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How Fernando Pessoa Saved Portugal Waiting For the Hidden One: Eugène Green Discusses “How
Fernando
Pessoa Saved Portugal"
Daniel Witkin • mubi.com 14 Aug 2018
For years Portugal was the only country in Europe where
there was no Coca-Cola.
The director discusses his new "mini-film,"
devoted to the great Portuguese poet, advertising, and the fight to bring Coca-Cola to Portugal.
Fernando Pessoa who was perhaps the greatest
European poet in the 20th century was almost unknown as a poet, and he wanted to succeed in
business.
He was never recognized in his lifetime—except a
little bit by certain intellectuals—he was very little known in Portugal and not at all known outside of
Portugal.
With director Eugène Green, it’s
always
key to be attentive to one’s surroundings. Accordingly, French cinema’s foremost native New Yorker
agreed
to meet me on a picturesque piazza where he was spending the morning with an espresso and getting
some
writing done.
Green had arrived in muggy Locarno, Switzerland for the
premiere of his newest work, the “mini-film,” How Fernando Pessoa Saved Portugal.
One of the twentieth
century’s leading modernist writers, Pessoa
might seem an unlikely subject for Green—particularly for audiences only partially
familiar with the filmmaker’s work (including a great deal of writing not yet translated into English), for
whom Green may be associated first and foremost with the baroque, one of his
films'
predominant themes. But Green remains concerned
above all with the present, even as he advocates for a vision of the good life rather at odds with the
proverbial "way we live now."
A lively, highly personable film, How Fernando Pessoa
Saved
Portugalemerged from a real anecdote in which the
man
who would be modern Portugal’s greatest writer tried—and failed—to generate an advertising campaign
for
a new American beverage: Coca-Cola. (Viewers of the director’s previous film Waiting for the Barbarians will recognize the return of
Green’s playful pejorative for his native tribe, the “United-Statesians.”) Among its not inconsiderable charms are a tête-á-tête between
Pessoa and his illustrious heteronym, Álvaro de Campos, a small
triumph of subtle visual characterization, and what must be one of cinema’s funniest exorcism scenes.
NOTEBOOK: The film begins with Pessoa’s poem “The Bell in My Town,” which is a celebrated
expression of the famously untranslatable Portuguese concept of
saudade. I’d like to start by asking what this idea means to you.
EUGÈNE GREEN:Saudade
is a
lot more complex than the usual translations convey. I think that in English it’s often translated as
“nostalgia,” but saudade is the presence of the past in the
present,
and it’s also the desire for the future in the present. It’s the reality of the present, which contains both
the
past and the future, which is something that we’ve forgotten in the modern world. The present doesn’t
exist
actually, there’s neither past nor future. People live in a false present, always looking into devices, which
is
not real, detached from where they are…
It’s one of the most well-known poems by Pessoa, which he published under his own name, and not under a heteronym. He was a great poet, but as you see in the film, no one around him knows it. At the same
time,
he wanted to really succeed in business. And he made several attempts to succeed in business; but they
never worked, they were always disasters.
NOTEBOOK:Saudade is also often explained as something
melancholic.
GREEN:Saudade is a sort
of
joyous melancholia. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the fado musical tradition—there’s a great singer who sings at the beginning
and
the end of the film—but often the fados sing very
sad
things about love, which doesn’t exist anymore, or memory, but there are also very joyous ones. But
even
when they’re joyous there’s something sad about them. So it’s something that is completely Portuguese,
which is difficult for foreigners to comprehend. It’s not depressive sadness; it’s a sort of sadness that is
a
part of the fullness of living in present.
NOTEBOOK:How Fernando Pessoa
Saved
Portugal is also a very funny film. How did you go about balancing the humor with
the
saudade?
GREEN: I don’t think of various ingredients, and then mix them together. It
comes
to me naturally. I always treat very serious themes, but in a very light way, with humor. It’s related also to Pessoa’s life, because he always had a sort of irony
about
himself and about everything around him. At the foundation of that irony is a sort of sadness. In this
case it
comes from the character, but I always work in this same way.
NOTEBOOK: Was there something specific about Pessoa that you thought would make him a good subject for a film?
GREEN:I wrote a short book about
Pessoa a few years ago, and I rediscovered this anecdote about his attempt to write
a
slogan for Coca-Cola. When I told it to Raphaël O’Byrne, who is
the
cinematographer of the film, he said that would be a very good subject for a short film. I think it
appeals to
me that this little story expresses the condition of the artist in the modern world—perhaps since always,
but
especially in the modern world.The writer who was perhaps
the
greatest European poet in the 20th century was almost unknown as a poet, and he wanted to succeed
in
business. He was never recognized in his lifetime—except a little bit by certain intellectuals—he was
very
little known in Portugal and not at all known outside of Portugal.
He
wasn’t recognized as a poet and he wasn’t able to succeed as a businessman, but he left something that
continues to influence Western thought and Western culture.
