Poetics of modernity: cinema and theater in Manoel de Oliveira

Abstract

This project, which is linked to the Grupo de Pesquisas em Dramaturgia (Research Group in Dramaturgy - GPD) from UNESP and integrated to the thematic project (still in preparation) titled "Poetics of Modernity: Theater and Other Arts", intends to study the works of the Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira (b. 1908) focusing the relations they establish with literature and, especially, with theater. Not with any theater, but with Modern theater, which is deliberately thought to provoke a detachment between the scene and the spectator, such as theorized and practiced by Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). Preserving due proportions in terms of political intention of the former and the latter artists, Oliveira's cinematographic aesthetics effectively relies on disjunctive procedures quite similar to what can be seen in Brecht's theater. However, the hypothesis that guides this research is that the theatrical matrix of Manoel de Oliveira's movies lies on the cinema itself and its investigation leads to the 1920's and to the production of Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), who started his career in the theater and to whom Brecht himself paid tribute. This possibility prompts us to an interdisciplinary study that makes us rethink, in the scope of the confluence of cinema and theater, not only the apparently non-political way of Manoel de Oliveira's works, but even the genesis of Bertolt Brecht's proposal of a political theater. (AU)