” reconstructs an autobiography based more on wandering and doubt than on the firm walls of a Jesuit college, listens to the resonance (affective and fetishistic) that comes with Leonor Silveira’s sailor suit (the embodiment

of youth). He was 88 years old when he staged this journey. What put him on this path? Why did he identify these places and subjects, and not others, as being his own beginning?

The famous Ferris wheel in The Third Man encapsulates some of these questions: by definition, a wheel has no beginning and no end, it is movement and suspension, it is a metaphor for life and travel, a space where we are embarked, and from where, one day, we fall (or are pushed).

This year, between March and November, the A Talking Picture film programme is running smoothly without leaving its place. It explores the notion of travel, objects, masks, mechanisms, long roads and detours, subjective time and chronological time. These are the themes, explored screening after screening, that organize the choice of films and spark discussion among the guests. The programme also maintains the principle of showing some of the greatest examples in the history of cinema, featuring films by leading filmmakers, among whom Manoel de Oliveira, eternally and prominently, is accompanied.