Available to stream from 16 to 18 August 2024 at https://stummfilmtage.culturebase.org
Documentary-like footage and avant-garde techniques are combined here in a striking manner to tell the fictional tale of the inhabitants of a Portuguese fishing village (the majority of whom are played by local amateur actors). For good reason, MARIA DO MAR is considered one of the best Portuguese silent films and seems to anticipate later trends such as Italian neorealism. In 2021, the Cinemateca Portuguesa digitally restored the film as part of an EEA-funded project to digitise films about the sea.
The ideological foundations of Salazarism were rooted in the idea that society was the reproduction of nature in the realm of human relations. The popularity of “natural cinema” – films about village life – in the 1930s and 1940s was simultaneously a symptom and a consequence of the emphasis placed by the [Salazar] regime on “living naturally”. This expression could serve as a complement to “living habitually”, which was Salazar’s wish for the country. On the one hand, the number of movies on this topic shows that the intellectual climate was favorable to this narrative genre. On the other hand, several of these projects were the result of direct support from the state.
Patricia Vieira: Portuguese Film, 1930-1960. The Staging of the New State Regime. New York, London 2013
Leitão de Barros called MARIA DO MAR “adramatized documentary of the lives of the fisherman of Nazaré”. In my opinion, MARIA DO MAR is a lot more than that. At the time it was made, it was one of the most accomplished examples of the documentary approach to dramatic and lyrical fiction, using both fiction and documentary to create a microcosmos in which the great human passions unfold, unfettered by considerations of plot. Barros achieved this via a mise en scène which is a supremely powerful and singular synthesis of German expressive realism, Soviet conceptualism and the American cult of the actor. And he achieved it by the simultaneous juxtaposition and estrangement of all these influences in a setting as sui generis, and in the last analysis as Portuguese, as Nazaré. In this lies its greatest achievement and its greatest impact.
This is why MARIA DO MAR occupies a unique and enduring place in the history of Portuguese cinema as one of its best-kept secrets and most visible miracles.
João Bénard da Costa, Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema, March 2000
