Thanks to Felipe and Bill for responses on de Oliveira. In writing that
he has "less of a signature style than most auteurs," I didn't mean to
suggest that I thought his oeuvre was inconsistent or that his films
couldn't be identified as de Oliveira films, just that he does shift
stylistically. Since making that post, I've been wondering if there is a
stylistic-thematic unity to his work, and it strikes me that in most of
it (and I've not seen many of the recent ones), there's a theme of
illusion, that is, that the depicted world is depicted as an artificial
construction, the image itself is present as an artifice and that
artifice is connected to the protagonists' dreams, fantasies, or failed
aspirations. There's a meta-dimension here; without being as obvious
about it as some modernist artists, de Oliveira makes image-making, in
the broadest sense of the term, his true subject, or one of them.

Mostly off-topic travel note: I post this from Xian, China, one of the
most amazing cities I've seen, with spectacular ancient (if recently
restored) city walls, a museum the Shaanxi History Museum) with a
history of Chinese art full of sublime works, the spectacularly austere
"Little Goose Pagoda," and the nearby tomb of the first Qin emperor, the
subject of Chin Kiage's great "The Emperor and the Assassin." The whole
tomb structure supposedly required decades of work by 700,000 to 800,000
laborers, who one gathers were not necessarily afforded decent working
conditions or full workplace benefits. This is the tomb with the
thousands of buried terracotta warriors, a couple of km from the burial
mound itself, and which are still only partially unearthed. The soldiers
aren't necessarily the greatest of Chinese sculptures (there are many
greater ones in the museum), though they're very good, but it's the
overall concept of burying so many, aligned in numerous rows, that's
kind of astounding. Viewing this enormous array, I thought, "I should
have liked to have been an emperor in China then, when men had the
power, and the freedom..."

- Fred C.