Film-Memory-(Micro)History: Portuguese Cinema(s) by Miguel Mesquita Duarte
Studies in Documentary Film, 2025
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This article explores the interplay of visual representation and oral testimony in Diana Andringa’s documentary films focusing on the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–1974), the Estado Novo dictatorship (1933–1974), and the transformative events of the 1974 April Revolution. Through a detailed examination of a key segment of Andringa’s filmography, I argue that her practice, by interweaving autobiography and personal testimonies with broader socio-historical analysis, not only embodies but also expands the concept of microhistorical documentaries, providing a multi-layered and insightful portrayal of Portugal’s complex and contentious recent history. Key themes addressed include the relationship between archival imagery and witness testimony in postcolonial documentary politics; the interaction between autobiographical inquiry and public memory in an intercultural context; trauma landscape and the challenges of representing suffering and historical upheaval in documentary filmmaking.
photographies 17.3, 2024
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In 1975, my parents-in-law met in Lourenço Marques (Maputo, Mozambique). The period preceding their engagement was marked by profoundly contrasting experiences. Because of his political activities against the Estado Novo dictatorship, he was conscripted into the Portuguese Commandos and participated in the conflict that unfolded in northern Mozambique. Conversely, she travelled from the Portuguese metropolis to Lourenço Marques as a child (following her grandfather’s promotion in public service), and had a happy childhood and adolescence, as documented in a collection of Super 8 films that were entrusted to me. How to reconcile such opposite experiences? And how to honour a legacy of images that do not cease to question me in the critical present? This photo-text essay focuses on a set of images that go beyond the commonly accepted depictions of Portuguese colonialism to problematize issues of resistance, indifference and complicity, showing how private and seemingly insignificant visual materials take part in collective forms of enunciation. It stresses the importance of landscape in conveying unassimilable and traumatic aspects of Portugal’s problematic history, examining how different discourses and imaginal references about war and colonialism reflect various perspectives, experiences and sensibilities, which may or may not align with each other. Ultimately, by drawing on an experimental, self-reflexive and visual approach to history, the essay encourages readers to actively engage in shaping alternative public memories, capable of encompassing the intricacies and diverse facets of history’s manifold manifestations.
Film and History and Other Cinemas by Miguel Mesquita Duarte
French Screen Studies, 2023
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Despite the recognition of Walter Benjamin’s influence on Jean-Luc
Godard’s cinema, little in-depth comparative work has been conducted
on this relationship to date. The article provides a close
reading of Godard’s documentary political filmmaking and articulates
it with a large spectrum of Benjamin’s texts, from the early
writings and unpublished fragments to his latter and best-known
work. The article looks beyond methodological confluences
between Benjamin’s historiography and Godard’s cinema, enabling
the viewer to consider philosophical, philological, metahistorical
and aesthetic issues that chart new points of analysis for further
comparative work. The first sections examine the importance of
dream and spectral appearances in the redemptive historiography
of both authors; the middle sections problematise dialectical thinking,
image and language, investigating the specificities of both
Benjamin’s and Godard’s practices and theoretical approaches;
the final sections consider the theological and Messianic interpretation
of historical time, analysing the importance of ethical and
political aspects in the work of both authors. By exhaustively mapping
the specific moments in which Benjamin’s passages appear in
Godard’s films, the article offers a way of entering into some of the
most enigmatic formulations of Benjamin’s historiography, while
opening up Godard’s documentary cinema to new readings.
