Carloto Cotta and Ana Moreira in 'Tabu.' Everett Collection


Film Forum
Through Jan. 8

Arriving onscreen at the end of a year given to much debate over the future of cinema, "Tabu" might seem to be the antithesis of a next-generation experiment like Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey." Made by writer-director Miguel Gomes in 35mm and 16mm black-and-white, with a title and themes evoking the 1930s, it's a self-reflexive antique. Yet, in its wistful way, "Tabu" marks the passing of an era. It's also rather clever. Mr. Gomes, who is 40 years old, described it as "a dysfunctional 'Out of Africa,' only our Meryl Streep, she's pregnant, so it is not very practical to have a love affair, and she has this pet crocodile..."

The tragic passion of Aurora (Ana Moreira), a daughter of Portuguese colonialists in Mozambique, for Ventura (Carloto Cotta), a rock 'n' roll singer entertaining the soldiers and plantation owners, is recounted in a long flashback. It's narrated by the man, now elderly, at the death of his long-ago lover in Lisbon, where she has grown old alone amid paranoid fantasies about her Cape Verdean maid. The 1960s characters speak to each other, but there's no audio for them—only other "diagetic" sounds: car doors slamming, a reptile's growl, or, booming over a loudspeaker, the urgent rhythm of "Be My Baby," sung in Portuguese.

Mr. Gomes spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the film during a September visit to the Toronto International Film Festival.

Your "Out of Africa" comparison is great, and obviously the title alludes to F.W. Murnau's 1931 silent classic, but there are so many other weird things going on in your movie. Where did you get these ideas?

There were two major events. One of them was that someone in the family told me a story about her neighbor, who was a very senile old lady with an African maid. She accused her of locking her at night in the bathroom. I got interested in these characters you don't see much in cinema. Like older ladies between 60 and 80. Lonely. But not marginals. People who are integrated into society but nobody seems to care. They don't have any adventurous life. And then, the second part of the film would be almost the opposite. This was one of the things. Another one was, in my previous film, "Our Beloved Month of August," I came across a song. I found out the first version of this song was recorded by some Portuguese guys in Mozambique in the '60s. I met them, and they told me stories of those times. They explained to be me how they used to pick up girls in Mozambique, living this playboy life. There was something that really got into me: They were missing their youth.

Halfway through shooting the film, you discovered there wasn't enough budget to proceed as you had planned. What happened next?

I threw into the garbage can the original script. We went to Mozambique. We knew the story more or less. We made up the scenes while shooting. The voice-over of the old man Ventura in the second part would allow us to restructure the film. By the end of the process, I was editing the footage we shot in Mozambique and at the same time writing the voice-over. This is my way of doing film. Maybe I'm not capable of doing things in the proper way.

Why did you shoot on film?

The industry is shifting from analog to digital and this film is dealing with memory. Cinema is memory, too. I wanted to do it the proper way. That means black-and-white film stock, and with the square ratio, which was the ratio of cinema for years before television appeared and forced cinema to compete.

Your approach is too seductive to be a gimmick. Tell me more about your rationale.

When you're remembering an old story, you forget the words that were exchanged at that moment, This was a way to approach an extinguished form of cinema, which is silent film, but not try to reproduce the aesthetics, but try to approach the sensations of watching these films. I have always seen this film almost like a ghost story. There is this society that vanished, a Portuguese colony in Africa, and the film tries to approach extinguished kinds of cinema—silent films but also classical American cinema: How Africa was seen in Hollywood in the '30s, '40s and '50s. "Tarzan" and "Mogambo" and "Hatari!" Nowadays, they can't show these films on television. 'People will phone to the station and say, "There is a problem with my TV set. There is no color!" It's kind of sad. Maybe I will not be able to show my film on television for the same reason.

Dickens on Film

Museum of Modern Art
Through Jan. 3

Along with the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare, the novels and stories of Charles Dickens have remained irresistible to filmmakers throughout the age of cinema. As this survey of nearly 20 different adaptations shows, the Dickens's sprawling social studies are highly malleable, packed with vivid scenes and larger-than-life characters that were cinematic before cinema itself existed. (Eadweard Muybridge invented his zoopraxiscope nine years after the author's death in 1870). Here, for instance, are six different versions of "Oliver Twist," including Carol Reed's 1968 Oscar-winning musical "Oliver!" (with Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes), variations from David Lean and Roman Polanski, the 1922 silent drama with Jackie Coogan as the titular waif and Lon Chaney as Fagin), and "Twisted," set in the 1990s Manhattan underbelly of drugs, drag queens and male hustlers.

See It Big!

Museum of the Moving Image

It's easy enough to stream "La Dolce Vita" from the Internet and watch it on a cell phone. But that's missing the entire point of the experience: Federico Fellini's satirical 1960 classic was pivotal in the director's career, a transition between his neo-realist roots and the surreal visions that people began calling "Felliniesque." With its array of iconic sex symbols (Anita Ekberg, Nico, Anouk Aimée) to occupy debauched journalist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) on a sweeping weeklong journey to the end of the Roman night, it's a movie whose gorgeous black-and-white palette begs for the big-picture treatment. Weekend screenings in 35mm deliver precisely that. Also featured in the year-end program is another tale of European decadence, "Bonjour Tristesse," which reunited a young Jean Seberg with director Otto Preminger.

Edie Adams and Sid Caesar in Stanley Kramer's 'It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,' which screens in 70mm at Lincoln Center. Everett Collection

See It in 70mm!

Film Society at Lincoln Center
165 65th St., (212) 875-5601

See it big or see it bigger. Timed for the seasonal inclination toward nostalgia, spectacle and tradition, this series boasts 15 expansive favorites from Hollywood's glory days, as well as some rarely screened epics. All are to be screened in the 70mm format, revived for active duty this year by director Paul Thomas Anderson, who employed it for his 2012 hit "The Master." Notable titles include "Goya: Or the Hard Way to Enlightenment," an East German/Soviet co-production from 1971 starring Donatas Banionis (the lead scientist in Tarkovsky's "Solaris") as the Spanish painter; Kenneth Branagh's four-hour "Hamlet"; Stanley Kramer's three-hour "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World"; and the 1982 Disney sci-fi favorite "Tron," which, ironically enough, marked the onset of digital cinema.