The effect of censorship on Manoel de Oliveira’s screenplays during the Salazar Dictatorship in Portugal (1933−74)

Portuguese screenwriter/director Manoel de Oliveira (1908–2015) survived almost the whole history of cinema, starting in the silent film epoch with Douro Faina Fluvial/Labor on the Douro (1931), and premiering his last film, O Velho do Restelo/The Old Man of Belem (2014), on his 106th birthday. During the political dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, from 1933 to 1974, Manoel de Oliveira had to deal with exhaustive supervision over his projects and screenplays. The documentation held by the Portuguese National Archive reveals the complex conditions imposed by the censors (Secretariado Nacional de Informação (SNI), the Portuguese National Secretary of Information), as well as the filmmaker’s screenwriting strategies to circumvent those rules (not always with success, unfortunately). Throughout the files of Angélica (1954), Acto da Primavera/Rite of Spring (1958), A Caça/The Hunt (1958), among other film projects that did not succeed in passing the SNI evaluations, we can observe how decisively censorship influenced Portuguese cinema and the screenwriting of that time. This article explores how, under the tight control of the SNI, Manoel de Oliveira was not allowed to follow the original ‘finale’ foreseen in his screenplay A Caça/The Hunt and how, instead, he was bound to film a new ‘happy-ending’ according to the regime’s premises.