Journal of Beijing Film Academy, 2023
Quarterly Review of Film and Video 39:6, 2021
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Godard’s assertion that the historian must “provide an accurate description of what has never happened” speaks eloquently to Benjamin’s equally provocative idea (taken from Hofmannsthal) that history allows one “to read what was never written”. For both - as well as for Warburg, who envisioned a “psychological history” capable of reproducing the latencies and survivals of the images of art history - historical knowledge is invaded by the irrational and the imagistic. But, for all of them, the potentiality of historical imagination is reciprocal to the requirement of truth, consubstantiated in the privilege commonly conceded to the categories of image and memory. The article examines the tripartite relationship between truth, imagination (the space of formation of dialectical images) and historical memory within a constellation of complementary philosophical references - from Proust’s involuntary memory and Bergson’s durée, to Deleuze’s thought of the outside, Derrida’s hauntology and Ricoeur’s epistemology of history - in order to reassess Godard’s documentary and political cinema. By proposing a shift in emphasis from methodological aspects to conceptual, philosophical and epistemological confluences, the article opens up the cinematography of Godard and the historiographies of both Benjamin and Warburg to new comparative analysis. The article’s last sections focus on the sequence of Histoire(s) 1A relating Giotto’s Magdalene and Elizabeth Taylor in George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun, in order to (re)discover issues of religion, art, nymphal impulse and historical trauma, which prove to be fundamental in the analysis of the political and ethical resonances of memory in the projects of the commented artist-historians.
Studies in Documentary Film 12, no.1: 56-71, 2017
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From Proust to Modigliani, Hedayat, Chopin and Mercoeur, in Forever we follow Honigmann in her journey through the mythical Père-Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris. Evoking the artistic legacies through the testimonies of those, anonymous people, who pay their homage to the most cherished artists, Honiggman’s Forever constitutes an alternative way of reading art history, a memorial mosaic more and more haunted with ghosts and with reflections about life and death, joy and sorrow, memory and forgetfulness. The article argues that Forever constitutes an act of historical imagination that can be read through the notion of prosthetic memory (A.Landsberg, 2004) - a type of memory enabled by mediated representations of the past, and intersections between private and collective memories - offering an elaborative discussion of notions related to empathy, otherness and the politics of alterity. A specific relationship between Honigmann’s documentary and Benjamin’s thought is also established, stressing the ability of film to construct alternative modes of narrating the past. Drawing upon concepts from the fields of literature, history and film studies, the article claims that in Forever the poetics of documentary is contemporaneous to an ethical relation by which the persistence of time should be understood as change and redemption.
Doc Online Revista Digital de Cinema Documentário, 2017
Partindo da relação entre o cinema documental do Holocausto e o regime deleuziano da imagem-tempo... more Partindo da relação entre o cinema documental do Holocausto e o regime deleuziano da imagem-tempo, este artigo centra-se na análise comparativa de dois filmes, - Shoa, de Lazmann, e Histoire(s) du Cinéma, de Godard, - de forma a compreender diferentes perspectivas sobre a montagem, o audiovisual e o valor das imagens de arquivo como suportes documentais e actos de testemunho.
Aniki : Revista Portuguesa da Imagem em Movimento v. 1, n. 2 (2014), Jul 18, 2014
Este artigo propõe uma leitura comparada do filme experimental Video Letter (1983), de Shuji Tera... more Este artigo propõe uma leitura comparada do filme experimental Video Letter (1983), de Shuji Terayama e Shuntaro Tanikawa, e do texto de Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (2000), construído em torno da obra literária L’instant de ma mort (1994), de Maurice Blanchot. A aproximação entre estas duas obras permite-nos, apesar das suas diferenças, - no primeiro caso, uma obra vídeo, no segundo, um texto literário, - explorar problemáticas comuns ligadas aos conceitos de instante, morte, memória e testemunho, assim como indagar sobre quais as novas formas de temporalidade que emergem dos procedimentos de fragmentação e interrupção convocados por ambas as composições. Procuramos, a partir daí, demonstrar que os procedimentos ligados ao corte, à fragmentação e à descontinuidade concorrem para o estabelecimento de uma forma de escrita que faz convergir a singularidade do instante, - habitualmente associada, de modo exclusivo, à consideração da imagem parada da fotografia, - com as novas formas de narração que participam de uma reavaliação da habitual estrutura fílmica.
Key words: Writing, Testimony, Fiction, Time, Video.
