Historic Centre is an omnibus film consisting of short subjects by well-known Spanish and Portuguese directors. (with a Finn thrown in for a good measure). It seems to have been compiled in 2016 and commissioned by the Portuguese city of Guimares, the oldest settlement in that country. (Perhaps, the film celebrates some kind of centennial.) With one startling exception, there's nothing in the movie worth watching. Two of the four films seem to have only a tangential connection to Guimares.
For some reason, Aki Kaurismaki, the great Finnish director, contributes a 10 minute clip called "O Tasquiero" ("The Tavern man"). It's like a parody of Kaurismaki's better work. A melancholy waiter comes to his tavern located on an alley near the town square. He serves three miserable alcoholics, presumably regulars, as soon as the place opens. He cooks some soup. Down the street, on the historic plaza, there's a successful cafe full of tourists. The tavern-keeper disconsolately dines there. He makes his chalk-board menu seem more attractive -- he changes the notation Sopa (1.5 euros) to Sopa de Pescadores ("Fisherman's soup" for 2.5 euros). Still no one buys. The tavern-keeper who has a long gaunt face and looks like Ichabod Crane has a date for the night. He goes to a barber who cuts his hair and, then, has his shoe's signed. Some musicians croon sad songs in the background -- literally sitting behind the morose hero when he is getting his hair cut. The woman coming for the date, apparently, by bus, doesn't show up. The tavern-man pitches his bouquet of roses in the garbage, goes home and has a drink, and, then, sets out a cup of milk in the alley for the cats. All of this is beautifully shot, each image like a gorgeous still life, but there's nothing here and the film is so dead-pan as to be DOA, -- nonetheless, "O Tasquiero" is veritably novelistic compared with Manoel de Oliveira's contribution and the ridiculously pretentious film produced by Pedro Costas. The Oliveira film can be dealt with in a few words: a tour guide speaking in heavily accented English leads tourists to the plaza in the "historic center" of Guimares. There's a big, ominous statue of a knight in full armor, the so-called conqueror. Everyone takes pictures of the statute and so the tourist guide declares the "conquistador has been conquered" by those snapping photographs of him. It's witless and stupid, although the segment is also very, very short. (Guimares certainly didn't get its money's worth with this little dollop of a film, evidence, perhaps, of the centenarian director's senility.) The film by Costas is unbearably bad. (Costas is a fantastically tedious, if politically correct, director and I have never found any merit in any of his films.) In Historic Centre, Costas is represented by a half-hour picture that is simply foolish and that, like the Kaurismaki offering, seems to be some sort of mannered parody of the director's very distinct, if irritating, style. The movie begins with handsome Africans posed picturesquely in a dark garden or, perhaps, quarry. The people are all motionless and statuesque and impressively lit. They keep calling for someone named "Ventura". After about ten minutes of this, the film cuts to a man on a gurney being shoved into what seems like a hospital elevator. Next we see Ventura, a handsome old man with a bald head (this guy is in all of Costas' films). Ventura stands next to a demon-soldier. The soldier's face and hands are bronze and he seems to be wearing a bronze uniform and carrying a bronze machine-gun. Ventura whines about not being able to stay in his home country of Cape Verde. (He literally whines, making weird howling and barking sounds.) The soldier talks about tormenting him. From the colloquy, which is extremely obscure, we learn that Ventura has been a migrant worker in Lisbon for 38 years -- he is now apparently dying and this elevator ride (which lasts for 20 minutes in a steel box) represents a hallucination of his death. Ventura talks about missing his wife and children. He recalls a revolution in which work ceased when he was laboring to build the headquarters for the national phone company. (This was the military uprising in 1974). There's a suggestion that the soldier tortured Ventura at one point. The demon soldier, who seems like animated statuary, taunts Ventura. Then, the elevator stops and Ventura gets out and, in the film's one witty moment, the damn thing flashes that it is going down -- presumably into the sub-basement of Hell. Then, we're back in the quarry or garden or whatever it is, now during the daylight. Ventura is sitting in a cleft rock. Someone grins at him and says "I heard you went to the doctor". Presumably, the garden represents Cape Verde and, in death, Ventura has returned to the his homeland. The movie is extremely dull and difficult to understand.
