PROGRAM NOTES

In conjunction with the release of Narrow Margin’s third issue, its editors will present two films by Rita Azevedo Gomes: Altar preceded by the short The Conquest of Faro. Narrow Margin #3 is devoted to Azevedo Gomes and Larry Cohen. It features original criticism, the first English-language translations of important texts on both filmmakers, a roundtable on Cohen’s The Ambulance (1990), and a new interview with Azevedo Gomes.

Originally trained as a painter, Rita Azevedo Gomes worked in various capacities in the Portuguese film world before making her feature debut with The Sound of the Shaking Earth (1990). Her films are distinguished by their remarkably free, collage-like method of adaptation, their probing interest in cinema’s place in the broader history of the arts, and their attentiveness to the specific aesthetic capacities of different cinematic media, from film to video to digital. This program consists of two films made at an early, pivotal moment in her ongoing career. A commissioned short produced by Paulo Rocha and the first of Azevedo Gomes’ many collaborations with actress Rita Durão, The Conquest of Faro begins with the chance encounter between two couples at a hotel restaurant. As one of the men, a professor, regales the table with a story about the city’s capture, the four figures are transposed into the historical drama as its characters. Looking backwards to Azevedo Gomes’ apprenticeship under Manoel de Oliveira and forwards to A Woman’s Revenge (2012), Faro develops her engagement with the liaison of cinema and theater before taking a sharp left turn—an unforgettable long take set to Janis Joplin.

Azevedo Gomes’ most formally experimental work, Altar was made soon after Fragile as the World (2001), a film released over a decade after her feature debut. Shot on Hi8 for little money with “things that were around” and a crew credited collectively alongside Azevedo Gomes as its filmmakers, Altar is a cinematic palimpsest. Its throughline is the reminiscence of an old, widowed playwright (René Gouzene) who recalls an enigmatic boyhood encounter with Madeleine, the woman who engendered his first feelings of romantic love. Altar’s form prismatically refracts this experience across its seventy-five minutes, layering motifs and textures in a tidal rhythm. Certain totemic images (a woman’s hand, a rose held out) oneirically surface in advance of their mention in the story; fragments of paintings, music, and poems reverberate as the memory’s obscure echoes. Throughout, the reflection of a woman (Patrícia Saramago) is glimpsed in windowpanes and dirty mirrors. She seems at once the fantasized figure of René’s melancholic remembrance and something of the woman herself in the grip of a secret emotion. An altar for an unrepeatable, long-past encounter, Azevedo Gomes’ film dwells on the singularity of the image that remains and its ultimate, irreducible muteness.

Program notes by Benjamin Crais