Tribute to Manuela Serra
Tribute to Manuela Serra
Sculpt the landscape over time
The gaze mediated by the camera is suspended before starting the movement through the landscape. It moves in the transition from night to day, before approaching people, the gestures with which daily life is composed in tune with the rhythm of nature.
At first, it was the landscape. After wandering around the country looking for her place, after abandoning a feminist project, of filming "Women", Manuela Serra found a landscape with a river "inhabited by people", in the North of Portugal. In this landscape, one lives day-to-day – as documented in The Movement of Things (1979/1985). Isabel, however, projects (in) the future. Fiction breaks out, in the film, mainly through her – factory worker who is the affirmation of the modern economy – and also through a "timed" time – expression by Manuela Serra in an interview given to Ilda Castro (2012) –, with the recreations of the rural everyday life, in which, in the changing landscape, the gestures are those of life and the time is that of cinema.
"Time passes through sunrise and sunset," the original synopsis reads. The subject of Manuela Serra's film is as much – it is more – the long time, that of ancestral things and gestures, as less – but it is also – time in acceleration: that of the machines deafening the sound of the landscape and the ways of doing. If the encounters of days with nights and nights with days compose the rhythm of this work that fixes "very ancient and perched gestures" and "breathing life" in Lanheses – only in the final generic is the place identified –, the final plan overshadows the future. of these ancestral gestures (and breathing). The inspiration with which the film is animated, before the pulsation to the rhythm of the liturgy of the hours struck by the bell, is contrasted, in the final shot, with the image of the factory, a trace of the imposition of the time of supposed "progress", in which the rhythms are determined by the clock of the modern economy, by the ticking of the clock. In the end, it's the landscape again: the horizontal beauty of the river and the clouds in the sky is shadowed, vertically, by the smoke from the factory.
In order to film the disintegration of the "every day of silence", Manuela Serra stops time, cuts it, and glues it through/in the shots taken by Gérard Collet and which fix, in the landscape, the movement of things among themselves – time sometimes in suspension now in shock. She does so as an alternative to animating an abstract script, drawn out of time and filmed spaces – her gaze, mediated by the camera, integrates and pulsates with the rhythm of the "daily life of silence" between people, also familiarized in and by ancestral gestures and movements. that they carry out in everyday rituals. João Bénard da Costa stated that the insertion of sequences in this singular work is only arbitrary. He wrote: "with greater attention, we will discover that the filmmaker's use of editing is precisely a questioning of editing, as if Manuela Serra, at every moment, called into question this very notion, replacing it with the notion of collage and bringing together a whole the different materials that it shows". The collage is symbolic. In the landscape, which is one of the subjects of the film, through gestures and the sculpting of everyday life over time, present, past and future are sewn together. The movement of things shares the sensibility of the cinema made by Tarkovski: it sculpts over time in a transparent montage, to the rhythm of life, without imposing a point of view. By sharing essences, it makes the spectator live the experience from the materiality of things in motion in the landscape.
Of the (Christian) Liturgy of the Hours
The arrangement of the liturgy of the hours, which has Lauds as the morning prayer and Vespers as the afternoon prayer as its double axis, profoundly marks the rhythm of the work. Popular life organized by faith and intermingling with the cycles of nature intertwines existence in the village.
Faith and nature marked the beginning of the director's life. Manuela Serra studied in religious schools. She had her first experience of freedom in Doroteias, at the age of five, when she was not yet old enough to study but was accepted at the institution with her two sisters. That primordial time was one of joy – she wandered unimpeded through the corridors and through the college's farm, enjoying what Jacques Rozier set out precisely in Rentrée des classes. When she became a student, she never recovered from the loss of freedom and joy of being constrained in the school that generically formats and uniforms. Her film marks a reunion. If there are shadows in it, what is certain is that it reflects the freedom and joy – her own and that of a community – that underlie this movement towards natural things, towards the rituals of the usual, beautifully fixed in the plans he designed with Collet. Furthermore, there is also a sensitive film created by the sounds captured by Richard Verthé – birds trill in the landscape and the sounds of animals echo, the rustle of foliage and wooden wheels on the stone pavements – and by the sound images drawn by José Mário Branco, music for flute in sync with the landscape, sublimating tempos. In addition to the film collage of frames that make up the shots, there is a film that is also "seen" by listening.
It is in the rhythm of the hours, therefore, that the director significantly meets the inhabitants of Lanheses. If the gestures are strange, new to her, and that is why she looks at them with new attention, disintegrated from the "discourse of order", it is by the natural order of things that her gaze is caught.
Bringing the audience The movement of things
This is a type of refund. One of the legacies of António Ferro and his "politics of the spirit" was the aestheticization and Portugueseization of the rural world – of gestures, ways of dressing and inhabiting, and even of the landscape, with an attempt to strictly define the "Portuguese house". The model, nationalist, eliminated the chronicle of poverty, abstracted from the poor, waterlogged paths; he hid the manure and firewood, concealed that people and animals shared spaces.
