Manoel de Oliveira, Pensive Filmmaker Who Made Up for Lost Time, Dies at 106

Manoel de Oliveira, the acclaimed Portuguese filmmaker whose career began in the silent era, flowered in the 1970s with the end of authoritarian rule in his country and ended with a surge of productivity extending into his 11th decade, died on Thursday at his home in Oporto, Portugal. He was 106.

His death was announced by the City Council of Oporto.

For much of the past 25 years Mr. Oliveira was known among cinephiles as the world’s oldest active filmmaker. Unable to work for decades under the repressive right-wing government of António de Oliveira Salazar, who came to power in 1932, Mr. Oliveira started making up for lost time in his 60s, at an age when most directors are entering their creative twilight.

Almost as old as cinema itself, Mr. Oliveira often seemed like a filmmaker out of time, or perhaps of many times, a 20th-century modernist drawn to the themes and traditions of earlier eras. He was known for ruminative, melancholic, often eccentric movies about grand subjects like the nature of love and the ever-present specter of death.

Mr. Oliveira, center, directing the 1985 movie “The Satin Slipper,” a seven-hour period film.CreditCannon International, via Photofest

Critics noted that his age, combined with his belated coming-of-age as an artist, granted him a certain freedom. Reviewing his 1998 movie “Inquiétude,” the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma said of Mr. Oliveira, “He is sovereign, free, unique, perched high on a tightrope no one else can reach, defying the laws of gravity and above all the rules of cinematic decorum and commerce.”

Manoel Cândido Pinto de Oliveira was born on Dec. 11, 1908, in Oporto. His father was an industrialist who owned a dry-goods factory and later built a hydroelectric plant. Mr. Oliveira dropped out of college and, before turning to filmmaking, compiled an impressive résumé as an athlete. He was a pole-vaulter, diver and racecar driver and even briefly performed in a trapeze act.

He entered the film world in the late 1920s as a bit-part actor. The first film he directed, “Douro, Working River” (1931), was a short silent documentary about the riverside bustle in his hometown.

After a number of other short documentaries, he made his first feature, “Aniki-Bóbó” (1942), a children’s parable often considered a precursor of neorealism, then struggled for decades to get projects approved by the government-run film commission.

During that time, Mr. Oliveira operated a farm and vineyard that his wife, Maria Isabel, had inherited. He would come to regard this forced absence from filmmaking as an important incubation period. “I had time for a long and profound reflection about the artistic nature of cinema,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2008.

Between 1931 and 1970, Mr. Oliveira made only two features and a handful of shorts. But as the Salazar regime entered its final days — it was overthrown in 1974 — he wasted no time putting his long-gestating ideas into practice.

Mr. Oliveira became a pre-eminent auteur among European critics with a series of films made between 1971 and 1981 — “The Past and the Present,” “Benilde or the Virgin Mother,” “Doomed Love” and “Francisca” — that came to be known as his “tetralogy of frustrated love.” Set in different periods (from the early 19th century to the 1970s), based on plays or novels, all deal with obsessive passions that are inevitably thwarted by external forces.

All four of those films, and a vast majority of Mr. Oliveira’s oeuvre, were based on literary or theatrical texts. Two of his favorite sources were contemporary Portuguese writers, Agustina Bessa-Luís and José Régio. Among the classics he adapted or excerpted were works by Flaubert, Beckett, Ionesco, Dostoyevsky, Paul Claudel, Madame de Lafayette and Camilo Castelo Branco.

Mr. Oliveira’s fondness for aristocratic settings, grand philosophical themes and long, faithful literary adaptations — “The Satin Slipper” (1985), based on an epic Claudel play, runs seven hours — earned him a reputation as a high-culture mandarin.

