Manoel de Oliveira Photographer
Event
The more than one hundred photographs on display in the Manoel de Oliveira Fotógrafo exhibition are one of the big surprises that the director’s personal archive, entirely deposited in Serralves, had been holding. Produced between the late 1930s and the mid-1950s, these images, stored for several decades and mostly never-before-seen, reveal an unknown facet of Oliveira and open new perspectives on how his filmmaking developed.
Manoel de Oliveira's passage through the static image is a decisive stage in his career as a filmmaker. In dialogue with both pictorialism, constructivism and Bauhaus' experiments, his photographs are halfway between exploring the classical values of composition and the modernist spirit running through the entire first phase of his film work.
Used mostly artistically, photography is for the director an instrument of formal research and experimentation, another way of questioning, often in direct relationship with films, to building his own visual language.
These images that are now on view, certainly add a new chapter to the history of Portuguese photography of the 1940s. But they are also a precious instrument to better understand the way Manoel de Oliveira took on, during a period of ten years, the direction of photography of his own films, as well as to contextualize, from a broader perspective, the strict composition that, in general, featured in all his films. Looking at these images, it will not be of much interest to know where the photographer begins and where the filmmaker ends, nor to define, with precision, the extent to which the first one may have sometimes taken the place of the second one. What is important, is to question how this coexistence between two ways of seeing and thinking is embodied in Manoel de Oliveira's work.
Curated by António Preto, Director of Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira.
All the photographs on display belong to the Manoel de Oliveira Collection, Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira - Fundação de Serralves, Porto.
Manoel de Oliveira's passage through the static image is a decisive stage in his career as a filmmaker. In dialogue with both pictorialism, constructivism and Bauhaus' experiments, his photographs are halfway between exploring the classical values of composition and the modernist spirit running through the entire first phase of his film work.
Used mostly artistically, photography is for the director an instrument of formal research and experimentation, another way of questioning, often in direct relationship with films, to building his own visual language.
These images that are now on view, certainly add a new chapter to the history of Portuguese photography of the 1940s. But they are also a precious instrument to better understand the way Manoel de Oliveira took on, during a period of ten years, the direction of photography of his own films, as well as to contextualize, from a broader perspective, the strict composition that, in general, featured in all his films. Looking at these images, it will not be of much interest to know where the photographer begins and where the filmmaker ends, nor to define, with precision, the extent to which the first one may have sometimes taken the place of the second one. What is important, is to question how this coexistence between two ways of seeing and thinking is embodied in Manoel de Oliveira's work.
Curated by António Preto, Director of Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira.
All the photographs on display belong to the Manoel de Oliveira Collection, Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira - Fundação de Serralves, Porto.
