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A tea among the clouds

"When I discovered it, hidden in a rural antique shop, I could hardly believe it. Although I had never laid eyes upon it, I knew its history, and I immediately recognized it: a gigantic poster, three meters tall and one meter wide, its paper slightly brittle due to the passage of time (a minor fault, considering it is more than a century old). From that large canvas emerges Porto's Clérigos tower silhouetted against a sharp yellow background. Two figures can be perceived above, a pair of white-clad gymnasts waving victorious banners. Below them you can read: 'A Tea Among the Clouds, Astonishing Movie Feature, Caldevilla Film, Porto'. As extravagant as the story behind it, this poster promoted the first advertising film ever made in Portugal. It's a story involving mountain climbers, petit beurres, crowds and a true visionary, whose ambition made him worthy of the title of Portugal's first advertising man.

Raul de Caldevilla was born in Porto to Spanish parents in 1882. He studied business in Porto and advertising in Paris. In 1914, he created, in Porto, his firm ETP (´Escritório Técnico de Publicidade´, or ´Technical Firm for Advertising´), thus launching the Portuguese industry for the creation and production of large-scale outdoor billboards. By then, this idea-filled jack of all trades had already worked as an actor, as a deputy consul in Cadiz, as a Portuguese trade representative (promoting Portuguese wines in South America, for instance), and he would later be an entrepreneur, an advertiser, a graphic designer and a film director.

He was linked to the first film production company established in Portugal, named Invicta Filmes, and he directed his first film in 1917: ´A Tea Among the Clouds´. Aiming to popularize a new brand of biscuits, the bubbly Caldevilla devised the following scheme: he hired the Puortollanos, a Spanish father-and-son team of gymnasts famed in the showbiz milieu, and had them climb the 75 meters of the Baroque Clérigos Tower. The feat gathered an unprecedented crowd in Porto, 150,000 fevered souls hanging in dread while the two showmen accomplished their half-hour climb. Upon reaching the top, the duo set a table and had some tea with, of course, the new Fábrica Invicta-brand petit beurres. From up top, they then released thousands of leaflets advertising the grandiose biscuits.

Caldevilla's big coup was to film all this and shortly thereafter to release the resulting ´astonishing movie´, a 17-minute long blockbuster that, according to the press of the era, sold theaters out for days on end.

Not a man to rest on his laurels, the following year he repeated his feat in Lisbon; this time, the Estrela Basilica was the scenario for his daredeviling, which resulted in a new film, titled ´Desafiando a Morte´ (´Defying Death´).

Thus, when the French Spider-man [Alain Robert] was scaling the 25 de Abril bridge, as he had previously scaled the Vasco da Gama tower to promote a cellphone company on TV, I wondered: is this really anything new in Portuguese advertising?"

Catarina Portas

(Column published in "Público", August 2007)