The Movement of Things
Throughout the years, in a country that battled fascism for so long, women in Portugal were more than left on the sidelines of life. They were working phantoms. They produced the comfort of others and their existence was sustained by a willingness to constantly maintain the order of other people’s lives. This is a lot of what Manuela Serra’s first and only film tells us. But on a larger scale, she tells us about herself, because the film is so much a part of her that to speak of it is to invariably veer it to her. She called it The Movement of Things, and if nothing else this idea of motion, of comings and goings, only amplifies the fact that a film that was first presented at the Cinemateca Portuguesa in November 1985, and then three more times after that (1986, 2004, and 2006), only just had its commercial premiere in June 2021, after being made nearly invisible for over three decades. As invisible as the working women we recognize in it. Our grandmothers, our mothers. The filmmaker herself.
The film opens by the river, calmly nestled by the bluish grey of another daybreak’s mist. The light beaming from the projector at the old Cinemateca is strong enough to make this feel like the beginning of something majestic. The camera’s lens is made visible by a couple of water droplets stuck to it, turning it into a cinematic oil painting, vibrating with the energy the passage of time has on all things. And then, with a single panning movement, glistening with José Mário Branco’s flute playing on the soundtrack, we are introduced to the church and then the crosswalks of the village of Lanheses, a small rural village in the north of Portugal, between Viana do Castelo and Ponte de Lima. And then a house. A light is turned on in one of the windows. The only character identified with a name, Isabel, makes some coffee and drinks by dipping dry bread into it. It’s now morning. She’s off to work at the factory. This film is open to us from the very beginning, creating a space in which the audience can roam and feel.
In the midst of what will be a feast of human gestures in lieu of portraits of rural life, three days and three families are at the center of the film. Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The timeline is not explained, but very easily perceived. First, the working day and people coming together at the local café at night. Then the Saturday’s street market, the desfolhada (a leafing corn “ceremony”) until sundown, and then the Sunday mass. This could just be a typical exercise of rural ethnography. These are images of the real. Not created, but pointed at. But then there’s Isabel, who in her still-traditional way of being is unknowingly defining this space she inhabits for herself and for us, who desire for her to change her circumstances and her surroundings. Her image projected onto a screen transposes as a time capsule for what women looked like. Humans. The country. The fields. The animals. The communion between people. A balm of tranquillity running through it all. And the woman behind the camera pointing us towards this perspective, warning us of what not to forget.
ANGER IS A WOMAN'S INNER WORLD
Whether chatting in a café or via a phone, the two times I spoke with Serra—before and after the commercial premiere of the film took place—she expressed the sadness of being unrecognized as a filmmaker by her own country. The fact that so few people knew of her work a few months ago lies bare just how peripheral is the agency given to female filmmakers. “Bittersweet” had been the word she used to describe to me how her life and her work had suddenly been brought to the foreground. Many weeks later, she continued to elaborate on the lack of representation and the strength the patriarchy had and still does have in the film industry. “It came too late. It should’ve been then and not now. I had to reduce myself and find some quality of life through the actions of those around me,” she uttered with a strained voice, as if something were stuck in her throat. “You know, surviving is very different from living. Society did not credit me. And I have been trying to survive that loss all this time.”
After The Movement of Things, Serra spent 10 years trying to be a filmmaker only to eventually abandon the field altogether. When a young man asked her during the introductory Q&A at the Cinemateca about which specific films she enjoyed watching, she very firmly told him she had given up even that, even the watching. “I can do without it perfectly well. The world is too broad.” This she was to repeat again and complete. “When one is forced to be on the inside of life, one can envision the transcendent without cinema. I’ve given up cinema, but not creation.” The woman who brilliantly scolded not just the current director of the Cinemateca Portuguesa with the strongest retaliation speeches I’ve witnessed before a full room of people—“A man who you are friends with destroyed my filmmaking career by saying how awful the film was once to some other very important men”—has not stopped speaking her mind. The conflict she encountered in her life trying to create and make a voice for herself and for the women around her has, however, left her prey to doubt. Especially when one learns the context of how the film was made. Following the Carnation Revolution, Serra comes back from Brussels and funded the collective VIRVER (a wordplay on “living” and “coming and watching,” the name’s literal translation to English). The women’s movement was on the rise. The country was finally opening itself up to the world and women were finding in themselves an anger they had not, until then, recognized as such. Using this cultural change as a catapult, Serra began the project with other women and decided to call the film just that, Women. But it didn’t prove itself easy. And when the differences between them became too unsurmountable, she followed through with the project alone.
