Manoel Cândido Pinto de Oliveira (Portuguese: [mɐnuˈɛl doliˈvɐjɾɐ]; 11 December 1908 – 2 April 2015) was a Portuguese film director and screenwriter born in Cedofeita, Porto. He first began making films in 1927, when he and some friends attempted to make a film about World War I. In 1931, he completed his first film Douro, Faina Fluvial, a documentary about his home city Porto made in the city-symphony genre. He made his feature film debut in 1942 with Aniki-Bóbó and continued to make shorts and documentaries for the next 30 years, gaining a minimal amount of recognition without being considered a major filmmaker.
In 1971, Oliveira directed his second feature narrative film, Past and Present, a social satire that both set the standard for his film career afterwards and gained him recognition in the global film community. He continued making films of growing ambition throughout the 1970s and 1980s, gaining critical acclaim and numerous awards. Beginning in the late 1980s, he was one of the most prolific working film directors and made an average of one film per year past the age of 100. In March 2008, he was reported to be the oldest active film director in the world. In world film history, Manoel de Oliveira was the only active filmmaker from the silent period into the digital age.
Among his numerous awards were the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the 61st Venice International Film Festival, the Special Lion for the Overall Work in the 42nd Venice International Film Festival, an Honorary Palme d'Or for his lifetime achievements in 2008 Cannes Film Festival, and the French Legion of Honor.
Oliveira was born on 11 December 1908 in Porto, Portugal, to Francisco José de Oliveira and Cândida Ferreira Pinto. His family were wealthy industrialists and agricultural landowners. His father owned a dry-goods factory, produced the first electric light bulbs in Portugal and built an electric energy plant before he died in 1932. Oliveira was educated at the Colégio Universal in Porto before attending a Jesuit boarding school in Galicia, Spain.
As a teenager, his goal was to become an actor. At 17, he joined his brothers as an executive in his father's factories, where he remained for the majority of his adult life when not making films. In a 1981 Sight and Sound article, John Gillett describes Oliveira as having "spent most of his life in business ... making films only when circumstances allowed."
From an early age, Oliveira was interested in the poverty of the lower classes, the arts and especially films. While he named D. W. Griffith, Erich von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, Max Linder, Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc and Sergei Eisenstein's The General Line as early influences, he was also disappointed to have virtually no Portuguese filmmakers to emulate. The Portuguese film industry was also highly censored and restricted under the fascist Salazar regime that lasted from the early 1930s until the mid-1970s. His later films, such as The Cannibals and Belle Toujours (a sequel to Belle de Jour), suggest an affinity with Spanish-Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel. He stated "I'm closer to Buñuel. He's a reverse Catholic and I was raised a Catholic. It's a religion that permits sin, and Buñuel at the very deepest is one of the most moralistic directors but he does everything to the contrary. I never say that I'm Catholic because to be Catholic is very difficult. I prefer to be thought of as a great sinner."
1927–1942: Early documentaries and first feature
Oliveira's first attempt at filmmaking was in 1927 when he and his friends worked on a film about the Portuguese participation in World War I, although the film was never made. He enrolled in Italian film-maker Rino Lupo's acting school at age 20 and appeared as an extra in Lupo's film Fátima Milagrosa. Years later, in 1933, he also had the distinction of having acted in the second Portuguese sound film, A Canção de Lisboa. Eventually, Oliveira turned his attention back to filmmaking when he saw Walther Ruttmann's documentary Berlin: Symphony of a City. Ruttman's film is the most famous of a small, short lived silent documentary film genre, the city-symphony film. These films portrays the life of a city, mainly through visual impressions in a semi-documentary style, without the narrative content of more mainstream films, though the sequencing of events can imply a kind of loose theme or impression of the city's daily life. Other examples include Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures and Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera. Oliveira said that Ruttman's film was his "most useful lesson in film technique", but that he also found it cold, mechanical and lacking humanity.
The discovery of Ruttman's film prompted Oliveira to direct his own first film in 1931, a documentary short titled Douro, Faina Fluvial. The film is a portrait of his hometown Porto and the labor and industry that takes place along the cities main river, the Douro River. Rino Lupo invited Oliveira to show the film at the International Congress of Film Critics in Lisbon, where the majority of the Portuguese audience booed. However, other foreign critics and artists who were in attendance praised the film, such as Luigi Pirandello and Émile Vuillermoz. Oliveira re-edited the film with a new soundtrack and re-released it in 1934. And again, in 1994, Oliveira modified the film by adding a new, more avant-garde soundtrack by Freitas Branco. Over the next ten years, Oliveira struggled to make films, abandoning several ambitious projects and making a handful of short documentaries on subjects ranging from artistic portraits of coastal cities in Portugal to industrial films on the origins of Portugal's auto industry. One of these shorts was a documentary about the inauguration of the hydro-electrical plant that his father built, Hulha Branca. He also first met and befriended Portuguese playwright José Régio during this time period. Oliveira would go on to adapt four of Régio's plays as films.
Fifteen years after his first attempt at filmmaking, Oliveira made his feature film debut in 1942. Aniki-Bóbó is a portrait of Porto's street children and based on a short story by Rodrigo de Freitas. Oliveira used non-professional actors to portray the children. The story centers around two young boys who compete for the attention of a young girl. One of the boys in an extroverted bully, while the other is shy and innocent. The film was a commercial failure when it opened, and its merit only came to be recognized over time. Oliveira stated that he was criticized for portraying children that lied, cheated and stole, which in his mind made them act more like adults. The film's poor reception forced Oliveira to abandon other film projects he was involved in, after which he dedicated himself to work in a vineyard that his wife had inherited. In the early 1950s, he and Régio submitted a screenplay to the Estado Novo-run Film Fund commission, but the commission refused to either accept or reject the film. Oliveira attributed this to his own well known dislike for the Salazar regime.
1955–1970: Return to filmmaking
In 1955, Oliveira traveled to Germany to study new techniques in color cinematography. He re-emerged onto the film scene in 1956 with The Artist and the City, a twenty-six-minute documentary short film shot in color. Much like his first film, The Artist and the City is a portrait of Porto, juxtaposing color shots of the city with paintings being created by local artist António Cruz. The film was shown in a number of festivals to positive reviews. In 1959, Portugal's National Federation of Industrial Millers commissioned O Pão, a color documentary on Portugal's bread industry.
In 1963, Rite of Spring (O Acto de Primavera), a partly documentary, partly narrative film depicting an annual passion play, marked a turning point for his career. The play is based on a 16th-century passion play by Francisco Vaz de Guimarães and was actually performed by villagers in northern Portugal. Along with the performance of the play, Oliveira staged the actors rehearsals, spectators watching the actors and even himself and his crew preparing to film the performance. Oliveira said that making the film "profoundly altered his conception of cinema" as a tool not to simulate reality, but merely represent it. O Acto de Primavera was called the first political film from Portugal by film critic Henrique Costa and gave Oliveira his first worldwide recognition as a filmmaker. The film won the Grand Prix at the Siena Film Festival and Oliveira had his first film retrospective at the Locarno Film Festival in 1964.