Cahiers. Could you talk to us about the filming, about the conditions in which you worked with the peasants of Trás-os-Montes?
A. Reis. I can tell you that we have never filmed with a peasant, a child or an old man without first becoming his buddy [copain] or his friend [ami]. This seemed to us an essential point, in order to be able to work and so that there are no problems with the machines. When we started to film with them, the camera was already a kind of a little beast, like a toy or a kitchen appliance, which was not scary. So arranging one’s lighting at their homes or mounting mirrors in the fields to have indirect light, this wasn’t a problem. It was at the same time a sort of game. It was therefore possible to demand certain things, most often with tenderness. And if we were in difficulty, they understood it very well. A very important thing: they could verify by our work that we were also “peasants of cinema”, because sometimes we had to work sixteen, eighteen hours per day and I think that they liked watching us work. And when we needed them to continue to work with us, even when leaving the animals with nothing to eat or the children without supervision, they didn’t feel it, I think, as a constraint. It was admirable to see that.
But, you know, I don’t have a tautological conception of people but I believe that in the Northeast, they have a very special way of treating people. If you arrive - suddenly - they welcome you, they open their door to you, they give you bread, wine, whatever they have. At the same time, they aren’t “goodness personified” because they are also very tough. Only, they pass abruptly from gentleness to violence.
Cahiers. What relationship did they have with cinema, or television?
A. Reis. At the village where we filmed, I can tell you that there was neither cinema nor television. (He makes a drawing on the paper tablecloth) Portugal is like this, Spain is like this, the Northeast, it’s here. Here, there is a city called Bragança and over there another called Miranda do Douro. All the villages where we filmed are located near the border and around these two cities. So, the peasants know that there is cinema and television at Bragança, but that’s all. In a lot of villages, there isn’t electricity yet. The relationship to cinema is still a relationship to the still photo, very simply.
Cahiers. When you had the idea and the project for the film, how did you think to avoid casting an ethnographic gaze over these peasants?
A. Reis. You know, I believe that the ethnographic gaze is a vice. Because ethnography is a science that comes after. Likewise we haven’t cast a picturesque or religious gaze on the Northeast. Evidently, we are very interested in the anthropological problems posed by the region, in Celtic literature, etc. We have read all your Markale, because the Celts are still there. We have studied Iberian architecture because the architecture of the houses there wasn't born from spontaneous generation. But it’s always with the aim of choosing, of intensifying. Because if we read a landscape only from the point of view of “beauty”, it’s very little. But if we can read at once the beauty of the landscape, the economic aspect of the landscape, the political geography aspect of the landscape, all this is the reality of the landscape. An integrated landscape, without transformation, a cultivated landscape, etc. So, on the subject of the Northeast, we dialecticized everything we knew, everything we had learned with the people, everything we discovered ourselves. Because it was also possible to discover things. Margarida was born in the most violent part of the Northeast. Even today, she remembers the taste of the wine, the legends and the nightmares of childhood. All that has become subject matter, with a certain thickness.
Cahiers. But for someone who lives in Lisbon, what is the Northeast?
A. Reis. It’s very far away. It’s where the electricity, the almonds, the good sausages, the hams, the iron, etc. come from. What the peasants of the Northeast say about the capital is what we say to Lisbon from there. Exception made to the emigrants from the Northeast to Lisbon. To them, even if they had lived twenty or thirty years in Lisbon, if you mention the name of a tree in their sub-dialect, they still tremble.
Cahiers. Something is striking in the film: it’s the absence of the Catholic Church, of religion. Now, according to what we know in France of Portugal after the 25 April, and particularly of the North, it seems to us that the Church played an important role…
A. Reis. I can tell you that on this subject, we have adopted, Margarida and I, a position on the principle of tabula rasa. In the film, we never deal with institutions. Now, Catholicism is a very recent religion over there. We feel in the film that there are more ancient religions and for the people themselves, Christianity is something very epidermic. It isn't an exaggeration or poetic license to say that they are druids. If you listen to them talking about trees, about how they love them… there is something very ancient there that has nothing to do with Christianity, it was about making it present by its absence. The film is a fresco, a gesture of the Northeast, it’s more vast than a little chapel in an artificial world, with the village priest, etc. I think that a film with all this as its subject would have to be made differently than the one that we made, with other implications.