But there was also a perverse plainness to his method. He developed a cinema of long takes and static tableaus, an aesthetic so elemental it verged on the primitive. He extended this stripped-down approach to the acting. He cultivated a stable of actors — among them Luís Miguel Cintra, Leonor Silveira and his grandson Ricardo Trepa — who typically delivered their lines with minimal expressiveness, sometimes blankly facing the camera.

Mr. Oliveira said his goal was simplicity, a directness meant to focus the senses. “I search for clarity in my films so that deeper thoughts may be more easily perceived,” he said in 2008.

The final phase of Mr. Oliveira’s career was also his most prolific. From 1990 to 2010 he made a feature almost every year. This remarkable rate was a testament not just to his vitality but also to the resourcefulness of the producer Paulo Branco, who worked with Mr. Oliveira on 21 features and often secured financing through partnerships with French and Spanish companies.

In the 1990s, Mr. Oliveira’s international profile received a lift when he started making films in French and supplementing his repertory of Portuguese stars with bigger art-house draws like Catherine Deneuve, Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli and John Malkovich. “The Convent” (1995), a theological mystery in French, English and Portuguese starring Ms. Deneuve and Mr. Malkovich, was his first film to be released in the United States.

In his later years, Mr. Oliveira became increasingly preoccupied with history, and in particular with the rise and fall of the Portuguese empire. This theme surfaced, with varying degrees of directness, in films like “Word and Utopia” (2000), “The Fifth Empire” (2004) and “Christopher Columbus — the Enigma” (2007). The most ambitious of these “ ‘Non,’ or the Vain Glory of Command” (1990), recounts a wide swath of Portuguese history by flashing back to the empire’s bloody conquests and defeats.

Mr. Oliveira also dwelled more on personal history in his autumnal phase. Mortality loomed large; several of his films featured elderly protagonists that were clearly meant to be surrogate figures. In “Voyage to the Beginning of the World” (1997) Mr. Mastroianni (in his final role) played a filmmaker named Manoel. In “I’m Going Home” (2001), Mr. Piccoli played an actor steeling himself for an old age without his loved ones.

But for all the wistfulness and serenity that characterized his late style, there was also sometimes despair, as in “A Talking Picture” (2003), a history lesson that culminates in an apocalyptic prognosis for Western civilization.

Mr. Oliveira started receiving lifetime achievement awards after he reached his late 70s — from the Venice Film Festival in 1985 and the Locarno Film Festival in 1991. These honors would come to seem premature, as he showed no signs of slowing down. (Venice presented him with another lifetime award in 2004.)

There was renewed interest in Mr. Oliveira’s work when he turned 100, not least because he was the only major filmmaker in the history of the medium alive and working in his centennial year. Repertory houses around the world mounted retrospectives of his films in 2008, and that year he was awarded a Palme d’Or for his body of work at the Cannes Film Festival.

In 2010, the year he turned 102, he fulfilled a longtime ambition by making “The Strange Case of Angelica,” based on a script he wrote in 1952 and initially intended as a portrait of melancholy and anxiety in the aftermath of World War II. The updated film, a limpid ghost story about a dead bride who comes to life before a young photographer’s camera, touches on 21st-century concerns like climate change and global financial crisis. It turned out to be one of Mr. Oliveira’s most well-reviewed movies.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Oliveira is survived by two sons, Manuel Casimiro and José Manuel; a daughter, Adelaide Maria; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Mr. Oliveira continued to make films almost to the end. Between 2010 and 2014 he directed a number of shorts, as well as segments in two multidirector anthologies and a feature, “Gebo and the Shadow” (2012), with a cast including Claudia Cardinale and Jeanne Moreau. Reviewing that movie for The Times, A. O. Scott called it “an intriguing minor composition by a shrewd and skillful master of the art.”

There is also one film by Mr. Oliveira still to be released.

His “Visit, or Memories and Confessions” was made in 1982. It is said to be about a house where he used to live. Mr. Oliveira stipulated that because of its personal nature, it could be shown publicly only after his death.

CREDIT: DENNIS LIM for New York Times