""
Aniki : Revista Portuguesa da Imagem em Movimento. v. 2, n. 1 (2015): Dossier 'Cinema Expandido', Feb 26, 2015
Para lá da dificuldade em circunscrever o seu campo teórico e epistemológico – dada a pluralidade... more Para lá da dificuldade em circunscrever o seu campo teórico e epistemológico – dada a pluralidade de acepções que o mesmo abarca e dos múltiplos desdobramentos que foram despontando nas últimas décadas, - uma das tónicas mais prementes afectas ao expanded cinema refere-se à sua relação com questões de narrativa. Embora pouco óbvia, a referência ao trabalho de Julião Sarmento neste domínio parece-nos particularmente útil, desde logo pelo modo como a obra do artista português configura a existência de um impulso contra-narrativo que, construindo-se primeiramente no interior de uma dialéctica singular entre a fotografia e o cinema, pulveriza de modo particularmente eficaz o centramento estrutural e a linearidade espácio-temporal da sequência de imagens. Seguindo um percurso que nos leva dos filmes experimentais do meio dos anos 70 até às instalações dos anos 2000, procuramos sugerir que a importância do estruturalismo e da perspectiva genealógica da história e da memória do cinema constituem, no contexto da obra do artista, aspectos cada vez mais significativos na pesquisa ligada às novas configurações perceptivas, cognitivas e topológicas que acompanham a emergência do cinema dito expandido. A originalidade e o posicionamento crítico do autor levar-nos-á, por último, a equacionar a hipótese de um anti-expanded-cinema: é que mais do que uma problemática restrita à evolução tecnológica e ao alargamento multi-disciplinar, em Sarmento a expansão do cinema refere-se, sobretudo, à expansão dos critérios ligados à circulação do pensamento e do desejo numa topologia de infra-significação que emerge das novas formas de narrar, de fazer e de exibir cinema. Desta forma, o que está em causa é pois todo um novo modo de identificar, nomear e complexificar a problemática do expanded cinema, para lá da sua definição ortodoxa.
Quintana, Nº15, 2016. ISSN: 1579-7414, 2016
How does experimental cinema disassemble voyeurism? And what are its political implications when ... more How does experimental cinema disassemble voyeurism? And what are its political implications when viewed from different gender positions? Yoko Ono’s Fly (1970) questions the role of women as passive objects by means of a ‘masculine’ intruder in the form of a fl y. Andy Warhol’s Blowjob (1964) explores the vulnerability of a sexually aroused man and holds the viewer accountable for watching him. In Copies (1975), by Julião Sarmento, the director/voyeur reveals himself at the end, thus abandoning his space-shadow and showing himself to be an exhibitionist.
This paper argues that though the dismantling of voyeurism by the experimental cinema of the 1960 and 70s is often associated with a feminist perspective, there are significant male counter examples, from both queer and heterosexual viewpoints. Warhol and Sarmento question an orthodox feminist theory bound to a binary analysis (male/female, activity/passivity, watching/being watched, voyeur/exhibitionist, subject/object) and show that the subject of voyeurism is far more ambivalent, heterodox and complex.
Photography, Archives, Intermediality by Miguel Mesquita Duarte
Quintana: revista do Departamento de Historia da Arte 22, 2023
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Este artigo pro... more OPEN ACCESS: https://revistas.usc.gal/index.php/quintana/article/view/8262/13339
Este artigo procura estabelecer alguns paralelismos entre o Atlas de Gerhard Richter (1962-2013) e o Atlas Mnemosyne (1924-29) de Aby Warburg, apesar das diferenças históricas e temáticas que separam os dois projetos. Partindo da ampla relação entre arquivo, memória e imagem, o artigo foca três aspetos fundamentais: a montagem-conhecimento como base para a constituição de uma história sem texto; a importância da componente autobiográfica e ficcional nos projetos historiográficos destes dois autores; e a centralidade dos processos de inscrição, transformação e sobrevivência das imagens, bem como a respetiva correlação com o espaço da memória cultural, aqui abordada na sua multiplicidade de saberes e objetos, mas também como princípio ético-científico de simbologia e interpretação do conhecimento histórico. Fornecendo pistas para novos estudos comparativos entre Richter e Warburg, - até hoje praticamente inexistentes na literatura especializada (o texto de Buchloh sobre o arquivo anómico, de 1999, aborda essa relação apenas superficialmente), - o artigo pretende também contribuir para a reavaliação epistemológica de alguns dos significados, valências e conceitos inerentes aos atlas destes dois “historiadores-artistas” alemães.