Cahiers. But we cannot deny this influence of the Church, recently in the North of Portugal. What did it use to make the peasants budge politically?
A. Reis. You know as well as I do the game of the priest with the peasants. He maneuvers with death, the afterlife, he frightens. He uses the fact that the people, at this moment, need certain fetishes and that it is therefore easy to impress them. But does this mean that deep down the people are what they tell the priest, what they do with him? No. Everything that we feel, in contact with the peasants, with their revolt, with their philosophy, with their daily lives, is that there are very different religions, more ancient ones…
Cahiers. That would concur with the very beginning of the film where we see a child, a shepherd, who sees an inscription on a rock, an inscription which recalls a very distant past.
A. Reis. You know, there are three shepherds in the film. All three are different. The first, the one that you’re talking about, is a force of nature. Like a Fula in Africa or a shepherd from the Middle East, a shepherd who has an occupation, a code with his sheep, who walks in the night, who still belongs a bit to the Neolithic. What he says to his sheep is a code in which it is difficult to separate the music, the phonetic, lexical aspects: one feels a clash between all these elements. And he speaks a sub-dialect more ancient than Portuguese. He is very different from the final shepherd. He’s a primitive in the good sense of the term.
Cahiers. How did the idea of the film come to you?
A. Reis. I’ve already said that Margarida was born there. I was born in a province without force, without beauty, without expression, already eroded, 6km away from Porto. So I internally had the desire to be reborn elsewhere. And the first time that I went to Trás-os-Montes with an architect friend, I felt that I would be born there. Therefore, I had known the province for several years and, working with Margarida, going there often, I said to myself that it would be good to make a film over there because everything would be confluent in a cinematographic sense. So much that when we started to film, much of the location scouting had been done long before. Which doesn’t mean that we didn’t plan things, but it was a flexible planning. In a lot of scenes, for example, it is very difficult to distinguish what is filmed live from what is not. The dialectic of these two aesthetic positions was hell for us. But we believe to have succeeded in making not a synthesis, but a confrontation of opposites. Even live, on one hand we needed all the speed and all the surprise but on the other, we cleaned up the parasitic things which did not make sense or which were gratuitous populism. And because of that, we needed the eye of an insect.
Cahiers. I had the feeling that, during all of the first part (that of the children), you employed fiction to progressively bring information that is more naked, closer to what we expect of a documentary.
A. Reis. But when the mother tells the story of Blanchefleur, are we in fiction or in documentary? We are in both. It sometimes happens that in a village, an event is fiction. What is surprising in a village is that if we are there, we very simply only see the golden dust, the animals at the fountain, etc. But if we could go from one house to another, then to a river, then through a door, then things become so complex that you can no longer speak simply of fiction and documentary. In this house, you can precisely hear this mother telling the story of Blanchefleur orally, while working. And the children of the Middle Ages are like Blanchefleur in images. What one understands with Portuguese villages is that it is a vice to separate the millenary culture, the civilizations which came after and the daily life of today. It is precisely there, in this refusal of separation, that I find a progressive and revolutionary element. Because I think that the masses there will know how to assimilate, with a critical point of view, forms of life that owe nothing to the city. Because these people are not disposed to always losing. They start to realize, upon seeing their sons returning from Europe, that that doesn’t compensate. The sons who return from Europe build themselves a house “next to” the others, fence it in and the parents think: “My son has gone mad!”. And because of this sometimes the old people are in disagreement with their own children. They know very well that they have a richness and that there is a genocide upon them. It’s why, in those moments, they can say: we are going to cut off all the provisions, the food supplies to Lisbon. It’s not only to be reactionary, it’s because they want their hands and their heads to still possess value.
