Edgar Pêra

Edgar Pêra
Edgar Pêra, 4 April 2011, photo by Rudy Rucker
Born	(1960-11-19) 19 November 1960 Lisbon, Portugal
Nationality	Portuguese
Occupation	Film director

Edgar Henrique Clemente Pêra (born 19 November 1960) is a Portuguese filmmaker. Pêra is also a fine artist and a graphic comics artist .^[1][2] and writes fiction and cinema essays (PhD). Edgar Pêra studied Psychology, but switched to Film at the Portuguese National Conservatory, presently Lisbon Theatre and Film School (Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema).^[3] Aka Mr. Ego (scripts), Man-Kamera (image), Artur Cyanetto (sound).^[4] Edgar Pêra has auto-financed and produced many his own movies, or directed "auteur films" for cultural institutions. " If there has been in Portugal a filmmaker who has continuously filmed (apart from the well-known case, in the opposite direction, of Manoel de Oliveira), he is Edgar Pêra, as a consequence of his availability and insistence on doing so regardless of the perennial problems of juries and public subsidies. But it is also a consequence of his adaptation to light technologies, he and his camera, constituting symbiotically an "Ego" that is really making its own film-diaries". (Augusto M. Seabra)^[5][6] Pêra started as a screenwriter but in 1985 bought a camera, inspired by Dziga Vertov, and never stopped shooting on a dially basis. "Pêra has a penchant for odd, eccentric, obscure and sometimes twisted humor. His unique touches include an arthouse, avant-garde approach somehow combining retro and avant-garde modernities.” (The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre)^[7]

For some critics he is considered “the most persistently individualistic Portuguese filmmaker”.^[8] Edgar Pêra has done more than one hundred films for cinema, TV, theatre dance, cine-concerts, galleries, internet and other media. The first phase of Edgar Pêra’s work started in 1984, shooting Portuguese rock bands in a neuro-punk style. Pêra’s first film was shot in 1988 in the Ruins of Chiado, a neighborhood in the center of Lisbon that suffered a major fire that year. In 1990 Reproduta Interdita was shown at the Portuguese Horror Film Festival, Fantasporto.^[9] In 1991 he directs A Cidade de Cassiano /The City of Cassiano, a film about the Portuguese modernist architect Cassiano Branco (Grand Prix Festival Films D'Architecture Bordeaux). After this consensual film, Pêra goes into another direction, making more radical movies.

After O Trabalho Liberta?/Arbeitch Macht Frei? and SWK4 - The Parallel Universes of Almada Negreiros, Pêra directs his first fiction feature in 1994, Manual de Evasão LX 94/Manual of Evasion (for Lisbon 1994 Capital of Culture), articulating an aesthetic legacy of soviet construtivist silent films, with what the filmmaker called "a neuro-punk way of creating and capturing instantaneous reality". Many years after its release, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre wrote that Manual of Evasion is a "Portuguese thought-provoking experimental movie with a great potential for cult status." Pêra invited three major counterculture American writers: Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Rudy Rucker and asked them about the nature of time. Manual of Evasion LX94 was received in Portugal with very strong criticism, both for and against the movie.

In 1996 he founded, with the "elementaristic" writer Manuel Rodrigues, Akademia Luzoh-Galaktica, a trans-media working space. During that time he produces and directs several films made with students and takes four years to edit the feature, A Janela (Maryalva Mix)/The Window (Don Juan Mix), premiered at the Locarno Festival in 2001.

From then there’s change in Pêra’s work, inflecting towards a more emotional cinema, but keeping the emphasis in non-realist aesthetics and eccentric humor. In 2006 Edgar Pêra has a retrospective at the Indie Lisboa winning awards in every category of the festival for a more consensual film: Movimentos Perpétuos/Perpetual Movements,^[10] a cine-tribute to legendary Portuguese guitar composer and player Carlos Paredes. In Paris he wins the Pasolini Award for his career, along with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fernando Arrabal. Critic and programmer Olaf Möller wrote that'"Pêra is too different from everything which we regard as ‘correct’, ‘valid’ within the culture of film, ‘realistic’ in a cinematic, socio-political way. Put more precisely: Edgar Pêra is different from everything that we know about Portugal” ^[11][12]

O Barão/The Baron, an adaptation of Branquinho da Fonseca's short story, premiered in 2011 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.^[13] * Sight and Sound Critic Jonathan Romney wrote that "Its atmosphere and style are foremost in a melange which variously echoes Welles, James Whale, Cocteau, Hammer and (inevitably) Edward D. Wood Jr.".^[14]

Over the past five years Pêra has been assembling his personal archives and made documentaries about Madredeus and other artists.

In 2011 he started to work intensively in the 3D format. His most controversial film yet, Cinesapiens is a segment of 3X3D, an anthology 3D feature with 2 other films by Jean-Luc Godard and Peter Greenaway, premiered at the closing night of La Semaine de la Critique of the Cannes Film festival.^[15]

In 2014 Pêra directed two 3D films, Stillness and Lisbon Revisited. Stillness, premiered at the Oberhausen Film Festival and also a polemical movie: it was considered "astonishingly offensive" (Filmmaker Magazine).,^[16] Lisbon Revisited, with words by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, was premiered at the Locarno Festival, in Switzerland. Pêra premieres, also in 2014, the pop comedy feature Virados do Avesso/Turned Inside Out - his first commercial success in Portugal (120.000 spectators). In 2015 he made the 3D short A Caverna/ The Cavern, a film about a bunch of spectators trapped in a cinema theatre. O Espectador Espantado/The Amazed Spectator, a kino-investigation about spectatorship. premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival, 2016. His latest 3D film was Delirium in Las Vedras, about the portuguese Carnival in Torres Vedras. In 2018, O Homem-Pykante Diálogos Kom Pimenta, about the poet Alberto Pimenta, premiered at IndieLisboa Caminhos Magnéticos/Magnethick Pathways, starring Dominique Pinon and Ney Matogrosso, will premiere this summer.

Filmography

Criticism and Praise

• "The montage is as relentless as the guitarist’s finger-work, the footage as compelling as the music is poignant.”, The Barbican (a multi-art organization) on Perpetual Movements^[17]
• "Cartoonishly weird comedy", The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre on The Window (Don Juan Mix)^[18]

"the find here is lesser known Portuguese director Pêra’s weird and wacky whirlwind of a film; a sharply astute indictment of mainstream cinema and culture."(Arun Sharma about Cinesapiens and 3X3D) ^[19]

"Cinesapiens, keeps audiences guessing right to the final frame, ending with a surreal and haunting scene experience." ^[20] Cinesapiens: "pure visual chaos"^[21]

See also

• Cinema of Portugal

References

External links

• Edgar Pêra's channel on YouTube
• Allmovie
• Edgar Pêra on IMDb
• World Wide Video Festival Biography
• edgar pêra filmzz: cine-diáryos de edgar pêra cine-arkives
• Kino-News

Bibliography