Restor(y)ing Meaning: Reading Manoel de Oliveira’s Non ou a Vã Glória de Mandar

Abstract Manoel de Oliveira’s is a landmark in Lusophone Cinema’s revisitation of the history of Portuguese expansion and colonial conflicts. This article aims at analyzing the film’s political import by extrapolating from Jacques Rancière’s meditation on the ‘aesthetic regime’ and from Manoel de Oliveira’s references to Derridean deconstruction. Non ou a Vã Glória de Mandar and Oliveira’s filming praxis both exceed and disrupt the filmmaker’s personal logocentric and teleological theories of history and cinema.

now classic Um Adeus Português, by João Botelho. Four years later, Manoel de Oliveira addressed the theme again in Non ou a Vã Glória de Mandar (Non). The comprehensive historical revisitation which the film sets forth cannot be said to accompany the endeavours undertaken in literature and art when calling into question Portuguese imperial mythology. The historian Carlos Fabião, when questioned about the vision of the past presented in the film, claims that it has ended up, paradoxically, reiterating the Estado Novo discourse through the historical narratives introduced by the main character of the film, Alferes Cabrita (Fabião et al., 1991: 172).
As vulnerable as the film may be to such criticism, I believe that the real critical concern is not the reiteration of this historical discourse, denied and repudiated from the start via the formula of the 'pedagogia das derrotas' (Fabião et al., 1991: 173). In fact, the Comissão Nacional dos Descobrimentos (officially responsible for celebrating the discoveries, and the producer of official discourse on the matter during the 1980s and 1990s) went as far as to condemn the film's defeatist vision (172). One should rather be wary of the rehabilitation of a 'tempo português' which preserves and continues a mythical identity and that precedes and outlasts its specific formulation under the Estado Novo regime (Lourenço, 2004: 108). What is of concern in the film is the presentation of a historical vision which, by ignoring historical tensions and contradictions, harmonizes differences by, as Richard Rorty would term it, 'going transcendental' (Norris, 1985: 10).
By juxtaposing the analysis of the film with Oliveira's interviews, the film will be read taking into account the (claimed) shift in perception originated by the Carnation Revolution (25 April 1974) without which it could not be conceptualized. The cinematographer's transcendental view of the event as 'inaugurating a new status in the History of the world' (Oliveira, 2001: n.p.) does not 'deconstruct' (to use Bethencourt's term) imperial discourse nor does it inscribe an alternative historical narrative. On the contrary: it is consistent with the mythologizing of the Revolution (and decolonization) (Lourenço, 2000: 48-62) and it depoliticizes the Revolution and neutralizes the event as yet another 'dádiva' of the Portuguese to the world, inscribing it within a teleological view of Portuguese expansion, with a 'sentido último que tudo explica', as Lieutenant Cabrita repeatedly puts it. This analysis, however, will attempt to demonstrate how Oliveira's cinematic practice contradicts his teleological and logocentric vision of history and thus renders accessible to the spectator aesthetically and politically affirmative readings. The spectator thus exploits rather than falls victim to the constrained vision of history being represented, operating on selection and exclusion.
In the context of Manoel de Oliveira's work, 1990 is a turning point, since it is the start of the most productive period of his career; Oliveira has made at least one film per year since then. Non was exhibited in the Cannes Film Festival, giving continuity to the process of internationalization, which the period encompassing the longlasting partnership with producer Paulo Branco, from Francisca (1981) to O Quinto Império (2004), consolidated (Johnson, 2007: 39). Non is also a landmark, in that it sees the filmmaker approach Portuguese history and historical figures per se for the first time. It inaugurates a trademark Oliveirian addressing of a teleological reimagining, not only of Portugal, but also, through Portuguese history and figures, of the world. Non ou a Vã Glória de mandar anticipates both the extensive discussions on conflict, war, and the possibilities for peace and harmony between civilizations and peoples which are to come in the next films. It also provides an initial addressing of relevant Portuguese historical events and figures such as António Vieira (1608-97) and D. Sebastião , in this case in articulation with a Portuguese literary and prophetic tradition explicit in the references and the enacting of episodes from the national text par excellence, the epic poem Os Lusíadas (1572), by Luís de Camões (c. 1524-80).
Non considers the fate and destiny of Portugal using the Colonial Wars (1961-74) waged between Portugal and the nations under Portuguese colonial rule aspiring to self-determination, as a backdrop. It could be said that this places the filmmaker's work and Portuguese society on the same wavelength (although in very Oliveirian terms, as in 1990 Portuguese society was still reflecting on the passage of Portugal from an imperial nation famously 'orgulhosamente só' to a member of the European Economic Community). After all, Oliveira had a reputation for alienating his films from the surrounding socio-political context. The release of Benilde ou a Virgem Mãe (1975) adapted from a 1947 play by José Régio had brought criticism on Manoel de Oliveira for a lack of political engagement (Johnson, 2007: 33) and the adaptation of Camilo Castelo Branco's book Amor de Perdição (1978) had given rise to a cultural witch-hunt (Lopes, 2001: 68).