Manuela Serra
When I ask her if her work is in any way militant, she quickly confirms that it isn’t. She just wanted to make a film that could be felt by others. Emphasis on the word “felt.” She even adds at some point she really did make it for others: “I would’ve kept the sequences longer. Especially the more formal shots. The landscape. But I didn’t want to annoy the spectators.” In keeping with that, back in the beginning of the 1980s when the country’s identity crisis was most strongly felt by those on the margins of society, Serra speaks at length about how people were back then and how the notion of being radical is confounded now. “All we wanted was to be different, to create one’s own life. We were very aware of that,” she said. Freedom was indeed freedom. Freedom from institutions, machines, industrialization. This is another tangent present in the film. To be at one with nature is to find infinity. And not only was the hybrid root of the intermingling between documentary and fiction a reflection of the shaky ground the country was standing on, but also a middle-term of poetic non-identity Portuguese cinema has since taken at face value. Cinema was not imitating life. Life was becoming it. There was an increase in ethnographic projects, especially those such as Serra's, that both highlighted the contours of the popular gestures and their myths but also functioned as a forewarning for the desensitization of the mind. The figure of the factory and its female workers was transforming people's routines.
So, it’s more than natural that when I ask her about the film’s last frame—the factory and the smoke coming out of it amidst a menacing single-tone score, a frame taken out of the film for some time and placed back again now—her eyes widen as if she’s been expecting me to make a reference to it. “You were being prophetic without knowing it,” I tell her. “Everyone thought I was being a pessimist,” she responds, “so I took that last frame out. But now it’s very clear why it should be there. Massive production and consumerism has taken the world to a whole new level. It’s difficult for people to know who they are anymore. It’s all tall buildings and trash.” But Serra’s fight is not so much with the city—she still lives in Lisbon—but more to do with what happens to people now that the so-called modern life is here to stay. António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s Trás-os-Montes (1976) immediately comes to mind. Even though a lazy reference, one film always finds the other. Both share the same approaches to meditative lyricism and they’re both tales of human ancestralism that mark the passage of time—both the films’ and the people that inhabit them—not to mention how they eternalize the folklore image of an all-embracing collective memory. But what truly distinguishes Serra’s film is exactly what she named it after. It is an object of movement, made out of “emotional waves,” as she calls them. If there is stasis, it is there to intensify that which cuts it and changes it from that stoppage to motion. So, after a Saturday at the street market selling and buying food, utilities or clothes, the day dies down, the twilight settles in and there’s a return to the water. On the screen, the most transparent of colors. It’s a going back in time. The dance of the distancing and the embracing, the shifting and the transience of our inner-worlds.
This undulation of entropy and harmony, engraved in the film’s form, couldn’t make a more feminist-empowered speech than it is. Harsher images on screen wouldn’t be able to hold the film’s overall clarity of thought. There are circular panning motions and zooms in and out that happen very organically, never too forced, because they’re in charge of locating the silence in the noises we’ve lost the ability to hear. The film’s force is therefore telluric. It’s stimulated by an inner-anger Serra told me women “transferred onto nature” and the work in the fields and at home: building corn walls, milking cows, cutting grass with a sickle, making pomace, sowing the fields, and then doing the washing or making bread in a dough kneader on top of it. The spiritually calm space the film takes us to is built on camera around these non-places, where nothing is ever stationary.
