The School of Reis: The films and legacy of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro. António Reis (1927-1991) is revered in his native Portugal as a visionary artist whose films and many years as a beloved teacher and mentor exerted an immeasurable influence over the post-Salazar rebirth of Portuguese cinema and the new generation of filmmakers that emerged in the 1980s and 90s.

Born in Oporto, Reis found renown first as a poet before making a series of documentary shorts that attracted the attention of Manoel de Oliveira who invited Reis to be assistant director on Oliveira’s first radical masterpiece, RITE OF SPRING. The pioneering mode of poetic ethnographic cinema which Oliveira and Reis defined guided the course of the four extraordinary works Reis co-directed with his wife, the psychologist Margarida Cordeiro.

The films of Reis and Cordeiro invented a poetically liberated and hypnotically cinematographic film language, a style and sensibility that set the course of Portugal’s lasting tradition of radical cinema, exerting a formative influence, for example, upon João Cesar Monteiro. Yet equally important was Reis’ career and legacy as a longtime senior professor of film production and aesthetics at Lisbon’s Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema. This retrospective includes a selection of works by Reis’s students including Pedro Costa, João Pedro Rodrigues, and Joaquim Saphino. 

Introduction written by Haden Guest, Director of the Harvard Film Archive.

Special thanks to Haden Guest (Harvard Film Archive); Pedro Fernandes Duarte (Rosa Filmes); Alexandra Pinho (Instituto Camões); Paulo Cunha Alves, Consul General of Portugal in Boston; José Manuel de Costa & Luis Miguel Oliveira (Cinemateca Portuguesa); João Pedro Rodrigues; Pedro Costa; Ana Conboy & Sofia Soares (Boston College), and Rui Boavista Marques (Portuguese Trade and Investment Office).

Film prints are courtesy of the Cinemateca Portuguesa.

Screenings
Friday, June 22nd until Thursday, June 28th

Contact
Jed Rapfogel, Film Programmer
jed@anthologyfilmarchives.org

Tickets (info)
$9 general, $7 students/seniors
$6 Anthology Film Archives members