Book, Manoel de Oliveira: a presence, literature and cinema studies[LS]

Manoel de Oliveira is a prodigious example of contemporary Portuguese art. First of all, due to the extent and importance of his cinematographic work, which began in 1931 by cultivating avant-garde cinema, continued in 1942 by inventing neorealist cinema, returned in 1971 proposing a kind of nouvelle vague, and, above all, from 1978 and the great Amor de Perdição, making dozens of feature films with a quality of innovation that has earned progressive international recognition. His most important principle is perhaps that of treating life as theater, in the sense that life is already representation, and nothing it can exist without the conventional elements that give it meaning: if with theater we access reality, without it we are reduced to nature. Therefore, theater becomes the truth of cinema.Manoel de Oliveira proposes forms of representation that display the conventions of representation, exposing the artificiality that is an intimate part of the human experience - and thus creating constantly surprising art. - Fernando Cabral Martins, Universidade Nova de Lisboa