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Full-Day Workshop – (Post)Colonial Images: an Intermedial Approach

21st June 2018, 11:00-18:00 – Studio Space, Minghella Building, University of Reading

The fantastic Maria do Carmo Piçarra will be contributing to the IntermIdia project with a wonderful full-day workshop, entitled: ‘(Post)Colonial Images: an Intermedial Approach’. The workshop will run from 11:00 to 18:00, in the Studio Space, Minghella Building, including a screening, an exhibition and some fantastic names, such as Vicente Sánchez-Biosca as keynote speaker and not least an opening speech by Maria do Carmo herself. See the full programme here.

Silent Movie Prologues in Brazil

Brazil: 30th June 2018, Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS-SP), São Paulo, Brazil
UK: December 2018, University of Reading, further details to be confirmed.

Silent Movie Prologues in Brazil will bring together theatre and film, by restaging the comedic movie prologues which used to precede the screening of silent Hollywood films.  In 1926, film exhibitor Francisco Serrador introduced the movie prologues, a novelty intended to attract audiences to the luxurious cinemas he had built at Cinelândia, in the centre of Rio de Janeiro. Movie prologues were stage presentations based on themes, characters and scenes of the foreign films they preceded. Usually accompanied by dance and musical numbers, they drew inspiration on the popular teatro de revista, the Brazilian vaudeville-style theatre.

The first restaging of the Brazilian movie prologues will take place on 30 June 2018 at Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS-SP), by the theatre troupe Companhia Antropofágica. In December, the programme will travel to the UK, and will involve staff and students of the Department of Film, Theatre & Television, University of Reading.

For full event information, see here.

Passages

Passages, an essay film written and directed by Lúcia Nagib and Samuel Paiva
Release date: Spring 2019

The relationship between cinema and the real is probably the most central and complex issue in film studies. Passages attempts to address this issue by looking at a selection of films in which intermedial devices, that is, the utilisation within film of artforms such as painting, theatre, music, photography and others, appear to function as a ‘passage’ to political and social reality. In preparation for the film, we have interviewed 15 key Brazilian filmmakers, technicians and curators, all of whom are prominent figures of what became known as the Retomada do Cinema Brasileiro, or the Brazilian Film Revival, of the 1990s, which brought back to the agenda the question of national identity and Brazil’s lingering social issues. The flourishing and diversification of independent filmmaking from that period onwards favoured not only a new approach to reality, but an emboldened use of the film medium that acknowledged and exposed its inextricable connections with other art and medial forms. The Passages project proposes that the intermedial method is thus strategically poised to shed a new light on the ways in which these films not only represented but interfered with and transformed the world around them. The chosen case studies hail from Pernambuco, in the northeast of Brazil, and from São Paulo, in the southeast, whose filmmakers, though stemming from disparate regional cultures, have been in a close artistic dialogue since the Brazilian Film Revival, demonstrating their shared values at a certain historical juncture and interconnectedness across Brazilian geography.

See full page here.