Karl Martin

Gothic film in a monastery, where sensual monks murder the children they receive, with images of fantastic, painted from the author own painting and also from the Hammer films and the Saxon plastic tradition of romanticism.

This is one of Noronha da Costa's films in which the "fictional" component is most visible. D. Jaime or the Portuguese Night, like the rest of Noronha da Costa's films, is part of the gothic films (Terence Fisher's work was one of his great influences), and in it he shows the different variations around the "specular bodies", which evolve into luminous magic and into sensual and sensory incandescence. At the same time, we witness a series of ironic and erotic, or historical, views of wicked virgins and laughable sadists, all resurrected from German and British romanticism, while the scenery is no longer Portuguese.

A series of brief, evocative scenes capturing the life of a painter—his moments of inspiration, frustration, solitude, and fleeting triumphs. From the quiet ritual of preparing his brushes at dawn to the feverish strokes of creation at midnight.

Padres begins with a fabulous shot. Instead of two parents, we see two cats, one black and one white. Without exaggeration, one could say that these cats are the first "parents" of the film, happily fighting for food, one more aggressive, the other more passive. It turns out to be a brilliant association in "sacralizing" the animals and eroticizing them.

Evocation of the filmmaker, defined by João Bérnard da Costa as "a film about Murnau's ghost on the canvas, prolonging to paroxysm the game of doubles and the game of spectres".

The large translucent screen that dominates the film clearly shows Manuela de Freitas' body holding a candle, or rather a shadow (reflection) of that body and the dominant figure in the film, a variation of reflection, blurring, and shadow. This is a shadow theater for a cinema of reflections, from which other bodies emerge rhythmically, which in turn are reflections of souls. In this black and white, silent film, the bodies are the only materiality, and it is no coincidence that the film—a film about the body and soul of Manuela de Freitas—is titled Manuela.

Elusive portrait of a girl moving through a space that is both hers and not hers, where every gesture seems to be in search of something undefined.

The statues—solid, unmoving—become vessels of time, capturing the quiet tension between permanence and decay.

Layers of architecture fold into one another, shifting perspectives where walls breathe and structures seem to disintegrate into light.

The characters touch and separate, dance and stand still, fall asleep and wake up, animated by a game of reflections that lasts longer than ever. Among them are several paintings by Luís Noronha hanging on the walls, especially the famous representation of poor Lusíada floating on the raft with the green and white flag.

The boundaries between memory, dream, and reality blur, leaving only the sensation of something once known, now slipping away.