In the last five-or-so years I’ve probably not acquainted myself with a better filmmaker than João César Monteiro, who I’d either distill as the closest analogue cinema had to Philip Roth or, per my friend Ian Barr, “like Chaplin’s Tramp combined with Chaplin’s IRL sex life.” To say God’s Comedy, God’s Wedding, and Hovering Over the Water can stand among the greatest films only begins explaining his corpus. Running through it on MKV files of wildly varying quality has enlightened, infuriated, galvanized––sensations that will surely carry (if not multiply) with a new set of restorations carried out by the Cinemateca Portuguesa and coming stateside via Cinema Guild. We’re delighted to exclusively debut a trailer for the distributor’s retrospective, which starts at MoMA this Friday and anticipates wider releases.
Here’s how Cinema Guild distills Monteiro’s work and legacy: “João César Monteiro (1939-2003) emerged from the radical climate of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of 1974, part of a lively generation of filmmakers who broke new cinematic ground as the country shook off decades of fascist dictatorship. To this day, he remains one of the most provocative and influential figures of Portuguese cinema. At once a dandy and a pauper, a hedonist and a monk, a revolutionary and a classicist, a realist and a romantic, Monteiro was an artist of profound contradictions. His work combines a perverse, slow-burn burlesque with the formal sense of a high modernist and a poets’s feeling for language and lyricism. Pinching from the high and the low, he synthesized the avant-garde with a popular spectacle, launching a furious, carnivalesque revolt against the established order.”
Find the preview and poster below:
