Peasants of the Cinema: António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro
Opens February 21, 2025 at Metrograph (New York) & Feb. 22 at Doc Films (Chicago)
Largely unknown outside Portugal, filmmakers António Reis (1927-1991) and Margarida Cordeiro (b. 1939) are legendary figures in their native country. Reis was a poet, a folklorist, and an ethnographer; Cordeiro, a psychiatrist by trade. Across the four films they made together, the duo forged a cinema of profound commitment, deeply rooted in the language, labors, myths, dreams, and material realities of a land and a people: namely, the peasants of Trás-os-Montes in Portugal’s remote Northeast. With one foot firmly anchored in the earth and the other in the cosmos, Reis and Cordeiro conjure up the deep, cyclical time of folk tradition. Their films are a collision of the forces of documentary and poetry, fact and fabulation, the ancient and the avant-garde, a vertigo of contradictions at once harmonious and sharply unreconciled. Employing simple and direct means, their work is all the more mystical for being so concrete. “Here and nowhere else. Here and anywhere else”—this is the paradoxical space-time of their films, in the words of Serge Daney. Emerging in the years after the Carnation Revolution of 1974, their poetic-ethnographic filmmaking permanently shook the foundations of Portuguese cinema. It was a formative influence on Pedro Costa, for one: “I had a teacher, António Reis, who believed in stones, in nature. He was a pantheist. He was an animal.” A cult of Reis and Cordeiro has persisted through time, however clandestinely, with contemporaries like Jacques Rivette, Marguerite Duras, João César Monteiro, Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Robert Kramer, Jean Rouch, and Joris Ivens all counted among their admirers. Today, these works endure as hieroglyphs of an entirely new ethic and aesthetic of film. We are proud to present all their surviving films in this rare and comprehensive retrospective. Our program includes the three features completed by Reis and Cordeiro, their landmark first collaboration, Jaime (1974), Reis’ two extant shorts from the 1960s, and one of his earliest filmmaking efforts, O Auto da Floripes (1963), a collective endeavor produced by the Experimental Film Section of the Cine-clube do Porto.
Related texts
Jaime, The Unexpected in Portuguese Cinema: António Reis interviewed by João César Monteiro
João César Monteiro’s Introduction to Jaime
An Interview with Pedro Costa on António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro
Joaquim Pinto on António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro
Program 1
Ana
Dirs. António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro
1982. 115 min. 4K Restoration.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa.
At the center of Ana—Reis and Cordeiro’s second feature—is Ana, an elderly matriarch portrayed by Cordeiro’s own mother (Ana Maria Martins Guerra). She cares for her children and grandchildren in the far-off mountains of Trás-os-Montes. As the children grow and learn to perceive the outer world, we see the evolution of their inner life; meanwhile, Ana grows sick and her imminent death looms. Through a series of non-linear scenes resembling reminiscences and rituals, with dialogue adapted from poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Reis and Cordeiro manifest a link from individual experience to the collective toils of people throughout the ages, and from the collective to the earth and its history, all wrapped up in the cycles of life and death and renewal. Keyed to the resonances of small gestures, footsteps, and whispers, the film sustains the hushed atmosphere of a chamber piece, even as it opens out to vast landscapes, and to eternity.
preceded by:
Painéis do Porto
Dir. António Reis
1963. 16 min. 4K Restoration.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa.
Reis’ first film, commissioned by the City Council of Porto, is a short poetic reportage following the activities of workers through this medieval Northern city. With its plain style and attention to the inner revelation of ordinary things, the film evinces a strong continuity with Reis’ work as a poet, his “everyday poems.” From a contemporaneous review in the journal Filme: “[Reis] did not give in to the temptation of romanticism or the cuteness of an elaborate formal effect: he keeps the tone of the report alive and tense, not limiting himself to what is seen but seeking to go further, searching for the roots of what exists.”
Program 2
Trás-os-Montes
Dirs. António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro
1976. 111 min. 2K Restoration.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa.
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. In 1974, Reis and Cordeiro traveled ten thousand kilometers across this isolated, near-mythical region in the Northeast of Portugal. They recruited a cast of inhabitants old and young from the villages of Bragança and Miranda do Douro to materialize their histories, legends, dreams, and nightmares for the camera. The philosophy of the peasants, their rebellion, their everyday existence far from the laws of church and state, their closeness to ancient things, to trees and rocks—these encounters informed the dialectical approach of the film, where fiction and reality, past and future swell in an immediate present. The result is a work of deep and threatened lyricism. In voiceover, Reis and Cordeiro adapt passages from Kafka and the Chinese poet Po Chü-i, translated to the guttural subdialect of the Northeast. As an act of solidarity with a people facing extinction, Trás-os-Montes echoes through time.
Program 3
Rosa de Areia
Dirs. António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro
1989. 88 min. 4K Restoration.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa.
Reis and Cordeiro’s final film is their most cosmic endeavor. 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. In Reis’ 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.” And Cordeiro: “Rosa de Areia is a film for those who can see and listen as if for the first time; as if it was the first film that came from the earth and spoke about it.”
preceded by:
Do Céu ao Rio
Dirs. António Reis & César Guerra Leal
1964. 17 min. 4K Restoration.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa.
