reviews

'I was fascinated to read Fausto Cruchinho's article ‘The Woman in the Shop Window and the Man Looking at Her: The Politics of the Look in Oliveira's Oeuvre'. It so happens that Manoel de Oliveira's latest film, Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl, premiered in Berlin in February this year, is precisely - and primarily - about a man looking at a woman framed in a window. This is a felicitous example of the way that artists can often belatedly provide literal confirmation of the metaphors that critics apply to their work. Having recently written an overview of Manoel de Oliveira's work from a rather different, more journalistic perspective, I'm fascinated to read the more scholarly approaches to his films in Dekalog 2. The collection is extremely valuable for followers of the director's oeuvre, which - as several contributors point out - is elusive to the point of being virtually inaccessible, in terms of limited availability on DVD and rarity of screenings. The book's contributors impress in their attention to the complexities of an oeuvre which is too often dismissed as a glorious but eccentric and even inscrutable aberration in the field of European cinema. Relating Oliveira's work to the standard economics of film production, Randal Johnson notes the point that Oliveira's concept of film-making is idiosyncratic and odds with the norms of film-making practice. But what is especially suggestive in several of these essays is that they emphasise Oliveira's literary and historical - rather than specifically filmic - interests, especially his working practices with the novelist Agustina Bessa-Luis. The inescapable conclusion: what makes Oliveira so distinctive as a film-maker is that his works beg to be read not as an exotic or dissident form of cinema, but as a branch of literature pursued by other means.' – Jonathan Romney, Independent on Sunday