Peasants of the Cinema: António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro

Programmed by: Edward McCarry, Graham Carter of The Theater of the Matters

Largely unknown outside Portugal, filmmakers António Reis (1927-1991) and Margarida Cordeiro (b. 1939) are legendary figures in their native country. Reis was a poet and an ethnographer; Cordeiro, a psychiatrist by trade. Across the four films they made together, the duo forged a cinema of profound commitment deeply rooted in the language, labors, myths, dreams, and material realities of a land and a people;namely, the peasants of Trás-os-Montes in Portugal’s remote Northeast. With one foot firmly anchored in the earth and the other in the cosmos, Reis and Cordeiro conjure up the deep, cyclical time of folk tradition. Their films are a collision of documentary and poetry, fact and fabulation, the ancient and the avant-garde, a vertigo of contradictions at once harmonious and sharply unreconciled. Employing simple and direct means, their work is all the more mystical for being so concrete. “Here and nowhere else. Here and anywhere else” — this is the paradoxical space-time of their films in the words of Serge Daney. Emerging in the years after the Carnation Revolution of 1974, their poetic-ethnographic filmmaking permanently shook the foundations of Portuguese cinema. It was a formative influence on Pedro Costa, for one: “I had a teacher, António Reis, who believed in stones, in nature. He was a pantheist. He was an animal.” A cult of Reis and Cordeiro has persisted in time, however secretly, with the likes of Jacques Rivette, Marguerite Duras, João César Monteiro, Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Robert Kramer, Jean Rouch, and Joris Ivens among them. Today, these works endure as hieroglyphs of an entirely new ethic and aesthetic of film, waiting to be found and put into practice. We are proud to present all their surviving films in this rare and comprehensive retrospective.

Digitization of all films by Cinemateca Portuguesa - Museu do Cinema.