Cinema, the City, and Manoel de Oliveira’s Logic of Sensation: Film and Painting

Although it is an emerging research field, the philosophy of film has a long tradition of investigating the complex relationship between painting and film, with a special focus on films about painting: on how the two art forms encounter each other from a spatial and temporal perspective. In addition, the field has long explored the ways in which films represent the modern city. From the beginning, film has been associated with the representation of the modern city and of other art forms. Focusing on O Pintor e a Cidade/The Artist and the City (1956) by Manoel de Oliveira (1908–2015), and grounded in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of film, the following touches on both of these themes. The Artist and the City is a short documentary on António Cruz (1907–1983)—a watercolorist known for his landscapes of Porto—the subject of which is not only the painter’s life and work but also the city itself, as its title suggests. As the following will show, the film offers a twofold representation of the city: that provided by Manoel de Oliveira, and that provided by the subject of the documentary, António Cruz.