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).