The Movement of Things / O Movimento das Coisas
Gothenburg
Fri 18 Nov
19:00 — Hagabion
Malmö
Fri 25 Nov
18:30 — Panora
Stockholm
Sun 4 Dec
17:00 — Zita
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PRODUCTION YEAR: 1985
GENRE: Documentary
DIRECTOR: Manuela Serra
COUNTRY: Portugal
FILM DURATION: 86 min
AGE LIMIT: 12
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Everyday stories of silence. The portrait of a remote village, Lanheses, that shows the simple movement of people and their work lives, more as a cinematic experience than an explicit political manifesto.
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LANGUAGE: Portuguese
SUBTITLES: English
Review
O Movimento das Coisas (The Movement of Things,1979-85) by Manuela Serra is a unique work in the history of Portuguese cinema. Not so much because it has achieved a certain cult status, but because it is still today a film that resists any viewer's fingerprints.
Movement, when genuine, is difficult to grasp. First attempt. Serra worked as assistant and editor of Deus Pátria Autoridade (1975) and Bom Povo Português (The Good People of Portugal, 1980) by Rui Simões, both works that somehow address the Portuguese revolutionary period. Serra was also a founder of a cooperative named Virver, in 1975. Thus, naturally, there was an expectation that, even indirectly, O Movimento das Coisas could be tagged as a film engaging with a political structure. As a general statement that is not wrong, but still... Second attempt. Serra´s single film captures men, women, and children in the village of Lanheses, Minho, north of Portugal, engaging in daily rural life, working in the fields, taking the bus to go to work in the factory, talking at the table around a plate of soup, or going to the church. Therefore, the film is seen, in the lines of other filmmakers such as António Campos or António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, in their poetic anthropological gesture of capturing the traditions of the Portuguese rural world. And that is also not untrue. Third attempt. The film was also seen as a political statement against the increasing tempo of industrialization, attested by the final shot of the film - a factory and its smoke among the vegetation - that was removed at the time, seen as too pessimist for the imminent entrance of Portugal in the EU, and now finally added in the restored version of the film.
Interestingly enough, O Movimento das Coisas encapsulates all these elements: something from the Portuguese post-revolutionary feeling; the capture in celluloid of these rural gestures and postures; while, still addressing, subtly enough, a critique of Modernity which is a critique of movement. But it goes much further. While rational movement must slow down, the movement of things must be presented in cinema. Not as a statement of purity or a form of achieving cinematic transfiguration and aesthetic poetry, but as a wider and deeper notion of movement. Real people represent daily actions for the film, but there is also the movement of light, shadow, fog, sunrise, water. And all of these are grasped, patiently, without concession, by another affective movement: that of the unclassified, uncategorized Manuela Serra's gaze and camera. In the context of a male-dominated cinema production system, O Movimento das Coisas, although it had won some prizes, never got to be distributed commercially at that time. Only last year, due to the digital restoration of the film, issued by the Portuguese Cinematheque, was it possible the historical reparation of having Serra´s beautiful film come out in a commercial distribution. The diamantine position of Serra's only film also tells us something about the fragility of this gaze, how one needs time, comprehension, and poetic solitude to grasp the deeper movement of things in all of its splendor.
Carlos Natálio
À pala de Walsh