[...] The Strange Case has its documentary aspects as well. In one apparent non sequitur, Oliveira frames the house cat intently watching the landlady’s canary. The shot is held until, somewhere in the vastness beyond the frame, a dog barks, humorously underscoring the cat’s presumably unscripted concentration.

Playing out its dialectic between the infinite and the ephemeral, the movie ends with the song of the workers in the vineyard. The landlady draws the shutters on Isaac’s window. The camera that is Isaac’s room vanishes, along with Oliveira’s, leaving only darkness and the sound of fading footsteps. The last living filmmaker born during the age of the nickelodeon, Oliveira told an interviewer that cinema today is “the same as it was for Lumiére, for Méliès and Max Linder. There you have realism, the fantastic, and the comic. There’s nothing more to add to that, absolutely nothing.” The great beauty of this love song to the medium is that Oliveira’s eschewal remains absolute. It’s a strange case—pictures move and time stands still.