The School of Reis

The School of Reis is a film theory concept relative to the teachings of Portuguese director António Reis, to his oeuvre, conceived with his wife Margarida Cordeiro, and to the works of the directors influenced by theirs.

The term School of Reis was coined by film historian Haden Guest, director of the Harvard Film Archive, when referring to the influence exerted by the school of thought of Portuguese director António Reis through his didactics at his classes as professor of the Portuguese National Filmschool, from 1977 to 1991, over generations of future Portuguese directors who learned under Reis' mentoring.

The term Reisian is sometimes applied in a similar fashion as Fordian or Tarkovskian, relative to the style of both the American director John Ford or the Russian director Andrey Tarkovsky.

António Reis lectioned at the Portuguese National Film School classes such as Filmic Space, in 1977, and later Film Analysis, History of Image, Direction of Actors and Introduction to the Study of Image.

One of the characteristics of his teaching method was that it was almost exclusively oral, existing very few written materials reataining his theory, in what could be stated to be a reflex of António Reis' beliefs in the ancient oral tradition.

One of the most recognizable aspects of António Reis' aesthetics was his structuring of the cinematographical unity around the exploration of the limits of the possibilities of the match cut producing visual rhymes, associations and understated meanings, clearly identifiable in works of his like Jaime or Trás-os-Montes.

António Reis' works had a major impact on the practices of contemporaries of his like Manoel de Oliveira, whom Reis assisted in his second feature, Rite of Spring, in 1963; Paulo Rocha, having Reis written the script for his feature Change of Life; or João César Monteiro, whose quotations of Reis are clear in films as Recollections of the Yellow House, God's Comedy or Silvestre.

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