IN THE MIDST OF THE END OF THE WORLD: ANTÓNIO REIS & MARGARIDA CORDEIRO

5/10 - 5/27 Now Playing

António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro together created one of the most influential bodies of work in the history of Portuguese cinema. Their films deal with rural communities, rituals and landscapes, blending reality, fiction, ethnography and poetry into a singular survey of the north-eastern Portuguese region of Trás-os-Montes.

Reis and Cordeiro developed their cinematic vision alongside their regular jobs: Cordeiro as a psychiatrist, Reis as a poet, art critic and film lecturer. Their broad set of interests allowed them to craft a catalogue of work best understood through instruments often regarded as alien to the art of cinema: sociology, music, painting, anthropology, physics, even architecture.

The duo’s work acknowledges the intimate connections between the elements and human life, drawing parallels between soil erosion and the destruction of plant species with the disappearance of regional populations. The pair initially intended to document and record different aspects of the rural Trás-os-Montes region, but their films’ originality ultimately lies in their radical transfiguration of reality – their use of different arts and disciplines, bringing together ancient folktales and scientific treatises.

Made during years of political turmoil and rapid sociocultural change, Reis and Cordeiro’s films now function as living archives. By observing rural communities, studying their history and acknowledging both their dignity and their singularity, Reis and Cordeiro developed a uniquely non-naturalistic way of depicting the world around them.

Films in this Program

TRÁS-OS-MONTES

1976

António Reis

Margarida Cordeiro

111 minutes

António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro masterpiece exploded the meaning and possibilities of ethnographic cinema with its lyrical exploration of the still-resonant myths and legends embodied in the people and landscapes of Portugal’s remote Trás-os-Montes region. Evoking a kind of geologically subjective time, with past and present layered upon one another, TRÁS-OS-MONTES interweaves evocative recreations of the ancient worlds and encounters with atavistic peasantry, following the pilgrim’s path traced by Reis and Cordeiro as they led their skeletal crew from village to village in search of the poetic essence of the Portuguese language and imagination. Reis and Cordeiro painstakingly researched and shot TRÁS-OS-MONTES over the course of one year, becoming intimate with every person included in their ambitious film, carefully selecting the different voices, faces and gestures that would together provide an extraordinary composite, associative and mythological response to the question of how to define a “national cinema.”

"A film of long shadows and smoke in twilight, TRÁS-OS-MONTES is an intensive labor of recollection, an epic of a land and a way of life on the edge of oblivion. As an act of solidarity with a people facing extinction, TRÁS-OS-MONTES echoes through time." - Edward McCarry

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ANA

1982

António Reis

Margarida Cordeiro

115 minutes

At the center of ANA — António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s sublime second feature — is Ana, an elderly matriarch portrayed by Cordeiro’s own mother. She cares for her family in the far-off mountains of Trás-os-Montes. As her grandchildren grow to perceive the outer world, their inner life evolves; meanwhile, Ana grows sick and her death looms. A series of nonlinear scenes resembling reminiscences and rituals, with dialogue from poems by Rilke, ANA manifests a link from individual experience to the collective toils of people throughout the ages, and from the collective to the earth, all wrapped up in the cycles of life, death, and renewal. Keyed to the resonances of footsteps and whispers, the film sustains the atmosphere of a chamber piece, even as it opens to vast landscapes, and to eternity.

“A flash-back of five thousand years. This is how Joris Ivens describes the scene in ANA where an ethnologist relates the ancient customs of Trás-os-Montes with those of ancient Mesopotamia. It’s about an internal look at a land whose inhabitants are geological deposits and in whose landscapes, filmed as if they were cities, there doesn’t appear to be anything anonymous: each tree, each track, each stone could have its own name. Chant to a land, two women, a name, a language; precise dreams and transposed nightmares during the day.” - CCCB

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ROSA DE AREIA

1989

António Reis

Margarida Cordeiro

87 minutes

António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s final feature is their most cosmic endeavor, a feature that brings together science, art, metaphysics and magic. ROSA DE AREIA draws on a diverse series of texts, from the centuries-old Atharva Veda to Michel de Montaigne and Carl Sagan, to reflect on the human condition from ancient times to the present – as symbolised by the sand-rose, a geological formation whose survival depends on the combined action of water, wind and sand. At the same time, the film is also directly concerned with the physical reality of the Trás-os-Montes region of north-east Portugal. Starting from ‘a practical imagination’, attributed to the people of the region, Reis and Cordeiro work with materials and textures that echo the labours of these rural communities – while also fabulating in collaboration with them.

In Reis’s words: “A film made of matter. Matter in constant evolvement. Natural wind becomes tuba wind, actresses’ dresses act side by side with clouds, three-dimensions are defeated by two-dimensions, sequence shots are put to rest by still shots, music is silence and colour is modulated, the purest of lights becomes a floating and diffuse one. ROSA DE AREIA is but a torrent: it disappears in a slow rotation, a slow translation, moved by the rebellious energy of cinematographic forms.”

“A work of sensuous abstraction performed in the open air of Trás-os-Montes, as elusive and exquisite as the ‘desert rose’ of its title.” - Edward McCarry

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