6 - Neo-Baroque Landscapes: João Pedro Rodrigues’s Docu-fictionand Ecosophical Kinships in The Ornithologist

Summary

No matter how small, each body contains a world pierced with irregular passages, surrounded and penetrated by an increasingly vaporous fluid, the totality of the universe resembling a pond of matter in which there exist different flows and waves.

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

INTRODUCTION

Even while internationally there have been sporadic curations and discussions of Portuguese “landscape” films (centering around works by Manoel de Oliveira, Paulo Rocha, António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, Pedro Costa, and Miguel Gomes, among others), the meaning of “landscape” in the geographic, historical, and cultural surroundings of Portuguese cinema remains largely obscure to the Anglophone film milieu. The idea of Portuguese landscape, as philosopher Adriana Veríssimo Serrão elucidates, carries a spiritual lyricism of “yearning” that “oscillates between finitude (limited) and infinity (unlimited)” of land as it evolved in the development of Portuguese modernity, owing in large part to its physical location on the fringe of the European continent.

Bearing in mind the country's geographical status as the Western frontier of Europe, the Portuguese aspired to both preserve and expand their territory for the development of Portuguese national (and transnational) identities. This desire animated the practice of complex symbiosis between nature and culture and came to embody a singular sanctuary in the conceptualization and visualization of the Portuguese landscape. As opposed to the idea of uncultivated nature, the landscape in the Portuguese context illustrates a mixture of the contemporary with the mythological (the supernatural or poetic elevation), as has been shown distinctively in the Portuguese tendency towards “docufiction” in landscape films. This view is supported by scholars and critics who have attempted to introduce a group of Portuguese films to American and other international audiences (well beyond the Iberian Peninsula) in the past decade. For instance, the film critic and programmer Dennis Lim, in his spring 2012 essay for Artforum, addressed a legacy of “docu-fiction” in Portuguese cinema by emphasizing the evocative combinations of documentary and fictional or poetic narratives in the films of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro. A similar critical direction has been taken by the scholar Patrícia Vieira, who has also looked at landscape-driven Portuguese films to address how the “environment” is embedded dramatically in the genealogy of Portuguese cinema, and how this corresponds in turn to the socio-economic and political transformations of modern Portugal.