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List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. The Beautiful Automaton
1. Cinema and/ as the Myth of Modernity
2. Towards an Oliveirian Aesthetics of Stillness
3. The Trope of the Doll
II. Camões and Don Quixote
4. The Cultural Philosophy of Oliveira
5. Profanations
6. Cultural Mimicri
III. Doomed Loves
7. Disturbing Adaptations
8. Letters on the Screen
9. Sounding Letters
Coda: A Melancholic Cinema?
Index
About the author
Hajnal Király is a Senior Researcher at Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Romania. She is the author of Between Book and Film: Beyond the Fidelity Principle (Könyv és film között. A huségelven innen és túl, 2010) and Film at the Border (Film a határon, 2022), both published in Hungarian. She co-edited with Zsolt Gyori the volume Postsocialist Mobilities. Studies in Eastern European Cinema (2021) and has contributed to many edited collections and published scholarly articles in English and Hungarian.
Summary
Manoel de Oliveira is the only filmmaker whose career spans from the silent era to the digital age, and yet there is little written in English about his extensive filmography. This volume, the first to discuss Oliveira's later works in English, fills this incredible gap in scholarship on the director with fresh and original analysis of over 50 of Oliveira's films, ranging from 1963's Rite of Spring to 2009's Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl.
Organized by tropes and topics, rather than chronological order of release, The Cinema of Manoel de Oliveira creates a unique lens through which to consider the director and the ways in which his work links cinema, literature, and other artforms. Hajnal Király sheds new light on Oliveira's filmography with new readings of his work in relation to 20th and 21st century history.
Foreword
Offers an in-depth analysis on Manoel de Oliveira’s oeuvre from a psychoanalytic prism, using the notion of the uncanny as a guiding thread for the interpretation of the renowned filmmaker’s major works.
Additional text
Hajnal Király’s in-depth analysis of Manoel de Oliveira’s oeuvre from a psychoanalytic prism is both theoretically sophisticated and thorough in its interpretation of a variety of films. Using the notion of the uncanny as a guiding thread, the author offers a unified vision of Oliveira’s filmography that is a must-read for fans of the renowned Portuguese director
