Classes On Portugal / Lisang na Portugal

The late Portuguese film director José Álvaro Morais directed into his Lucarno Golden Leopard-winning The Jester a dozen apparently separate threads weaving together a vivid picture of Lisbon's young intelligentsia in 1978 amid the idealism aroused by the Portuguese revolution finally dying. It was mostly about most of the central characters being involved in putting on a play (adapted from the novel The Jester  by Alexandre Herculano, on whom I shall write more here later on), counterpointing the on-stage and off-stage lives, especially the off-stage gun-running to finance the play, an ambivalent  love triangle, and a murder... The on-stage scenes were designed sumptuously enough (although with their playful anachronisms of a contemporary theatrical performances) and are in enough of an amount that I ended doing a fan edit cutting just them, the off-stage scenes that mimick the missing scenes of the novel enough and then added some of the similar plotted opera Rigoletto in ...

  Yesterday was the commemoration of the start of Portugal's democratic transition with the April 25th, 1974 Revolution, a mostly peaceful uprising with a small number of dead (provoked by a shooting out of the headquarters of the then-dictatorship's political police PIDE/DGS), barely any resistance from military defending the then-government and a popular welcoming that lead to flower vendors putting red (and according to the main Captain Salgueiro Maia, white ones as well that were deemphasized by the photographer then for symbolic-ideological reasons). Next year, I shall make a more proper post on this holiday and its history, but for now, we shall stay with an edited version of a 1977-78 dystopian film, A Confederação -- O Povo É Que Faz a História  ("The Confederation - The People Is Who Makes History"), which edits out the science fiction elements and tries to portray the closest possible to the actual events from right after the revolution (what in symbolic Por...