“I can’t hear a thing... only the wind outside”: music and sound as the place of mystery in Oliveira’s Benilde ou a Virgem Mãe (1975)

Abstract

The association between Manoel de Oliveira and composer João Paes initiated with the film O Passado e o Presente in 1972, culminating in the film-opera Os Canibais in 1988. Their relationship constitutes a unique example of collaboration between a director and a musician in Portuguese cinema. The two  worked together on seven films and explored in a particularly creative way the articulation between moving images, sound, and music. In this article, we discuss their second collaboration, Benilde ou a Virgem Mãe (1975), focusing on a detailed account of the music and sound elements in José Régio’s play, Oliveira’s original script, and the film’s soundtrack. In Benilde, it is the music and the sound that establish – and at the same time dissolve – the boundaries between the interior and the exterior, the real and the unreal, opening the possibility for a cinematic representation of the “divine mystery”. We will thus address the importance of Benilde in Oliveira’s creative trajectory, not only as the film that consolidated the close relationship between his cinema and the theatre, but also as a fundamental moment in the development of his particular idea of film as an audio-visual object, that he would further explore in his “mature period”.