In his cinematic portrait of Lisbon, Portuguese playwright and film director José Leitão de Barros (1896–1967) does not focus so much on its spaces and architecture but rather on its inhabitants involved in all kinds of activities. Or, as the opening credits state, it is a film showing “how people are born, how people live, and much more in … LISBON”—the name of the city getting larger while we see shots of trains at the station and while the camera scans the harbor. Including nine reels, the film’s ambitions are encyclopedic, taking us to an endless string of Lisbon places and institutions such as nurseries, schools, the navy, the army, offices, shops, markets, factories, sports grounds, parks, the beach at Cascais, and tourist sites such as the Belém Tower. In the context of his exploration of Lisbon’s urban landscape, Leitão de Barros portrays all kinds of professions and colorful characters such as street vendors, traffic cops, sailors, dockworkers, tram conductors, dandy-like strollers, shop girls, musicians, knife-grinders, washerwomen, beggars, and newspaper boys among others.
Several sequences are marked by an expository mode while others tend towards the poetic, and still others evoke the hustle and bustle of the city by means of a highly mobile camera, the use of multiple exposures, or remarkable viewpoints such as the high angle (or even vertical) shots from the famous Santa Justa Lift in the city center. Leitão de Barros’s favorite trick, though, is slow motion, which is used in sequences depicting children rope jumping or fighting, women carrying baskets, cavalrymen horse riding, and all kinds of sports, from fencing and tennis to athletics and soccer.
First and foremost, the film’s striking characteristic is its ambivalent position between documentary and fiction. Shot on location in June 1929, the film, as explicitly indicated in the opening credits, includes many scenes in which professional actors interpret dramatic situations that are staged for the benefit of the camera. However, there is no character development as the film’s structure is entirely episodic, moving from one “anecdotal” situation to the other. Many of these sketches are comical in nature such as the intersecting phone calls between two lovers and two business men, men touching a mannequin doll in a shop, a traffic cop seduced by a woman driving a car, a tram halted by a horse, a boy and an old women soliciting people for money, et cetera.
Steven Jacobs
further reading
Baptista, Tiago, “Documentário, modernismo e revista em ‘Lisboa, Crónica Anedótica’,” Doc On-line 6 (August 2009): 109–27.
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