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 "If I'm not the last one, I'm close," Feliciano said. "This
is a legacy that is going to end. When I'm gone, traveling
cinema will be mentioned in articles, but only as a memory."
After six decades traveling four million km (2.5 million miles)
to screen 4,000 films in Portugal's far-flung villages,
Feliciano does not plan to retire just yet. But he is resigned
to the fact that the Internet, digital TV and distribution
monopolies have made his craft obsolete.
Like Toto, the boy who befriends projectionist Alfredo in the
1988 Italian hit film, Feliciano also started as a youngster, in
the 1950s, helping a traveling projectionist announce the
weekend's bill on a loudspeaker in his village in rural Alentejo.
"The film bug", as he calls it, grew and by his teens he was out
on the road, helping screen films in music halls and
bullfighting rings. That led to a career which even the need to
earn a living as a bookkeeper did not interrupt, combining weeks
in a Lisbon office with weekend screenings.
About 200 km from Lisbon, hilltop Monforte is a typical Alentejo
village - picturesque, but sleepy, its population reduced to
3,000 by economic woes and emigration.
On a bright Sunday, however, the village livens up with
Feliciano about to screen a film in honor of Domingos Pecas, a
local projectionist who died in 2005 after 50 years in the
business.
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW?
"Our entertainment was the traveling cinema, we didn't have
anything else, no TV, no radio, we were very poor," resident
Nazare Alfaia, 71, said.
"I don't know how to read, so I can't remember the names of the
films, but they were adventures, cowboys and horses," she added,
surrounded by a collection of Feliciano's old projectors and
fading posters of Westerns and musicals.
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Artemisio Pecas, the projectionist's son, recalled that "before the
film, they showed news, and it was at the cinema that people would
see Lisbon, the colonies, even the sea, for the first time".
Wearing a blue workcoat with the word "Cinema" printed on the back,
Feliciano spends an hour setting up, at one point using a hammer to
align the reel of a biopic of Amalia Rodrigues, diva of Portugal's
melancholic 'fado' music.
"This is a ride of unpredictable emotions, never easy. The sound
must be good, the image clear, the equipment protected for travel.
I'm like a trapeze artist without a net," he said.
But he has no regrets: "Sometimes I feel like I 'am' cinema. At a
screening, here's the machine, the screen, the audience, all
concentrated together, we laugh, cry together. And without me it
doesn't work. Thrilling."
Feliciano looks younger than his years, his conversation peppered
with anecdotes about his quasi-bohemian life.
His jovial expression sours only when he laments that he cannot find
anyone to carry on the tradition.
"It's a shame that this important cultural expression is lost, that
when I die there will be no one left to go from village to village
to show a film."
(Editing by Axel Bugge, Michael Roddy and Andrew Heavens)
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