The Movement of Things
Still, Isabel: The main character. Owner of one stopped frame in the film, which takes place just after she gets out of the bus and looks back at us, transferring her whole body our way, as if she knows we’re behind the camera gazing at her, wondering if she’s going to be the figure of change. According to Serra, that was never what was going to happen, not in the film and not in life: “she loved being in her village.” It makes one wonder how manifestos can be truculent without being brutal. The film’s narrative is linear, filled with the corporeality of women on screen. Their faces, their hands, their backs on display constantly moving and reacting to something. With that one still frame—“conscience is a stoppage,” as Serra explained—the ultimate accomplishment of portraying time and consciousness on screen happens under the guise of an anthropological assessment. The filmmaker envisions the language of the woman, the material and also the imaginary that distinguishes the female strength. Isabel works as a vehicle that takes us back to reality, a mechanism that almost breaks up the fourth wall only to entangle its nostalgic convulsions around the ephemerality of time, human rituals and our imminent disappearance alongside them. Now that so many years have gone by, it's easier to go into it and look for how much has changed under the influence of time. But the motions shown to us eliminate that chance. The film hasn't grown old. It is as visionary now as it was in 1980, when it was being made. It has however grown closer to Serra's desire for it to become a starting point for the conversation we're having. She gives women true agency on screen.
RISING TOWARDS RECOGNITION
In the still deep well that is the figure of the female filmmaker in Portugal, names such as those of Bárbara Virgínia, the only woman to have directed a feature film, Três Dias Sem Deus (1946), during the New State fascist regime (1933–1974), are finally beginning to be spoken of again. The 26 minutes recovered from this lost film have very recently been shown at the Cinemateca, who restored it digitally this year. More and more frequently, names that could easily be equated to the likes of Barbara Loden, Manuela Viegas and her Glória (1999), or Ana Luísa Guimarães and her Nuvem (1991), are coming forth as one-film careers examples of the blurriness of the new democratic world, with women trying to empower Portuguese cinema with their narratives of women and their work. These films search for an identity, for a body that may support their skeletons.
That said, from Joana Pimenta to Catarina Ruivo, Susana Sousa Dias to Ana Vaz, women have been making cinema that wends through the kind of tangents we need for a re-building of the map of creation. The lack of diversity in the position of the producer but also that of the film critic perpetuates the tragic unknownness of these existing works of art. Funnily enough, The Movement of Things was distributed by a young man who has taken onto his stride films that otherwise the world wouldn’t know about. In that regard, upon the premiere of Mark Cousins’ Women in Film, an interview in which Another Gaze’s Daniella Shreir spoke of the fetichism of the unfindable: “The idea of a forgotten film or a forgotten filmmaker suggests that the creator of their work is the agent of the forgetting, abdicating responsibility from institutions, distributors and programmers who either have their own sexist/racist/homophobic biases or are too scared to take a risk on something that might not make money.” For the release of Serra’s film, there was no performative activism, no programmer taking advantage of its marginalization to credit her/himself for the “discovery.” It goes without saying, however, how few people in the world will ever know of Serra’s lucidity and coherence as a filmmaker.
The Movement of Things
“Can cinema be a lesson then?” I ask. After all the filmmaker had confessed, it was surprising to hear her say it contributes to a well-being one is in need of. “Cinema naturalizes meditation. It has a thing for initiation. It mystifies the experience of being alive,” she said. In my head, it all sounded like she was saying that cinema lies. A sudden silence keys back my train of thought. What about cinema as a democratic tool? But I don’t ask. Later in the conversation, just after she explains how she dislikes the plasticity of digital copies and prefers the warmth of film, Serra completes the question I never placed. “It’s unifying. It’s cooperation politics. The party politics only divide us. Cinema is politics, but it keeps us together.” So, are things getting better, I wonder? Serra says it all moves ever so slowly. But that it is moving, much like the self-reflexive circularity her film presents with. No matter the case, it is reassuring to know that whenever limbo strikes, The Movement of Things can be a film that takes one back to that place where everything is universal, where one can roam about, free in the cinema that needs you to be there to punctuate and propel the experience. In the many cycles and passageways both the film and our inner world is made of, the staging of the real is where one can fully read the poetics of life. When materialized the way Serra has in The Movement of Things, it becomes about where we have failed: It reveals just how much we haven’t been attuned to see.