R.I.P. Manoel de Oliveira, Portuguese master and the last silent filmmaker

Manoel de Oliveira was born in 1908, before penicillin, before the radio, and before the popularization of the feature film, in what was then the Kingdom Of Portugal. He died earlier today, age 106, an iconic figure, and one of the unlikeliest greats in film history. He started in the silent era, and shot and edited his final films digitally. He lived through four Portugals, both World Wars, and over a century of cultural, political, and technological change. He didn’t find international recognition until he was in his 70s, and remained prolific and productive up until the end, producing a film a year well into his mid-100s.
Born into a wealthy family of factory owners in Porto, Oliveira received a Jesuit education in Spain, and became interested in film in his teens, initially intending to become an actor. His first foray into filmmaking came in 1927, in a low-budget project about World War I that was never completed. Soon after, he began studying under the Italian silent director Rino Lupo. He made his directing debut in 1931 with Douro, Faina Fluvial, the first in a string of silent documentary shorts. (Sound came late to Portgual, and Oliveira would go on to appear in the first Portuguese-made talkie, 1933’s A Song Of Lisbon.)
His early films—influenced by the German city symphonies of the 1920s—were not well-received, and though he eventually went on to make a feature (1942’s Aniki Bóbó), Oliveira spent the next several decades working in the family business, spending his free time on unproduced scripts (one of which he would eventually film in 2010 as The Strange Case Of Angelica) and the occasional documentary. These were the days of the second Portuguese Republic and the Salazar Regime, a time when being an artist wasn’t easy. Though the films Oliveira quietly made during this period showed a filmmaker coming into his own, they went almost unseen and unknown abroad.