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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.

This text is an introduction to the special issue on ‘Landscape and Cinema’ published by Aniki. Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image. It is composed of a brief state of the art, which anchors this work within the bibliography on the subject, and a synthetic description of the discourses developed by the six papers included in the issue: the first one addresses the historical and aesthetic evolution of the background in the Russian and Soviet cinema of the first decades of the twentieth century; the second discusses the representation of the Portuguese landscape in Manuel Guimarães’ films; the third identifies a few cinematic techniques that work as conventions of psychological landscape film, such as juxtaposition and superimposition; the fourth interprets the meaning of Brazilian urban landscapes showed in the feature film A Vida Provisória (Maurício Gomes Leite, 1968); the fifth deals with the corporeal and conceptual relations between body, memory and landscape through a sensory reading of the films Ten Skies (James Benning, 2004) and Sin Peso (Cao Guimarães, 2007); and finally, the sixth undertakes a comparative analysis of three South American non-fiction works that show several waterscapes as places of memory: El botón de nácar (Patricio Guzmán, 2015), Los durmientes (Enrique Ramírez, 2015) and Las aguas del olvido (Jonathan Perel, 2013). The aim of this preliminary text is therefore to introduce the main contents of the issue and some of its conclusions. In this sense, it is necessary to emphasise the open and polysemic nature of landscape, which works, inside and outside cinema, as a palimpsest in which multiple meanings come together. For this reason, those films that depict, create and intervene in landscape allow to perceive, among other things, the overlapping of historical and subjective times that takes place in certain spaces.

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.

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 'From Reel to Real' season of programmes, the first retrospective of women filmmakers' work from the London Film-makers' Co-operative, curated by Maud Jacquin with Tate Modern and LUX, bring together three generations of filmmakers, and highlight the transmission of a political aesthetics that is both theoretically-informed and embodied.

Manuel Guimarães’ films stand out in Portuguese cinema as a new and singular way of representing the national reality, which had previously been too much forged according to the principles and values defended by the New State (Estado Novo). In this context, the landscape is a crucial element in both the subversion of the human relations with the territory and the representation of the physical environment. Manuel Guimarães’ films aim at a new perspective of space, giving new meanings to the territory while introducing very different characters to those that inhabit the cinema of the period.The revisitation of the landscape in Manuel Guimarães’ feature films seeks to analyse the way in which the filmmaker recodifies landscape in an attempt to counter the utopia established by the regime.

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.

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.

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

In 2010, Manoel de Oliveira films The Strange Case of Angélica, a project from the early fifties of the past century. In it, the confrontation between the documentary side of the film (the sequences where the protagonist, Isaac, photographs the workers in the vineyards) and the fantastic sequences (the episodes with the ghost of Angelica) seems to indicate an affinity. That "shadow of resemblance" Petrarch spoke about to his close friend Giovanni Boccaccio: "... he who imitates must proceed in such a way that what he does is similar but not equal, and that the likeness is not that which exists between the original and the copy, that the more similar the more it is praiseworthy, but instead a likeness which one finds in the similarities between a father and a son, among which, though much difference is made in the aspect, there is, however, as a shadow of resemblance, which the painters call 'aire' (...) "(apud Rodrigues 2003: 5). A "family air" as a living correlation that comes to our encounter and which is felt as an immediate understanding (and not as definable evidence). In the film, the shiver that assaults us through the apparition of Angelica seems to announce something that goes beyond this same vision: the eminence of the disappearance of the vineyard workers and their gestures, a loss of connection between Man and Nature. The present affinity - Angelica / diggers - is mirrored in Isaac's immense melancholy, the only person apparently capable of perceiving the landscape, the "air" that this relationship evokes. The whole film is crossed by the glimpse of this indefinable kinship, by the porosity between the sensitive world and the spectral world, the permanent interweaving of visibilities / invisibilities that allow us access to this other cinematographic space-time, more percept than visible, in which, according to Manoel de Oliveira, the phantom of physical reality reveals itself "more real, however, than reality itself" (Baecque and Parsi 1999: 81).

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.

Este artigo é dedicado à análise do filme brasileiro A Vida Provisória (1968), do diretor Maurício Gomes Leite. A partir dele, estabelece-se uma discussão sobre a relação entre cinema e cidade. Para tanto, propõe-se deslocar a atenção do estudo da memória de sua especificidade temporal para a espacial, buscando entender como o cinema potencializa a discussão entre a cidade real e o discurso feito sobre as cidades. Para o exercício da análise fílmica elegem-se três principais categorias: a presença e os significados que reverberam a exposição das cidades do Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte e Brasília na trama do filme; mimese entre diretor e personagem principal; e a tessitura do provisório na vida das personagens e a relação com o tempo histórico de realização do filme, em plena Ditadura Militar.

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.

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.

When the avant-garde theoreticians claimed the purity of film as opposed to the excesses of theatricality that contaminated the new art, they ignored that film, intermedia art par excellence, only would benefit itself in interaction with theater – though it was necessary to wait for modern cinema to renew the filmic language by interweaving the potencies of each language. Thus, the purpose of this paper is analyze the TV-movie 'After the rehearsal' (1984), by Ingmar Bergman, from the perspective of theatricality in film, aiming to demonstrate how Bergman promotes an amalgamation between film and theater, besides a constant interaction with the work of playwrighter August Strindberg.

