Issue 5: Winter 2009 / '10
Coffee & Cigarettes with Joao Botelho
Lilliana Navarra
An Interview with João Botelho
João Botelho is the Portuguese filmmaker of memory, whose films seek to transform the physical into the metaphysical and to render ideas and poetry physical. His work is based on the word, a creative approach that is almost more poetic than cinematographic and which was already demonstrated in his debut feature, Conversa Acabada (1982), a conversation between two great Portuguese writers, Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro, that could be defined as an epistolary framework for an examination of what is articulated through different times and fashions: a conversation that is anything but ‘finished' (‘acabada').
His subsequent films include Tempos Difíceis ( Hard Times, 1987) and Aqui na Terra (1993), for which he wrote the screenplay. In 1999 he was in the Venice Film Festival with Se a Memória Existe which received a good critical reception. He returned to Venice with Quem és Tu? (2001) from a novel by Almeida Garrett called Frei Louis de Sousa, and in 2005 with O Fatalista, from Diderot's celebrated novel, which played in competition. His most recent feature is A Corte do Norte (2008), which was featured in the third Rome Film Festival - Festival internazionale del Film di Roma.
A decidedly Lusitanian cinema, a cinema of poetry and memory, a silent Portuguese farewell...
Botelho on set
Esplanada do Príncipe Real, a garden visited by many great Portuguese thinkers and the inspiration for many films, including João César Monteiro‘s Come and Go (Vai e Vem, 2003). It is here, on a grey September afternoon, that I chat with a Portuguese director who has made his mark on Portugal's national cinema: João Botelho. Our words mix with the smoke from his cigarette and the vapour from our coffees...
Liliana Navarra: João, the readers must surely be curious: having studied mechanical engineering, what made you make movies?
João Botelho: Before embarking on a career in cinema, in Coimbra I was part of a circle of plastic artists and of a theatre group. That was where I began broadening my horizons. I began frequenting a cineclub where you could completely immerse yourself in cinema history, and it was a way of running away from violent academic procedures. You have to know that 'freshers' weren't allowed out after six in the evening. The only solution: lock yourself in the cinema.
LN: What kind of films appealed to you?
JB: I saw everything, whatever was being projected. It was a vice for me, almost a sickness, that drove me abroad. I worked in a factory in England, in a number of restaurants in Switzerland, and then spent everything I earned at the Cinémathèque in Paris, where I was able to see as many as six films per day.
LN: The Carnation Revolution brought great changes. What changed in the Portuguese film business, if we can call it that?
JB: After April 25th, I enrolled in film school where I was the oldest student. I was twenty-five or twenty-six at the time, whereas the average age was closer to eighteen.
LN: Was there already a film school in Lisbon?
JB: Yes, it was the Conservatorio del Bairro Alto, the current theatre and cinema school which can be found at Amadora, except that at the time it was decidedly practical. There were many professors who came from France, some from Cahiérs. We got a solid grounding in the various fields: direction, sound, photography... I and some of my colleagues arranged to see at least one film a day, two if we could manage it. Early mornings, we went to a projection room at Castello Lopes Productions and, in the afternoons, we went to the Cinemateca Portuguesa.
LN: Do you think attendance at the Cinemateca has changed?
JB: Yes, unfortunately. It makes me very sad when I go to screenings and see the cinema almost empty. The young people acquiesce, it's a profound farewell to the cinema and its world. It seems like a refusal of historical memory.
LN: Is this why there's such a strong historical mark in your films, almost as if you want to imprint the memory of the Portuguese people on celluloid?
JB: Absolutely, this is what cinema allows you to do. Memory and imagination.
LN: There's a strong literary influence in your films. What's your relationship with this influence?
JB: Something very curious happened. The film industry came to favour films adapted from novels, almost seeing it as a guarantee of success which would bring returns on their investments. In Portugal, you don't invest in films and so the amount of money available to make them is really derisive. The only institutions that can increase funding want guarantees, and the novel is one of these guarantees. They almost exclusively select films adapted from novels or based on Portuguese memory. Very few Portuguese films can be seen outside Portugal and, if they were, they almost never get distribution outside of festivals.
LN: Why does the ICA (Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual) make this kind of selection?
JB: Because those making the selection were men of literature, a sort of ‘literary jury'. None of them knew what a travelling shot or a storyboard was. This gave literature a very strong presence in cinema, a cinema that was precarious. But I have to admit that receiving only small amounts of money to make movies, and without a real market for films, I've always been very free. I've always done what I wanted. Of course, you always have to adapt to circumstances: little money or little time. Our cinema is one which privileged the fixed camera, much light and shadow, and little editing or effects. More poetry than prose. Perhaps this has become our way of being.
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Page from Botelho's notebooks
LN: What you've just affirmed reminds me of Tynjanov's words, anticipating Pasolini's concept of a cine-language: "The only legitimate analogy that can be established between cinema and the art of the word is not between cinema and prose but between cinema and poetry." How did all this influence national film production in Portugal?
JB: Portuguese production is artisanal, handmade. For instance, on my films I'm the director but also the editor and I often take care of the photography and sound. This gives me a great liberty of action. The film is for nobody, but at the same time it presents the best of me.
LN: In my opinion, this artisanal liberty is not only found in your films but is also visible in your colleagues' work.
JB: What we have in common is that no one copies anyone else. We all have our own ideas, our own point of view, our own way of filming. Yet together we created a style, the Portuguese style. The common characteristics are fixed shots, essential framing, the presence of literature and the lack of money. We are directors with small means and great ambitions.
LN: What is your response to critics who claim that Portuguese cinema is filmed theatre?
