Galeria Nuno Centeno is pleased to present é um outro país, a film directed by Manuel Santos Maia (n. 1970, Nampula, Mozambique).
Ligação terra
by Ricardo Ramos Gonçalves
Man has two ways of understanding himself: from the world of things, based on what he can do; or from what he can be, based on himself. Let’s say that the first is the vector of inauthentic existence and the second is the compass of authentic existence.
– Ernesto Sampaio in Sal Vertido (1988)
Everything exists in shadow and everything is revealed in light – a form of separation between what is visible and tangible to the eye, and what remains unrevealed. This serves for general knowledge and, in the same way, for sketching a particular story. The premise seems absurd – one could say it’s a common use of a notion in the face of what is observable. However, it runs the risk of becoming disturbing, as we realize how much of the penumbra still covers our eyes. Ricardo Meneses was born on April 5, 1981, in Orgal, in the municipality of Vila Nova de Foz Côa.
He was a boy, a young teenager, an adult, an actor and a man. He died in 2010, after a long period in the shadows.
Little or nothing is known about his story before and after he starred in João Pedro Rodrigues’ film “O Fantasma” (“The Ghost”) (2000), which reflects the narrative of a dream (perhaps Americanized) that he wanted to make a reality. In 2024, fourteen years after the disappearance of Ricardo Meneses, the Portuguese artist Manuel Santos Maia (1970) returns to his story in the film “é um outro país” (“it’s another country”), which is the subject of this text. As an alternative to the chosen title, we came up with the option “A King in Exile”, which is also the name of a creation by choreographer Francisco Camacho. Because this is also about the body, or the corporeal condition of existence and its symbolism. In any case, it was interesting to suggest, through both of them, a proposal for reading about the country (the other) that is disputed here.
We can start with the mental movie: the young actor appears to us. We travel with him to the garbage dump, in an almost lunar landscape, and the (ghostly) creature takes on mythological contours. We could be on the other side of the mirror or leaning over Alice’s burrow. A parallel can be drawn between “The Ghost” – from which we take this first set of images – and her life. After making himself visible to us, he soon disappears without a trace. So where do we stand? We return to the shadows, because it is in them that we can see something else. When we arrive at Manuel Santos Maia’s film, we hear in the dark the voice of Carla Pinto, a film technician at the Serralves Foundation, Ricardo Meneses’ teacher somewhere in the 1990s, who confronts, exposes, thrills and pacifies. Like other artistic objects before it, there are almost no images in the frames of this film. Are we, after all, ‘emancipated spectators’, capable of creating a narrative in our heads?
Lao Tse tells us that the countryman derives his profit from the seasons, that the merchant appreciates profit, and that the craftsman (the one who creates) looks for particular tricks. What is expected of the latter is the completion of his work or ruin. We can say that this is how Manuel Santos Maia’s film “é um outro país” manifests itself. In this case, we could say that it is “a simple, straight and sharp cry in the clear morning”, quoting the poet Ernesto Sampaio once again. Having achieved the feat of creating an image in our heads, but above all the narrative of a man and a country in search of themselves, it is we who assume the position of self-projection.
Let’s also take a look at Carla Pinto’s testimony. She tells us the story of a young man who arrives in Lisbon (in search of a better life), who is enchanted and dazzled, but who is equally disillusioned. He looks for ways to survive and, when the opportunity arises to join a film production company, he doesn’t hesitate. Ricardo (or Telmo, as he introduced himself at the time) was cast as the lead in “O Fantasma”, the first feature film by director João Pedro Rodrigues. The film earned him acclaim from the queer community: “Gays gave me everything,” he says – quoted by Carla Pinto. The phrase is striking. Ricardo found in this community, which is also marginalized, the same connection to the land that he was trying to establish, that is, a form of struggle for freedom won in one’s own name, returning to Jean-Paul Sartre’s words about the construction of a “lucid and coherent system out of evil”, achieved by Jean Genet in the course of his life.
