The inaugural exhibition of the Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira explores multiple representations of the house in the director’s films, focusing in particular on the film, Visit, or Memories and Confessions (1982), that was produced at a time when Oliveira, already in his seventies, was forced to leave the house where he had lived with his family for over forty years. The director decided that Visit should only be presented posthumously. It was thereby predestined to have a paradoxical statute: as a work of memories and confessions, in which the filmmaker remembers the past while discussing his own cinematographic convictions, while also providing a preview of themes explored in his subsequent films — the most substantial part of his oeuvre — which unexpectedly was still to come. The film’s overall tone revolves around saying farewell to a place, and to his own life, but it actually turned out to be more prophetic than testamentary.
A film of beginning and return, Visit, or Memories and Confessions, demonstrates, like no other film, that cinema is a spectral art. A phantasmagorical device that Oliveira shows us — and in which he shows himself — in order, in a final word, and a final image, to demonstrate that it is possible to inhabit a film in the same way that we inhabit a house.
A film of beginning and return, Visit, or Memories and Confessions, demonstrates, like no other film, that cinema is a spectral art. A phantasmagorical device that Oliveira shows us — and in which he shows himself — in order, in a final word, and a final image, to demonstrate that it is possible to inhabit a film in the same way that we inhabit a house.
