t is entirely possible that when confronted with the geographic reference “Portugal”, a US citizen might have trouble associating it with the notion of cinema. In fact, since the very earliest days of the moving pictures it has been extremely rare for a Portuguese film even to be shown in the United States, and those which have managed that feat have been limited to small and very specialised circles there.

Portugal’s cinematographic repertoire is indeed quantitatively small (in the 1990’s around 10 fullength fictional works were produced each year) and its filmmakers are not organised along industrial lines, but rather practise a very special kind of artisanal craft. The hundred or so films made during the course of the last decade were directed by nearly sixty different people – something which says nothing but good about the country’s cinematographic panorama. Most filmmakers are not able to make more than one film a decade and the exceptions can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand.

When it comes to financing, Portuguese cinema survives solely thanks to the massive presence of state grants and the input of television stations. The internal market is very small (less than 400 cinemas in the whole country) and Portuguese penetration of the international markets is fairly precarious, thus making it impossible to earn a reasonable return on investment. A film is considered to be a success when it draws an audience of more than 150,000 – and very few Portuguese films manage to do so.

And yet Portuguese cinematography possesses something very special. The filmgoers who frequent the main European film festivals (Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Locarno) have become used to regularly seeing Portuguese films of a constancy and quality that make Portugal one of the most interesting melting-pots of director-controlled cinema – one that is free from constraints, innovative and surprising.

The great master of the Portuguese cinema is Manoel de Oliveira (b. 1908) – an absolutely astonishing example of vitality and talent. At the age of ninety-three (he made his first film when the movies were still silent), Oliveira remains active and continues to create at an impressive rate. Since 1990 he has made an average of one film a year, directed major international stars who have succumbed to the lure of his talent (such as Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich, Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli and Irene Papas), received the most varied awards and won the respect of the cinematographic community all over the world.

His fame extends to the United States, where retrospectives of his work have been shown at the Los Angeles Film Festival (1992), the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (1993), the San Francisco Film Festival and the Cleveland Museum of Art (1994). On top of all this, his films have begun to be successful at the box office too – as was the case with Je Rentre à la Maison (2001) in Italy.

Another of the major figures of Portuguese cinema is João César Monteiro (b. 1939). A member of the generation which founded the so-called ‘New Portuguese Cinema’ in the 1960’s, it was only from the mid 1970’s that his work achieved its full expression. He is now one of the most original European directors, making extremely provocative films in which the base meets the sublime. The key landmarks of his work in the 1990’s include O Último Mergulho (1992), A Comédia de Deus (1995), Le Bassin de John Wayne (1997) and As Bodas de Deus (1998). A Comédia de Deus won him the Jury’s Special Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1995.

Amongst the younger generation, it is only fair to single out Teresa Villaverde (b. 1966). Having begun her career with an ephemeral passage before César Monteiro’s cameras (À Flor do Mar, 1986), in the 1990’s she surfaced as a director. Her films are full of suffering and tend to be stories about adolescent characters who come into various kinds of conflict with the society around them. One of her films (Três Irmãos, 1994) was to win Maria de Medeiros the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival.

JORGE LEITÃO RAMOS