International Conference
27 January 2016 Minghella Studios, University of Reading, 28 January 2016 – King’s College, London
CONVENOR
CFAC / FCT Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Maria do Carmo Piçarra, in cooperation with the Camões Centre for Portuguese Language and Culture
The fortieth anniversary of Portuguese decolonisation of Africa has acted as a catalyst in discussing how Portugal ‘imagined’ colonial politics through moving images and how these propagandist portrayals began to be questioned by the Portuguese ‘Novo Cinema’. This can be seen in works that were censured and prohibited. Portuguese colonial cinematographic representations were later challenged by films made in the context of the liberation movements and by images that emerged out of the national cinematographic projection (Frodon) of the new Portuguese-speaking African countries.
This conference intends to go some way in highlighting common aspects in the emergence of cinema in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, which have all been studied individually. In addition, it will provide a reflection on the roots of the emergence of the ‘New Cinema’ from the militancy that uses film as a means of changing society and focussing on the birth [in images] of new nations, being projected by the programs of the Marxist parties that assumed power. The aim of the conference is also to analyse how, through ‘Third Cinema’, the ‘Cinema Novo’ of Brazil and Cuban Cinema, more specifically, in addition to the authors of the French ‘Rive Gauche da Nouvelle Vague’, all played a role in questioning and rupturing the colonial representations of the Portuguese dictatorship and, most of all, in the formation of the projects and cinematographic archives of emerging African nations.
This conference also intends to question, apart from the reasoning of nationalist propaganda, how did these new countries tell the story of their own history through film and cinema (Godard/Ishaghpour)? Finally, it will be discussed how, given the ‘urgency of the present’, the redemption of the past (Benjamin) is realised through a ‘cinema of resistance’ (Deleuze), such as that of Pedro Costa, and by other moving images artistic practises?
The Playlist below collects videos from the first day of the conference, hosted at the University of Reading: