Introduction: Nonconformities and Unconventional, Unreal Liberties—The Cinema of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata

Summary

In April 2020, during the six-week lockdown imposed by the Portuguese government at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, João Pedro Rodrigues shot Turdus merula Linnaeus, 1758, a fourteen-minute-long film documenting the first days of a new-born common blackbird. The film opens with images of the birds’ eggs placed in a cup-shaped nest that had been built by the breeding parents in a privet hedge in front of Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata's apartment in Lisbon. It is a sequence of fixed shots covering the first weeks, gestures, and actions of the naked and blind chick, punctuated by black cards giving date information. The last date to be presented—25 April—introduces footage of a grown chick, quite large, in its hatching nest, followed by images of the same nest in its now unoccupied state. The common blackbird flew the nest on the same day that, forty-six years before, a military coup in Lisbon had deposed the dictatorial Estado Novo (New State) regime, putting an end to the Portuguese colonial wars in Africa and enabling a democratic Portugal to emerge in Europe.

The soundtrack of the film includes direct sounds from the directors’ domestic space (passages of dialogue, noises, diegetic music playing tracks from the French director Guy Gilles's films), as well as non-diegetic Portuguese music. More specifically, we hear the two songs that in 1974 secretly signaled the start of the coup to the rebel military officers who enacted it: Paulo de Carvalho's “E Depois do Adeus,” and “Grândola, Vila Morena,” which was written and performed by the influential political singer-songwriter José Afonso. During the spring lockdown, at 3pm on 25 April 2020, “Grândola, Vila Morena” was played on loudspeakers and in homes across Lisbon, in a celebratory, symbolic gesture performed by those who, due to the pandemic, could not commemorate the historical landmark on the streets as they usually would. The last scene of Turdus merula Linnaeus, 1758 mixes ornithological documentary with historical momentum in a home movie that has cinephile and queer melodramatic resonances, and which simultaneously reflects on the pandemicrelated condition of self-isolation.