António Reis (1927-1991) is revered in his native Portugal as a visionary artist whose films exerted an immeasurable influence over the post-Salazar rebirth of Portuguese cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. Born in Oporto, Reis found renown first as a poet before meeting the great Manoel de Oliveira, who invited Reis to be assistant director on the radical masterpiece Rite of Spring.
Their pioneering mode of poetic ethnographic cinema guided the course of the four extraordinary works Reis co-directed with his wife, the psychiatrist Margarida Cordeiro (b. 1939), culminating in Trás-os-Montes, a lyrical search for the very “soul” of Portuguese culture and history in the myths and peasant folklore embodied in Portugal’s remote far-north region.
Admired by the likes of Joris Ivens, Jean Rouch, and Jean-Marie Straub, the films of Reis and Cordeiro invented a hypnotically cinematographic film language, a style and sensibility that set the course of Portugal’s lasting tradition of radical cinema. Yet equally important was Reis’s career and legacy as a long-time senior professor of film production and aesthetics at Lisbon’s Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema. (Harvard Film Archive)
