Time and Time Again: Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica

By Michael Sicinski

There are, needless to say, certain old saws that we as critics rely upon far too often. They can help us get somewhere in a hurry, make a point or join a gap in an argument so that we can move on to where it is we really want to go—and this can be useful when we’re forced to fend off counterarguments or attacks that are equally as reflexive as the ones we’re invoking. For example: “So-and-so just makes the same film over and over again.” To which we might reply: “No, a great master devotes him or herself to a lifelong aesthetic program, continually refining it, exploring it from every possible facet. You could say it is all one big film.” The first statement needs to be knocked down, because it is not a real criticism. It’s a manoeuvre against thinking, what Roland Barthes once called “deaf and dumb criticism.” (“I’m a professional film critic, and ______ bores the crap out of me, so guess what? You punters really don’t even need to bother. Thou art vindicated!”) But the retort, while serviceable as rhetoric, isn’t particularly useful as criticism either. It doesn’t really help us see or hear.

I speak as someone who has relied too much on this One-Big-Film idea a bit in the past, and who, for the twelve or so years that I have been watching the films of Manoel de Oliveira, have too often allowed that idea to structure my deep appreciation of his work. In certain ways, this has prevented me from being fully attuned to how his films have changed in recent years, how bizarre, unruly aspects of them that struck me as “anomalies” (in an almost Thomas Kuhn way: “outlying” facts that I couldn’t square with “Oliveiraness”) were really collapsing my dominant interpretive paradigm. (more…)