Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
THE SCHOOL OF REIS: THE FILMS AND LEGACY OF ANTÓNIO REIS AND MARGARIDA CORDEIRO
June 22 – June 28
Little known in the U.S., António Reis (1927-1991) is revered in his native Portugal as a visionary artist whose films and many years as a beloved teacher and mentor exerted an immeasurable influence over the post-Salazar rebirth of Portuguese cinema and the new generation of filmmakers that emerged in the 1980s and 90s.
Born in Oporto, Reis found renown first as a poet before making a series of documentary shorts that attracted the attention of Manoel de Oliveira who invited Reis to be assistant director on Oliveira’s first radical masterpiece, RITE OF SPRING. The pioneering mode of poetic ethnographic cinema which Oliveira and Reis defined guided the course of the four extraordinary works Reis co-directed with his wife, the psychologist Margarida Cordeiro, culminating in TRAS-OS-MONTES, a lyrical search for the very “soul” of Portuguese culture and history in the myths and peasant folklore embodied in Portugal’s remote far-north region.
Admired by the likes of Joris Ivens, Jean Rouch, and Jean-Marie Straub, the films of Reis and Cordeiro invented a poetically liberated and hypnotically cinematographic film language, a style and sensibility that set the course of Portugal’s lasting tradition of radical cinema, exerting a formative influence, for example, upon João Cesar Monteiro. Yet equally important was Reis’ career and legacy as a long-time senior professor of film production and aesthetics at Lisbon’s Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema. As a tribute to Reis’ inspiration over the most important talents in contemporary Portuguese cinema, this retrospective includes a selection of works by Reis’s students including Pedro Costa, João Pedro Rodrigues, and Joaquim Saphino.
Unless otherwise noted, all film descriptions (and introduction) are by series curator Haden Guest, Director of the Harvard Film Archive.
Special thanks to Haden Guest (Harvard Film Archive); Pedro Fernandes Duarte (Rosa Filmes); Alexandra Pinho (Instituto Camões); Paulo Cunha Alves, Consul General of Portugal in Boston; José Manuel de Costa & Luis Miguel Oliveira (Cinemateca Portuguesa); João Pedro Rodrigues; Pedro Costa; Ana Conboy & Sofia Soares (Boston College), Rui Boavista Marques (Portuguese Trade and Investment Office), and Jinna Lee (Jeonju International Film Festival).
All prints are courtesy of the Cinemateca Portuguesa, and are in Portuguese with English subtitles. English translations for JAIME, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, and ANA have been generously provided by the Jeonju International Film Festival.
