International Conference- LIBERATION STRUGGLES, THE ‘FALLING OF THE EMPIRE’ AND THE BIRTH [THROUGH IMAGES] OF AFRICAN NATIONS_27th January 2016

International Conference

LIBERATION STRUGGLES, THE ‘FALLING OF THE EMPIRE’

AND THE BIRTH [THROUGH IMAGES]

OF AFRICAN NATIONS

Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures, University of Reading, Reading

27th January 2016

FINAL PROGRAMME

© Rute Magalhães / Luhuna Carvalho – Ruy Duarte de Carvalho e Beto Moura Pires na rodagem de Ofícios

Attendance is free but booking is required. To register, please email cfac@reading.ac.uk

http://www.reading.ac.uk/cfac/events/cfac-forthcomingevents.aspx

…

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?

 

27th January 2016- Event schedule

10h-10h45 Studio Space, Minghella Building room 102

Maria do Carmo Piçarra (Lisboa/Minho/Reading) – Colonial reflections: Aleph as an

action-research platform to criticize colonial imaginaries

…

11h00-13h00 Studio Space, Minghella Building room 102

Panel I (De)constructing the projection of African nations through cinema

Chair: Alexandre Figueiroa (Recife)

Paulo Cunha (Coimbra) – Cinephilia and film culture in the “Portuguese Africa”: film

societies and amateur film

Raquel Schefer (Paris) –Mueda, Memory and Massacre by Ruy Guerra and the cultural forms

of the Mueda Plateau

Catarina Laranjeiro (Coimbra) – In the past the future was better

…

13h00-14h30 Lunch break

…

14h30- 16h30 Studio Space, Minghella Building room 102

Panel II Memory and gazes upon the “colonial archive”

Chair: Tiago de Luca (Liverpool)

Lúcia Nagib (Reading) – Colonialism as atmosphere in Tabu and The murmuring coast

Nuno Barradas Jorge (Nottingham) – To die a thousand deaths: historical memory and

the representation of personal narratives in the cinema of Pedro Costa

Teresa Castro (Paris) – The afterwardness of the colonial image: artists-researchers and

the Portuguese colonial archive

…

16h30-17h30 – Studio Space, Minghella Building room 102

Presentation of Daniel Barroca’s work by Teresa Castro

Drawing and undrawing images and memories by Daniel Barroca

…

18h00-20h30 Cinema, Minghella Building G4

Presentation by Nuno Barradas Jorge

Cavalo dinheiro (Horse money, Pedro Costa, 2015)

Projection and debate with the Portuguese Film Archive – Museum of Cinema director,

José Manuel Costa, and the director of CFAC, Lúcia Nagib.

 

Chair:

Maria do Carmo Piçarra (carmoramos@gmail.com)

Organising committee

• Lúcia Nagib, director of the Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures, University of Reading
• João Paulo Silvestre, Camões Centre for Portuguese Language and Culture, King’s College London
• Rosa Cabecinhas, Head of the PhD Program in Cultural Studies (University of Minho and University of Aveiro) and Associate Professor at the Social Sciences Institute University of Minho
• Maria do Carmo Piçarra, postdoctoral researcher, Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures, University of Reading / Communication and Society Research Centre, University of Minho / CEC – FLUL University of Lisbon
• Abdoolkarim Vakil, Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies & Department of History, King’s College London
• José da Costa Ramos, Professor, ISCTE – University Institut of Lisbon

Specialists and invited artists

• Ana Balona de Oliveira, postdoctoral researcher, CEC – FLUL / University of Lisbon / Institute for Art History of the New University of Lisbon
• Catarina Laranjeiro, filmmaker and doctoral researcher, CES – University of Coimbra
• Daniel Barroca, artist
• Filipa César, artist
• José Manuel Costa, director of Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema
• Lee Grieveson, director of the Graduate Programme in Film Studies at University College London and co-principal investigator of ‘Colonial Cinema: Moving Images of the British Empire’
• Maria-Benedita Basto, professor, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 8
• Nuno Barradas Jorge, doctoral researcher, University of Nottingham
• Paulo Cunha, professor and researcher, CEISXX – Universidade de Coimbra
• Pedro Costa, filmmaker
• Raquel Schefer, artist and professor, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
• Robert Stock, professor, University of Konstanz
• Ros Gray, theorist and lecturer in Fine Art (Critical Studies), Goldsmiths College, University of London
• Teresa Castro, art historian and professor, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3

Production Support

Sílvia Macedo

Wednesday 20th January- Actors for Human Rights are performing their documentary play Asylum Dialogues in the FTT Department

We are very excited to announce that Actors for Human Rights will be performing their documentary play Asylum Dialogues in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television.

Wednesday 20^th January, at 7.30pm

£7.50 (non-concessions) and £5 (concessions)- Tickets available on the door one hour prior to the show

Bulmershe Theatre, Minghella Building

 

The performance will take place in Bulmershe Theatre, in the Minghella Building, on Whiteknights Campus, and will be followed by a Q & A with the director. The estimated running time of the performance and the Q & A is an hour and a half.

Actors for Human Rights was founded in 2006 and is a network of more than 700 professional actors across the UK who are dedicated to drawing public attention to human rights concerns. They respond to requests for rehearsed readings of their documentary plays and can go anywhere at any time.

Actors for Human Rights – which is connected to the London-based theatre company ice&fire – was inspired by an Australian network called Actors for Refugees, formed by actors Kate Atkinson and Alice Garner in 2001 in the wake of a series of particularly aggressive and controversial actions by the Australian government towards asylum seekers arriving by boat. The UK network was launched in June 2006 at Amnesty International, London. There is also a German network directed by Michael Ruf.

Asylum Dialogues is scripted by Sonja Linden, and conceived and researched by Christine Bacon. Drawn from real life conversations between friends – one an asylum seeker and the other a British citizen – this Actors for Human Rights script explores the positive transformations created by their encounters with each other.