The following text coincides with ‘Peasants of the Cinema: António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro‘, a program screening this weekend (Feb 21-23, 2025) at Metrograph in NYC and Doc Films in Chicago, via The Theater of the Matters. All images courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa.
by Liam Kenny
António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro were filmmakers bonded by grand admiration for the people of Portugal, the back-country, and the tales of peasant children. Their films are masterpieces that have deep-set footpaths in Portuguese life, yet remain unseen by the youth of America.
Reis and Cordeiro felt repulsion towards the cities of Portugal, Reis said, “I’ve already said that Margarida was born there. As for me, I was born in an already eroded province lacking force, lacking beauty, lacking expression, 6 km from Porto. So inside me I had the desire to be reborn somewhere else. And the first time that I went to Tràs-os-Montes with an architect friend, I felt that I was born there.”1 However, Reis’ earliest films are incisive industrials about Porto and a hydro-electric dam. On his own, he demonstrated his knowledge of Portugal’s cityscapes and industrialization, becoming free when he began working with Margarida Cordeiro.
“I had a teacher, António Reis, who believed in stones, in nature. He was a pantheist. He was an animal.” – Pedro Costa2
New York City and Chicago will be offered the chance to see these films on the weekend of February 21st. This retrospective is an extraordinary opportunity to become acquainted with films of an olde skein. The Theater of the Matters has deemed this retrospective the “Peasants of Cinema,” and will prove a testament of outstanding profundity and artistic revolt.
Brought together in the early 1970s, Reis and Cordeiro revolutionized a national mode and practice – truly on the basis of revolution – concerned with the people abused by the fascism of Salazar. It is a cinema with heavy scars, which shouts victoriously, lives to see liberation, and justifies such a real liberation, one in which working people have their hearts expressed and enlightened.
Trás-os-Montes filled the Portuguese cinema houses3 with the caterwaul of a young shepherd boy. Panning across the mountain region of northeast Portugal, the first of the film’s three shepherds herds us brashly, with furrowed brow, into the corral of the film’s life. We first see a young boy turn back to witness many scenes, our comprehension can prove unclear, but once we are reminded there is a boy who has turned to stop and look back, an overwhelming understanding of life behind the mountains is revealed. This gaze backwards in time will, without explanation, offer much to the lives of the peasants behind the hills in a few minutes lost in time. Life in the Portuguese back-hills seems to be home to the sandman. Trás-os-Montes is a film bustling with lively, epic dream sequences. However, there is no mysticism, there will be no mood ring cinema. The sights are not disorienting in these dream sequences, the language is very clearly enunciated, which should prove a real poeticism.
Two boys go off in search of an old family home supposedly filled with treasures and curiosities. They are giddy upon their discovery of a phonograph, but every shot in this house has an extremely clear purpose, there is an intent in the découpage that finds the sight of a curious filmmaker alongside curious little subjects. Two small boys scan a wall of portraits, meandering and wobbling into each other. Their dream state is clear, and their curiosity reveals the ghostly nature of the past to such small children. There is also a feeling of waking up from these dreams, which can be so drawn out that sprinkles of sleep cooed my nerves when the film last played in New York City.
The films of Reis and Cordeiro are dense assemblages, maximizing elliptical understanding in their dream sequences. The Theater of the Matters recently published an English translation of an interview between João César Monteiro and António Reis on the topic of the Reis/Cordeiro film Jaime. This is a text of tremendous density, an infinite cache of filmmaking and philosophical knowledge. I reach into the text like one reaches into a hat to pull a random slip, and find that Reis has said of his film, “There’s no complementary relation between image and sound in Jaime. There really isn’t a single redundancy: not even when Louis Armstrong sings, “on a long, white table” and a white table appears…”4 All of these collaborative films function this way. To refer to them as tapestry due to their unfurling wealth of ideas would be wrong, because the sound and the image function as two works that can function individually or in tandem. Parallel, the film’s sound and image demonstrate that Reis/Cordeiro were thoroughly dedicated to film as a human craft – one in which collaboration in artistic effort bolsters community.
The music in their films are never grace notes but rather large spinal columns for the ancestry of the Portuguese hills, the real political contents for a nation reeling from fascism. A woman walks at the end of her life through the tree line and garners a world of deathly understanding, but in those same steps the sounds of Bach will illuminate her whole life. Much of the play of this duo’s final film, Rosa de Areia, is that of sound. A woman plays a timpani in the woods. The world of an instrument, so unfairly pigeon-holed in the western classical canon, comes to new life. Much of Rosa de Areia is about the spread of new life, new ideas. Its characters shout from the mountaintops, gathered on stone formations or at the dinner table. This final film is bittersweet – there is as much death as there is life – but it is also a new sight for the Reis/Cordeiro oeuvre. The duo reimagine their color palette, they move away from the Trás-os-Montes of Trás-os-Montes and find bluer skies, greater winds, new people with whom to share a camera. In one scene, perhaps the oddball scene of all the Reis/Cordeiro filmography, an errant pig meets its end at the gallows by the hands of two hangmen. They are enormous, burly men, who might spark a reconsideration in the outsider’s view of rural Portugal. This highlights the most important feature of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s filmmaking: it is a filmmaking of friends. Their lives are dedicated to the bonding of people, a virtue you will find always present, from Painéis do Porto and the city streets, to the mysterious rainbow of pools in Rosa de Areia. All of these films offer an absolutely precise understanding of the lives of Reis and Cordeiro, two who allowed themselves to be known by the camera and the people.
“I can tell you that we never shot with a peasant, a child or an old person, without having first become his pal or his friend.” – António Reis5
- https://kinoslang.blogspot.com/2012/07/antonio-reis-and-margarida-cordeiro.html ↩︎
- https://theaterofthematters.com/programs/peasants-of-the-cinema-antnio-reis-margarida-cordeiro ↩︎
- João Bénard da Costa wrote of Tras-os-Montes and Ana’s poor box office and festival results. https://www.focorevistadecinema.com.br/FOCO1/benard-trasosmontes.htmhttps://www.focorevistadecinema.com.br/FOCO1/benard-ana.htm ↩︎
- https://theaterofthematters.com/texts/jaime-the-unexpected-in-portuguese-cinema ↩︎
- https://kinoslang.blogspot.com/2012/07/antonio-reis-and-margarida-cordeiro.html ↩︎
Liam Kenny is a filmmaker and art critic based in NYC. [Letterboxd] [Twitter]
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