25th Feb until 25th Mar at 18:30 
Cicle Intersection with an Otherness
Auditório Ilídio Pinho

Cinema, through its association with creation via resemblance to reality and movement, has acquired an immediate union with representation. Whether in the context of industrial cinema or in more independent paths, cinematic artistic expression is largely anchored in its potential for representation, through either fiction or documentary. Cinema, as a medium through which the Human sees itself, thus becomes a crystallized mirror of what it is and a future builder of what it will become. On the other hand, part of the path followed by filmmakers and artists interested in experimental cinema lies precisely in, when faced with the neglect of cinematic apparatus, recalling the structure of cinema and its manipulability, focusing on the creation of works that could be considered abstract or non-representational. This duality—between cinema that represents something and cinema that represents nothing—assumes a binary opposition that, extending beyond the context of cinematic imagery, rests on an exclusive disjunction in which the image before us either points to something or points to nothing at all.

The goal of this four-session film cycle is, first and foremost, to challenge that conception. By proposing that the sign does not assume its meaning as an absolute value derived from a relationship to an external object, what follows is that this association is constructed by the viewer and the relations they establish. Contained within the act of seeing is implicitly an act of “seeing as.” The potential that resides in this seemingly innocuous shift flourishes when the boundary of representation, by ceasing to be defined, becomes permeable and therefore individual and malleable. In other words, the Human not only sees itself in the image before them, but also defines, transforms, manipulates, and finds itself within it. If the limit between the representational and the non-representational is not a line but a gradient, the path chosen here is an attempt to search for it—and, in doing so, to transform it: cinema as a space where the Human sees and builds itself. The oscillation between representation and non-representation, between meaning and the absence of meaning, between being inside and outside the domain, allows for the constructivist project of self-reflection and construction, “taking the Human as a constructive hypothesis, a space for navigation and intervention.”

The aim of this cycle is not to select films with (anti-)humanist themes, but rather to trace moments in which the confrontation between the human and the non-human, and between figuration and abstraction, occurs in parallel: contact with the non-human as a form of “meaning-making”; and, in turn, the re-signification of meaning as revision and construction. The first three sessions form a trajectory. The first session features the film Maya, by Teo Hernandez, which experiments through a frenetic camera with an oscillation between the protagonist and the surrounding natural environment, where identification of what we see is often impossible. Constantly shifting between figure, landscape, and simple enigma, the elements continuously merge and blur. This session aims to introduce the central conflict. If this conflict is between two entities—human and non-human—then the second and third sessions propose to fragment them.

The second session includes three films: The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome by Kenneth Anger; In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman; and Dream Enclosure by Sandy Ding. Focusing on the Human and representation, this session presents three films where it is possible to identify characters and narratives, but where linearity is replaced by spaces of dream, ritual, exaggeration, and incomprehension. Precisely through the abyss that characterizes any interaction between the Human and its exterior, the hallucinatory space makes explicit this constant movement of making and unmaking meaning—a communication necessarily, in part, devoid of meaning.

The third presents five short films projected in 16mm. Focusing on the non-human, with particular emphasis on the plant kingdom, the mediation inherent in this contact materializes in five different ways. Through the films Alaya by Nathaniel Dorsky, Discoveries on the Forest Floor by Charlotte Pryce, Bouquets 1–10 by Rose Lowder, and The Wold-Shadow by Stan Brakhage, we witness a constant representation of the natural world through different scales and interventions, also allowing for varied representations and abstractions. Filming the natural world either as landscape or in close-up detail, the sequence of films primarily seeks an interest in the “meaning-making” of the natural world. Thus, the final film, Seven Days by Chris Welsby, is intended to act as a vector returning to the starting point—to the subject and the mediations through which they see.

The final session consists of the film The Amazonian Angel by Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki. As an epilogue to the path traced by the previous three sessions, this film resembles the first, but in this case, as a portrait of the artist Lena Vandrey. Bringing the artist’s method and work closer to the mythological universe of the filmmakers, the artistic work itself emerges here as a mediator of meanings between the human and their surrounding context.

With this film cycle, the spectator is challenged—through oscillating and blending films between figuration and abstraction—to search in the figure for form, color, movement, or texture, and in the blur for a face, an object, or a reference.

(Mariana Machado, MA student in New Media Art)