To come back to what you’re saying; indeed, there is a turning point in the film. This turning point is the lyric which is always threatened. Even when the children are having fun at the river, they discover death with the frozen trout. The big dusty house or the dead or the child who has fun with the spinning top (who is the one that goes to the mine), it’s always a threatened world. I believe that the film is always in metamorphosis. The so-called “final” part has to act as a boomerang: the spectators must be compensated by the lyrical space and time of the first part to support what comes next. When the blacksmith laments that people are leaving the village, that refers precisely to the mutilated children and the dead of the colonial wars, that is them. Them who will come to Lisbon, to Europe, to the slums, to the factories, etc. It’s why we treated these young children with such intensity. If you go there, you will see, they are like this, there is no naturalism, they are still a bit like angels.
Cahiers. We also have the feeling that it is they who establish the link with the past. The adults seem to fade into the background. They appear in the form of voiceovers, not live speech.
A. Reis. Because there are no adults there. The voiceover that you hear, a bit violent, a bit oppressed, is the voice of a character that we see for a brief moment in the film. He is the son of a miner, an executive. His father spent fifty years in the mine. The voice of this man is traumatized. He speaks of the old community of miners who were former peasants. Never in our film do we talk about the communities of villages, but we should feel that they exist. One dances, one walks in the dark as a community. The voiceover is contrapuntal to the life of the miners as the whistling of the train is contrapuntal to the music of Pergolesi which we hear for a moment. There is always a crossing, a dialectic of sound with the image which interests me a lot more than all these stories of raccords, ellipses and other rules from the manuals of cinema.
Cahiers. You cite at one point in the film a text by Kafka which says that the people are far from the Capital, therefore from the Law, that they try to guess it but that they cannot succeed because the Law is possessed by a small number of people etc. Could we consider this as an abridged version of the historical situation of Trás-os-Montes in relation to Lisbon?
A. Reis. Yes. We translated Kafka’s text in the sub-dialect and, consequently, this text became very guttural, very expressive, endowed with an extraordinary force. They have a marvelous word to designate the way that the nobles twist the Law for their profit: “baratim”. Because the laws of the community, they are flexible, they have been transformed by historical development. They are, of course, oral laws, they aren’t made once and for all, they are flexible. And it is due to this very flexibility that they have been liquidated by the written Laws. One day, it’s this shepherd who leads all the sheep to graze, another day it’s another shepherd. There is a sort of primitive communism in those regions. And we feel that sometimes they are closer to the future than the people of the city. For example, if Lisbon lacks water for twenty-four hours, that’s collective neurosis! How, in the harshness of his life, a peasant faces the snow, the fire, the heat etc. With what endurance. Even when certain peasants were imprisoned by the PIDE, they had succeeded in resisting. Why? And how many buddies I had known in Porto who spoke a lot and very loudly and who, when they were imprisoned… I don’t mean to say that the peasants are more courageous and the others more cowardly. But why, for example, when the peasants of Baixo Alentejo were arrested, did they have an endurance that the people of the cities didn’t?
Cahiers. We have the feeling that your film is made up of image-sound blocks in relation to which you refuse yourself all trickery…
A. Reis. We did synchronized sound, of course. We have, as you say, organized blocks, as if it were possible to have a symphonic sound. These are units that, in fact, will sometimes reverberate further on. I’ll give you an example: when the old woman in black comes to say to the child who fell: don’t cry I’m going to sing you “Galandun” (a song from the Middle Ages), there is a voice that says: “the dancers who rise up, who rise up…” And she is already memorizing what she’s lost and so we see the men who dance very close up, blurred, then from very far, as in a postcard. We leave to the spectator the task of saying to themselves: hey, a postcard! Because the peasants had never in fact danced in that place. It’s what we imagine today. But pay attention: one must wait until the end of the film to really signify that shot. Because then, we see the old man looking and we could believe that he is looking at the dancers, but this is not true. These are successive disillusions, but not traps. Often people say of the film: the rhythm is too slow. It’s because one must wait for the end of the film to signify certain things. And the way that the different blocks dialecticize themselves, for us, is very important. What has bothered us a lot, is that we did the montage in black and white and that we haven’t had enough time afterwards to work on the color. Working twelve months on an editing table cutting in black and white a film that we should have seen in color!
