Manoel de Oliveira and Portuguese Cinema: 2. Liberdade! is the second part of a cycle of three exhibitions dedicated to the film-maker's extraordinary personal archive, which is housed in Serralves. Following on from the first exhibition, which focused on the director's film production during the Estado Novo (1930-1970) and was subtitled A Bem da Nação (For the Nation's Sake), this second stage focuses on the films made by Oliveira between 1970 and 1990, in line with the celebration of the 50th anniversary of 25 April 1974, under the slogan of Freedom. The previous exhibition presented the entire archive gathered by Oliveira, against the backdrop of a chronology of Portuguese cinema corresponding to the period covered by the exhibition. This second moment extends the chronological timeline by twenty years, inverting points of view in terms of listening to the documentary legacy, based on two fundamental concepts: anachronism and anti-archive.

The first of these synthesises the stance of Oliveira's work at the dawn of democracy, which manifests itself in the way the filmmaker placed himself "outside of time" in order to build, by contrast, a critical view of the world and of history (his own history, even). The second assumption, which stems from the previous one, is twofold. On the one hand, the freezing of a time is staged: an asphyxiating environment (as in Benilde or Virgem Mãe) that, although averse to the winds of change, didn't have enough strength to suffocate the Revolution, just as it didn't, afterwards, have the capacity to see the aesthetic revolution that Manoel de Oliveira unleashed with Amor de Perdição, nor to understand the questions that his work raised about the country's destiny. On the other hand, in contrast to the values of safeguarding and conservation that define the archive, we can ask ourselves if what is rejected (what is no longer useful, the old-fashioned junk or the obsolete spoils of a time) does not hold within itself a (frightening) identity, a ghostly ballast, a latent and chaotic power that confronts us with a memory of history that no selective and acoustically organised archive can restore.

Disrupting chronological linearity and intensifying the feeling that the present is made up of the confusing accumulation of multiple pasts - complementary, contradictory and unequal - these hypotheses propose a new look at Manoel de Oliveira's archive, adding to the backdrop of this exhibition and defining the dramaturgy of its installation.

Curated by António Preto and João Mário Grilo