lower classes, the arts and especially films. While he named D. W. Griffith, Eric von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, Max Linder, Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc and Sergei Eisenstein's The General Line as early influences, he was also disappointed to have virtually no Portuguese filmmakers to emulate. The Portuguese film industry was also highly censored and restricted under the fascist Salazar regime that lasted from the early 1930s until the mid-1970s. His later films, such as The Cannibals and Belle Toujours (a sequel to Belle de Jour), suggest an affinity with Spanish-Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel. He stated "I'm closer to Buñuel. He's a reverse Catholic and I was raised a Catholic. It's a religion that permits sin, and Buñuel at the very deepest is one of the most moralistic directors but he does everything to the contrary. I never say that I'm Catholic because to be Catholic is very difficult. I prefer to be thought of as a great sinner." Career 1927–42: Early documentaries and first feature Oliveira's first attempt at filmmaking was in 1927 when he and his friends worked on a film about the Portuguese participation in World War I, although the film was never made. He enrolled in Italian film-maker Rino Lupo's acting school at age 20 and appeared as an extra in Lupo's film Fátima Milagrosa. Years later in 1933 he also had the distinction of having acted in the second Portuguese sound film, A Canção de Lisboa. Eventually Oliveira turned his attention back to filmmaking when he saw Walther Ruttmann's documentary Berlin: Symphony of a City. Ruttman's film is the most famous of a small, short lived silent documentary film genre, the city symphony film. These films portrays the life of a city, mainly through visual impressions in a semi-documentary style, without the narrative content of more mainstream films, though the sequencing of events can imply a kind of loose theme or impression of the city's daily life. Other examples include Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures and Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera. Oliveira said that Ruttman's film was his "most useful lesson in film technique", but that he also found it cold, mechanical and lacking humanity. The discovery of Ruttman's film prompted Oliveira to direct his own first film in 1931, a documentary short titled Douro, Faina Fluvial. The film is a portrait of his hometown Porto and the labor