A new start, a new end
He visto que las cosas cuando buscan su curso encuentran su vacío. (García Lorca, 2008: 8, '1910 Thus wrote Federico García Lorca in New York, more or less around the time that the young Oliveira (now the oldest active filmmaker in the world) was filming and editing his groundbreaking debut film Douro, Faina Fluvial, released in 1931. This reference aims to draw attention to the longevity of a uniquely prolific career, the vitality of which is certified by a consistently high-quality output which has slowly but surely gained widespread critical recognition and international acclaim. Oliveira's career itself underwent a similarly slow rise. Its first phase is marked by long intervals between films, mostly documentaries, with a resurgence in the years just before the Carnation Revolution (the so-called 'Primavera Marcellista', from 1968 to 1974). Oliveira could then film more frequently without the political constraints of the conservative and reactionary regime of the Estado Novo. I have also begun with a reference to a poem because this essay further departs from the ways in which Oliveira has been perceived as one of the masters of transposing the word onto the screen, of bringing words into presence conveying philosophic ideals and a meaning behind and beyond. Oliveira's ontological view of cinema as a synthesis of all other arts may have played a part in this, as cinema is, as the director puts it, the only art which simulates real life and provides a memory 'histórica ou ficcional' which 'repõe as coisas como se fôra a própria vida' (Oliveira in Cakoff, 2005: 57). Writing provides the function of intelligibility while the image provides, as Jacques Rancière would put it, the flesh to thought and a means to eidos (2007: 46). Oliveira claims in the same interview to Leon Cakoff that: nada há com maior riqueza para a tradução de um pensamento ou de um sentimento do que a linguagem escrita, porque não havendo imagem direta (sempre limitada e circunscrita àquilo que se vê), a imagem que a palavra guarda é cativa da letra e sugerida ao pensamento. (Cakoff, 2005: 58) The filmmaker's meditations on cinema as an audiovisual means to register theatre (Lopes, 2001: 67;Costa, 2005: 119) and on palavra visual, after Peter von Bagh had written on the extraordinary capacity of his films to read literature cinematographically (Costa, 2005: 153), have led his work to be seen as 'filmed theatre', where the word takes centre stage. In the case of Non, which is presented by Oliveira in a testimony in the DVD edition of the film (Oliveira, 2001: n.p.) as the negative (but no less metaphysically infused) supplement to the expansionist enthusiasm of Os Lusíadas, this has led the film to be described, significantly, as an Apocalypse Now of philosophical ideas. Non 'makes flesh' and 'gives substance' (Rancière, 2007: 45-46) to conflicts and defeats, to the particular literary references which are extracted and enacted: the episode of the Island of Love and the quotations from the Old Man of Restelo in Os Lusíadas; the extract of António Vieira's sermon, which becomes the Non monologue when anachronistically inserted after the battle of Alcácer-Quibir (Ksar el Kebir) (1578). After all, as Oliveira would say, quoting Aristotle, 'Não se pode pensar sem uma imagem'; or, when reflecting about film and being, 'através do que se vê, há o que não se vê' (Oliveira in Cakoff, 2005: 71).
The title Non ou a Vã Glória de Mandar is a juxtaposition of references to part of a sermon by Padre António Vieira, extracted from the Sermão da Terceira Quartafeira da Quaresma (pregado na Capela Real, no ano de 1670) and to a verse in Os Lusíadas ('Ó Glória de mandar, ó vã cobiça'). The idea for the film, a major European co-production between Madragoa Filmes (Portugal), Tornasol Films (Spain), Gémini Films, and SGCC Films (France) (Johnson, 2007: 165), originated in 1976 as a response to the Carnation Revolution and the process of decolonization, and it ambitiously aimed at a negative history of Portugal. As soldiers embark on a voyage through the African continent, fighting for the control of African colonies, they reminisce, guided by the discourse of their officer, a History graduate, on the several obstacles (nons) that Portugal encountered when in the course of its history it attempted to expand unreasonably and against its due and proper course. The film acts as a historical and metaphysical reflection upon the colonial experience and expansion, in opposition to the glorious maritime expansion, the mythology of which is left untouched. As the following section will explore, the contentment with the film providing meaning by constantly reiterating the presence of an ultimate truth shrouded in mystery beyond current conflicts disguises the ways in which an imperial nostalgia endures through the film, albeit reformulated as a spiritual experience of sorts. In the first dialogue between characters, when discussing the violence carried out by the different parts in the conflicts in Africa, Cabrita intervenes after a soldier mentions the genocide perpetrated by white colonizers: 'Está bem! Quer dizer, está mal . . . É o lado mau do Homem. Não há nada a fazer, quando é assim, são piores que feras'. Cabrita then supports another soldier's claim that Portuguese colonialism 'quebrou o ódio entre as diferentes tribos' and opened up 'perspectivas para a criação de uma pátria, ou estado multirracial' by emphasizing the important role of the Portuguese language in the process.
