Aniki: Revista Portuguesa da Imagem em Movimento (Jan 2017)
'The Strange Case of Angelica': affinity between Fantastic and Documental
Abstract
In 2010, Manoel de Oliveira films The Strange Case of Angélica, a project from the early fifties of the past century. In it, the confrontation between the documentary side of the film (the sequences where the protagonist, Isaac, photographs the workers in the vineyards) and the fantastic sequences (the episodes with the ghost of Angelica) seems to indicate an affinity. That "shadow of resemblance" Petrarch spoke about to his close friend Giovanni Boccaccio: "... he who imitates must proceed in such a way that what he does is similar but not equal, and that the likeness is not that which exists between the original and the copy, that the more similar the more it is praiseworthy, but instead a likeness which one finds in the similarities between a father and a son, among which, though much difference is made in the aspect, there is, however, as a shadow of resemblance, which the painters call 'aire' (...) "(apud Rodrigues 2003: 5). A "family air" as a living correlation that comes to our encounter and which is felt as an immediate understanding (and not as definable evidence). In the film, the shiver that assaults us through the apparition of Angelica seems to announce something that goes beyond this same vision: the eminence of the disappearance of the vineyard workers and their gestures, a loss of connection between Man and Nature. The present affinity - Angelica / diggers - is mirrored in Isaac's immense melancholy, the only person apparently capable of perceiving the landscape, the "air" that this relationship evokes. The whole film is crossed by the glimpse of this indefinable kinship, by the porosity between the sensitive world and the spectral world, the permanent interweaving of visibilities / invisibilities that allow us access to this other cinematographic space-time, more percept than visible, in which, according to Manoel de Oliveira, the phantom of physical reality reveals itself "more real, however, than reality itself" (Baecque and Parsi 1999: 81).
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