A documentary land
The first films shot in Madeira, short documentaries accessible in a few clicks and with eloquent titles such as The Wine Country, show a world and a society out of time, which modernity seems to have left intact and which is hardly disturbed by the passing tourist ships. Sissi had been an illustrious initiator when she retired in 1860, as the last part of the trilogy that made Romy Schneider a star, Sissi facing her destiny (Ernst Marischka, 1957), in which Ravello in Italy, less remote and less exotic, was used to feature both Madeira and Corfu. A few years earlier, Jorge Brum do Canto, to whom a small museum is now dedicated in Porto Santo, had come to shoot a peasant drama with an early neo-realist touch in this land of levadas, those irrigation canals that today also serve as hiking trails, A Canção da Terra (1938), a hymn to Mother Earth, as its title suggests, but also a testimony to the harshness of the island's drought, against a backdrop of amorous rivalries. The post-war period and the consolidation of Salazar's power correspond to a period of lean times for Portuguese and, a fortiori, Madeira's cinema, when the potential manna from tourism did not leave the dictatorship indifferent. Warning signs: john Huston's arrival in Madeira to film some scenes from his Moby Dick (1956), not the least of which include a whaling scene shot with the archipelago's whalers, a practice that would not end until 1981, and then a curiosity, the first and only film shot in Cinemiracle (a three-camera process), Windjammer (Louis de Rochemont, Bill Colleran, 1958), a spectacular documentary retracing the transatlantic crossing of a sailing ship and its Scandinavian crew stopping over in Madeira during the New Year's Eve celebrations. The Portuguese film industry, which is still very artisanal, only sporadically invests the Island of Flowers, but it is there that THE star of Portuguese song, Amália Rodrigues, plays her last film role in The Enchanted Islands (Carlos Vilardebó, 1961), a confusing and silent film inspired by a short story by Melville, which gives pride of place to Madeira's rugged and wild landscapes.
Quiet Revolution
In 1972 Madeira opened its first international airport, which may explain why a filmmaker like Jesús Franco, one of the popes of the disenfranchised exploitation cinema, came to Madeira to shoot some of his countless films. Among them, The Obscene Mirror (1973), one of his most famous films, a portrait of a young singer adrift in the jazz clubs of Funchal, whose Spanish version is more in line with Franco's vision than the French one, butchered by the producers and weighted down with pornographic scenes, or The Black Countess (1973), where his predilection for horror and eroticism is to be found. António da Cunha Telles, one of the few native directors of the archipelago, whom he left to study in Paris before settling in Lisbon, began his career with a portrait of a woman in search of emancipation (O Cerco, 1970) and then that of a disillusioned generation that had no idea that the Carnation Revolution was imminent (Meus Amigos, 1974). Colónia e Vilões (Leonel Brito 1977), which was banned by the Madeira Government when it was released, is a combination of live images, including beautiful aerial views in warm colours, and archive footage, and is an invaluable document of life in Madeira following the Revolution, deeply imbued with Catholicism, where one obviously finds thatched houses, terraced gardens and all the things for which the island is famous, but also a new desire among the island's peasants to get rid of an iniquitous system. A year earlier, as an indication of the changes to come, Funchal had inaugurated its casino, imagined by Oscar Niemeyer, which serves as a setting for the meeting of a couple possessed by the gambling demon, played by Jacques Dutronc and Bulle Ogier in Tricheurs (Barbet Schroeder, 1984), a film that deserves a detour. Raoul Ruiz, whose career is marked by a Portuguese tropism, which can be explained in part by the tandem he forms with producer Paulo Branco, gives free rein to his unbridled fantasy with Les Trois couronnes du matelot (1983) - in which Madeira plays Valparaiso - and, in the wake, a three-episode mini-series designed for Portuguese TV, Les Destins de Manoel (1985), a phantasmagorical tale that becomes more and more delirious as it nears its end.
Nowadays
Since then, few films have been shot in Madeira: Porto Santo (Vicente Jorge Silva, 1997) is one of those exceptions - and even then, the script makes a fortuitous and involuntary stopover in Madeira when a transatlantic flight is forced to land there. The Portuguese film's tutelary figure Manoel de Oliveira finally goes there for Christopher Columbus, the Enigma (2007), a melancholy meditation on the explorer whose visit to the island - where he got married - is the pride of the inhabitants. Adapted from a novel by Agustina Bessa-Luís, also loved by Oliveira, A Corte do Norte (João Botelho, 2008) demonstrates the very special qualities of a certain Portuguese cinema, whose ambitions are in no way formalised by the lack of means: it is the portrait of an aristocratic family over several generations, enhanced by images of the island's green slopes falling steeply into the sea. Aside from a few telenovelas, or documentaries about the nature reserves on the tiny islands of Desertas and Selvagens (where Cousteau would have found the purest waters in the world), the occasional documentary about local star Cristiano Ronaldo, film news is humming in this archipelago, which is nonetheless ten times smaller than Corsica, which also lacks the logistical facilities of its Spanish acolytes, the Canary Islands, which partly explains the relative tranquility of the seventh art.
