José Malhoa's painting O Fado (1910) is, in part, responsible for the birth of the Portuguese talkie in 1931, despite that the naturalistic portrait of the singing punter and the Lisbon prostitute in erotic repose already seemed outdated by the time it was displayed at the Sociedade Nacional das Belas Artes in 1917. In 1911, Vega Simões had pronounced the death of Symbolism, brought on by the recent crisis of Carlos I's assassination (1908) and the installation of the First Republic (1910). T he i nternational i nfluences of modernism a nd t he technological advances in photography and animation had rendered faithful representation unnecessary in the plastic arts. Portuguese audiences in Lisbon and Oporto had seen their own silent films and others from the United States, France, Spain, England, Germany, and Russia. And the Futurist vein of the Orpheu generation was getting ready to wage an aesthetic war against repeated resurrections of native and imported Romanticism. However, it was not until 1923 when Maurice Mariaud adapted O Fado to silent film, from Bento Mântua's play O Fado: Episódio em Um Acto (1915), that Malhoa's still obscure painting had a reason, rather, a yearning, not only to speak in Portuguese but also to sing in Portuguese.

But why the relationship between the fadista/prostitute and her guitarrista lover as the context for Mariaud's silent film? After all, we cannot hear their music; but then again, neither can we in Malhoa's painting. However, in José Galhardo and Frederico Valério's song “Fado Malhoa,” the fadista confirms what Mariaud must have recognized, that in fact, we do hear the fado in Malhoa's painting:

Malhoa's painting – and Mariaud's film in its adaptation of Malhoa's episode – captures more than just a silent moment between two fadistas: it engenders the fado particularly because it portrays a moment between two fadistas of the same class.