But there is one segment of the film that is tremendously moving and effective, perhaps, one of the greatest films ever made about human need to work. This is Victor Erice's "Vidrias Partidos" ("Broken Windows"). The film is heightened documentary and seems a highly poetic and affecting version of the sort of political films made by Straub and Huillet. It's minimalist but doesn't seem impoverished and every camera set up is exquisitely calibrated to the effects the film aims to achieve. Ostensibly about the closing of a textile factory at the Vizela River, the movie expands to be about memory, human happiness, capitalism and labor, and how we shape the past in our imagination. Erice starts with some elegant shots of the abandoned factory, a huge structure that produced fabric and yarn between 1845 and 2002 -- now it's called the "factory of the broken windows." We, then, see a sort of exhibit -- some very large photographs or a cafeteria or dining hall full of what seem to be several hundred workers eating their midday repast. (This is Portugal and the workers have bottles of wine on the tables and, probably, are eating a massive lunch of the sort that the finest restaurants in this country would be unable to serve.) Then, a former worker appears, a woman: she tells us she worked in the factory and was given a half-hour to nurse her newborn baby in that refectory; she recalls that she used to carry her baby brother to the factory so her own mother could nurse him -- the infant cried on the way to the factory but was more content during the walk home. (Another woman tells a similar story -- the interviews are styled "screen tests.") A technician talks about keeping the spinning machines running for forty years -- he is obviously proud of his work. He itemizes some terrible injuries he sustained to his hands. Another woman explains how she left her groom at the altar because he had lied to her, worked in the factory, and, then, emigrated to Paris, first and, then, Normandy where she cared for animals. She married a Frenchman and had children with him but now that she is a widow she has come back to Portugal. A man tells about how he fought in the war in Mozambique and, then, worked in the factory until it closed. He explains that the factory can't compete with the near slave labor wages paid in places like Indonesia and Cambodia. An old woman says that she never found any happiness in her life although "of course, there were moments of joy" -- she spent many years working in the factory and wonders what it would be like to be happy. A man says that the workers were hitched to their machines like horses to wagons. A woman tells us that her parents made her go into the factory when she was 12 and that her one regret is that she wasn't educated enough to work in an office or bank. One woman has hearing loss due to the noise of the machines and has had to have an ear-drum transplant. These people appear to be fantastically eloquent and speak with amazing force and authority -- I suspect that they are actors who have been hired to recount the work narratives by men and women who were employed in the factory. But the accounts are enormously moving and poetic. Each person speaks to the camera -- their positions are slightly varied to keep the format from becoming monotonous: sometimes, they are already posed; other times, they enter the frame. Titles introduce the shots as being "takes" or "screen tests" in the movie. The only worker who is shot in close-up is the 77-year old woman who questions the nature of happiness. When the sequence of testimonials is complete, the camera reverses angle and shows the people, one after another, facing the large photograph of the dining hall. The witnesses now address the picture and speak to the people shown in it -- these were lives full of "unhappy joy", the old woman says, mirroring her own plight. Then, an actor appears and recites lines from a Marxists play about labor -- he tears off his worker's clothes to reveal that he's nattily dressed in suit and tie. He ends his recitations with the comment that the world has dematerialized -- "work is virtual"; "we're all caught in the web," referring to the internet. A final witness sits in front of the picture and discusses how his father and grandfather were renowned local musicians and spent their lives in the factory. He, then, says that he never worked in that place and that he went to college and is now professional musician. We seen an accordion posed in front of the picture -- "screen test of an accordion", the title tells us. The man takes the accordion and, turning to the image, plays it. The camera explores faces in the picture. One of the women said: "They look sad because they know they have to return to work." But the narrative is very complex. No one really complains about the factory and everyone seems to have appreciated the chance to earn a living there. And the old laborers show an enormous pride in their productive labor in the place. This short film is one of the great explorations of industrial labor -- I have lived in a slaughterhouse town for 42 years and can attest to the picture's essential truth.
Erice was an odd film-maker with a strange career. He made a very great masterpiece The Spirit of the Bee Hive in 1973, El Sur, another estimable picture, released in 1983, and an abstract, but reportedly beautiful film, The Quince Tree Sun in 2010. His Wikipedia entry hasn't caught up with the short subject made for Historic Centre but, I think, it's also a masterpiece.
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