As a spectator, one need not accept this erasure of history, politics, and conflict, however tempting and ideologically neutral this sublimation may appear in this confrontation of perspectives which leads to consensus. One need not accept the binary opposition and clear separation where the utopia of world domination provides a fruitful drive for Humankind and the 'dádiva' of discoveries make up for the atrocities of colonialism and territorial expansionism. It could be argued that, whilst Non does not glorify war, it nonetheless presents a dignified view of it, mostly through the legitimizing discourse of Alferes Cabrita, as he narrates several episodes in Portuguese history. Many of these episodes are but common 'tableaux' of Portuguese heroism (Fabião et al., 1991: 173), which would not look out of place in a New State history manual. The same actors navigate through space and time in the guise of different historical characters who testify to the bravery and nobility of a glorious few no matter what terrible fate awaited them given the ever-present ambition and greed. In one of the dialogues, Cabrita reinforces Portuguese colonial exceptionalism, somehow lending credibility to the throwaway remark that is made by soldiers that 'Isto não é o Vietname!': Não é o que conquistamos ou dominamos que vai ficar. Isso se esbaterá com o tempo, como vai acontecer ou aconteceu já a outros impérios, por maiores que fossem ou sejam. Mas o que é dádiva, o que, por exemplo, os portugueses trouxeram com os descobrimentos, dando ao mundo novos mundos, novas gentes, novos mares e novos céus, isso ficará.
According to Oliveira, it is Non's focus on the 'dádiva', rather than on conquests, which lends the film a revisionist focus (Oliveira, 2001: n.p.). Oliveira repeats in an interview of 2008 the Eurocentric commonplaces that Jacques Derrida analysed in the same year that Non was released, in L'Autre Cap [The Other Heading]. The Western cape of Europe as a vanguard of innovation and discovery inseminating the rest of the world (Derrida, 1992: 19-20, 24-25) is a strong reminder that universalism is the strongest ipseity. This interview also highlights the luso-tropicalist 1 echoes of the cinematographer's considerations regarding how Iberians, through discoveries, did 'in practice' what further north in Europe 'the humanists did in theory' (Gardnier, 2007: 158, 159): The people from the Iberian Peninsula discovered new people, new parts of the world. The explorers did not want to dominate; it was not an act of conquest but an act of giving life, bringing these people into the rest of the world. Even Captain Albuquerque would invite his sailors to marry with the natives, with people of other races, other colors. (Rapfogel, 2008: n.p.) History is a lesson, and one to be taught by the accredited Historian (Alferes Cabrita) and to be learnt by the soldiers, and the viewers. 2 A historical lesson which 1 See Luís Madureira for a concise criticism of luso-tropicalism and its ideological appropriation by the Estado Novo (2006b: 138-45); Hilary Owen's recent (though still unpublished) work, presenting an intricate analysis of the episode of the Island of Love in Non, teasing out the sexualized imagining of the nation is an insightful contribution. For a reading which associates the episode in The Lusiads to Gilberto Freyre's theory, see Anna Klobucka (2002). 2 Although there are many voices and many distinct opinions put forward in the dialogues by the soldiers, it is easy to subsume it all under the references to the 'truth' which an 'ultimate meaning' will render accessible. Alferes Cabrita presents not a but the historical vision (Fabião et al., 1991: 173); Rui Ramos confirms the role of Cabrita as a History teacher in uniform, highlighting the characters' plausible indoctrination by the regime's propaganda (Fabião et al., 1991: 173). is certainly open to criticism for partaking in what Christopher L. Miller terms an 'Africanist discourse' (Blackmore, 2009: 14), where Africa is but a blank space and slate on which to project past and/or future utopias. It is a lesson about the end of empire and a new beginning: Sebastian and Cabrita both represent the end of an era: Sebastian the end of Portugal's period of conquest in the name of Christ (thus the bloody, inverted sword), Cabrita the end of modern Portuguese colonialism. The Revolution of 1974 dramatically brings the latter to a close and points towards a different future. (Johnson, 2007: 69) A different future, but a future already conditioned inevitably by the projection of a present (and past) meaning to be achieved. If, according to Oliveira, ('my vision' of) 'History' is the ordering principle of the narrative, could one accept that 'history' is itself outside the narrative? In other words, is there a History beyond and behind the storying of the Portuguese past?