This rare short by Reis, another commission, has long been unavailable due to the precarious state of its archival materials. The film documents various aspects in the building of dams along the Cávado River in the Northwest. Filmmaker Fernando Lopes recognized in these early shorts—a third one is known to exist, but remains lost—an uncommon sensitivity, motivating him to produce Jaime with the Centro Português de Cinema a decade later: “I had seen one or two things that Reis had done, small documentaries in which he had worked. I was very impressed with his images in those touristic documentaries that weren’t touristic at all, they were images with a transfigured vision of reality...”
Program 5
Jaime
Dir. António Reis
1974. 35 min. 4K Restoration.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa.
While working as a psychiatrist at the Miguel Bombarda sanatorium in Lisbon, Cordeiro discovered a sketch—one among hundreds left behind—by the late Jaime Fernandes, a farm laborer admitted to the institution at 38 years of age, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He would spend the rest of his days there, turning to drawing and painting in the last years of his life. In their first collaboration together, Reis and Cordeiro set out to make a record of this man, a testament to his material existence: the spaces he once inhabited, the things he saw and laid his hands on, his writing, his works. Far from a traditional portrait, images of Fernandes himself are notably absent from the film, but for a single still photograph at the very beginning and end. With a restless and inventive form, using a handheld camera to “[represent] the helplessness of the human eye,” and featuring the music of Louis Armstrong, Stockhausen, and Telemann, Reis and Cordeiro refuse to see Jaime as an abnormal or an outsider; rather, he was poor and imprisoned, a man far from home. “One of the most beautiful films in the history of the cinema,” said João César Monteiro.
preceded by:
O Auto da Floripes
Dir. Experimental Cinema Section of the Cineclube do Porto
1962. 60 min. 4K Restoration.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa.
This short feature is a rigorous documentation of a piece of folk theater, a mixture of pantomime, recitation, and dance performed every year in the early days of August by the villagers of Neves, dating back to the 16th-century. Directed by a collective of amateur filmmakers—among them Reis, then a poet and ethnographer—O Auto da Floripes was a formative early experience for Reis, for “the spirit of love for work, sacrifice and selflessness” involved in the production process. It directly inspired Manoel de Oliveira to recruit Reis as an assistant on Rite of Spring (1963), which is something of a conceptual remake of Auto. In a 1963 letter, Oliveira penned this appreciation: “Are they amateurs? Yes, they are. But they are amateurs in the best sense of the word. The future of our cinema lies in their hands. They are the experimental basis for diverse and non-academic expression, one that is not conventional, pre-fabricated, one-sided or biased: healthy cinema, new cinema, free cinema.”
Special thanks to Inge de Leeuw & Anri Vartanov (Metrograph); Joana de Sousa & Rui Machado (Cinemateca Portuguesa); Ana Carneiro (Cineclube do Porto); Hannah Yang (Doc Films); Andy Rector; Raquel Morais; Stoffel Debuysere (Courtisane Festival); Marta Mateus; Pedro Costa.
Jerry Lewis’ The Big Mouth
March 4, 2025 at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 35mm
“If Jerry Lewis had been working in 1917, he would have made genuine Marxist movies.” - Jean-Luc Godard
Related texts
The Big Mouth Strikes Again: A Dialogue on Mid-period Jerry Lewis by Chris Fujiwara and A.S. Hamrah
"The Big Mouth" from Le Monde de Jerry Lewis by Noël Simsolo
The Program
The Big Mouth
Dir. Jerry Lewis
1967. 107 min. 35mm.
In English.
In The Big Mouth, Jerry Lewis plays hapless accountant Gerald Clamson. While on a fishing trip in San Diego, he hooks a strange catch: a mortally wounded scuba diver who looks just like him. It all goes south from there as Jerry, donning various guises, gets mixed up with vicious mobsters in pursuit of stolen diamonds, entering a merry-go-round of mad men and doppelgängers. From this pretext of a scenario, Lewis the filmmaker mounts a rebellion against the dominant laws of cinema. With stasis, delay, and entropy as organizing principles, it’s a film made up of isolated units of gags liberated from dramatic continuity and identification, propelled only by the narcotic of the filmmaking apparatus, the bewitchment of image and sound, the hypnotism of matter.
“If we see The Big Mouth as a Vietnam movie, that makes it Lewis’s La chinoise or Made in U.S.A., just as it’s his Pierrot le fou and his Week-end.” - Chris Fujiwara
“At the end of the actor-director’s eighth feature, a man is born: his name is Jerry Lewis.” - Noël Simsolo
Special thanks to Jesse Trussell (BAM); Chris Fujiwara; A.S. Hamrah; Noël Simsolo; Nicholas Elliott.