RIHA Journal: Journal of the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art, Oct 10, 2018
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Gerhard Richter's Atlas is a collection of photographs and sketches that the artist started to assemble in 1961. This article aims to demonstrate that Holocaust imagery plays a unique and irreplaceable function in Atlas, creating paths throughout the project and pointing towards some of Richter's most important ideas and contexts within which his pictorial work comes into being. The article places particular emphasis on the photographs assembled in panels 807 and 808 of Atlas, which are the basis for Richter's series of abstract paintings entitled Birkenau paintings, from 2014. The article argues the importance of this series, making a case for a different interpretation of Atlas's dynamics, and pointing out alternative ways of addressing the tensions between photography and painting – and, in particular, figuration and abstraction – that pervade Richter's practice. The themes concerning Richter's position on photography and the role played by the medium in the pictorial exploration of the traumatic past are thoroughly discussed in the article, generating new insights into the concept of the historical image in the work of the German artist.
Photographies 12:3, 2019
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This article was prompted by James Elkins’s argument — developed in his book, What Photography Is, from 2011 — that there is no actual relationship between Roland Barthes’s theory of photography and Maurice Blanchot’s philosophy. Drawing on considerations of an historical, philosophical, and literary nature, the article argues for the importance of a dialogic encounter between Barthes and Blanchot, demonstrating that the interconnection between the concepts of intimacy, image, and writing, appears as a crucial aspect in the theory of both authors. At the same time, by contesting Elkins’s wider criticism of Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1982), the article aims to develop better-informed theoretical understandings of Barthes’s thoughts on photography. The final section of the article attempts to map promising points of connection between Barthes, Blanchot, and Proust, in order to reassess the notion of punctum in its broader relation with the concepts of time and death.
Photographies 15:3, 2022
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This photographic essay was motivated by a reflection on a set of photographs, taken and found from 10 years ago, and the concomitant rediscovery of some of my wife’s youthful writings. By combining creative writing with philosophical debate and photographic imagery, the essay aims at constructing an alternative experience of time, loss and inter-subjectivity. Grounded in a poetical dialogue with theorists and artists such as Barthes, Chris Marker, Blanchot, Levinas, Godard, Derrida, Benjamin, Freud, Susan Sontag and Allan Poe, among others, the work entwines analytical thinking, personal memories, vernacular records and fictional readings. It thus tries to offer a space for imaginal reflexion about the precariousness of memory and the redemptive potentiality of the photographic image, here probed in its simultaneously reciprocal and asynchronous relationship with self-reflexivity and poetico-philosophical writing.
Philosophy of Photography 9, no.1: 71-93, Apr 1, 2018
The fictional regime of the photographic image allows Helena Almeida to stage a theatrical metamo... more The fictional regime of the photographic image allows Helena Almeida to stage a theatrical metamorphosis of her own body through displacements, expansions and dissimulations, placing photography at the heart of a pictorial transgression that undermines the disciplinary boundaries of visual media: the artist becomes ink, inhabits the empty canvas space, multiplies herself in mirror games that produce the unfolding of a body in deep crisis, thrown beyond its physical limits and identity. Moreover, in multimedia works such as Feel me, Hear me and See me (1979–1980), as well as in some images of the series entitled The House (1982–1983), Almeida seems to move towards a radical linguistic and pictorial derangement, likely to break the traditional communicative and representative mechanisms. We seek to demonstrate, on the basis of these different aspects relating to photography’s effects of hybridization, and making use of the post-structuralist thought of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, that the artist moves towards the designation of a structural space that combines photography, writing and the reinvention of the body. Almeida’s work confronts us with a complex reconfiguration of ways of seeing, feeling and thinking the photographic act, as well as its discursive features.
