Search

This article serves to broadly address formalist approaches to rendering natural settings psychological in cinema, or, in other words, mobilizing landscapes to function beyond their usual function as narrative backdrop. By “formalist” it should be understood that such an approach to visual representation is both inherently aggressive and experimental, where one implies the other, especially when compared to more realist modes of expression. Instead of human characters portrayed within an authenticating wilderness, as in the typical classical Hollywood Western, the precise topography of the landscape becomes reflective of a particular human consciousness.

The International Seminar of Archive Documentary – Archives in Motion took place at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (CPDOC-FGV), in Rio de Janeiro in november 2016. This article proposes a report and a reflection on the conference.

James Benning was an invited speaker at the International Conference on Space and Cinema held at the University of Lisbon School of Arts and Humanities between the 28th and the 30th of November 2016. On the morning of the 29th, instead of delivering the protocol one-hour lecture, he presented his latest film, time after time – a montage of shots taken from earlier films, which the director had finished the week before –, in a world premiere at the Portuguese Cinematheque. We joined him in the afternoon for the conversation that follows, which took place on a small room at the University, with a view to the empty playground in a nearby kindergarten.

Book review of Slow Cinema, edited by Tiago de Luca & Nuno Barradas Jorge.

Through the close analysis of four films, the author emphasizes the importance of the poetics of the displacement in the relations between body, memory and landscape. Following the thinking of French philosophers Gilles Tiberghien and Anne Cauquelin, landscape is understood as a physical environment that gives rise to a relation. The idea of landscape as a relation leads to a reflection on the notion of vestige. From Emmanuel Lévinas’ thoughts on this concept, this paper discusses two works made by American artist James Benning and two other by Brazilian artist Cao Guimarães. This research thus identifies a recurring tendency in contemporary audiovisual production from the organization of vestiges.

Critical overview of the cinematic installation 4.56.20, presented by the Portuguese artist João Tabarra at Solar – Cinematic Art Gallery (Vila do Conde) in 2016.

This paper aims to approach the artists Chris Marker and W.G. Sebald, trying to determine and develop pervasive questions in their works: the construction of a historiographic discourse, the ambiguities of memory, the erratic movement of their characters and essayistic thinking. We have tried to draft some starting points to make possible the writing of a memory as a cartography, created through walking on the world and also through the collection of images and of stories that tell about lives that went astray in the mis-paths of History.

Critical overview of the exhibition ""De Méliès à la 3D. La machine cinéma" at the Cinémathèque Française. A number of studies on techniques and filmic machines are evoked and different aspects of the exhibition are critically discussed.

The idea of background (horizon) is consubstantial to the birth of landscape in the Western World – a concept inherited by cinema since its inception. Considering that notion, this paper attempts to approach the representation of nature in Russian and Soviet cinema. The main idea is that the background works as an aesthetic category in itself, from which it is possible to diachronically and historically analyze this cinema. From a methodological point of view, this article is based on the double distinction established by Maurizia Natali between the figure and the background, and the background's background. Temporally speaking, it is focused on the potentialities of the idea of background until the consolidation of Socialist Realism, in the mid 1930s of the last century.

Considering recent contributions on affective geographies and on the relationships between memory and spectrality, this papere analyses aquatic imaginaries in a corpus of audiovisual works from Argentina and Chile. Through water, El botón de nácar (Patricio Guzmán, 2015), Los durmientes, El exilio imaginado (Enrique Ramírez, 2012-2014), and Las aguas del olvido (Jonathan Perel, 2013) convey an “affective mapping” that creates ways of “being together” in the aftermath of loss. While Patricio Guzmán, Enrique Ramírez and Jonathan Perel refer to the so-called “death flights” – as both the Argentine and the Chilean dictatorship use oceans and rivers to “discard” the corpses of dissidents and “drown” the truth — their works also transgress conventional geographical and historical demarcations. These films, videos and installations subvert stabilizing cartographies and use anachronism to reflect on the contradictory meanings of water as a source of life, epicenter of cultures and cemetery not only for the victims of dictatorships, but also for indigenous groups or even contemporary migrants. Finally, these works insist on an “aesthetics of affect” that makes it possible to “touch” forgotten events, spaces or subjects and to connect different memories and geographies in the present.