O filme é uma consequência histórica. Resulta de uma consciência, de uma reflexão histórica. Não é uma coisa inventada por mim. Não é invenção, é apenas uma visão, através desses factos. A minha visão, que julgo acertada. E a História não é o que podia ser, mas é aquilo que é. Portanto a História foi aquela e é sobre a História que fala. Portanto não tem nada que alterar. A História é que pode alterar as coisas daqui em diante e devia. Eu não. (Oliveira, 2001: n.p.) All conflicts and tensions can ultimately be (hi)storied, they can ultimately be explained, as there is a meaning there beyond to be revealed. In other words, is there a History (an ultimate meaning for history) behind and beyond narratives? Or, in this case, are histories and stories jointly structured around the promise of an ultimate meaning to be revealed?
In other words, what Derrida has identified as a typical movement of a metaphysics of presence (represented in the 'ultimate meaning') consubstantiates a teleology which both de-historicizes and depoliticizes the conflicts of war, colonialism, and expansion. Submitting to the 'presence' of 'History' ('é aquilo que é') is not only to overlook reality in itself, but also the ways in which the perception of reality, as objective as a historical 'reflection' or 'vision' may purport to be, is always already itself affected by historical events and itself part of a construction.
The above is an expression of the obsession with logos, or the 'metaphysics of presence' to which Cabrita falls prey: 'Deus sobrepaira acima de tudo isto', says the soldier obsessed with the 'sentido último'. Moreover, and most significantly, if one is to defend an active interpretation of Non against the filmmaker's statements and the traditional criticism of the film, to resist such a teleology is of the utmost importance because the telos suggested by the promise of an ultimate meaning behind the historical vision of defeats of the Portuguese nation cannot be read separately from a logocentrism implied in the analysis of his cinema which naturalizes the philosophical and transcendental content of the film to be found in the unveiling of its form. Oliveira's voice-over pointing to the significance of the date of Cabrita's death (as well as his signature and dedication to his grandchildren (see Fabião et al.: 1991: 172, 174)) is a performance which allows for a presentation of a vision of History (as prophecy) and the justification for a historical vision. This historical vision is not one which 'is what is', but one which is dependent on taking the Revolution of 25 April as a point of focus and articulation outside history. The Revolution of 25 April is at the centre and, at the same time, outside history, always already structured albeit naturalized as hors-texte and hors-champs:  (Oliveira, 2001: n.p.) This focus is not anti-traditional. In fact, it is the consensual way in which Portuguese art and historiography has dealt with 25 April, which Luís Madureira has identified in some works as the 'desire for the absent of history ' (2006a: 163). Eduardo Lourenço has noted, on the other hand, how the historical conflicts and complexities of the event have been sublimated by the myth of an 'exemplaridade revolucionária' (2000: 50), a new exceptionality which supplements the 'Atlantic exceptionalism' (Vecchi, 2010) and has 25 April as the imagination of a centre. 3 As Oliveira puts it in an interview to Jean Gili recorded in 1992: Non ou a Vã Glória de Mandar is a reflection on Portugal's history. The history of each country is not just the specific history of a certain country; it is also part of world history. To put it in another way, it is a fragment of the history of humanity. One can say therefore that nothing happens without a reason, that everything has a meaning. How? Everything occurs in relation to the end, an enigmatic but absolutely essential end, an end that is very important for man himself. (Gili, 2007: 145-46) This is a fundamental delusion: to equate a constructed history with meaning and presence, or more so with a movement towards its revelation/unveiling ('sentido' means both meaning and direction) beyond historical events and their storying. This leads to the illusion of a presence which provides logic and necessity to the teleological unfolding which takes place.
Cinema, then, has no political function according to Oliveira; fiction and history are based on memory and historical observations: A função da arte não é ensinar, dizer como se deve fazer o futuro. Esse é um sentimento político. A arte repete o que já aconteceu e o que já foi feito na vida: não o futuro, mas o passado. Nos filmes de atualidades, registra-se o acontecimento presente, que logo se transformou no fantasma de um passado próximo. A arte fala do que aconteceu, não fala do que vai acontecer. Essa previsão compete à ciência e à política. Enfim, a arte funciona sobre observações históricas. Isto é, sobre a memória. Esta é a base fundamental para a composição da história e da ficção. (Oliveira in Cakoff, 2005: 42) Is such a historical proposition viable without this teleological model of reading (eidos to be appropriated by the effacing of the phantasms of representation)? Are history and stories not jointly structured around the promise of an ultimate meaning, which will sublimate conflicts and incidents, harmonizing differences in politics, in religions, in power? 4 Other meanings and historical visions can be teased out if one chooses to countersign the historical vision which is being enacted.