Frans van de Staak: A Shoemaker’s Son in Amsterdam
October 22, 2024, 7pm & 9pm at Brooklyn Academy of Music
Hailed by Jean-Marie Straub as the “only true heir to Dziga Vertov,” filmmaker and painter Frans van de Staak (1943-2001) was a prolific underground figure who held a special place in Dutch cinema. His films investigate space-time and language with a mixture of anarchy and rigor—wild intuitions fixed on film with extreme clarity. Whether stripping works of literature for parts or working from his own deconstructed scenarios, Van de Staak filmed the alchemical meeting of fiction and actuality, of a text and its surroundings, working somewhere at the crossroads of poetry, theater, and essay, always with a liberating sense of play and sly, almost slapstick humor. While a consummate avant-gardist, he never rejected the elements of a traditional film: actors (and non-actors), camera movements, staging, dialogue, scenes, incident, gestures. Instead, he alienated these ingredients through off-kilter repetitions and dislocations, scattering narrative to the wind to see what tension and energy was left behind. Often collaborating with experimental writers such as Gerrit Kouwenaar (Deed Undone) and Lidy van Marissing (People Passing Through Me in an Endless Procession), Van de Staak was particularly invested in everyday speech and routine endeavors: activities like walking in the street or mending an old pair of shoes. He set his eyes squarely on these ordinary things to make them strange again—suddenly, they appear brand new to us.
A filmmaker who “rarely [gave] any sign of caring whether or not people came to see his films,” Van de Staak pursued a deliberately marginal cinema. He made his films on a small scale and in a collectivist spirit, focusing his energy on creating underground networks of solidarity among independent directors. Originally housed above his father’s cobbling workshop, Van de Staak’s film studio was an important meeting place and production facility within Amsterdam’s experimental film community. He helped nurture a vibrant cadre of young and beginning filmmakers, and developed close ties with other eminent Dutch experimentalists, like Johann van der Keuken. When asked about the driving force of his work, he said, “Desire, I’m driven by desire, not by anger, yet a very strong emotion indeed. This desire arises from the tension between being alone and being together in society.” In much the same spirit, we are proud to inaugurate our first ‘Theater of the Matters’ program, presenting two key works by Van de Staak from the 1980s on imported 16mm prints, plus a rare 35mm screening of Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice, which Straub-Huillet dedicated to Van de Staak and “a few others.” This series will be among the first and only of its kind to be organized in the United States.
Related texts
The Fight is Worth It: An Interview with Frans van de Staak
‘A Crumbled Man Counts for Ten’: An Essay on People Passing Through me in an Endless Procession
Frans van de Staak on Antonioni, Murnau, Van der Keuken
Screening 1
Ongedaan gedaan
(Deed Undone)
Dir. Frans van de Staak
1989. 73 min. 16mm.
In Dutch with live English subtitles.
Courtesy EYE Filmmuseum.
Two couples. Four people portrayed by eight actors. They come and go in the street. We don’t know where or what for. Always alone, terribly busy. And we see them together at home: they laugh, quarrel, write notes, fuss around, make love, speak. Nothing connects. But there are patterns, and ruptures. Poems by Gerrit Kouwenaar appear as intertitles, giving a strange unease to these workaday scenes—a poet who tried to “cut the throat of a word.” Per the director, it’s “about people who want to get something done. I leave out the why as well as the results. What’s left is the moment of endeavor.” As lucid as it is hypnotic—a Van de Staak classic.
Preceded by:
Toute révolution est un coup de dés
(Every Revolution Is a Throw of the Dice)
Dir. Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet
1977. 10 min. 35mm.
In French.
Courtesy Belva Film.
In Père Lachaise cemetery, by the wall where the last men and women of the Paris Commune were executed in 1871, nine speakers recite Stéphane Mallarmé’s elusive free verse poem “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance.” Straub and Huillet displace Mallarmé’s text to a dense and mysterious film-construction. Each speaker is assigned one of the alternating typefaces of the poem, their pauses commemorating the ‘silence’ of the page's blank spaces. Dedicated to “Frans van de Staak, Jean Narboni, Jacques Rivette, and a few others,” the film was released in 1977 on a double bill with Jean-Claude Biette’s The Theater of the Matters.
Screening 2
Er gaat een eindeloze stoet mensen door mij heen
(People Passing Through Me in an Endless Procession)
Dir. Frans van de Staak
1981. 86 min. 16mm.
In Dutch with English subtitles.
Courtesy EYE Filmmuseum.
Written with poet-playwright Lidy van Marissing, the film consists of a string of scenes featuring the same eight actors, with one unfamiliar face in every set-up. They speak lines while sitting in a church, strolling along a dyke, or playing cards, the text not acted out as such, but declaimed: the performers become corridors for speech. Their sentences—by turns commonplace and cryptic—take on the air of an incantation. And the meaning of the words comes undone. A revolt against the enchantment of movies, Van de Staak guides us to a liberated zone where the codes of everyday talk and behavior are estranged and upturned.
Special thanks to Jesse Trussell (BAM); Marjolein Bakker & Olivia Buning (EYE Filmmuseum); Rieks Hadder (Mokum Filmdistributie); Katherine Pickard (Miguel Abreu Gallery); Barbara Ulrich Straub & Christophe Clavert (Belva Film); Noah Waxman (Consulate General of the Netherlands); Veva Leye; Jaime Levinas; Inge de Leeuw.
