• From Oliveira’s A Talking Picture (2003)

It seems a little silly to mourn someone who lived to be 106 and remained an active artist up until his death, and fittingly, the obituaries for Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira that have appeared in the last week feel less mournful than celebratory. In fact, the obituaries feel a little redundant. For some time it had been a critical cliche to begin reviews of Oliveira films—of which there were dozens in the past few decades—by mentioning his age and summarizing his biography: Oliveira made his first movie during the silent era, then remained sporadic in his filmic output until the end of Portugal’s fascist period, becoming a prolific director only in his 70s. (As you can see, I’ve just perpetuated the cliche myself.) If there’s anything tragic about Oliveira’s passing, it’s that his extraordinary longevity now threatens to overshadow his artistic achievement, if it hadn’t already.

Chicago has had the distinction of presenting more theatrical screenings of Oliveira’s movies than most other American cities. Starting in the early 1990s, the Chicago International Film Festival screened a new film of his almost every year, hosting the North American premieres of several. (Jonathan Rosenbaum’s extensive writings about Oliveira for the Reader played a big role in raising awareness of his work in this country, where too few of his films are available on DVD.) The director honored the city by appearing at the festival in 2005 to introduce a couple screenings of his Voltaire-esque satire Magic Mirror. I was in the audience for one of the shows and had the good fortune of getting to ask him a question during the Q&A. He’d told another audience member that the filmmakers he most admired were John Ford, Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, and Chaplin—I wanted to know what he thought of the direction movies were taking now. He chuckled and whispered something to his interpreter, who then relayed, “Mr. Oliveira thinks that some new movies are good, that some are bad, but that the future is up to God.”