As if to atone for last year's absence of Christopher Columbus: The Enigma, Manoel de Oliveira's ode to history's artifacts, statues and old men, lost in a present they still haunt, the New York Film Festival offers The Northern Land, something like a bad Oliveira forgery. As in Oliveira's work, The Northern Land: collapses times and jumps among them to find the echoes; is a beautifully composed series of tableaus, with the hues of people emerging, just barely, from the shadows; poses everyday people like statues amid elaborate ruins, with paintings as the walls; lets these people sit and talk—almost lecture—quietly at the camera about how the myths represented around them have resounded in their own lives. The characters are, like Oliveira's, living artifacts; the novel the movie is based on is even by one of Oliveira's frequent collaborators, Agustina Bessa-Luís. The movie, however, evinces no recognition, as Oliveira always does, that there's a reality beyond the walls.   David Phelps