Infusing meaning porque para se ver verdadeiramente em profundidade a riqueza de um filme deve-se ir também, de certo modo, à desconstrução. Através do que se vê há o que não se vê. (Oliveira, 2001) Oliveira is not without responsibilities in the logocentrism present in the analysis of his cinema that is, of image, thought, idea, meaning taking a determining place over and above, beyond, and behind the materiality of film and history. If I have been using a term by Jacques Derrida, it is also because Oliveira's misinterpretation of Derrida provides a point of entry into his thinking: Tive a ocasião de conhecer pessoalmente Jacques Derrida [1930Derrida [ -2004 It assumes that, somehow, there is (there must be) a presence above and beyond, to be unveiled through representation ('there is what is not seen'): De maneira que a desconstrução faz-se na construção. [. . .] Embora seja um bocadinho mais difícil de compreender, existe, no cinema, o ser e o être. A gente vê o ente mas está a mostrar o ser, ou a gente está a mostrar o ser para dar a visão do ente. É difícil explicar essa suposição de que vemos o que não se está a mostrar, transpondo-se para idéias formadas com imagens. (Oliveira in Cakoff, 2005: 71) When, by the end of his reasoning, Oliveira quotes the familiar Aristotelian motto of the impossibility of thinking without a picture, one should not be surprised. Image imparts 'flesh and substance' (Rancière, 2007: 46) to the textual linking that has taken place throughout the film and dialogues. What Oliveira, contre Derrida, never conceives of is that there is no eidos except in representation, in the articulation which does not simply disappear before presence; as there is no history entirely beyond the storying. 5 That there may not be a pure or ultimate meaning which can ideally justify everything, contain all incidents and signs, is never considered a possibility.
The above-mentioned idea of the ends (objectives, telos) of art, and cinema in particular, brings to mind how, according to Jacques Rancière, 'a certain idea of fate and a certain idea of the image are tied up in the apocalyptic discourses of today's cultural climate', which has led Rancière to consider art's role in the 'problematic alignment' of the 'several functions' contained under the term 'image' (Rancière, 2007: 1). In the specific case of Non, this provides a productive point of entry into considering how the teleology implicit in the mimesis of the eidos and an imperialist teleological imagery are alive and well in the culture of what we presume to be the age of deconstruction, postcolonialism and globalization. Therefore it is indispensable to scrutinize, as Rancière does, the implicit political assumptions that seemingly neutral conceptions of image put forth. And, as a consequence, to resist going transcendental regarding the 'symbolic' (Oliveira, 2001: n.p.) and Eucharistic aspects of the ending of the film, even if this implies reading against the filmmaker's reading.
To avoid simplistic and naive readings of the image and the relation between text and image one must read against the 'common measurement' of history as the 'assemblage of actions' which, since Aristotle, has defined the rationality of the poem, 'according to a schema of ideal causality' (Rancière, 2007: 38). One should begin by calling into question the presumed role of Os Lusíadas in providing 'textual intelligibility' (38) to Non particularly because Oliveira's meditation on cinema and the written word seems to involve a hierarchical relationship between text and image. This hierarchical positioning is very restrictive in aesthetic and political terms: This ancient measurement of the poem according to a schema of ideal causalityconnection by necessity or verisimilitude -involved also a certain form of intelligibility of human actions. It is what established a community of signs and a community between 'signs' and 'us': a combination of elements in accordance with general rules and a community between the intelligence that produced these combinations and sensibilities called upon to experience the pleasure of them. (Rancière, 2007: 38-39) Of course, the aesthetic regime of art, which has been in place for two centuries, implies the distancing from that common measurement and the hierarchy between text and image, leading to the autonomy of the arts (42). 6 The reference to the composition of poems both illustrates a resistance to ontological readings of cinema as exceptional in relation to other arts and also both questions and undermines definitions of Oliveira's of cinema's 'palavra visual' (Costa, 2005: 153). 5 With this neologism one seeks to emphasize the articulations that create an effect of presence. This presupposes that representation does not 'suddenly encroach upon presence' but is part of its 'enjoyment' (Derrida, 1997: 312). 6 Autonomy between arts does not mean separation. As a matter of fact, not only do its forms become analogous, but the materialities are mixed (Rancière, 2007: 42). Autonomization does not lead to simple 'self-referentiality': 'the autonomization of aesthetics means first freeing up the norms of representation, and second, constituting a kind of community of sense experience that works on the world of assumption, of the as if that includes those who are not included by revealing a mode of existence of sense experiences that has eluded the allocation of parties and lots' (Rancière, 1999: 58).
The abolition of this aforementioned hierarchical order has aesthetic, and therefore necessarily political, consequences. The political and the aesthetic cannot be easily separated as both are connected to a certain 'partition of the perceptible', to a disruption of a 'common measurement' (Rancière, 2007: 38) (what established the community of 'signs ' and 'us') and to the assignment of places and functions, 'parties and lots' (Rancière, 1999: 58). Oliveira's 'resistance' is illustrative of his seemingly paradoxical stance. Although claiming not to be related to politics, it originates from a political situation (restriction and censorship) and its effects impact on Oliveira's cinema political utility in resisting the banality of images (Lopes, 2001: 69) as well as the objectification of the spectator (Gardnier, 2007: 158). His 'primitivismo cinematográfico' and his 'heterodoxia formal' (Lopes, 2001: 69) cannot be simply neutralized as formal curiosities. His cinema, as Lopes states, can be a useful weapon in combating the overflow of images in our day-to-day lives, but that should not lead to a simplistic view that correlates this with an ontologization of the image in and of Oliveira's filmmaking. Perhaps one should take these creative aspects as a partitioning of a perceptible which allows for a differentiation and a deferral of meaning(s), thus prompting a distancing from 'a certain form of measurement -that expressed by the concept of history' (Rancière, 2007: 38).
