Notes and study documents by Manoel de Oliveira are compiled in a book

The study documents and notes are telling of the ingenious mind by Manoel de Oliveira, worldly known by his cinematic masterpieces. The Casa da Música now reveals some textbooks and notes by the filmmaker in the book “Ditos e Escritos”. Some notes have never been published before.

This is the opportunity to have a different take at the work by Manoel de Oliveira and his films, as “the texts gathered here pave the way to understanding the interaction between movie making and its theoretical elaboration”, states the researcher and Director of Casa do Cinema, António Preto in the book’s preface.

The circa 300 page book features several notes and writings by Manoel de Oliveira that encompass the entire path of his work. The oldest ones date back to 1930, when he premiered “Douro, Faina Fluvial”, and the most recent ones go back as 2014, related to his last film “o Velho do Restelo”. The book includes two poems from 1986, as well, both related to the connection between the filmmaker and cinema, or even a newspaper page, from 1998, covered in Manoel de Oliveira’s writings.

António Preto also recalls that Manoel de Oliveira saw both “Chaplin’s debut” and the “start of digital cinema”, which is the same to acknowledge that “he became actively involved in the technical and aesthetic transformations that shaped the course of cinema throughout the twentieth and the twentieth-first centuries”.

It is also explained in the book that Manoel de Oliveira would normally take notes, and write personal takes on any paper at hand, would it be textbooks, loose pages, newspaper pages or even the flap of an envelope, on a number of issues, such as “life and truth, reality and realism, originality and copy, art and the artist, the conscious and the unconscious”.

António Preto also noted that the book “Ditos e Escritos” features the following undated thought by Manoel de Oliveira: “a good filmmaker may wish, but he cannot nor shall he force the viewer to appreciate his films. In turn, the filmmaker can only direct the films he likes directing”.

António Preto also advanced that the texts that Manoel de Oliveira wrote about each of his movies will be compiled in another book.

The book “Ditos e Escritos” was officially launched on 16 June, at the Casa do Cinema, at the Fundação de Serralves, in Porto, by António Preto, by Rosário Lupi Belo, the film studies expert and by the film critic Jorge Leitão Ramos.