Cineclub EA: Four of a Kind

Cicle

Contacts

Cineclube 2023-24

equipa do Cineclube EA 2023/24
 António Barata
Carolina Rebelo
Diana Monteiro
Diogo Pinto
Fernando Machado
Francisca Dores
Gabriel Andrade
Gabriel Luna
João Pinto
José Antunes
Luísa Alegre
Mariana Machado
Patrícia Pereira
Sofia Tavares


com o apoio de
Carlos Natálio

 

More Information

06th Nov at 18:30 
Whirlpool
by Otto Preminger

USA, 1950, 98'

Ann Sutton suffers from kleptomania.
After being caught stealing, a cunning charlatan hypnotist manipulates her, entangling her in his web of interests. In this masterpiece of noir, Otto Preminger highlights Gene Tierney's masterful interpretation, exploring his character's complex duality and psychological struggle.
Tierney's body expression, combined with precise camera movements, creates a captivating trance-like atmosphere.

 

 

14th Nov at 18:30
M
by Joseph Losey

USA, 1951, 88'

Remake of the classic 1931 film directed by Fritz Lang, Joseph Losey re-contextualizes the anguish of German Expressionism within the North American scenario in evidence of moral hypocrisy and the disruption of institutions.
A product of his own environment, the persecuted character exposes the great social contamination in this bitter thriller.

 

 

28th Nov at 18:30
Pursued
by Raoul Walsh

USA, 1947, 101'

A boy, who lives haunted by nightmares about the night his entire family was murdered, is raised by a neighboring family in the 1880s.
With a melancholic and displaced appearance, his only connection with the world around him is the love he feels about his adopted sister.
Years later, the past returns to torment him with the threat of an unknown relative who wants his death.

 

 

12th Dec 18:30
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
by Fritz Lang

USA, 1956, 80'

Austin Spencer, owner of an important newspaper, opposes the death penalty, having as his main opponent a public prosecutor who, in Spencer's opinion, obtains political dividends at the expense of the men he sentences to death.
Spencer convinces his future son-in-law, a rising writer, to allow himself to be framed in a murder case, planting false evidence that would lead to his arrest, trial and conviction; At the right time, the farce would be revealed, proving Spencer's thesis that a trial based only on circumstantial evidence can lead to the execution of an innocent person.

06 Nov - 12 Dec at 18:30 
Film Program Four of a Kind

The Mise-en-Scène of Fascination and the Fascination with Mise-en-Scène
For the French critic Michel Mourlet (b. 1935), the essence of cinema lay in its mise-en-scène.
The uniqueness of cinematic art was rooted in materiality in service of technique.
A person's position before the camera was mediated by the organization of their own private universe, their aspirations as a work born from a product of fascination.

Such fascination could only be achieved if the balance between reality and illusion was meticulously translated onto the white screen of cinema, captivating the spectator—not as part of this world, but as a distant observer, fully aware of their condition as an individual before the spectacle.

Mourlet expressed his cinematic ideals in the controversial article Sur une Art Ignoré, written amid the many debates on what is cinema? (it is worth noting André Bazin’s enormous influence on these discussions) that permeated Parisian cinephilia in the 1950s and 1960s.
At the heart of these debates were the Hitchcock-Hawksian critics of Cahiers du Cinéma (Godard, Rivette, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol) and their auteur theory, which placed the director above the form.
On the opposite side, the Mac-Mahonians (Pierre Rissient, Georges Richard, Michel Fabre, Jacques Serguine, and Michel Mourlet—also a critic at Cahiers) took the opposite approach, advocating that form (mise-en-scène) should be the primary and sole authority in a film.

When introducing the emergence of this concept and the breadth of thought that led to Mourlet’s essay, it is impossible to do so without revisiting the history of cinema that gave this select group of critics and cinephiles their name.
Active since the late 1930s, the Mac-Mahon cinema, located at 5 Avenue Mac-Mahon in Paris, near the Cahiers du Cinéma offices, was dedicated to screening American films exclusively in their original subtitled versions.
Its single 150-seat, art-deco-style auditorium became a meeting point for Rissient, Richard, Fabre, Serguine, and Mourlet, who frequented the cinema religiously.

It was through the symbiotic relationship between cinema and audience that Rissient persuaded Emile Villion, the director of Mac-Mahon, to program They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948). Following its successful screening, Rissient went on to curate other films, including Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool (1950).
In 1955, he programmed Joseph Losey’s The Lawless (1950) and M (1951).
In the following years, he featured films by Fritz Lang (particularly his American period), Raoul Walsh, and additional works by Preminger, which had previously been little known to French audiences.
The preference for these four directors, combined with the audience’s enthusiasm for their works, led to Villion’s formal recognition of them—displayed in the cinema’s lobby in the form of four black-and-white portraits of Preminger, Losey, Walsh, and Lang. Thus, they became known as la quadra de ases—the four aces.

