The Strange Case of Angelica (and some Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl)

I like movies about old people (e.g. Elsa and Fred, Poetry), movies by old people (e.g. Around a Small Mountain), and movies made by old people about old people (e.g. Wild Grass). I believe the elderly are to be cherished, not least of all in the arts. Because you know it amazes me that John Huston was 77 when he directed Under the Volcano, you can imagine how extra amazed I was when I enjoyed Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, a film directed by 100-year-old Manoel de Oliveira. I wonder how much he learned in the year between that film and The Strange Case of Angelica, and if you can tell the change in someone's perspective after one year's time when the person has already lived a century.

The Strange Case of Angelica, like Eccentricities, has gorgeous photographic compositions, engaging uses of sound and music, blooming long takes, and earnest passions. Oliveira's command of the movie medium is expansive and relevant to modern cinema, as any artist who engages in the exploration of an artform's potential will continue to be relevant. So, as to say, The Strange Case of Angelica is a film by a 101 year old man, but it is not just that.

As quoted here (what a great find Kino Caviar was!):

The cinema started with movement, ‘kino’, but the real difference between photography and the cinema is not movement, it is the content of each shot. Each shot resembles a photograph, but it is within context, while the photograph is out of context. The context is within the photograph, while in the cinema the context is outside the shot, in the relationship between shots. That is the great difference between cinema and photography. It is not movement, or rather it is movement between shots and above all as a possibility of introducing sound. If there is no movement, there can be no music; sounds do not exist without movement…. One does not need movement to show an image, but one does for sound.  One might say, therefore, that sound is more cinematic than the image.

 Manoel de Oliveira in an interview with Jean A. Gill, 1992 

in Manoel de Oliveira, Randall Johnson, 2007

A man, Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa, also the star of Eccentricities), is summoned on a rainy night to take photographs of a dead woman for an aristocratic family. While he takes these photos the woman opens her eyes, and a fantastical love story begins. Oliveira, writer/director, tells his story as factual occurrence, blending unreal moments with the real, reminiscent of magical realism. His writerly voice also possesses the droll, dry tone that some magical realism writers used.

A poem by Texeira de Pascoaes, read aloud by Isaac near the film's beginning, frames the story: "Dance! O stars, that in constant dizzying heights you follow unchanging. Exalt, and escape for an instant the path that you are chained to. Time, stand still, and you, former beings, who roam fantastical, celestial ways ... Angels, open the gates of heaven, for in my night is day, and in me is God."

Again from Kino Caviar,

“It’s a film. It’s not reality,” Oliveira explained to Jean A. Gili in a 1992 interview. “But what’s a film? A film is a phantasm, it is not life. On the other hand, life doesn’t exist; it too is a phantasm. Without books, without historians, without memory, not a trace would be left. The moment is ephemeral. To struggle against oblivion, humans have a need to remake what touches them, a will to preserve that which is important to them.” To this end Oliveira rejects a style of filmmaking that insists that life on the screen is “real” and the spectator is right there with it, in complete but passive emotional and psychological identification with the characters. Instead Oliveira invites the spectator to actively participate in making the film — to remake life — which is, in cinematic terms, resurrecting its spirit from the tangibles of the world.

Returning from his phantasmagoric flight, Isaac muses, "That strange reality ... Perhaps it was just a hallucination? But it was just as real as this. Could I have been to that place of absolute love I've heard about? It disappears like smoke from a cigarette. Yes, why this sudden love, which banishes all the anguish I feel?"

An aspect of The Strange Case that I admire is its structure. Oliveira keeps the film's 'purpose' slightly out of center, sometimes poking at it, but never cracking it. He gives us the audience substance to consider, but then gives that substance a spiritual value that places it again out of reach.

In The Strange Case that spiritual value has a pronounced magical value, though in Eccentricities the spiritual was continually evasive, mysterious. The spiritual was hidden somewhere within life. A piece of writing, a poem by Alberto Caeiro, was important in Eccentricities, "Yesterday afternoon a man from the city was talking at the doorway of the inn. He was also talking to me. He spoke of justice and of the struggle for justice. And of workers who suffer, and of constant labor, and of those who go hungry, and of the wealthy who turn a blind eye to this. And, looking at me, he saw tears in my eyes. And he smiled, contentedly, thinking that I was feeling the hate that he was feeling, and the compassion he claimed to be feeling. But I was barely listening. What do I care for me, for what they suffer or think they suffer? Let them be like me ... and they won't suffer. All the woes of the world stem from our caring about each other. To do good as to do evil, all we need is our soul and heaven and earth. Wanting more is to lose all this, it is to be unhappy. And I thought to myself, while the man of the people was speaking (which moved me to tears). It was like a distant whisper of bells in that late afternoon ... Yet perhaps not the bells of a tiny chapel ... where to mass might go flowers and streams and simple souls like mine. Praise God that I am not good and that I have the natural egotism of the flowers and rivers which blithely continue on their way with no cares other than to bloom and to flow. That is the only mission in the World. To exist clearly. And to know how to do so without thinking about it. And the man had stopped talking and was looking at the sunset. But what does someone who hates and loves have to do with the sunset?"

Oliveira, in these two films, leaves me to consider his film, myself, and little things outside the film and myself. So, then, Oliveira gives me the mystery and spiritualism that he gives his films.