Portuguese Experimental Cinema: The Artist’s Cinema

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DATE

22 Jan 2026

AUTHOR

Maria Inês Mendes

Portuguese Experimental Cinema: The Artist’s Cinema

AUTHOR

Maria Inês Mendes

"Conceived as an exhaustive program, the cycle brings together a significant set of cinematographic works by Portuguese artists who, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, used cinema as an extension of their previous artistic practices, opening up new formal and conceptual avenues. This cycle features an extensive list of artists and films, revealing not only the institution's openness to these interdisciplinary practices, but also its ongoing work to preserve, digitize, and recontextualize experimental cinema in Portugal."

How to define the place for cinema within the history of the arts? - Sergei Eisenstein

The difficulty of assigning a place to cinema and the invisibility of the multiple connections it establishes with other visual arts seems to be the result of a film theory dominated by literature, as well as an art history that is still blind to film studies. If, historically, there has been a tendency to segregate these two worlds, often considered irreconcilable, the 20th century was, paradoxically, marked by numerous movements of rapprochement. As a movement to redefine the artistic object took hold—along with a renewed concern with spatiality, temporality, and the construction of a different visuality—it also became inevitable that artists would turn their attention to cinema and the moving image. It was up to them to participate in an effort to liberate the visual arts themselves and their fixed categories. At the same time, they had to find in cinema a free space, far from the gigantic repository of aesthetic, ethical, and ontological discourse that weighed on artistic production.

MoMA opened its Film Department in 1929, under the direction of Alfred H. Barr. This project wasn't just about building a repository of documentary films about artists or works, nor was it meant to be a mere supplement to the museum's activities in the field of visual arts. On the contrary, it was the first moment of institutional recognition of cinema by the visual arts. And it is precisely in this broader field that the cycle Portuguese Experimental Cinema: The Artists' Cinema, 1960s and 1970s, presented at the Cinemateca Portuguesa in November 2025 and scheduled to continue in April this year, fits in.

Conceived as an exhaustive program, the cycle brings together a significant set of cinematographic works by Portuguese artists who, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, used cinema as an extension of their previous artistic practices, opening up new formal and conceptual avenues. This cycle features an extensive list of artists and films, revealing not only the institution's openness to these interdisciplinary practices, but also its ongoing work to preserve, digitize, and recontextualize experimental cinema in Portugal. Though difficult to explain, it's easy to see why all these artists devoted themselves to the moving image. In this regard, and assuming that they do not constitute different currents, but rather “areas of procedure that intersect in the same authors,” the inventory of the different relationships that artists establish with cinema is curious.

There are those who, in a more obvious way, follow the path of experimentation. Carlos Calvet (1928-2014), considered a pioneer of Portuguese experimental cinema, occupies a unique place in this panorama. His films VENEZIA (VENICE, 1959), ESTUDO DE CAMIONETA ABANDONADA (STUDY OF AN ABANDONED TRUCK, 1960) and FILME EXPERIMENTAL (EXPERIMENTAL FILM, 1963), for example, experiment with notions of rhythm and composition, which we find again later in MOMENTOS NA VIDA DO POETA (MOMENTS IN THE LIFE OF THE POET, 1964). Similarly, Ana Hatherly (1929-2015) also follows this experimental path, that is, the archaeological decomposition of cinematographic methodologies and processes.

An active member of the Portuguese Experimental Poetry group of the 1960s, author and translator of countless literary works, Ana Hatherly described herself as a creator “in permanent drift: a writer who drifted into the visual arts through constant experimentation with words, and a painter who drifted into literature through that same experimentation.” Her film experience is consistent and in line with the remainder of her work. Furthermore, the film medium seems to be used to continue an ongoing exploration of the visual dimension of the written word. This cycle features a series of clearly experimental works that reinforce the relationship between writing and image, abandoning discursivity in favor of the iconic dimension of the word.