Oliveira's cinema can thus be seen as aesthetic in this sense (necessarily political) in that it disrupts, as mentioned above, the 'general rules' and the 'community between the intelligence that produced' art and the 'combinations and sensibilities' of readers, spectators, and so on. Oliveira's films are not political in the sense that they illustrate or aspire to conflict between classes, but they are nevertheless political through and through because they are aesthetical and the aesthetical and the political are inseparable from a determined reconfiguring or shifting of borders of the consensual 'partition of the perceptible' (Rancière, 1999: 57-58).
Oliveira is proud of keeping to his own path and of not having attempted to please the post-revolutionary regime despite strong criticism for not making militant art and for being seemingly indifferent to the Carnation Revolution. Oliveira is strongly critical of art engagé (be it Marxist or Catholic-inspired) and of 'revolutionary' films which presumed to capture reality and project it (Oliveira in Cakoff, 2005: 36, 81-82). He goes to the extent of defining himself as a 'resistance filmmaker' after not being able to film due to the censorship and constrictions under the Estado Novo (Rapfogel, 2008: n.p.). One must note that when Oliveira uses the term resistance, he is not using it in its common political sense, but in cinematic terms, by characterizing how this hiatus has stopped his filming style from being influenced by trends and led him to reflect profoundly on the 'act of filming', acquiring a 'deeper consciousness of cinema' (Rapfogel, 2008: n.p.). Resistance equates to maintaining a certain degree of aesthetic autonomy (as there is no engaged art, there is no purely aesthetic art). Regarding the much criticized release of Amor de Perdição in the post-revolutionary period, which obviously did not refer directly to the Revolution, the filmmaker states: 'que melhor referência à Revolução do que o filme ter sido realizado ao tempo dela?' (Oliveira in Cakoff, 2005: 78).
One must then look again at the role of the image in the conveying of an idea (an eidos: o 'indizível') through the workings of shared rituals, says Oliveira: É um jogo de artificialismos, mas que é de um realismo total. É o jogo desses elementos que dão sentido ao cinema: são rituais entre imagens, palavras e sons. O som pode servir para mostrar o que não está visível. Ou, em outras palavras, esse é um jogo onde a imagem serve de máscara para mostrar aquilo que não se pode mostrar, como a alma, como os sentimentos, como o espírito: estes não têm corpo, não podemos filmá-los. E, quando a gente deseja ir além, serve-se desses elementos, desses símbolos para dizer outra coisa, para dizer o indizível. Uma posição pode simular uma outra, fazendo passar de um ponto a outro. (Oliveira in Cakoff, 2005: 70) The contradictions in Oliveira's text are as noticeable as they are telling of a hierarchy in place. Teasing out the tensions in this text, it becomes clear to an attentive reader and spectator that the promised and aspired passage is but simulation, its reality enacted only in the play of artificialisms. The 'unity of the parts' is not meaning, and there is no history (as ordering principle) but in linking. Logos/eidos is always already haunted by structurality, it is spectral.
One requires a different kind of reading in which image is not subjected to textual intelligibility but is a sign to be (emphasis) recombined: The power of the sentence-image can be expressed in sentences from a novel, but also in forms of theatrical representation or cinematic montage or the relationship between the said and unsaid in a photograph. The sentence is not the sayable and the image is not the visible. By sentence-image I intend the combination of two functions that are to be defined aesthetically -that is, by the way in which they undo the representative relationship between text and image. The text's part in the representative schema was the conceptual linking of actions, while the image's was the supplement of presence that imparted flesh and substance to it. The sentence-image overturns this logic. The sentence-function is still that of linking. But the sentence now links in as much as it is what it gives flesh. (Rancière, 2007: 45-46) One will then read images as being open to recombination rather than being closed off. So we can read the syntax (or montage, not in a strictly cinematic sense) as the point of entry for a reading which takes into account articulation and play rather than a schema which guarantees purpose and meaning (telos and presence).

