Jaime

The directorial debut of António Reis was something of a bolt from the blue. While it was certainly not the first instance of a great first work in Portuguese cinema – a cinema whose most interesting directors have, ultimately, been those who showed themselves as such in their earliest works – Jaime was nonetheless an arresting spectacle, due to its own beauty as a work as well as the striking impression that it conveyed. Reis’s first work impressed itself upon our cinematic landscape as a unique showing of raw materiality and instinctive force. It turned heads for its extreme modernity as well as its extreme originality; it instigated an unheard-of formal permissiveness and an approach to expression that was at once ascetic and rigorously precise. It was, in that sense, an entrance which at once took center stage in the world of Portuguese filmmaking. It was also, curiously, the object of a kind of collective endeavor, in view of the dogged defense of the film that was mounted by the 1960s generation (a generation which, at that time, still showed a kind of collective esprit de corps, as is clear from the numerous texts published which passionately defended the work, of which the best example may be the João César Monteiro’s interview with António Reis published in the April 1974 edition of Cinéfilo, days before the outbreak of revolution on April 25).

A native of Porto (where he self-educated at the local film club), Reis was, by the time of Jaime, already the author of two books of poems (Poemas Quotidianos, 1957, and Novos Poemas Quotidianos, 1959), a participant in the collective work O Auto da Floripes (an independent project of the Cineclube do Porto), and had been an assistant on the film Acto da Primavera as well as the writer responsible for dialogue in Mudar de Vida. In undertaking his directorial debut, Reis could count on three considerable assets: his solid grounding in related artistic fields (fine arts, music, poetry); his ability and inclination to apply that grounding to cinema much as if he were the first filmmaker ever to have done so; and his deep love and affinity for a popular culture, which he nonetheless strove to mine, searching for its ancient lore, purging it of contemporary convention and even, in some cases, of the whole intertwined paradigm of post-Renaissance culture.

In Jaime, Reis addressed that popular culture with the unrestrained freedom of a fictionist. While he took seriously his role as a keeper of public record (indeed, he was the mastermind of the Museum of Image and Sound, a project launched by the Centro Português de Cinema in 1974, which came to encompass his own Trás-os-Montes as well as Máscaras (1976), by Noémia Delgado, and Argozelo: À Procura dos Restos das Comunidades Judaicas (1977), by Fernando Matos Silva), his own area of work ranged far beyond that role, stipulating that no act of record-keeping can be profound and lasting if it is not, at the same time and with the same degree of emphasis, a creative act, and therefore a transformative one.

Like the impressionists, Reis brought realism to an awareness of its own material means of accomplishment (in this case, shots, spaces, time, color, silence, sounds, etc.). Like the expressionists, he built imagery from the point of departure of a clear inward-facing vision (the exact construction of each shot, the markedly constructive logic according to which they are organized). But, as he himself remarked of the expressionist or fauvist resonances of some of Jaime’s artworks: “if his aesthetic was noncontemporary with those European movements, it also owed nothing to them. His historical time was (and is) an altogether different one.” Or, to say the same thing in a different way: the true context of Reis’s work cannot be found by studying vanguard artistic movements or by discerning his relationship with cutting-edge cinematographic techniques. Reis is an “embryonic” presence within our cinema (as a pioneer of formal experimentation) while nonetheless remaining something of an outsider to it. His universe cannot be understood without recourse to his relationship with nature and with ancient cultural tradition (in making Trás-os-Montes, he even mentioned the Neolithic era), and in the creativity that marks the composition of each shot we can also discern a scientific influence (one might almost say a cosmological one, bearing in mind the juxtaposition in Jaime between a shot of a medical chart and the curving ridge of a mountain range, or the wonderful retelling of an eclipse that is delivered in Ana). Who was Jaime, and how did António Reis approach him? Jaime was born within the new century (in 1900); he married, was interned as a schizophrenic at the Miguel Bombarda Hospital at the age of thirtyeight, and died three decades later. In 1965 (only three years before his death), he began to create artwork with a pencil and a ballpoint pen. At the same time, he was writing prolifically across various notebooks. A large part (possibly the majority) of his startlingly original artistic works were ultimately lost. The remaining works – supplemented by the unearthed texts, by film of the place in which Jaime was imprisoned, and by dialogue with Jaime’s still-contactable widow (then aged seventy-one) – are what Reis used to make his film. Like Straub’s work on Bach, this is not a documentary about the life of one departed, much less a reconstruction of that life. What Reis did was to film and work exclusively with the concrete materials and images that remained in existence at the time the film was made. Any act of evocation (whether biographical, human, or psychological) that the film accomplishes is arrived at by other means – which is to say, by the film’s treatment of the actual materials themselves. (In that sense, the film is both fictional and documentary.)

Jaime, the film, begins (as it also ends) with a photograph of the internee, and with a phrase from his writing: “Nobody, just me” (Ninguém, só eu). Straightaway, we pass to a modern-day shot of the outdoor patio of the hospital, and of the men who inhabit it (Reis would later remark that “there are no patients in this film – nobody is either normal or abnormal”). They are seen in sepia, and seemingly through the lens of an oculus. All is silent. Then, the camera pulls back and its gaze moves from the patio upward into the sky, where a sudden noise (a plane?) cuts through the space, opening up a new dimension. The next shot is a high-angle shot from above that gives us a broader view of the patio. Color enters the film, as does music (Louis Armstrong). Now, we find ourselves inside the hospital, which is empty, disemboweled; across the shots, human bodies are either absent or lie encased on their respective beds. And the camera turns again to the world outside, by way of the building’s round perimeter and the vertical window bars through which light enters the room. There is an allegorical scene in which a wizard-figure is seen next to the patio fountain (invoking associations with life and creation), and we again enter the building for a shot of a decayed old bathtub, its inside empty and dead. But the soundtrack fills up that empty space with a different, natural element: the wind, which seems to lift us out of our pit and into scenes of nature (a stalled boat, running water, plants). From this vantage we understand that we have finally attained Jaime’s own pictorial worldview. From here on, images and sounds are organized according to that dialectic: the figures created by Jaime jostle with the real and imagined spaces and sounds of his surroundings; the two-dimensional space underlying his artworks, with the profundity of the images marked upon them; the intervention of those imaginary figures – animalistic and demonic – into the natural world.

In Jaime, there is no story, nor any linear narrative progression. There is a movement through places and through objects and places, through space and time. Shots and scenic compositions displace and destroy one another, accomplishing a systematic destruction of the framework of perception itself. Each transition between shots of a given image – or combination of image and sound – is undertaken so as to compress or enlarge some dimension of that which immediately preceded. This systematic rupture sustains a sense of spiraling escalation based on tension between the film’s material elements (shades of color, visual space, aural space). This opens up into an unraveling sequence of determinate areas and volumes; a movement through a sequence of spheres that are increasingly interiorized, and at the same time, increasingly liberatory. It is that dual movement (forward and inward, backward and outward) that allows António Reis, ultimately, to orchestrate the eruption on screen of the internal life of Jaime (“Nobody, just me”), his secret communion with a vast world of natural spaces.

Much like the incision which, at one point, we see being made in the body of an animal, much like the scene of wooden chests in an empty house (volumes opening up into other volumes held within them), the film goes to the wellspring of Jaime’s solitude, and discovers there a great and sweeping freedom.

While inviting a microscopic reading (at the level of individual shots and their transitions), the film does not fail to offer a “macro” reading, where its core thematic can be found. It is a film about man, about art, about creation, and it is a concrete, material work, rigorous and cinematic, about cinema itself. It is the fruition of a self-possessed notion of mise-en-scène.