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Manoel de Oliveira

Randal Johnson author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Illinois Press

Published:27th Jul '07

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Manoel de Oliveira cover

Understanding the iconoclastic work of a lifelong cinematic pioneer

Manoel de Oliveira's eighty-five year career made him a filmmaking icon and a cultural giant in his native Portugal. A lifelong cinematic pioneer, Oliveira merged distinctive formal techniques with philosophical treatments of universal themes--frustrated love, aging, nationhood, evil, and divine grace--in films that always moved against mainstream currents.

Randal Johnson navigates Oliveira's massive feature film oeuvre. Locating the director's work within the broader context of Portuguese and European cinema, Johnson discusses historical and political influences on Oliveira's work, particularly Portugal's transformation from dictatorship to social democracy. He ranges from Oliveira's early concerns with cinematic specificity to hybrid discourses that suggest a tenuous line between film and theater on the one hand, and between fiction and documentary on the other.

A rare English-language portrait of the director, Manoel de Oliveira invites students and scholars alike to explore the work of one of the cinema's greatest and most prolific artists.

"[A] comprehensive and informative critical evaluation of the Portuguese filmmaker's body of work."--Strictly Film School


"An aristocratic provocateur who most often comes up with aggressively eccentric but beautifully logical ways of adapting plays and novels, this 19th-century modernist needs an erudite explicator and finds one in Johnson."--Film Comment

ISBN: 9780252074424

Dimensions: 210mm x 140mm x 13mm

Weight: 286g

216 pages