This is also connected to the idea of the encoberto [“the hidden”], which is a very important thing in Portuguese culture.
It has to do with the historical disappearance of the Portuguese king
DonSebastiao at the end of the 16th century. He waged a crazy
battle in Morocco, which led to the massacre of the other soldiers and the decimation of the Portuguese
nobility. At the end of the battle, he wasn’t there, which caused a dynastic crisis. And according to the
marriage treaties, if there was a vacancy on the Portuguese throne it would be filled by the king of
Castille.
So Portugal lost its independence in 1580, and people were very unhappy but they
remembered
old prophesies about a hidden savior who would return. Since no one saw
Sebastiao die, they were convinced that he was alive but hidden, and that he would
come back. Even when they got their independence back in 1640, the great Portuguese writer of the
time, a
Jesuit priest named António Vieira, invented a sort of myth around this desire. He
said
that the encoberto would come back in several incarnations but wouldn’t be recognized, and he would
disappear again, and then come back. So this became a source of hope
in
Portuguese culture. And Pessoa at certain moments was convinced that he was one of the
incarnations of the encoberto.
NOTEBOOK:How Fernando Pessoa
Saved
Portugal is your first film to take place in the 20th century. You’re known among
other
things for your interest in the 16th and 17th centuries on one hand, and, on the other, in the
contemporary
moment.
GREEN: All of my other films take place in the present. Normally I don’t like to
make historical films because the actors start performing as if they were doing theatre since they’re not
in
their natural dress. You could say that this is my first costume film—it’s not very far back, but it’s 1927
—
now it’s almost a century.
NOTEBOOK:How did you go about constructing
this 20th century world?
GREEN:It’s not that different. I was born in
1947,
so for me it doesn’t feel very distant. The clothes are different, there are no computers, he types on a
typewriter. But throughout my youth and up until 25 years ago, I used a typewriter. So it’s not as if I
was
doing a film that took place in the Middle Ages.
NOTEBOOK: In the credits, How
Fernando Pessoa Saved Portugal is described as a mini-film.
What distinguishes the mini-film from a feature or a short?
GREEN: I don’t like the French term for a short film, court
métrage, because it literally refers to a smaller number of meters of film. It’s like you were in
a
grocery store and you asked for a kilo of apples or whatever. For me, it’s a film. Some of my films last
for
over two hours. The shortest feature, Le monde vivant, is only an hour and a quarter. But they’re all
films.
I call it a mini-film to distinguish it from a feature.
NOTEBOOK: You’re credits not as the film’s writer, but as creating “dialogues
and
arguments.” Do you see your work as a form of argument of rhetoric?
GREEN: There’s a tradition in France, though now it’s not very widely seen, but
in
the films up until the fifties they would do separate credits for “scenario” and “dialogues.” I do the two,
of
course. I don’t think of it as rhetoric, really. I work a lot on the style,
and in
the dialogues I try to concentrate a maximum of emotions within a minimum of words, using simple
words
and respecting grammatical forms. I don’t want there to be psychology, so there’s never any sort of
psychological explanation. It’s always the words that create the necessity of answering and the answers
are
related to the words in the question. For example, the same word will often appear in both the
question and the answer. If you want to see it as a form of rhetoric, it is; but I don’t conceive of it in
terms
of rhetoric.
There’s a great attention to the writing as writing. I’m also a novelist and people often remark that
the
dialogues in my novels are in the same style as the dialogues in my films.
NOTEBOOK: Were you thinking about Pessoa’s writing at all while writing this film?
GREEN: No. It’s the way I write.
NOTEBOOK:Much of the film is about
advertising, and it’s role in the creation of the contemporary world, with poetry
described as the natural antagonist of advertising. I’m curious as to how you think that one can
resist the impact of advertising in a world totally saturated by it.
GREEN:You have to constantly produce
barriers to
protect yourself. My parents had a television, but since I’ve been independent I’ve never owned one. So
I’ve
never been indoctrinated by television.When I go to the
cinema in
Paris, there’s about 10 or 15 minutes of advertising before the film. I just shut my
eyes
and cover my ears. I don’t look at advertising in newspapers. But you have to consciously do this
because it
comes from all over. It’s often also secretly introduced without telling you.
NOTEBOOK: So in reference to the film’s title, do you think that an individual
can
really ‘save’ a larger society?
GREEN: There’s a lot of irony in the title because Pessoa didn’t want to save Portugal, at least in that way: He wanted to succeed as a publicist. But his destiny was to be a great poet, so he didn’t
succeed
as a publicist. But the fact that he failed as a publicist allowed the Portuguese to go without
Coca-
Cola for 40 years, because it was only permitted in 1977, three years after the
Revolution. For years Portugal was the only country in Europe where there
was
no Coca-Cola.
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Festival Coverage Interviews Locarno Locarno 2018 Eugène Green