Photographies, vol.9, n.3. 2016, Sep 27, 2016
This paper deals with the experience of archive and memory as key aspects in the photographic wor... more This paper deals with the experience of archive and memory as key aspects in the photographic work of the Portuguese artist Julião Sarmento. Taking the installation entitled 1947 — based on the appropriation of an ensemble of found photographs — as the central object of study, this paper seeks to discuss the relationship between archive, memory and the photographic, or the filmic. It is argued that in Julião Sarmento’s artistic work the problematic of the archive acquires an autographical dimension, allowing us to think over the role of both archive and memory as creative processes involving distinct supports and temporalities of the image. It is through the articulation of the psychoanalytical theory regarding recurrence and the unconscious and crucial references whose authors directly or indirectly approach the theme of the archive (J. Derrida, G. Didi-Huberman, H. Foster, A. Buchanan and J. Schwartz, among others) that we will be able to understand the way the archive structure acquires, in Julião Sarmento’s oeuvre, the meaning of a device of (counter-)narration able to materialize the movements of memory itself. The article seeks, therefore, to highlight a temporal and affective dimension that reveals itself to be central in archival practices that comprise the personal archive and found photography.
Videographic Films by Miguel Mesquita Duarte
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[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 11.4, 2024
Letters always have an intention, a motivation that transcends what is written in them. The inten... more Letters always have an intention, a motivation that transcends what is written in them. The intention behind Duarte’s letter [is] nothing less than to make a video essay about Godard as Godard would have made it. Three Letters raises to this challenge, and it is at once generative of filmic insight and wistfully elegiac. It illuminates some of Godard’s themes and modalities through processes that are inspired by, but which also creatively extend, those of Godard himself, as in the tactile “caressing” of images via a mobile phone in Letter 1 (“Around the Myth of Orpheus”), and their simultaneous projection on a screen which creates an inner montage, a dialectics. And it elegiacally reverses time, as only the cinema can do, bringing Godard back from the dead, for a moment or forever − yet without annihilating Eurydice all over again.
- Laura Rascaroli
I doubt that we can learn something from Miguel Mesquita Duarte video essay if "learning" is meant as the ability to reproduce a clearly circumscribed body of knowledge presented to us in an audiovisual form. Like in his earlier video essays "The Birds After Hitchcock" where he erased the characters from the titular film so that its empty rooms can become populated by ghosts or in his "Grammatology of the Nymph" where he literally re-imagines Aby Warburg's montage technique, also this video essay instead of teaching is doing. And instead of teaching us this video essay is also "doing us": making us aware how much we are already doing these very image processes that we thought we are just witnessing. Or to misquote Jacques Lacan: A letter not only always arrives at its destination, we are actually already writing it.
- Johannes Binotto
[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 2021
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"[Duarte’s] audiovisual intervention in and reworking of Godard’s dense montages offers an original way of entering into and opening up Histoire(s) du cinéma for questioning and comparative analysis. His strategy of isolating and animating fragments from Mnemosyne, and setting these in tension with sections of Histoire(s) du cinéma, offers a simple but highly effective way of foregrounding and exploring selected motifs and themes across the two projects. His achievement is to have devised an experimental audiovisual laboratory that enables the viewer to consider the two projects - and the representation of the female body within them – from the perspective of the other".
- Michael Witt, [in]Transition 8.1, 2021.
***
To take the cinema’s attempt at the creation of an atlas, as Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma does, and cast it back onto the work of an obsessive archivist of modernity is a complex and original contribution to our understanding of both projects. To do so using the mediums in which they were both produced—film and video, and guided by text—is all the more felicitous. Miguel Mesquita Duarte presents foremost here this understanding: that the cinematic can only be judged in its own language, montage. [...] Duarte has recognised the significance of the nymph for Warburg, and in Godard’s figure of the woman understood this gendered image to motivate the events traversed and repeated ad infinitum. [...] Duarte ultimately makes a case for the memory of attraction, whose norms and habits no longer apply to us today. This is why the Grammatology of the Nymph is a ghost story, it is an undead idea that continues to haunt us every time we stare into the abyss.
- Giles Fielke, [in]Transition 8.1, 2021.
