Making War on the Isle of Love

Abstract

Non, ou a Va Gloria de Mandar was released in 1990 by Madragoa Films as an international collaboration between Portuguese, Spanish, and French production companies and won a special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Marking a distinctive turn toward Portuguese historical topics in Manoel de Oliveira’s vast filmography, and dedicated to his grandchildren, it combines a variety of different film and other visual genres, including war and buddy movies, historical epic, fantasy, literary adaptation, and national myth. It became famous, at the time, for being one of the most expensive Portuguese films ever made. Yet, despite its large budget, epic scale, and high production values, it does not subscribe to the type of pedagogical national agendas that gave birth to the Hollywood epic as a genre. Rather, it functions as a mock epic with a serious counternationalist, and ultimately antiwar, message. To this end, as we will see, Oliveira draws heavily and conspicuously on canonical national sources in Portuguese literature and art, but his cinematic treatment of them is far from reverential. Taking as it does a highly critical long view of national Portuguese destiny as a kind of recurrent fatalism that culminates in the disaster of the African Colonial Wars in the 1970s, it comes as no surprise that the film proved a controversial, highly debated work in Portugal, clearly disturbing the standard patriotic expectations of epic audiences. My intention here is to explore the constructions of race and sexuality that underpin Oliveira’s process of productive irreverence in Non.