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APROPOS OF WHERE ARE WE GOING TO LIVE? — A CINEMA CYCLE BY ANDY RECTOR
MADALENA FOLGADO AND ANDY RECTOR
11/08/2023
II.
MF: How did the foreign programmer come across the SAAL program?
AR: Well, precisely through João Dias’s film. So, a swift and nimble education. In medias res, as are the lessons of the SAAL program, Dias’s film, and the housing tragedy today.
I knew Dias had worked as an editor on Pedro Costa’s films (O NOSSO HOMEM, SWEET EXORCIST, CAVALO DINHEIRO, VITALINA VARELA), that he must be a serious worker, so I sought out OPERATIONS SAAL, his first film, about five years ago. Back then, one could only find a copy in the underground trade, without subtitles (unfortunately I need them).
What I found was a totally energetic film; a camera, purpose, and people totally animated — o animatógrafo, as they used to call the device, function and place of cinema — a film in total contrast to most documentary films of the past 15 years, which tend when dealing with historical failures and “the people” to be default somber, fake-sober, conceptual, very distant and without perspective. No, Dias has something to do, and he does it: investigate and revive the details of SAAL, go to the neighborhoods, show contemporary attitudes towards it, show this process in motion. Dias’s way of filming faces, people, is wonderful. Close, unsentimental, thrown into encounters. It’s physical. The people turn their heads and torsos, gesture everywhere; this is often missing from films made of interviews. I would even say it’s a great portrait of the Portuguese people, a certain laughter and affliction; a drooping lip and shrugging of the shoulders, and its opposite…
Whereas Fernando Lopes’s film about SAAL, HABITAT - UN DÉFI (1976; which Optec is also rereleasing), is a great geographical portrait of Portugal. This has enormous value because Lopes knows how to film the lay of the land, the people and dwellings on the land — “a sea-facing amphitheater, braced by the highlands of the Iberian plateau, and strongly shaped by the flatter Southern areas” — using extremely precise panoramic shots. And in one magnificent shot, the relation of the periphery to the city (Lisbon). It’s almost a miracle of seeing, of elucidation. There’s no point in showing films about a subject unless they’re well-filmed, revelatory. This is one reason why I chose to show some D.W. Griffith films in a cycle about housing; few filmmakers could film a house, a room, a window, its inside and outside, its inhabitants, the classes, a street, as he could.
I’m not from Portugal, nor from the field of architecture. I’m from the cinema, which is to say, I’ve been involved in a hundred thousand houses, my eye has traced them, I’ve tried to understand them and their place in the world, my ear has heard their acoustics, and I’ve been allowed inside many. There I’m not completely a foreigner. Serge Daney said that, increasingly, “cinema is the country missing from my map. We now wonder if it is an empire, a nation, or a province.”
The very term “movies” (in English) originally referred to a person; it was a discriminatory term in pre-Hollywood Los Angeles for film workers –– people considered uncouth, not bourgeois enough. For instance, in a “House For Rent” newspaper advertisement, a landlord would write: “No pets, no livestock, no movies”. This is documented in one of Kevin Brownlow’s films about early cinema. Movies were illegal chickens...There’s that moment in SAAL OPERATIONS, where it’s explained that, during the Salazar era, the “islands” (areas of overcrowded shacks for the workers, which were located behind the factory owners's houses) in Porto were destroyed, the people relocated to Municipal neighborhoods with strict regulations, and we see Inspector Abel Monteiro’s list of tenant violations:
HAS A LOVER WHILE BEING UNMARRIED
HOLDS AN ILLEGAL CHICKEN
INSULTED AND MADE FUN OF THE INSPECTOR
DID NOT REMOVE THE SWALLOWS
RECEIVES A MAN
CRITICISM OF THE INSPECTOR
This is the stuff of cinema, these violations of the regulations. And even more so, in the next scene, what musician José Mário Branco re-tells and sings: “There was an inspector, Abel Monteiro, and people were evicted. And when they were evicted a truck came, they forced their way inside the house, put stuff in the truck and went to dump it in the landfill. He sings from A Luta dos Bairros Camarários:"Let’s throw in the dump / The inspector and the truck / We will be making Portugal freer”.
All the films I chose for Where Are We Going to Live? are about this, in the spirit of this struggle. Particularly eviction and the terror of homelessness. And chickens run all through the cycle, from Storck, to Straub/Huillet, to Buñuel.
I must mention Optec producer Abel Ribeiro Chaves. He clearly wishes to keep the issues and memory of SAAL alive among architects and citizens, and even to bring the story of SAAL to a more international audience (making English, Italian, Spanish, French, and closed-caption subtitles for the DVD; doing a press release on United Nations World Habitat Day, etc.). It was he who had the idea to rerelease SAAL OPERATIONS, link it to the dismal housing situation today, support a cinema cycle around this theme, and ask me to program it.
With regard to SAAL itself, I’m here to learn. In SAAL OPERATIONS I see the speed, the reluctance, the factionalism, but also the incredible participatory initiatives. The interventions not of our time, beyond the limitations of our contemporary politics, are most inspiring: "80.000 families occupy in three months the vacant houses in Lisbon”. And that when it came to “the creation of the tendency to remove propriety” and occupy houses, the people seemed to lead the way, beyond the state intervention, and women dominated the process in the tenant assemblies.
Or the basic lesson of SAAL which, if it applied during a Revolutionary situation, we know must apply a millionfold to today’s exclusively capitalist drive: “There cannot be a rehabilitation process in the neighborhood which is not wanted by the inhabitants themselves”. Or the lucid distinction Souto de Moura makes in the film: “...what’s bad about the ‘islands’ is six people living in a 4m² area, not living by the riverfront ten minutes from where one works”. The current impossibility or incredible difficulty of living near where one works is exactly why today the housecleaning workers and janitors within VIDA JUSTA and from the periphery are demanding free and more public transport, among many other things.