Interview with Hernani Heffner, head of conservation of the Cinemateca do Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro. The interview addresses themes like Heffner's professional trajectory, the challenges and achievements faced by the Cinemateca do MAM, the particularities of Cinemateca's collection and the dilemmas faced by several institutions that struggle for the conservation and diffusion of Brazilian audiovisual memory.

Film studies have largely been built on the fiction film, within a paradigm that has been predominantly aesthetic, auteur-centred and national. Although they make up the largest part of the world film production, non-fiction films – a broad category that includes different formats and genres – have been systematically left out of canonical film histories and historiographies, national and international. This introduction to the special issue ‘Other Films’ tracks down the emergence, in the 1990s, of critical perspectives that enabled a positive reappraisal of these films and, consequently, their study. Bearing in mind this international context, we take stock of the current situation in Portugal and Brazil. With its 6 articles (mostly on amateur films and newsreels), this special issue aims to launch a wider debate about the way these “other films” may (ought to?) force us to rethink the study of cinema and the moving images.

This article analyses main contributions that social sciences provided to the study of the newsreel produced in Argentina. It takes into consideration the history of the genre, the conceptualizations proposed from semiotic and socio-historical perspectives, and defines its specificity by studying its similarities and differences in relation to documentary film and press. The article's contribution to the subject consists in systematising, analysing and discussing the concepts formulated to date, and what follows from that points to an original analytical perspective that constructs newsreel as an object of sociological study.

Book review of Uhuru. Stamp. Genealogy. Anatomy, de Catarina Simão (Bratislava: Apart Label, 2015) 91p.

This text is a report of my own experience as curator of short films at the Mostra de Cinema de Tiradentes for the past 5 years. Created in 1988, the festival has a focun in independent, auteur brazilian cinema, and has become one of the larger platforms for the exhibition and discussion of contemporary brazilian cinema.

This paper aims to study amateur films, made in a private context, as a powerful way of creating memory. To do so, we first present a theoretical analisys on the idea of “sites os memory” (Nora 1984) and also on the desire to protect memory, that calls to action the amateur filmmaker. At least, we analyze two Super-8 amateur films produced in Fortaleza (Brazil), in 1978, which were re-edited in the short movie Supermemorias (Danilo Carvalho, 2010). This analysis evidences to us the editing process as a way of constructing new sites of memory and also allow us to reafirm that the amateur film production can instigate interesting and relevant contemporary investigations.

The text provides an account of Blais & Grandmaison's exhibition La vie abstraite, which took place at Galerie René Blouin in Montréal in spring 2016.

The international conference Ruy Guerra e o Pensamento Crítico das Imagens (Ruy Guerra and Images’ Critical Thought) took place in Paris between the 7th and the 9th of October 2015. This article proposes a critical account of the event.

In the following article I argue that the public presentations of film heritage institutes largely focus on feature-length, predominantly fiction films. This statement is based on a survey I did within the framework of my PhD research of public programming information on the websites of 24 film heritage institutes, in February 2014. The results of this survey clearly show that these institutes’ public, curatorial activities fall short of their missions and negatively affect the sense of film history they convey to their audiences. In the case of publicly-funded institutes this is all the more serious, as they are mandated to be publicly accountable for their missions and activities. I conclude with recommendations for curatorial activities: to rethink the institutes’ gatekeeper function and to develop more more varied, imaginative, and informative public presentations that reflect the range of their collections and the histories these collections imply.

A review of the book Adaptation, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, in which Associate Professor of English and Film at the University of Southampton Shelley Cobb investigates the process of literary adaptation of women written fiction by women filmmakers, in a process of duplicate female artistic creation and authorial validation.