From prostitution, the outlet he found for himself before entering the movie, to the red carpet in Venice, Ricardo Meneses was an icon of this “movie-event”, as it was dubbed by the international press. This was followed by a period of illusions, of a return home and of gloom in the face of the disappointment of his own expectations. The ambition to be recognized in the land of his birth remained until the end. “I wanted to come back like a king,” says Carla Pinto. You have to choose paths and then, when you reach the river’s flow, look at the two banks that it separates. In “é um outro país”, we emerge into the conflict between the story of Ricardo Meneses and the story of a country (possible, real or fictionalized) that rises up in our imagination. We could play with Fernando Namora’s title and finally change it: real portrait of a fictional country. Or with Ruy Belo’s “País Possível”, or even with Mário Cesariny’s poem: “I wanted from you a country of goodness and mist / I wanted from you the sea of a foam rose”.
Manuel Santos Maia does not fail to outline a critical diagnosis of the country, the art system and Art History itself. It sounds like a detail, but it isn’t. The story of Ricardo Meneses, told by Carla Pinto, is a fair reflection on the injustice of rising to some form of stardom. It takes a look at the way in which we are so often led to put ourselves in uncomfortable positions or to carry out projects that, in their making or aftermath (post-exhibition), we end up acquiring.
Here we can also rehearse some questions. Not least because, as Susan Sontag says, “our response to a work of art can never be purely aesthetic”, nor can it be purely moral. Does Manuel Santos Maia’s film restore the truth?
Does it rescue memory and consolidate what remains of a history that has been lost in the gutters? Everyone’s interpretation is up to them. Art, as a practical good, be it in the form of a painting, sculpture, photograph or film image, comes loaded with the notion of “peace”, in the sense that Spinoza attributes to it: something more than the acquired absence of war, because art is the direct effect of the action of the good that stems from the will and therefore a resolution taken.
So we look at “é um outro país” as a movie about the loss of identity. The same loss felt by the young Edmund (in Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero), who succumbs in (still symbolically) Nazi Germany, in ruins, and leads him to his self-destruction under a properly installed chaos. It’s about how the young Björn Andrésen (in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice) becomes “the most handsome boy in the world” and objectified just for existing.
It’s about how an artistic creation can construct and annihilate at the same time, just to recall the case of Maria Schneider (in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris). It’s about how eros and thanatos – life and death drives, respectively – can unbalance or even destroy what would otherwise be an existential course. However, this text is not about the movie “The Phantom”. It’s about the omitted (better to say apocryphal) life of Ricardo Meneses.
In its parallel and reflected plane, Manuel Santos Maia’s film glosses over the history of a macrocephalous country, which could be divided between its interior and its coastline; its north, south and center. Between its “little villages” and small places and the life of the metropolis, where ambition has the luxury of being unbridled. Where there are different speeds of living, but the same unitary and symbolic system. It is also a portrait of the divergence between the urban and rural worlds and the many prejudices and stereotypes that exist on both sides.
This is the story of Ricardo Meneses. But it’s more than that. It’s a portrait of a country, of a time, of another movie that also deals with the history of a community that was previously unseen. Hidden in the night. It’s too late to become angels – to paraphrase the Moroccan writer Muhammad Chukri. The story told by Carla Pinto is the narrative of many of us and in this state of the art proposed by Manuel Santos Maia, it’s not the images that save us. Her film is, in fact, an iconoclastic creation, and a unique sketch for the many who want to delve into the history of this young man and this country that, unusually, is celebrating 50 years of freedom and democracy.
At the end of “é um outro país”, we, as spectators, are building a visual and archival narrative about the life of Ricardo Meneses. Our condition leads us, as the premise of an identity genesis, to a confusion that spreads through space and time. The imaginary construction of a country as a unit, which nevertheless reveals itself to be a puzzle made up of very heterogeneous pieces that still leave us at the heart of a certain obscurity. As simple as it may seem, at the end of the movie a spotlight opens up, with the projector facing directly towards anyone who dares to open their eyes. If we do, then we have irrefutable proof that, after all, everything exists beyond the shadow.
