Silence from beyond the Abyss in Manoel de Oliveira’s A Talking Picture

Abstract

This article explores Manoel de Oliveira’s travelogue film Um Filme Falado/A Talking Picture, released in 2003, the year in which Portugal joined the US-led coalition in the Iraq War. Here I discuss the ways in which the film recycles and subverts Portugal’s fifteenth-century maritime expansionist narrative and Sebastianist mythologies of the Crusade, as a means of exposing and criticizing Portugal’s late twentieth-century global alignment with post-9/11 anti-Islamicism. The result of this is a subtle remapping of the conventional West-to-East voyage of discovery in terms that actually underscore the origins of what the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos terms the ‘abyssal lines’ delineating a globalizing North against a globalized South.