Manoel de Oliveira - Early Life

Early Life

Manoel de Oliveira was born in Porto, Portugal, on December 11, 1908, to Francisco José de Oliveira and Cândida Ferreira Pinto. His family were wealthy industrialists and agricultural landowners. His father owned a dry-goods factory, produced the first electric light bulbs in Portugal and built an electric energy plant before he died in 1932. Oliveira was educated at the Colegio Universal in Porto before attending a Jesuit boarding school in Galicia, Spain. As a teenager his goal was to become an actor. At 17, he joined his brothers as an executive in his father's factories, where he remained for the majority of his adult life when not making films. In a 1981 Sight and Sound article, John Gillett describes Oliveira as having "spent most of his life in business...making films only when circumstances allowed."

From an early age, Oliveira was interested in the poverty of the lower classes, the arts and especially films. While he has named D. W. Griffith, Eric von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, Max Linder, Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc and Sergei Eisenstein's The General Line as early influences, he was also disappointed to have virtually no Portuguese filmmakers to emulate. The Portuguese film industry was also highly censored and restricted under the fascist Salazar regime that lasted from the early 1930s until the mid-1970s. His later films, such as The Cannibals and Belle Toujours (a sequel to Belle de Jour), suggest an affinity with Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel. He has stated "I'm closer to Buñuel. He's a reverse Catholic and I was raised a Catholic. It's a religion that permits sin, and Buñuel at the very deepest is one of the most moralistic directors but he does everything to the contrary. I never say that I'm Catholic because to be Catholic is very difficult. I prefer to be thought of as a great sinner."