Beyond restor(i)ed meanings
Esta é a ditosa Pátria minha amada. Não. (Sena, 1979: 89, 'A Portugal') I would like to attempt a reading of the final scenes of Non which takes into account the particularities of Oliveira's cinema, namely the long shots (objective), where the director disappears (Oliveira, 2005: 29) and the effect of distance created by the actors, who by looking into the camera create a sense of estrangement and stop the objectification of the spectator (Gardnier, 2007: 157-58). This active role of the spectator ('The spectator needs to complete the action he sees in the film' (157)) allows us to move beyond the reading of a hierarchy between text and image and of a meaning revealing itself. Not being transformed into a 'plaything', manipulated as if having 'taken drugs' (158), as Oliveira puts it, is to reject a 'community of signs' and a community between 'signs' and 'us'. Therefore, one aims to demonstrate how Oliveira's cinematic practice allows for a deviation from prescribed teleologies of critics and the filmmaker's theories. Accepting the historical reflection and vision and to look at (an inaccessible) meaning and/or philosophy is to be a passive spectator who overlooks the materiality of events and the textuality of forms. Thus, reading Oliveira's films against Oliveira's views is an affirmative act which re-politicizes and re-historicizes Portuguese past expansion and contemporary existence. The final sequence of scenes, in which there is a tracking shot of several wounded soldiers in bed before Cabrita steps into his morphine-infused delirium in which D. Sebastião appears reversing his sword, signals both more and less than the 'end of an era' and the pointing towards a different future, as Johnson (above) has it (Johnson, 2007: 69). The final scene in the film, Cabrita's delirium, hauntingly both 'sonho e realidade' (Oliveira, 2001: n.p.), must not be restricted to the interpretation of a transcendental (symbolic) unveiling in which the stories and histories of D. Sebastião and Cabrita converge (through editing) and are converted under the 25 April myth. Oliveira's pronouncement on Sebastião's inverting of the sword (2001: n.p.) implies an ideal scheme of causality, and reads this image as being formed to 'take the thoughts and feelings through which the causal connection was displayed to their highest expression' (Rancière, 2007: 39): the king turns his sword during Cabrita's delirium into a crucial symbol of harmony by inverting its position. Oliveira's reading of the sword in this position as a cross is a good illustration of Oliveira's theorization on the image's ability to transcend the visible and the sayable and of the subordinate relation of thought to image. It thus renders visible 'a certain form of measurement -'that expressed by the concept of history' (Rancière, 2007: 38), which involves 'a relationship of subordination between a ruling function -the textual function of intelligibility -and an image-forming function in its service' (39) (Figure 1). Thus, both Cabrita and Sebastião are reduced to 'vanishing mediators' (Zizek, 2008: 57-58), leading us into presence through their own unveiling, their own apocalypse, as flesh behind the word. Non restores meaning to historical events by re-storying them within the teleological movement inscribed by the promise of a 'sentido último'. In this sense, history (the film's and Portugal's) is a product of this structuration. Non supposes but a detour, a deviation, a diversion of Portugal from its due and proper spiritual course (the 'utopia' of a Fifth Empire) which can still be recovered, by achieving a sort of spiritual imperialism based on the 'dádiva' rather than on conquests.
Oliveira's signature in the opening can and must be countersigned by an emancipated spectator who is distanced and aware of the artifices of the film, intent on deciphering the signs aesthetically presented to him/her and to see history as a product of textuality itself. As mentioned above, history and storying are inseparable. This is an 'aesthetic' narrative in which signs are presented and deciphered, and signs always disseminate meaning. If regarding the historical reflection and vision in Non, the filmmaker says 'Eu não', the spectator can affirm a different recombination of signs and address differently the traces of history rendered accessible in the film. Bearing in mind that presence is but a product of representation, there can be no 'there is' beyond and independently of what is seen: to invert Oliveira's saying, in the film 'vê-se o que não há'. 7 Since meaning (present or absent) cannot be filmed, one 7 A very important distinction when it comes to filming what cannot be filmed can be noticed when one addresses the 'spectrality', or 'phantomality': 'something becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood' (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 115). Oliveira's thinking seems to postulate the visibility of the invisible, with a presence behind and beyond. Derrida's thinking is quite distinct.
can choose to read in this final montage what is selected and excluded, what is not there. After all, images work as much as signs of presence, as they do signs of absence. 8 Thus, one needs to consider whether the ending of the film does not present, rather than a symbolic leap, another limit (fines). The 'ultimate meaning' is but a deferral of meaning, its deferral is its meaning (in the same way as history is but its linking). Cabrita's mumbled and incomplete sentences break the mechanic narrative repetition, and instead it is incompletion which is supplemented by the last scene, both 'sonho e realidade'. Rather than identifying the several nons simply as obstacles to be sublimated in a spiritual and teleological narrative which selects and excludes reality, one must rather tease out the contradictions and tensions which were always already at work, such as the call for the conquest of Africa implied in the speech of the Old Man of Restelo in Os Lusíadas, which makes the inseparability between condemnation of conquest and utopia impossible to hold. Conflict and conquest are found not to be containable, justified, or explained by an ultimate meaning. Cabrita does not hesitate to kill, ponderously eyeing the combatant in the tree. He is as confident and comfortable in war as he is in discourse, because the impulses to war, to 'se sobrepor ao outro', 'são de natureza poética' (Oliveira, 2001: n.p.). It is another excessive image, that of the enemy's scream (even more so than the image of the enemy holding his bowels as he runs) which breaks ideal causality via its own exaggeration, disrupting and estranging the otherwise poeticized act of warfare. The 8 See Derrida's meditation on spectrality, which exceeds oppositions by inscribing 'a trace that marks the present with its absence in advance. The spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive logic' (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 117).
fi gure 1 D. Sebastião and the inverted sword.
disruption of speech and of narrative after Cabrita is shot by an unseen enemy will open the way to the representation of what cannot be seen, the appearance of which is its disappearance: D. Sebastião.