Within the framework of the XI Congress of the Association of German Lusitanists, the panel “Revisited (R)evolutions and Transitions - The End of the Portuguese Colonial Empire in the Cinematographic Representations of Lusophony” (1974-2014), organised by Teresa Pinheiro (Chemnitz University) and Robert Stock (Konstanz University), was held on 17th and 18th September 2014 at the RWTH Aachen University. This article proposes a reflection about the communications presented in the panel.

For decades, the history of Portuguese cinema was made without historians or academics in the social sciences and humanities, but made by curious, enthusiasts and writers who were committed to the object itself. It was therefore that these early writings, although an essential role in collecting and inventariações sources, promoted the creation of myths, more implicitly or explicitly manipulated the past of Portuguese cinema and conditioned its historic narrative.This thematic dossier brings together four essays that analyze and reflect on different ideas and conceptions of Portuguese Cinema which have been outlined in stocks, texts and films over the decades. The purpose of this dossier is not to answer questions, but take advantage of them to review preconceived ideas and to launch reading hypotheses to classic and current issues in the history of Portuguese cinema.

An interview with filmmaker José Fonseca e Costa (1933-2015) about his two short films — ...E era o Mar (1966) and A Cidade (1968) — whose subjects are, respectively, the Hotel do Mar, in Sesimbra, designed by the architect Conceição Silva, and the city of Évora. The interview was conducted in February 24, 2015, in the context of the research project “Atrás da câmara: práticas de visualidade e mobilidade no filme turístico português” (EXPL/IVC-ANT/1706/2013), funded by FCT/MCTES.

Critical review of the book "O Espectador (In) Visível – Reflexividade da óptica do espectador em INLAND EMPIRE de David Lynch" by Fátima Chinita

This essay suggest that the discussion of the issue of Portuguese cinema takes place at the most conceptual level possible, addressing its condition as national cinema and the way in which both film criticism and film studies have undertaken its analysis using this same framework. Dominant concepts and discourses will be challenged and we will assess the pragmatic importance of Portuguese cinema to audiences. In effect, more than attempting to answer the question “what is Portuguese cinema?”, this essays aims to explore what precedes the “being”, which is the reason for “existing” in the first place.

The international symposium "António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, eccentric filmmakers" took place in Paris between the 3rd and the 4th of June, 2015. Speakers exchanged on the political, social and poetical aspects of the duo's cinematography, as well as on the reverberations of titles such as Jaime (1974) and Trás-os-montes (1976) on the Portuguese filmic landscape of the decades that followed.

Eduardo Lourenço has focused some of his research on the historical-mythical relationship of the Portuguese with their country, claiming that they have been living in a kind of hyper-identity, incorporating an obsession with the past, which co-exists with a waiting utopian by future, as is demonstrates the Sebastianism myth. Focused on the representations of trans-temporality, identity, collective memory and myth, The Portuguese Cinema, Trans-temporality and the Myth, concentrated especially in Eduardo Lourenço's work to propose a research on how the identity myths – created and disseminated by Portuguese literature over the centuries – earned imagistic representations in the twentieth and twenty-first century’s, through a cinema that built or deconstructed these historical and patriotic mythological, inscribing image capacities to continually rebuild one mythologized common heritage.

This article seeks to identify the underlying historiographical discourses advanced by the Cinémathèque Française’s recent Buster Keaton retrospective and to question the actor-director’s status as a “silent” comic in light of his wide ranging sound era output.

Book review and critical reading of a book that crosses cinema and the aviation transport, a work that understands the latter as a territory of cinema diffusion. The films shown in the aircraft are designed to entertain the passengers, keep them calm, but also to promote marketing campaigns and lifestyles.

This essay aims at questioning the literary trend or trait in Portuguese cinema. The focus of the reflection is on documentary, and on author fiction films, starting with the analysis of works by António Reis, often considered "a filmmaker of poetry". The problematization it entails does not so much indicate a conclusion (whether Portuguese film is or is not literary) as it theorizes into what each of the terms of the analysis may imply.