Cahiers. To whom has the film been shown? What reactions has it provoked?
A. Reis. First we showed the film in preview to the peasants who filmed with us. In general, they liked the film, they reacted very well, including to the “connotations”. We had some negative criticism but they came from reactionaries like the ones that can be found in Lisbon or in Porto. They reproached the absence of the Christian religion, for not having shown the dams, the traditional cuisine, the poverty etc. They had even wanted to burn the film and destroy the negatives. But this is a very limited reaction, arising from people who I know and who spend their life in the cafés. What was important, for us, were the peasants…
Cahiers. But precisely, how can a film contribute to helping these peasants, who are otherwise so cut off from cinema?
A. Reis. Of course, there are problems of cinematographic language. They are not in possession of that language. But there are some elements which are very important in their daily life, things that recall the theatre of the Middle Ages. They live in a space, at home or in nature, that is already cinematographic. I am certain that if they study cinema, they will become filmmakers. A peasant said to me one day: “What? You’re leaving for Lisbon without having ever seen the light that goes from this kilometer to this kilometer? How can you?” I very hardly find people in Lisbon who speak to me about the light on the bricks or on the streets. So when the peasants saw the film, they recognized things that they liked and which belonged to them, even if sometimes our imagination or our freedom of expression confused them. For example, the snow scene. They had never eaten snow the way we see it in the film but they suffer from the snow, from the beauty of the snow, from the burn of the snow. So, as there are people who eat earth or straw, I made them eat snow.
Cahiers. I would like to ask you a more general question on cinema in Portugal. First, is there a “Portuguese cinema”? Then, what has changed since 25 April? And you, what do you think is going well and isn’t going well?
A. Reis. My position on this subject is a bit like that of Seixas Santos. We think that there is no “Portuguese cinema”. We are getting by, whether during fascism or after 25 April, in a situation which is characterized by a lack of links with the cinema of the world, a lack of control over our means of production, a lack of real and sufficient experience. There are some isolated cases, as is the case for Portugal since the 19th century. We have a bit of quality but we don’t have quantities of quality. In that sense, we cannot speak of a Portuguese cinema. Even the generation of 1962, whose efforts were very important, knew very well that their efforts were individual. Sometimes they unite to defend themselves, in the name of a certain political commitment and not without romanticism. I don’t believe that things have changed much since 25 April. There are cooperatives and independent filmmakers, but it’s with the State’s money anyway. We make films that are neither seen, nor sold and we don’t have any more money to make others. It’s unfortunate that we are working like this, forever asking ourselves: are we going to be able to make another film?
Cahiers. What kind of reactions has your film provoked among the filmmakers?
A. Reis. On this subject, we are a bit of enfants terribles, Margarida and I. We don’t recognize any influence. Even when people want to bring us closer to Manoel de Oliveira, we refuse it, even if we have a great esteem for him. Not least for the way that he works, for his demands. Besides, the cinema that we want to make is perpendicular to that of Manoel de Oliveira. Because there is a tendency with him towards the metaphysical, of the remains of Jesuitism, which do not interest us.
Cahiers. What is striking is that Manoel de Oliveira and you have a point in common, you are both from the North, from Porto. And not from Lisbon. Isn’t there, in the cinema as well, a sort of hypertrophy of Lisbon which does not produce much…
A. Reis. I believe so. I think that life in Lisbon doesn’t leave much time for filmmakers to deepen what they’re saying. I don’t want to be hard with them because they are friends, but I believe that sometimes their way of life blocks them. I believe that they are adult enough to know the fundamental reasons for which we are involved in cinema. I believe that the cinema is a matter of life or death. For us, we cannot cheat.
Jean-Pierre Oudart.