The Cinematheque has announced a series titled “Interpretar um texto com luz,” featuring a selection of 16 films showcasing the work of cinematographer Eduardo Serra across Portugal, France, and the United States.
The program is set to commence on July 8 with a session highlighting three documentaries directed by Eduardo Serra between the 1970s and 1990s: “Um aniversário,” “Rink-Hockey,” and “Cinéma portugais? Un mod d’emploi.”
Filmed in April 1975, “Um aniversário” marks the first anniversary of the April 1974 revolution, during a time when Serra had been living in Paris for a decade. The film “follows the first free elections for the Constituent Assembly from the perspective of agricultural workers in three villages in the Beja district,” according to the Cinematheque.
“Rink-Hockey” (1982) documents the world championship of Roller Hockey in Barcelos, 1982, where Portugal emerged as champions, while “Cinéma portugais? Un mod d’emploi” (1990) offers a “critical-historical essay on the tribulations of Portuguese cinema,” commissioned by the television channel SEPT.
Eduardo Serra is the only Portuguese to have been twice nominated for an Academy Award for his cinematography in “Wings of the Dove” (1997), by Ian Softley, and “Girl with a Pearl Earring” (2003), by Peter Webber, a film to be screened at the Cinematheque.
Born in Lisbon in 1943, Eduardo Serra moved to Paris to study cinema after leaving an engineering course at Instituto Superior Técnico, an active cine-club life, and a disagreement with the policies of the Estado Novo dictatorship.
In Paris, he trained at ENS Louis Lumière and studied Art History and Archaeology at the Sorbonne. He began as a camera assistant, working on over thirty films over a decade before venturing into cinematography in the early 1980s, debuting with “Sem sombra de pecado” (1982) by José Fonseca e Costa, which will be shown at the Cinematheque.
Turning 82 in October, Eduardo Serra would go on to collaborate with more Portuguese directors like Fernando Lopes and José Mário Grilo, though he established his career between Paris and London before moving to Hollywood.
In French cinema, he worked on seven films with Claude Chabrol and nine with Patrice Leconte, the latest being in 2013 with “A Promise.”
Eduardo Serra has also done cinematography for films such as Edward Zwick’s “Blood Diamond,” Michael Winterbottom’s “Jude,” M. Night Shyamalan’s “Unbreakable,” and Kevin Spacey’s “Beyond the Sea.” Additionally, he collaborated with David Yates on two films of the “Harry Potter” series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”
Serra, known for respecting the natural light aesthetic, was honored with lifetime achievement awards in 2014 by the American Society of Cinematographers and the Portuguese Academy of Cinema.
In 2004, he was awarded the rank of Commander of the Order of Infante D. Henrique by then-President Jorge Sampaio, and in 2017, he received the title of Grand Officer of the same order from President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