His early animated films stand out, such as C.S.S., FRAGMENTOS DE ANIMAÇÃO and SOPRO, produced in 1974 during his studies at the International London Film School, where geometric figures undergo successive metamorphoses and calligraphic letters give rise to drawn objects. “It is significant when, in one of these initial exercises, a set of vertical lines becomes the expression ‘Spaghetti time’, or when the red that invades the screen gives way to the reference to ‘Tomato’,” writes Joana Ascensão in her program notes accompanying the session. This is also relevant in the case of REVOLUÇÃO (1975), where the artist constructs a visual sequence similar to a chain of phrases. Originally filmed in Super 8 and premiered at the Venice Biennale in 1976, the film depicts the walls, murals, posters, and graffiti of the streets of Lisbon after April 25, 1974. The images follow each other at a dizzying pace, with shots that overlap and interrupt each other like the verses of her poems. The viewer-reader is then forced to follow the cadence of this visual flow: just as the pages are turned in the book, in the film we watch the rapid passage of the frames. Hatherly thus experiments, through cinema, with broadening the field of content-based reading, restoring to writing its “original, semiotic, iconic, and automatically semantic power.”.

It should be noted, however, that even experimentation must be scrutinised. While we have referred to formal experimentation, the cycle also includes a set of works that bring experimentation closer to an uncompromising relationship with cinema. Many artists have resorted to formats considered amateur, such as 8 mm and Super 8, exploring the freedom provided by portable devices. Above all, these artists sought other ways of doing things, establishing a closer relationship between life and art. From this gesture arises a free cinema, often diaristic, associated with everyday life and encounters between friends.

This is the case with Julião Sarmento (1948-2021), who presents us with ACORDAR (1976), a short essay that functions as a diary entry: for about three minutes, a man wakes up, lights a cigarette in bed, and allows himself to exist in front of the camera. This intimate approach to the cinematic gesture is taken up again later in a session dedicated to Lourdes de Castro (1930-2022). The films in this session, which come to us following a restoration project carried out by Galeria Porta 33, are two collective projects that resulted from the meeting of Lourdes de Castro and René Bertholo with friends, including José Paradela, Pitum Keil do Amaral, Eduarda, and Marcelo Costa, on the island of Funchal. In the summer of 1969, the group got together to shoot O AMOR QUE PURIFICA (1969), a photo novel that transports us to the Arab universe of the cinematic drama El Moustakbal el Moghou. For a few weeks, the streets of Funchal were transformed into a stage for “playboys with good intentions, modern girls, and Arab sheiks.” A year later, the group reunited to film TROTOÁRIO AZUL (1972), a disjointed and fragmented narrative divided into 21 parts and 43 episodes. The film, whose title refers to a popular Madeiran expression—a phonetic adaptation of the French term trottoir—is an unusual reverie constructed through the montage of images and improvised scenes. Although these films are not individually signed, they unequivocally reveal how, for the artist and her companions, art was inseparable from life. They are “amateur films” and, at the same time, “artists' films,” conceived with great humor and relaxation, in a playful context conducive to artistic creation.

Next come those who opt for a documentary approach to cinema. Their films reach us like time capsules, reminiscent of certain moments in performance art that allow us to reconstruct the artistic scene of the 1960s and 1970s. UM DIA NO GUINCHO, COM ERNESTO (1969) by Carlos Calvet, for example, documents an event organized by Ernesto de Sousa, in collaboration with Noronha da Costa and Oficina Experimental, which was attended by numerous artists and marked this phase of Portuguese experimentalism. ROTURA (1977), by Ana Hatherly, documents a performance by the artist at the Quadrum Gallery, in which large sheets of paper are torn vigorously, translating into the intensity of the sound. In this context, the film EXPOSIÇÃO DE LOURDES CASTRO NA GALERIA 111 (1970) also stands out, showing us some images from her exhibition, focusing on the projection and fixation of shadows and silhouettes on various materials, such as sheets, acrylic, and paper. Also in this vein is the film recording of a “Teatro de Sombras” (Shadow Theater) by Lourdes Castro at the Laura Alves Theater in 1970, with lighting and color effects by Manuel Pires, who directed the film.

Perhaps it is still necessary, within the scope of this debate, to consider those whose relationship with cinema is deeper. These are authors whose cinematographic practice is not part of an extension or deviation but rather permeates and informs their entire work. Authors such as Julião Sarmento and António Palolo (1946-2000) built a cinematographic universe within the visual arts, developing a truly cinematic work.

