Love or Theft
A Seminar on Audiovisual Essay
June 4, 2024 · 14h30-19h30
School of Arts, Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Free entrance
In the last decade, the audiovisual essay has become one of the most significant ways of producing knowledge in film and media studies fields. Thinking and conceptualizing with and through moving images and sounds is an essential step to acknowledging the singularity of cinema as an aesthetic and political powerful medium. This seminar intends to be a yearly space to discuss the definitions and developments of the audiovisual essay as a format, either as a pedagogical tool, a methodology for producing science or as a dissemination of scientific knowledge. In this first edition, we expect to discuss with practitioners the format and the different agendas at play. As the late Thomas Elsaesser has written, “Taking advantage of (…) the ease of access to films of all genres and periods, and their abundance online, video essay authors can work on the images and sounds themselves and they allow the film fragments not only to speak for themselves but to think cinema with their own sounds and images (…). In a short space of time, a substantial body of work in this new genre has emerged, with its own rules, reflections and reigning champions.”
Keynote Speaker
Kevin B. Lee
Speakers
Luís Azevedo, Ricardo Vieira Lisboa, Tiago Baptista
With a screening of audiovisual essays.
A joint organization of CITAR – Research Center for Science and Technology of the Arts, and LabCom (UBI).
A seminar in memory of Thomas Elsaesser (1943-2019).
Biographical Note · Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker, media artist, and critic. He has produced over 360 video essays exploring film and media. His award-winning Transformers: The Premake introduced the “desktop documentary” format, was named one of the best documentaries of 2014 by Sight & Sound and screened in many festivals including Berlin Critics Week, Rotterdam International Film Festival and Viennale International Film Festival. Through Bottled Songs, his collaborative project with Chloé Galibert-Laîné, he was awarded the 2018 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Grant, the 2018 European Media Artist Platform Residency, and the 2019 Eurimages Lab Project Award at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. In 2017, he was the first Artist in Residence at the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. In 2019 he produced “Learning Farocki”, a series of video essays on Harun Farocki, commissioned by the Goethe Institut. In 2020 he is co-curating the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist with Will DiGravio and Cydnii Wilde Harris. He was the Founding Editor and Chief Video Essayist at Fandor from 2011-2016, and a supervising producer at Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies, and has written for The New York Times, Sight & Sound, Slate and Indiewire. He is Professor of the Future of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts at Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano in colaboration with the Locarno Film Festival.
