Eccentricities of a Blond Haired Girl
(Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura)
With Ricardo Trêpa, Catarina Wallenstein, Diogo Dória.
Portugual, 2009, 35mm, color, 64 min.
Portuguese with English subtitles.
A late jewel in the extraordinary and defiantly prolific career of Manoel de Olviera – who this May celebrated his 100th year with the Cannes premiere of his 49th film – Eccentricities of a Blond Haired Girl is a lustrous and enigmatically lucid film that returns once more to the theme of doomed love so central to his cinema. A bewitching fable about young love simultaneously inspired and threatened by the rigidity of class divisions, Oliveira’s sumptuously beautiful short film offers a captivating yet ultimately chilling vision of a present day Lisbon haunted by the capricious ghosts of the ceremonial Old World.
PRECEDED BY
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Douro, Working River (Douro, Faina Fluvial)
Directed by Manoel de Oliveira.
Portugal, 1931, 35mm, black & white, silent, 18 min.
Oliveira's film debut is a visually stunning documentary poem about life and work along the principal river of the director's native Porto region. Greatly admired by critics and artists such as Luigi Pirandello, Douro reveals Oliveira's incredible eye and sense of rhythm. Although Hollywood had already ushered in the arrival of sound cinema in 1927, Portugal's film industry remained decidedly underdeveloped and continued to produce silent films into the early 1930s.