Between 1938 and 1951 the Portuguese Society of Newsreels produced for the National Propaganda Secretariat, under António Lopes Ribeiro supervision, a national newsreel entitled Jornal Português. From a total of 101 editions, composed of 510 reports, this article is only concerned with 15 of those reports which relate to the way cinema was depicted. In particular those reports dealing with foreign film celebrities visiting Portugal, Portuguese film shootings, their premieres and award cerimonies. The propose of this article is to analyze in which way cinema was instrumentalized during the dictatorship (Estado Novo) as a way of internal propaganda, and in which way António Lopes Ribeiro used Jornal Português as a tool of self-promotion and self-preservation, taking advantage of his position as “regime’s filmmaker”.

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.

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.

The exhibition, exploring Katia Maciel and André Parente's work, consisted in a multiple refexion of the ways a couple's relationship manifests itself through architectural links.

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.

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.

This article discusses the filmic production carried out independently by Ecuadorians self-taught filmmakers. By the turn of the 1990s to the 2000s, using home equipment and the market of pirated DVDs, they began making films that have been successfully received by the public. Working with films such as those by Fernando Cedeño, Nixon Chalacama and Nelson Palacios, shot in general in Ecuadorian "bajas tierras", far from the capital, Quito, and at first unrelated to official devices funding and display, requires first of all a deconstruction of customary antagonisms, as those who oppose "amateurism" and "professionalism", "craft" and "industrial", "center" and "periphery".

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.

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.

As in many national cinemas, the history of Brazilian amateur film is still in its early stages of investigation. In addition to this historiographical deficit, there are many ways in which amateur cinema is a small and less visible production: films shot in 16mm, 9.5mm and Super 8 are dispensable and Brazilian film archives and cinemateques only started cataloguing these materials in recent years. In the following paper we wish to establish a set of theoretic and historical guidelines to analyse amateur films that express different forms of amateur production. Through the collection of home movies from Alves de Lima family deposited at Cinemateca Brasileira (São Paulo), the amateur fictional films from Cinemateca Capitólio (Porto Alegre) and Raymond Chauvin's experimental films belonging to Hipólito José da Costa Communications Museum (Porto Alegre) we want to give visibility to films that are not yet part of Brazilian cinema history.

This article starts with an analysis of Daniel Barroca's work Circular Body in order to approach the conference Liberation Struggles, The ‘Falling of the Empire’ and the Birth (through Images) of African Nations, which took place in Reading and London on January 27th and 28th. The text focuses on the questioning of images and the work with the archive which were presented in the different papers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No seu novo livro intitulado Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian (2013), Michael Witt aborda alguns dos mais complexos e importantes aspectos da multifacetada obra de Jean-Luc Godard. Partindo de Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1998) como objecto de estudo central, Michael Witt evidencia as proposições históricas aí desenvolvidos e analisa as suas formas, temas e procedimentos através da contextualização dos filmes e dos vídeos criados pelo cineasta Francês ao longo do projecto. Esta recensão crítica centra-se no estudo levado a cabo por Michael Witt sobre as principais influências e metodologias da investigação histórica de Godard, conferindo particular destaque ao encontro dialógico entre Godard e Walter Benjamin. Os modos alternativos de escrita da história convergem com a utilização criativa da montagem e com a exploração das capacidades intuitivas e expressivas da imagem, permitindo ao espectador entrar numa relação subjectiva com o passado. E, no caso de Godard, isso irá orientá-lo em direcção a uma reformulação da sintaxe fílmica e à consequente amplificação das potencialidades do cinema em narrar a história.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Review of the exhibition of the German artist Hito Steyerl, at Artists Space, New York (March, 8 - May, 24, 2015).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Entre abril y julio de 1994 tuvo lugar en Ruanda, país ubicado en el corazón de África, el genocidio más rápido de la historia. Como asegura Linda Melvern, “la tasa de muerte en Ruanda fue cinco veces la alcanzada por los nazis”; en dicho período se calcula que fueron asesinados casi 800.000 tutsis y hutus moderados. Con el suceder de los años, diversos estudios académicos se esforzaron por estudiar lo que allí sucedió pero lo cierto es que una de las formas por la cual Occidente conoció los hechos fue a través del cine, con producciones tanto de ficción como documentales. Mientras el mundo fue tomando conciencia de este suceso, mientras las consecuencias de este crimen se hacían visibles, el cine comenzó a crear un archivo visual del genocidio, ya sea a través de imágenes recreadas o efectuando entrevistas en suelo ruandés a sobrevivientes y protagonistas de los hechos. En ese sentido, las producciones cinematográficas crearon un verdadero archivo sobre el genocidio ruandés, logrando así construir una memoria cultural. A partir de esta última cuestión, el presente escrito se propone estudiar el archivo cinematográfico del genocidio ruandés desde la noción de memoria cultural pensada por Aleida Assmann. Ésta es un tipo de memoria que se encuentra mediada a través de textos, imágenes, rituales, etc.; en ese sentido, el cine se ha vuelto uno de los medios contemporáneos más importantes para la construcción y transmisión de la memoria cultural. Por otro lado, la dinámica de la memoria cultural, en tanto forma activa de recuerdo, puede ser comprendida a partir del diálogo entre el canon y el archivo. Así, indagaremos el archivo sobre el genocidio ruandés a partir de dicho diálogo, un diálogo no siempre armónico sino que en ocasiones también puede ser disonante.