During the 1960s and 1970s, António Palolo experimented intensively with 8 mm and Super 8 film formats, producing a remarkable body of work that bears clear relations to his other visual art, forming part of a coherent and cross-disciplinary artistic project. Part of these films recovers images from popular culture: male and female bodies, cowboys, pin-ups, and public figures of the time cut out from magazines and set in motion, often accompanied by geometric shapes. The connections to pop art, Dadaism, and surrealism are evident, as are the paintings produced between 1968 and 1971, in which the artist articulates pop references in a style that oscillates between figuration and abstraction.

It is against this backdrop that Julião Sarmento's film work should be viewed. In his latest book, Uivar à Lua (2025), Delfim Sardo writes about his work: "Sarmento's painting is dedicated to establishing a lexicon of images, often references derived from film references, which combine texts and use a cinematographic device by definition: editing and montage. In fact, they are paintings that juxtapose, as in a temporal compression, images from different sources, interpreted and reassembled in other narratives, constructing composite planes whose unity can only be understood as derived from the filmic universe." There are several mechanisms that structure Sarmento's work as a cinematic practice, even though it is operated through the pictorial medium. Firstly, the cinematic reference based on the image, in an internal remission process from the visual arts to cinema. Secondly, the relationship with the cinematographic writing typology, visible in the fictional continuity that projects beyond the pictorial plane, invoking the notion of off-screen as a structuring element of the composition. Added to these mechanisms are the evocation of iconic places in cinema and the mobilization of recurring topics in film dramaturgy, such as love triangles, betrayal, and the centrality of the female figure. These procedures are evident in the films PERNAS (1975) and FACES (1976), which precisely evoke the relationship between desire and the image of the female body, and in RUMBA, where a woman dances the well-known Cuban dance, wearing a red satin dress. As André Silveira wrote in Julião Sarmento, The Complete Film Works, “these are images that, through their framing, refer to the artist's paintings,” condensing within themselves the focus on women, sexuality, and objectification, the monochromatic wall as a blank canvas (which would be incorporated into his White Paintings two decades later), and the fusion between the body and the background.

These artists' motivations—as we have seen—are diverse, overlapping, and difficult to reduce to a single explanation. On the one hand, cinema could function as a space of escape—a world to which man, and in this case artists, could flee in their crises of boredom with established forms and discourses. On the other hand, there was the possibility that cinema, as a synthesis of the arts, could condense multiple creative potentialities. As Eisenstein argued, for sculpture, cinema would be a chain of plastic forms in transformation; for painting, not only the resolution of the problem of movement, but the emergence of a new graphic art, a continuous flow of mutable forms; for literature, the direct materialization of the desired image in audiovisual perceptions. This expanded concept helps to understand the attraction exerted by cinema. But it is above all the dynamism that takes hold of the image—movement as a spark of life—that becomes decisive. For work endowed with a kinetic rhythm never repeats itself and is one of the freest creations imaginable. Cinema thus emerges as a form that escapes closed systems and, without any promise of definitive truth, lives solely on beauty and the permanent reinvention of forms.

In addition to those already mentioned, Ângelo de Sousa, Artur Varela, Helena Almeida, Fernando Calhau, E. M. de Melo e Castro, Luís Noronha da Costa, and Vítor Pomar will also be featured. The complete program for Portuguese Experimental Cinema: The Cinema of Artists, 1960s and 1970s can be found on the Cinemateca Portuguesa website. Some of the films included in this cycle will be presented in new copies, recently digitized by the Cinemateca, but many will be shown in their original formats, namely Super 8, 8 mm, and 16 mm.

BIOGRAPHY

Maria Inês Mendes is is studying for a master's degree in Art Criticism and Curatorship at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon. In 2024, she completed her degree in Communication Sciences at NOVA University Lisbon. She has written about cinema on CINEblog, a page promoted by NOVA's Institute of Philosophy. She is currently responsible for UMBIGO online, where she publishes regularly, and collaborates with BEAST - International Film Festival.

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