FILM SCREENINGS

Rite of Spring

1963. Portugal. Written and directed by Manoel de Oliviera. With Nicolau Nunes da Silva, Ermelinda Pires, Maria Madalena. Oliveira’s first masterwork, painstakingly and gorgeously restored by the Cinemateca Portuguesa-Museu do Cinema, is a modern-day staging of a sixteenth-century Passion Play, performed by the peasants of Curalha in northeast Portugal. Oliveira combines poetic allegory, political urgency, eroticism, folkloric ritual, and Brechtian acting and filmmaking techniques to capture the essence of the biblical text and the meaning of Christ’s agony and resurrection. In Portuguese; English subtitles. 99 min.