The movement of things was part of a new approach to the countryside, in which António Reis participated with Margarida Cordeiro and Noémia Delgado. In its singularity, it exempts itself both from the militant approach and from the determination of a genre, asserting itself both through the documentary record of experiences and through the staging underlying the filmic process. In her film, Manuela Serra restores gestures to workers; it beautifully fits the landscape she chose and her "daily silence" does not correspond to a stylization. The work is intimate without probing; particularizes and does not generalize; stages adding dignity.
With light – filtered through the leaves of the vines and trees – and shadows, it frames the pulse of routines. It is important to do it together – in sowing by haul as in meals; to do as a common breath, a family-body. Doing it in silence, supported by ancestral knowledge, to the sound of the wheel turning on the way, but also in this new time, with the car advancing on the asphalt – the birds everywhere besides the dogs, cats, and domestic animals in the house.
In particular, the gestures of women are shown – the house and the garden as their world. If men gather at night in the café, theirs is the taste of the wine drunk from the bowl after the bread is kneaded and before sowing the seed. Their rhythm is supported by that of the earth while everyone's life is lived to the ringing of the church bell. Manuela Serra offers us the color of the picture window in which peppers and pumpkins dry. Singing chickens suspended on the neck. The enamel sugar bowl. The cleanliness of modesty. The games of a girl and her dog. To the images of the world of women, he glues the cutting of the pine tree by the men, with the chainsaw. The routine of the gas man, to whom the wife takes the soup. Meanwhile, in the stone tank, the ritual is updated: the girl learns the choreography of washing clothes, the formula of water, soap, sun, and air. More beautiful than in any fascist aestheticization of the house, the strings of onions hang over the corn husks. There are children's games in a backyard that is not the garden idealized by the architects of the Estado Novo. A constellation of sun-filtered millet shines as the corn kernels are separated.
The time changes (the spaces change), and the wills change? In the garment factory, the worker follows the rhythm imposed by the loud-sounding machines. The men work in the building, noisily erected in iron and concrete. The factory siren is replaced at the ringing of the bell. The sunset takes the conversations to the street. They are done by gender: men talk to men; women with women.
The succession of the three days staged by the film integrates the Saturday fair, where you buy everything from creation to trousseau – the young worker Isabel keeps the future in a chest under the eyes of the doll of her past-present –, and that of the seasons and the crops. The maize harvest and subsequent defoliation is a fundamental communal ritual of sharing. It is not just the repetition of gestures or the singing in the ranch that actualizes belonging. At this work party, bread and wine are shared, as well as life stories. The rural ritual is articulated with the setting of the ritual, mystical, of the communion of faith on Sunday. The placidity of the river, with the mists suspended under the movement of the boatmen, is shown alternately in the Christian liturgy, which fills the church. The bell ringer designs the choreography with which he creates sounds with precise meanings in this shared liturgy. Death is part of the movement of things. Like time, water flows in the river crossed by the boatmen-a poetic metaphor of the crossing that is also life. The factory, this one, started to mark the landscape, crossed, vertically, by smoke.
After a long sleep, The Movement of Things commercially debuts in Portugal, in a gesture of restitution by The Stone and the Plot and following the restoration carried out by the Portuguese Cinemateca. Perhaps the film gains meaning today – when it was filmed it contradicted the spirit of the time, more focused on the revolutionary processes and the construction of the country to come. If it is true that it emerged in the context of cinema cooperatives – it was produced by Virver – created after the 25th of April 1974, with the restoration of democracy, it is a film that questions the path traced to advance towards a certain "progress". and that the entry – in 1985, the year in which the work was completed – of Portugal into the European Economic Community makes it inevitable.
This is a film that fixes a poetic landscape of abundance – of gestures and desire – as opposed to the scarcity of the economy (and politics for cinema). It makes you wish that Manuela Serra could have made her Movement of the waves, which would have the city as a space-time. If this The movement of things was made invisible (with the exception of the festivals where it circulated), it disturbs to perceive the lack of love for cinema that determined that the cinema that Manuela Serra carried within her was taken away from it. Sculpted over time and in a landscape in retreat, The movement of things is revealed in each of us according to the pictures and sounds that we can see, hear and feel. The cinema when it is life and thought.
Maria do Carmo Piçarra
Maria do Carmo Piçarra is an assistant professor at the Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa and a researcher at ICNOVA/FCSH. She is a film programmer and was deputy chair of the Portuguese Institute of Cinema, Audiovisual and Multimedia (1998-1999). Among other publications and books, she published Azuis ultramarinos. Propaganda colonial e censura no cinema do Estado Novo” (Ultramarine Blues. Colonial propaganda and censorship on Estado Novo’s cinema, 2015), Salazar vai ao cinemaI e II (Salazar goes to the movies, 2006, 2011) and, with Teresa Castro, edited (Re)Imagining African Independence. Film, Visual Arts and the Fall of the Portuguese Empire (2017).
