Historic Centre (2012)

If there’s a reason for omnibus films to exist, it’s for their audiences to detect each film’s key concern and examine how the different directors involved approach that concern. Historic Centre (Centro Histórico)—consisting of Aki Kaurismäki’s “The Tavern Man” (“Guimarães”), Pedro Costa’s “Sweet Exorcism,” Victor Erice’s “Broken Windows: Tests for a Film in Portugal” (“Vidros Partidos”), and Manoel de Oliviera’s “The Conquered Conqueror” (“O Conquistador Conquistado”), in that order—more or less has this key concern in its title: an inquiry into modern-day Portugal that is centered around history.

“The Tavern Man” keeps this history strictly personal, focusing on a clueless barkeep waiting forlornly for a lost love (who presumably knew how to cook much better than he does). “The Conquered Conqueror” rather lazily pokes fun at picture-taking tourists and loosely critiques the transformation of history into tour-bus fodder (even while the statues don’t seem much to care). “Sweet Exorcism” carries over the character of Ventura from other Costa films, which allows for the intersection of personal with national history: Ventura converses with the ghost of a colonial army in which Ventura himself once fought—on an elevator of steel, endlessly ascending. But the strongest film here is “Broken Windows,” in which former workers at the Vizela River Textile Mill (1845-2002) reflect on their work and the lives of workers past. It’s a film haunted by history, in which every life—lost or disappearing—becomes the camera’s raison d'être: neither we nor they can look away.