Manoel de Oliveira

By DENNIS LIM

When referring to the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, it is now customary to affix the phrase “world’s oldest active filmmaker.
” The operative word is “active.” Mr. Oliveira, who turns 100 in December, has made at least one movie a year since 1990 (when he was 82). His late-career surge defies preconceptions of what an artist’s twilight period should be. Mr. Oliveira’s undaunted productivity is remarkable, as is the undimmed creative vigor of his films.
What are we to make of an artist who hit his peak in his 70s?
Many of Mr. Oliveira’s films have a pensive, melancholic quality, with an underlying sense of impermanence. But whether grappling with mortality (in “Voyage to the Beginning of the World” and “I’m Going Home,” both of which feature elderly protagonists) or with the birth pangs and death throes of empires and civilizations (“ ‘Non,’ or The Vain Glory of Command,” “A Talking Picture”), he poses many more questions than he answers.
In his richest films Mr. Oliveira creates the impression of a living link between old and new: the ideals of the Enlightenment, modernism and European high culture on the one hand, the uncertainty and multiplicity of the present age on the other.
Regarded as a modern master in Europe, on a par with Bunuel, Dreyer and Bresson (filmmakers to whom he is sometimes compared), Mr.
Oliveira is a more marginal figure in the United States. Only a few of his films have received American distribution.
The peculiar shape of Mr. Oliveira’s filmography - he made only three features and a few shorts in the first 40 years of his career - is partly a function of Portuguese history. Born in Oporto to a well-off family, he competed in the pole vault, raced cars professionally and even performed as a trapeze artist in his youth.
He had just turned to filmmaking when the dictator Antonio Salazar came to power in 1932. It took Mr. Oliveira years to make his first feature, the neo-realist streetkid parable “Aniki-Bobo” (1942).
The decades that followed were no more hospitable, especially since he did not conceal his opposition to the authoritarian regime.
“I was never a political man,” Mr. Oliveira said in a recent e-mail message from Portugal. “But my obsession is with humanism, and I reject all action which is damaging to man.”
Mr. Oliveira’s movies are often described as painterly or theatrical. His camera frame functions as a stage, and his actors tend to deliver their lines with a declamatory stiffness, sometimes facing the camera. This mode of direct address is in keeping with Mr. Oliveira’s notion of interactive cinema. “Each film must be finished by the spectators,” he said.
As befits a man of his age Mr. Oliveira’s specialty is the long view, and the expanse of Portuguese history has given him plenty to work with. His most recent film, “Christopher Columbus - The Enigma,” completed last year, uses the quest of its hero - a researcher trying to prove Columbus was born in Portugal - to contemplate the once mighty empire’s central role in the age of discovery.
“It expresses a certain melancholy,” Mr. Oliveira wrote, “before the greatness of a past faced with the mediocrity we have come down to today.”