This article appeared in the November 8, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Rite of Spring (Manoel de Oliveira, 1962)

Early in Rite of Spring (1962), Manoel de Oliveira frames a procession of peasants dressed as Roman soldiers through the windshield of a Chevrolet, the rolling hills of Portugal’s rural Trás-os-Montes region behind them. Capturing a village’s performance of a 16th-century passion play, de Oliveira’s reflexive, liturgical film interweaves this sacral enactment with other layers of reality: the everyday lives of the villagers who read of the space race in the daily newspaper, the modern car driven by gawking young urbanites, and the very event of filmmaking itself, foregrounded through glimpses of a movie crew. The effect is less dialectical—a revolutionary collision between the ancient and the modern—than palimpsestic: a figuration of historical time perhaps more appropriate to Portugal’s unique form of uneven development.

Under the long-running dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, Portugal’s industrial sector developed little until the 1950s and 1960s—and even then weakly, predicated in part on the investment of foreign capital eager to combine cheap Portuguese labor with raw materials imported from its colonies. The peculiarities of this development shaped the revolution that put an end to the 48-year regime in 1974. Commemorated in its semicentennial by the Museum of Modern Art’s series The Ongoing Revolution of Portuguese Cinema (running through November 19th), the Portuguese Revolution was a military coup against dictatorship, the (partial) end of a colonial empire itself threatened by imperialist intervention, and a radical insurrection of workers and peasants that ultimately concluded with the establishment of bourgeois democracy. Lasting nearly two years, the revolutionary process was detonated by the overthrow of the Estado Novo government by the Movement of Armed Forces (MFA), a clandestine organization of army officers seeking the end of the dictatorship and its bloody colonial engagement in Africa. The fall of the regime (and a subsequent failed right-wing counter-coup) emboldened the Portuguese working class to assert itself and its interests without the fear of Salazar’s secret police (its violence methodically chronicled in the prisoners’ testimonies that constitute most of Susana de Sousa Dias’s chilling 2009 documentary, 48).

This new freedom to act and speak in one’s own name is palpable throughout the series’s documentary selections from 1974 and 1975. In a memorable moment from The Guns and the People (1975), collectively authored by a group called Colectivo de Trabalhadores da Actividade Cinematográfica, a middle-aged man elbows his way toward the camera, declaring, “I am a worker, let me pass—I want to talk too!” It’s a political desire that finds different expression in the numerous posters, murals, and graffitied slogans rapturously captured in Ana Hatherly’s Revolution (1975). This new will to speech also appears, although more ambivalently, in João César Monteiro’s What Shall I Do with This Sword? (1975). A work of agitprop organized around the threat of U.S. intervention (visually analogized to the nautical journey of Count Orlok in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu), its dynamic montage is counterposed to halting, often lengthy testimonies from various figures: factory workers, a group of Cape Verdean students, a sex worker, a farmer. Continually returning to images of the immense NATO ship looming on Lisbon’s coast, the film suggests a possible disjunction between a people still finding their collective voice and the scale of the task at hand. As the closing shots of graffiti enjoining “proletarians of all countries” to unite plainly suggest, the film’s title is a rhetorical question—one that could only be answered in practice.

Programmed by Francisco Valente, MoMA’s series derives its title from the “Ongoing Revolutionary Process,” a period of heightened revolutionary instability defined by accelerating factory seizures, housing occupations, and land expropriations. Spanning 58 years of filmmaking, the series asks its viewers to connect Portugal’s political revolution to a longer aesthetic tradition dedicated to the constant renegotiation of the relationship between documentary and fiction. Across the numerous films comprising the series, a slogan that could encompass both revolutions might be “agrarian reform,” or transformation in the Portuguese countryside. At the time of the revolution, around a third of the population worked in agriculture—many for latifundia like the titular estate of Thomas Harlan’s Torre Bela (1976), surveyed in a two-minute aerial shot that opens a film otherwise wholly dedicated to the messy struggle on the ground.

In Harlan’s film, Grupo Zero’s The Law of the Land (1977), and the memories of the elders in Marta Mateus’s Barbs, Wastelands (2017), the revolution appears as a contestation over the private ownership of common land (“We didn’t steal the land,” comments a farmer in The Law of the Land, “land is a part of nature”). For other filmmakers following the path of de Oliveira, cinema is less an adjunct of rural transformation than a medium itself revolutionized through immersion in the folklore and rhythms of the countryside. In António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s Trás-os-Montes (1976), the boundaries of fiction and reality, past and present, dissolve in the film’s hypnotic ethnography of the titular region in Portugal’s far north. Finding a cinematic form adequate to the mythic lifeworld of the peasantry and the stratigraphic density of the ancient landscape, Reis and Cordeiro’s film suggests a link between the “hybrid” aesthetic of Portuguese filmmaking and the uneven development of the country. Speaking to Serge Daney and Jean-Pierre Oudart of Cahiers du cinéma, Reis commented that Trás-os-Montes’s peasantry lives “in a space, at home or in nature, that is already cinematic.”

Indeed, the “revolution” of the series title might be understood in both senses of the word—the overthrow of calcified forms, but also the recursive motion whereby a body returns to its point of departure, whether the peasant countryside or the years of 1974-1975 (as in Margarida Rêgo’s 2014 short documentary The Revolution Hunter, in which a photograph occasions a meditation on the present’s relation to that moment of radical possibility). Several of the films self-reflexively foreground the presence of their crew and equipment, and the evanescent moments of collaboration and everyday life from which they emerged. The sublime ending of Fernando Matos Silva’s Acts of Guinea-Bissau (1980) intercuts between footage of the crew hanging out on set and earlier staged sequences in which actors appear as representatives of history (“the fascist,” Ulysses Grant, etc.), before silently concluding on a photograph of the anti-colonial revolutionary Amílcar Cabral. In cinema, reality’s raw material is incorporated and remade in the creative act—so too with history and revolution.

Benjamin Crais is a writer based in New York.