There are images that seem to want to stop time. Originally written and conceived in the late 1940s, but only made more than half a century later, The Strange Case of Angélica (2010) tells the story of how a photograph of a dead woman becomes, for Isaac, a disturbing presence - somewhere between desire and death. This unsettling relationship between the image and what is no longer alive lies at the heart of Susana Viegas’s commentary on the film.
“Tempo, detém-te!” (“Time, Stop!”) is also the title of Viegas’s text in the fourth catalogue, Manoel de Oliveira and Portuguese Cinema 4: Yesterday as Today. As she writes: “At the end of THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGÉLICA, time does not stop. What stops is the image, or, more precisely, its illusion of presence. And it is precisely in this immobility that death becomes visible - not as an absolute end, but as that which inhabits every attempt to fix the living.”
Join us on 7 October at 5 pm at Casa do Cinema | Fundação de Serralves, Porto, for a screening of the film, presented by Susana Viegas.
More on the event here. You can purchase your ticket here.
📷 O Estranho Caso de Angélica [2010] by Manoel de Oliveira
