In 1963, a promotional poster for Paulo Rocha’s feature film “The Green Years” announced: “the new wave is here…”. It was, doubtlessly, an unique moment for Portuguese cinema and for what it has become ever since: an auteur cinema, with almost artisanal resources, and which rarely found the ideal reception from the audience. The year, 1963, was remarkable, not only due to the appearance of this premonitory film by Rocha, but also for the release of one of Manoel de Oliveira’s (always considered the father of this generation) masterpieces: “Rite of Spring”. Truly modern cinema, Oliveira’s movie surpassed its own time by offering a complex hybrid between fiction and documentary, while looking, reflexively, at cinema’s own apparatus and at its ability to represent a reality. But if 1963 is seen as a key-year, it was essentially because a series of other converging events allowed, in fact, for what was then called the “new Portuguese cinema”. Among them: the growth and importance of the film club movement and of film criticism, the scholarships for studying abroad, and the technical training courses that warranted the renewal of production crews. All of this precipitated the decline of an “old cinema”, anchored in the “assistants generation”, which tried to reproduce the old formulas of Portuguese cinema from the 1930-40s. Short film, due to its shorter shooting schedules and fewer production requirements, was a fertile ground to anticipate the transformations in the creative and productive ecosystem of Portuguese cinema. That is why this programme offers a set of short films directed between 1962 and 1963, which serve as a prelude to what was about to happen in feature films. We think it is appropriate to end this screening with an excerpt from “The Green Years” that points towards an imaginary space of Portuguese cinema: a real place – the space of nature, mysterious – and a mythical place, of a certain impossibility of love, and of the need for escape and destruction. (Paulo Cunha & Daniel Ribas)

Copies provided by Portuguese Cinematheque – Film Museum