From the analysis of the short film documentary A queima (Diego Benevides, 2013), we discuss the relationship between indexing, ethics and aesthetics in contemporary Brazilian documentary based on comments made by Noël Carroll (2005 ), Fernão Ramos (2001, 2008 ), Roger Odin (2012, 2005) on the delimitation of the documentary field.

In this essay, we shall study the aesthetic manifesto as an element frequently used by the Latin American plastic and literary artists during the 1920s and 1940s, and which later influenced the theoretical proposals of the filmmakers who shaped the New Latin American Cinema. We will analyze the uses and practices of this type of texts and their historical development, as well as their political implications over time. We will understand manifestos as a bridge between the different historical periods that marked the development of the arts in Latin America, in literature, in painting, and in cinema.

Portuguese film tradition has been marked by a series of thematic and aesthetic features that appear, as signs of identity, in the films of its main filmmakers, such as Manoel de Oliveira, Paulo Rocha, Fernando Lopes, João César Monteiro, António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, Pedro Costa and Teresa Villaverde. Film critics usually study the relations and similarities in the work of these and other filmmakers in order to point out the elements that distinguish Portuguese cinema from other national cinemas. This approach, however, is incomplete in the context of globalization and post-modernity, because nowadays the present and future of national cinemas rely on their greater or lesser connection with the main global aesthetic and economic networks: thus, the greater the connection, the greater the distribution of films, which consequently helps a country and a culture to achieve a significant place in the contemporary geopolitics of cinema. Following this logic, the aim of this paper is to reverse the traditional approach of studies on national cinemas to rather explore the transnational linkages of Portuguese films and filmmakers.

Book review of Os Cinemas de Lisboa. Um fenómeno urbano do século XX, by Margarida Acciaiuoli (2012).

Critical review of the book Imagem, Corpo, Tecnologia: A Funcao Haptica das Novas Imagens Tecnologicas, by Patricia Silveirinha Castello Branco (2013).

The text is thought as a brief museological and museographical journey of Paolo Gioli’s exhibition “Volti” [“Faces”], that allows the reader to go through the exhibition-making process, discussing, among others, the difficulties that I have encountered.

Through the analysis of the installation Looming Fire – Stories From the Netherlands East Indies (Péter Forgács, 2013), this article investigates the new meanings mobilized by the reappropriation of amateur films produced in the heyday of the colonial exploitation of the Dutch East Indies, territory which today constitutes Indonesia. As these private records assume new territories of history and memory, we propose to study their various displacements. Along with films which reappropriate official images from the Dutch colonies such as Mother Dao, the Turtle-like (Vicent Monnikendam, 1995) and Facing Forward (Fiona Tan, 1999), we intend to analyse how the ethical and aesthetic procedures employed by the artists question both the colonialist logic and gaze.

Review of Illusions in motion: media archaeology of the moving panorama and related spectacles, by Erkki Huhtamo.

The eighteenth meeting of the Brazilian Society for Cinema and Audiovisual Studies - Socine, took place between 7th and 10th October 2014, at the University of Fortaleza, Brazil. This article is a reflection on the organization of the event and our review of some of the papers presented there, primarily focused on the most recent Latin American cinematographic productions.

Through the study of the censorship report from the film A promessa (1972), directed by António de Macedo, and of other reports of the same period, as well as the Atas da Comissão de Censura, I intend to study the way how these filmes were censored and, in what A promessa is concerned, all the relationship established between the director, the distibutor and the Comissão de Censura.Through the analysis of some of the censored Portuguese filmography in Marcello Caetano’s time, I intend to help to understand the way how the Comissão de Censura operated in relation to the Portuguese films of that period what, by the way, may lead to a broader understanding of mentalities in Portuguese history.The present investigation is based on a study of the archives of the Secretaria de Estado da Informação e Turismo (SEIT). All the information produced by the Comissão de Exame e Classificação de Espectáculos under the Estado Novo is to be found in the relevant section of the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT), in Lisbon. As well as looking at the handling of the censorship of films, this investigation is also based on the study of the Atas da Comissão de Censura corresponding to the period from 1971 to 25 April 1974.

