Nationally Correct: The Invention of Portuguese Cinema

Abstract

In December 2007, the Cinemateca Portuguesa (the Portuguese Film Museum) ended a yearlong programme dedicated to ‘national genres’ with a selection of 18 Portuguese fi lms not associated with any particular genre, but with the category of ‘Portuguese cinema’ itself . It seemed an odd choice, even if one took into account the very loose definit ion of ‘f i lm genre’ of the previous months – who could deny the relat ionship between the western and the United States, or even the polar f i lm and France, but what of the more dubious associations of ‘metaphysical cinema’ with the Nordic countries, of ‘real ism’ with Italy, or of ‘historical cinema’ with Japan? The programme’s curator and Cinemateca’s director, Joao Benard da Costa, argued that contrary to other countries, Portuguese cinema never had a predominant f i lm genre, nor had it developed any specif ic f i lm style that managed to gain any international relevance. What Portuguese cinema had excel led in, Benard da Costa maintained, was in portraying Portugal , or rather in mirroring the country’s imaginary on fi lm. The central argument of the curator was therefore that, « less paradoxical ly than it might seem, one could state that the dominant genre in Portuguese c inema is Portuguese c inema i tse l f .» (Um Pais um Genero)