Francisca

Fanny Owen, the novel by Agustina Bessa-Luís, is a mystery. Francisca deepens this mystery cinematographically. In Francisca, I saw unfold what Manoel de Oliveira called a visual word. “Oliveira films a word like someone filming a tree,” a girlfriend told me a few days ago.

This time it was not chance that struck me. In truth, I earned my place in this film one day when I plucked up courage, rushed up to Manoel de Oliveira and told him I would like very much to work with him. I, who had never even gone to film school, but I had seen Amor de Perdiçao, secretly, in a private screening, hidden in the projection booth. At that time rumors and opinions about Oliveira were terribly critical, with rare exception.

I was determined to infiltrate the shooting of Francisca, to unravel that mystery surrounding a big production during which I found myself literally invaded by an impudent desire to film. Francisca was my laboratory, my school, my inquietude. The Tóbis film studio was a sacred temple, an initiation, so to speak. I only entered again into that studio, inhabited by ghosts, a full thirty years later to film—not by chance—A Woman’s Revenge which would, fatefully, be the very last feature shot within its walls.

“The soul is a vice,” says Agustina, says Francisca. Cinema will also be a vice if it possesses us with the immense solitude of its makers. – Rita Azevedo Gomes