Filming the Past – the case of Portuguese Documentary Film
Objectives
a) To understand and critically define cinema and its language as a field of studies, and within it the specificity of non- fiction film /Documentary as an expression with its own identity: Documentary Film as a genre of cinema.
b) To undersatand and define Documentary as an Historical movement connected with the ideas of Authenticity and Truth.
c) To stimulate ways of seeing: the use of different strategies and cinematographic dispositifs in portuguese documentary filmmaking.
d) To understand and analyse the artistic, cultural and political contexts associated with specific No
General characterization
Code
02106283
Credits
8.0
Responsible teacher
Catarina Sousa Brandão Alves Costa
Hours
Weekly - 3
Total - 224
Teaching language
English
Prerequisites
Available soon
Bibliography
AUSTIN, T. and JONG, W. 2009, Rethinking Documentary. New Perspectives, New Practices, Open University Press
BERREBI, Sophie, 2014, The Shape of Evidence. Contemporary Art and the Document. Ed. Valiz,
CLIFFORD, J and MARCUS, G. 1986, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. California University Press.
MACDOUGALL, David, 2006, The Corporeal Image. Film, Ethnography and the Senses, Princeton and Oxford. Princeton University Press.
NICHOLS, Bill, 2016, Speaking Truths with Film. Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary, University California Press.
ROSENTHAL, Alan (ed) / CORNER, John (ed), 2005, New Challenges for Documentary, Manchester, Manchester University Press.
WINSTON, Brian, (et al.), 2017, The Act of Documenting. Documentary Film in the 21st Century. Bloomsbury.
Teaching method
The course’s learning activities will comprise seminar-style classroom discussions (based on the films) and will include visits to several film archives.
The methodologies include exposition and presentation of the uc contents confronted with film excerts that will be collectivelly discussed. Classes will also reflect on students own ideas and academic projects.
Evaluation method
Método de Avaliação - One Final Essay Assignment: students will hand in a 4500 - 5000 word-final essay focused on one of the main topics of the course contents(70%), Written reports from viewing films or visiting archives (3) 10% each(30%)
Subject matter
The course will focus on the way the past and memories in the present have been represented in documentary film. Documentary film in its ideas of evidence, ethics and politics highlights historical discourses and uses of the past. The course will discuss several cinematic rhetoric’s related to different historical moments:
1. Nationalistic Representations: the case of II World War refugees
2. Forms of resistance and Repression during Salazar’s regime
3. Women and gender narratives
4. Performing the revolutionary movement: activist cinema
5. Artists, Filmmakers and the Media looking at the revolution
6. Popular Culture, ethnography and rurality: a non-temporal landscape
7. Social Sciences, Archives and the colonial world
8. The world we live on: migration, the city
9. Post-colonial reconfigurations: new and old relations
10. Contemporary Portugal: the peripheric becomes center