30 Out Labor on the Douro River
It’s interesting that the city of Manoel de Oliveira, was the city that saw the birth of cinema in Portugal. Porto was the birthplace of the Portuguese cinema, where the photographer Aurelio Paz dos Reis shows the first film projection in Portugal, on the night of November 12th, 1896.
During the thirty years that followed, no major film was filmed in Porto. It’s not that there are occasionally interesting films, but at this stage aren’t shown many films that may reveal moments of the history and everyday life of Porto or doesn’t have so great emphasis on the image of the city.
It is from a camera given by his father, that the young filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira shoots the first major cinematic landmark of the city of Porto. Labor on the Douro River is a documentary whose genesis is due to the film Berlin, Symphony of a City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), a reference work that arises from “urban symphonies” of the third decade of the twenty-century. The film take us on a journey between the most abstract and the most concrete that has its beginning and its end in the shape of an existing lighthouse at the mouth of the Douro river. This bright seems to reveal the source of the images, how it creates the illusion and put the film under the sign of the projection. Seventy years later, in Porto of My Childhood (2001), the director will return to this lighthouse, looking to make the connection to the origin of moving images and the film author.
In Labor on the Douro River, a number of iconic images of a city that had developed from its river: the silhouette of the right side of the river, where you can easily stand the towers of the Cathedral; the staircases of historic downtown streets, the old bridge of D. Luis, an element that calls the iron architecture and its presence in the city of Porto and serving as a link between the two sides of an ancient river, a river that turns out to be the reason of existence of all these iconic images.
The city of Oliveira, is a humanized space, where workers earn their living through economic activity boosted by the river. The activity of these people makes the central reason of the film’s action. The daily routine of this river has a lot of animals, cars, trains and ships, all of them in a continuous movement, converting them into the living organism. A place filmed through a cubist articulation of perspectives and viewpoints.Labor on the Douro River, aims to be a union between physical and humanistic space, while it’s a reflexive attitude about film language. With this film, Manoel de Oliveira starts a work that turns out to be a single case of longevity, a work that is intertwined with the history of cinema.
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