However, the final sequence does not permit (filmic) textuality to be erased before the image of the (invisible) 'indizível'. The spectator is alerted by the gaze of the wounded soldier and rendered immune to identification with the final scene. The gaze, unexpected, repeated, unnecessary, breaks with the schema of causality and heightened affect: the setting and the identification between Cabrita and Sebastião as well as the communion between the soldier, the king and the spectator, both under the sign of the Eucharist and the apocalypse. The spectator is alerted both to the drops of morphine which mirror the drops of blood, and to the fio which is repeated both in the sword and in the pen which inscribes the death of Cabrita and its date (25 April 1974). It enhances, by mimicking, the distancing effect that the actors' gaze into the cameras during Cabrita's narratives had already provoked, where the same actors, disaffectedly, play different characters in time and space. In this sense, the shots of the actors in the lorry addressing the camera lead to an estrangement which defers identification (Figure 2). The theatricality and the breaking of realism are not, therefore, an exclusive feature, on the one hand, of the episode of The Island of Love and, on the other hand, of Sebastian's appearance in Cabrita's delirium. Those evocations act not as 'present' visions of a 'past' or 'myth', but as an enactment of what is neither past nor present. The actors playing different parts leads not to identification between the characters and different historical figures or to an identification with the spectator, but to a further disidentification.
The image of the gaze of the wounded soldier breaks with the continuity established while holding together, syntactically, through distancing and separation, an fi gure 2 Portuguese soldiers in the Colonial War. oblique point of resistance which allows for a recombination of signs on the part of the spectator. One is thus not restricted to a mimetic and logocentric approach which lives off the promise of a meaning to be revealed hors-texte and hors-champ ( Figure 3). The closing inscription of the date, rather than unifying under an authorial aegis, merely points to the metaphysical nudity of the act. This performance reveals by excess what was already there, if not visible, throughout the film: that there is no history except its linking, which 'constrói-se na união das partes'. O 'que se vê', therefore 'há', is nothing but the simultaneous materiality and vacuity under the wraps of performance, which the gaze of the soldier, isolated and explosive, displays so well. To accept the telos implied in the death of Cabrita is to overlook the hollow and the horror of a reality that is only visible if one looks at what is not being shown (telos, meaningfulness), if the community of 'signs' and 'us' (community between 'signs and us' has long been lost) is disrupted by the estranged gaze. The song accompanying the end and the date of 25 April, with the verses of the Island of Love episode as lyrics, enhances the emptiness behind the acts which attempt to establish a relationship between the gifts and the rewards of discoveries and the high price paid in territorial conquest (which Cabrita mentions as he is shot). 25 April is equally, in the terms one has been using, a storied (hence de-historicized and depoliticized) gateway to the future, but merely as a point of departure to a reinterpretation of Portuguese history in a new light. It merely allows for a new conception of a history of Portugal which is no less exceptional, rather than addressing the metaphysical nudity of a constructed teleology.
This 'political' reading is possible not because of Oliveira's political views, but because of his aesthetic practice. His acknowledgment that history and fiction share the same basis ('memory', 'historical observation') acts as a reminder that there is not fi gure 3 The wounded soldier's gaze. Mandar (1990), de Manoel de Oliveira, é um marco na revisitação da história da expansão e conflitos coloniais portugueses no cinema lusófono. Este artigo visa analisar a relevância política do filme partindo da teorização de Jacques Rancière relativa ao 'regime estético' e às referências de Manoel de Oliveira à desconstrução derrideana. Non ou a Vã Glória de Mandar e a praxis cinematográfica de Oliveira acabam simultaneamente por exceder e romper com as teorias de cinema e história logocêntricas e teleológicas expressas pessoalmente pelo realizador.

Notes on contributor
Rui Gonçalves Miranda holds a PhD in Lusophone Studies, awarded by the University of Nottingham, and has taught Portuguese literature and cinema in Nottingham and in Queen Mary, University of London. He is currently a post-doctoral research fellow (Fundação de Ciência e Tecnologia) in the Centro de Estudos Humanísticos (Universidade do Minho) and the University of Nottingham, working on post-conflict literary and cultural disseminations and dialogues within the Lusophone countries and communities.