The Luso World Cinema Blogathon started on the anniversary of an important day for Portuguese film history. On November 12, 1896, Portugal joined the cinematic world when a native made film screened to the public for the first time. Only a mere five months before, movies had been introduced to the country, but they were foreign made. One short film, a minute long, brought Portugal into the new media age. That movie was
SAÍDA DO PESSOAL OPERÁRIO DA FÁBRICA CONFIANÇA / WORKERS EXIT FROM THE CONFIANÇA SHIRT FACTORY (1896).
Its director Aurélio da Paz dos Reis worked as a florist in Porto, Portugal, but amateur photography was his passion. “He liked to take pictures of people, family, friends, theater people, he was also a street photographer.” He specialized in stereoscopic photographs and eventually established Estereoscópico Portuguez as a publishing house for them. Besides flowers, he sold his photographs, stereoviewers, Lumière & Jougla film, cameras, and Yast typewriters in his shop Flora Portuense.
When Edwin Rousby introduced Portugal to moving pictures with his touring Theatrograph shows in the summer of 1896, Paz dos Reis attended and soon attempted to buy his own apparatus. He travelled to Paris to buy a Cinematograph from the Lumière Brothers, but they were making films, not selling equipment. He ultimately bought a De Bedts Kinématographe with funding provided by his friend António da Silva Cunha, a Porto industrialist.
Like many of the earliest filmmakers, Paz dos Reis began filming scenes of every day life around him. His actuality shorts fall into the genre of documentary, but unlike contemporary documentaries, Paz dos Reis did not structure his films. There are no edits during the course of his films. Each short unfolds as an accurate depiction of the moment captured.
On November 12, 1896, Paz dos Reis presented his movies to the public for the first time at Porto’s Teatro-Circo Príncipe Real (now known as Teatro Sá da Bandeira). An advertising poster referred to them as “animated scenes”. Paz dos Reis screened four films, including O VIRA / THE VIRA (a dance style), FEIRA DE GADO NA CORUJEIRA / CATTLE FAIR AT CORUJEIRA, and NO JARDIM / AT THE GARDEN. All three followed SAÍDA DO PESSOAL OPERÁRIO DA FÁBRICA CONFIANÇA on the program, earning it the distinction of being the first Portuguese made film to be exhibited ever.
SAÍDA DO PESSOAL OPERÁRIO DA FÁBRICA CONFIANÇA was obviously inspired by LA SORTIE DE L’USINE LUMIÈRE À LYON / EMPLOYEES LEAVING THE LUMIÈRE FACTORY (1895). Both shorts feature a static camera filming workers exiting their respective factories. The majority of them are women. None of these people likely imagined this aspect of their daily lives being immortalized. The Lumière film was an honoring of their employees and an advertisement of sorts for their factory, and the Paz dos Reis’s film honored investor Silva Cunha by recording his factory.
Propelled by his success, Paz dos Reis made more shorts and exhibited them in Portugal and Brazil. He ultimately made a known thirty-six films in his first year of filmmaking, but only four are believed to survive. He never graduated to narrative film. On January 15, 1897, technical problems ruined a Brazilian screening, and an embarrassed Paz dos Reis retired from filmmaking and resumed his photographic studies. Despite such a short film career, he is remembered as the first Portuguese filmmaker thanks to SAÍDA DO PESSOAL OPERÁRIO DA FÁBRICA CONFIANÇA.
Sources (In Addition to Above Wikipedia Links)
“Centro Português De Fotografia.” DigitArq, https://digitarq.cpf.arquivos.pt/details?id=39146.
“Ficha.” Cinemateca Portuguesa, http://www.cinemateca.pt/Cinemateca-Digital/Ficha.aspx?obraid=905&type=Video.
Edited by Stephen Herbert and Luke McKearn, Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema, https://www.victorian-cinema.net/reis.
Martins Ferreira, J. M. “Portuguese Stereographers / Publishers – Aurélio Da Paz Dos Reis.” Antique Stereoviews of Portugal, 2003, https://web.fe.up.pt/~jmf/stereo/pt/ptapr/ptapr-info.htm.
Medeiros, Margarida, et al. Photography and Cinema: 50 Years of Chris Markers La jetée. Cambridge Scholars P., 2015.
“Teatro Sá Da Bandeira.” Comércio Com História, https://www.comerciocomhistoria.gov.pt/en/listings/teatro-sa-da-bandeira-3479/.
This post is part of the Luso World Cinema Blogathon!
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That was fascinating! Even more curious is that the last Portuguese film I watched is also about a factory: it’s called The Nothing Factory and it has musical numbers!
This blogathon was awesome. I hope we can repeat it next year!