JB: Portuguese actors almost all come with theatrical training. Many of them even say that cinema doesn't exist. Theatre is much truer than cinema. Cinema as it has always been made in Portugal is a cinema of transparency and identification. A cinema of distance which sometimes gives more importance to the text than to its representation, to the wind in trees than to the actor's expression.
LN: In theatre, the spectator can choose what to look at, whereas in cinema one is obliged to look at what the director decides to show.
JB: Certainly, it's always the director's point of view. It's what I see and what I want others to see. To come back to literature, it's always been very important in my life. In my opinion the cinema is a vampire stealing from the other arts and transposing them to the screen.
LN: Rather than being a vampire, I think that the cinema is a kind of sponge which absorbs other arts. The director's talent is measured by how successful he is in capturing on film what he has experienced.
JB: Creativity is the 'password'. Never give answers in cinema. You must always pose questions, questions, questions.
LN: This is the basis of your cinema, isn't it?
JN: I think I'm doing something different from ordinary cinema, that I'm giving people something they haven't seen or thought. I don't like to repeat, I like difference. In Portugal, we've never made sequels like 1-2-3-4. It doesn't work. That's for the Americans, not for us.
LN: Perhaps this has led us somewhat to the nature of the Portuguese character? Cinema as a mirror of the Lusitanian soul?
JB: Yes, perhaps. This is related to the fact that Portugal is a small country, enclosed by a large power on one side and by an ocean that's no longer ours on the other side. With the passing of time, our country lost its importance and became only a small rectangle in Europe. All this is reflected in film, in poetry, in fado, in the concept of destiny. For example we even have the bullfight but we don't kill the bull, we just pierce it. A perverse act, perhaps more cruel than killing it.
LN: To return to the marketing of Portuguese films, do you think things have changed?
JB: It's a market that doesn't exist although cinema is a commercial product. Film as an art is a new reality in Portuguese cinema. Films must be a-temporal. If a film is ten years old and you can still watch it, it's not bad. If you can still watch a film after thirty years, it's quite good.
LN: This concept of a-temporality is quite common in your films.
JB: The trick is playing a little bit with abstraction. Try to make a film that isn't set in a specific space-time. You don't have to understand whether it's a yesterday or a tomorrow. The film doesn't have to be for our children, but for our grandchildren: to have films that resist time.
LN: Do you think independent film has a future in this world marked by sequels?
JB: The American cinema, the blockbuster, has by now replaced the national cinema. There are a thousand ways of filming, but they're being kicked aside by the mode of entertainment. More and more films are being projected in shopping malls, it's becoming increasingly common for people to eat and drink during screenings. An entertainment for kids where adults are not present, preferring to stay at home and watch television.
LN: Do you think all cinema must be considered as mass entertainment?
JB: Obviously there are exceptions, but these are a minority. A few years back, there were many more European films than American, but today it's getting harder for a European film to get into cinemas. The public isn't there. Today the number of DVDs sold is much higher than the number of spectators in cinemas.
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Storyboard from Botelho's notes
LN: Let's talk about your next challenge, The Book of Disquietude by Fernando Pessoa.
JB: Yes, the most complicated challenge I've ever encountered. Not even I know how to do it.
LN: In fact, some say that in reality it doesn't exist as a book...
JB: That's why I can make it! (Laughs) The book exists, or, rather, many books of disquietude exist. It's a puzzle which you can take apart and put back together in different ways. It'll be a film about dream, about how you must dream. What Pessoa had to do to access a higher level through dream. Complete dedication. Through silence everything is possible. This is the kind of cinema I like, a box within a box within a box. I've made many films from this perspective. The Book of Disquietude is like a labyrinth. I've signed over the line, the screenplay is ready and we start to shoot around November.
The light has now changed, Chinese shadows appear on our table and we wake ourselves from our dream, a Lusitanian dream composed of memory and saudade for a cinema rooted in the past, but unforgotten and unforgettable. Now it's time to say goodbye, with a promise: we'll meet again, soon, for another conversation about his films.
(Lisbon, September 2009)
Translation: Gianluca Pulsoni & Maximilian Le Cain
Filmography:
1977: O ALTO DO COBRE (short)
UM PROJECTO DE EDUCAÇÃO POPULAR (short)
OS BONECOS DE SANTO ALEIXO (documentary)
1978: ALEXANDRE ROSA (short, with Jorge Alves da Silva)
1980: CONVERSA ACABADA
1985: UM ADEUS PORTUGUÊS
1987: TEMPOS DIFÍCEIS
1991: NO DIA DOS MEUS ANOS
1993: AQUI NA TERRA
1994: TRÊS PALMEIRAS
1996: 13 FILMES X 3'
1998: TRÁFICO
1999: SE A MEMÓRIA EXISTE (video short)
2001: QUEM ÉS TU?
2001: AS MÃOS E AS PEDRAS (video short)
2003: A MULHER QUE ACREDITAVA SER PRESIDENTE DOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DA AMÉRICA
2005: A LUZ NA RIA FORMOSA (documentary)
2005: O FATALISTA
2006: A BALEIA BRANCA, UMA IDEIA DE DEUS (documentary).
2007: A TERRA ANTES DO CÉU (documentary)
2007: CORRUPÇÃO (Film not completed due to disagreements with the producer)
2008: A CORTE DO NORTE
Liliana Navarra, is a PHD candidate in cinema studies at Nova Universidade in Lisbon with a project on João César Monteiro and his cinema: she is also the creator of the first official website dedicated to him, www.joaocesarmonteiro.net
She is a freelance journalist involved in media studies. She collaboreted with NapoliFilmFestival (Naples, Italy) and Indielisboa Festival (Lisbon, Portugal) and organized "O'Curto" Napolitan Film Festival (Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Lisbon, Portugal) and a retrospective "Il favoloso mondo di G" dedicated to Ugo Gregoretti's cinema (Lisbon, Portugal).