Book review of O cinema sob o olhar de Salazar, coord. Luís Reis Torgal (2011) 2nd ed.

In his trilogy, comprising La Libertad (2001), Los Muertos (2004) and Liverpool (2008), Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso employs a distinctive narrative motif, namely the journey of solitary individuals through desolated landscapes in rural Argentina. From a comparative view, the key to understanding these introverted trajectories is to consider Alonso’s construction of narrative space around the misery of a stark void, namely the absence of home. For Alonso, home is not a peaceful destination, connoting the intimacy of a family, serenity or simply a place where one is allowed to dream in peace (Bachelard). The absence of home becomes the blind spot of these journeys: home turns out to be a broken horizon. In this essay I will mainly focus on the film Los Muertos and the way in which it radicalizes narrative space through the combination of cinematic silence (absence of words and dialogues) and cinematic slowness (static long-takes) while formulating a void which coincides with the protagonist’s homelessness. Moreover, this essay tries to consider how Alonso’s radical cinematic realism problematizes the concept of authenticity in its modern formation, and also in the context of Rancière’s notion of documentary fiction and the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

Book review of Empatia e Alteridade – a figuração cinematográfica como jogo, by José Bogalheiro (2014).

Translation of the text originally published in Bruno, Giuliana. 2007. “Modernist Ruins, Filmic Archaeologies. Jane and Louise Wilson’s A Free and Anonymous Monument.” In Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts, 43-86. Cambridge: MIT Press.

The passing of time in Alessandra Sanguinetti's photographs refer to aspects of the moving image if we assume its inherent qualities of change and duration. Those are images of an encounter between cinema and photography which contaminate each other reciprocally with its own processes by expanding towards each other. There is a real durational quality that comes from the referent (the daily life of the photographed characters) which turns up into fabulation giving access to other beings and other specificities of time, all of them living in the image. That is the realm of the imaginary documentary in which images evoke bifurcations, take shape and gain movement inasmuch as they cease to allude to a given and objective notion of the real referring rather to a broader notion of time as indeterminate forms of duration. The ten years that goes by during the photographic essay 'The adventures of Guille and Belinda and The enigmatic meaning of their dreams' appears therefore to be shot in a single afternoon. The durations and becomings in the passage from the characters childhoods to their adult lives - or from a superficial game to an intense performative encounter with theirselves and Sanguinetti - are based in a free indirect speech form. This particular photographic fashion of the free indirect speech comes to light by the means of apparatuses, understood in a broad sense. Those apparatuses guide the photographic and relational processes leading to the creation of slits between objectivity and subjectivity that ultimately act in order to favor temporal and immaterial aspects in the images.

Versão revista e alargada de “Conceptual Synchronicity: Intermedial Encounters between Film, Video and Computer”, publicado em Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film, edited by, A. L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball and David Curtis (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 194-201.

Entrevista a André Parente gravada na Covilhã no dia 16 de maio de 2014.

Recensão crítica do livro Novas & Velhas Tendências no Cinema Português Contemporâneo, coordenado por João Maria Mendes (2013).

Aconteceu entre os dias 15 e 17 de maio de 2014 o IV Encontro Anual da AIM – Associação de Investigadores da Imagem em Movimento. A UBI – Universidade da Beira Interior –, na Covilhã, acolheu o evento que, em sua quarta edição, já goza o status de referência portuguesa entre investigadores nacionais e estrangeiros interessados em trabalhos dedicados ao cinema, ao audiovisual e em suas variáveis, bem como na inter-relação entre estes e múltiplas áreas da pesquisa científica.