Using the context of Mac-Mahon and Mourlet’s essay—both historically and inherently connected—this film cycle aims to present and discuss the role of mise-en-scène through films that embody Mac-Mahonist thought.
This is not intended as an endorsement of Mourlet’s theoretical solidity but rather as an exploration of how this fascination manifests in the spectator and a reflection on the act of staging itself.
Through this controversial and enigmatic text, Michel Mourlet directs his gaze toward the exaltation of the sensory experience in cinema’s grand kinesthetic writing.

In it, we may ponder the inexplicable fascination evoked by Gene Tierney’s mesmerizing performance in Whirlpool.
At the same time, we might reject the near-fascist imposition of an idolization of bodies—primarily white and standardized—as the only fully cinematic form of expression.
At the intersection between beauty and dogma, between the mystique of aesthetics and formal rigor, the films in this cycle emerge to illuminate this scenic hypnosis through the works of the four favorite directors of Mac-Mahonism’s followers.

More than simply presenting the historical conditions that led to this concept of fascination, the cycle seeks to draw parallels in how these same bodies exist within the diegetic world, how the world responds to them, their actions, and how they are orchestrated by the hand of their director.

The exercise lies in an attempt—perhaps premature—to understand what makes Robert Mitchum’s melancholic, Oedipal cowboy in Pursued, Raoul Walsh’s pseudo-noir western, resonate with David Wayne’s character in the remake of M, which in turn dialogues with the conspiratorial uncertainties of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, all culminating in the literal hypnosis of Whirlpool.

If, as Mourlet so vehemently states in his manifesto, everything is in the mise-en-scène, then it is from there that we begin our search for fascination.
For now, these films may serve as a gateway—or rather, an exhibition of what may or may not work.
Ultimately, through trial and error, we seek to locate that confluence of energies that dominate the cinema hall.
That magical element that invades us, seizes our attention, places us in another time at its command, absorbs us—or nearly so.

Gabriel Luna (Master’s student in Cinema at the School of Arts)

Contacts

Cineclube 2023-24

equipa do Cineclube EA 2023/24
 António Barata
Carolina Rebelo
Diana Monteiro
Diogo Pinto
Fernando Machado
Francisca Dores
Gabriel Andrade
Gabriel Luna
João Pinto
José Antunes
Luísa Alegre
Mariana Machado
Patrícia Pereira
Sofia Tavares


com o apoio de
Carlos Natálio

 

More Information

06th Nov at 18:30 
Whirlpool
by Otto Preminger

USA, 1950, 98'

Ann Sutton suffers from kleptomania.
After being caught stealing, a cunning charlatan hypnotist manipulates her, entangling her in his web of interests. In this masterpiece of noir, Otto Preminger highlights Gene Tierney's masterful interpretation, exploring his character's complex duality and psychological struggle.
Tierney's body expression, combined with precise camera movements, creates a captivating trance-like atmosphere.

 

 

14th Nov at 18:30
M
by Joseph Losey

USA, 1951, 88'

Remake of the classic 1931 film directed by Fritz Lang, Joseph Losey re-contextualizes the anguish of German Expressionism within the North American scenario in evidence of moral hypocrisy and the disruption of institutions.
A product of his own environment, the persecuted character exposes the great social contamination in this bitter thriller.

 

 

28th Nov at 18:30
Pursued
by Raoul Walsh

USA, 1947, 101'

A boy, who lives haunted by nightmares about the night his entire family was murdered, is raised by a neighboring family in the 1880s.
With a melancholic and displaced appearance, his only connection with the world around him is the love he feels about his adopted sister.
Years later, the past returns to torment him with the threat of an unknown relative who wants his death.

 

 

12th Dec 18:30
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
by Fritz Lang

USA, 1956, 80'

Austin Spencer, owner of an important newspaper, opposes the death penalty, having as his main opponent a public prosecutor who, in Spencer's opinion, obtains political dividends at the expense of the men he sentences to death.
Spencer convinces his future son-in-law, a rising writer, to allow himself to be framed in a murder case, planting false evidence that would lead to his arrest, trial and conviction; At the right time, the farce would be revealed, proving Spencer's thesis that a trial based only on circumstantial evidence can lead to the execution of an innocent person.

Contacts

Cineclube 2023-24

equipa do Cineclube EA 2023/24
 António Barata
Carolina Rebelo
Diana Monteiro
Diogo Pinto
Fernando Machado
Francisca Dores
Gabriel Andrade
Gabriel Luna
João Pinto
José Antunes
Luísa Alegre
Mariana Machado
Patrícia Pereira
Sofia Tavares


com o apoio de
Carlos Natálio

 

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