[in]Transition. Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies 5.4, 2019
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"There are basically two very bold interventions into Hitchcock’s The Birds made by this video; stopping the motion and removing the figures. This immediately transforms the object and the viewers relation to it, opening the original film up to a potential space ‘beyond the movement of cinema’ [...] The still images of the interior still sets most effectively point to the ‘beyond’ of movement in cinema by being haunted by the voices and fixed shadows of the missing figures. The ground of the still image has apparently swallowed them up before the birds arrive to decompose the image and replace it with sound. Duarte’s interventions into The Birds collude with the malevolent non-human agency that is present throughout the original in order to successfully extract from it another film. In this way the piece raises the idea that experimental video essays of this kind are always, to some extent, attacks on the fabric of film from within the form".
- Gordon Hon, [in]Transition 5.4, 2019.
***
"Duarte’s use of digital manipulation is certainly the less popular choice for intervention upon a film/text, with most essays in the journal favouring the compile/compare/contrast/accentuate provisions lent by re-editing. As such, the essay contributes a valuable example for scholarship, providing another way in which one can intervene upon a film/text. [...] Duarte’s essay uses digital tools to intervene upon The Birds in an interesting way; it offers a counter-pointing example for audio-visual criticism of an attempt to reveal an ‘alternative reading’, through stilling moving images rather than retaining their motion".
- Catherine Fowler, [in]Transition 5.4, 2019.
Books by Miguel Mesquita Duarte
Livros LabCom.IFP, 2018
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Este estudo sustenta que o arquivo é um mater... more OPEN ACCESS: http://www.labcom-ifp.ubi.pt/book/314.
Este estudo sustenta que o arquivo é um material activo sujeito a transformações, releituras e sobrevivências. O material de arquivo relaciona-se com o passado enquanto espaço de latência e de desejo, sobrevindo como um ponto de partida criativo que se opõe ao fechamento das taxonomias racionais e descritivas. Articulando diversos autores e conceitos oriundos dos campos da filosofia, da história da arte, da literatura, da psicanálise e da teoria da imagem, o autor examina a passagem que vai do arquivo ao atlas, interessando-se pelas implicações estéticas, epistémicas e ontológicas desse movimento. Mostra-se que o atlas rompe com a habitual ordem do arquivo de imagens, fornecendo ao passado uma dimensão vertical associada ao modelo de tempo mnemotécnico, noção aqui revelada na sua componente simultaneamente técnica, imaginativa e afectiva. Através da exploração do cinema documental ficcional de Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg e Chris Marker, e estabelecendo ligações aos projectos de historiadores como Aby Warburg e Walter Benjamin, o autor demonstra que a potencialidade contra-narrativa do filme é comparável a uma historiografia alternativa, a uma forma de pensamento por imagens que permite ao sujeito acercar-se das zonas de sombra da história. Ao reconhecer a importância de uma arquiviologia das imagens que incorpora as suas múltiplas histórias e tradições, o estudo abre novas perspectivas sobre os efeitos da imagem-arquivo e o modo como esta molda e reconfigura a nossa relação com o passado, individual e colectivo.
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Film-Memory-(Micro)History: Portuguese Cinema(s) by Miguel Mesquita Duarte
This article explores the interplay of visual representation and oral testimony in Diana Andringa’s documentary films focusing on the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–1974), the Estado Novo dictatorship (1933–1974), and the transformative events of the 1974 April Revolution. Through a detailed examination of a key segment of Andringa’s filmography, I argue that her practice, by interweaving autobiography and personal testimonies with broader socio-historical analysis, not only embodies but also expands the concept of microhistorical documentaries, providing a multi-layered and insightful portrayal of Portugal’s complex and contentious recent history. Key themes addressed include the relationship between archival imagery and witness testimony in postcolonial documentary politics; the interaction between autobiographical inquiry and public memory in an intercultural context; trauma landscape and the challenges of representing suffering and historical upheaval in documentary filmmaking.
In 1975, my parents-in-law met in Lourenço Marques (Maputo, Mozambique). The period preceding their engagement was marked by profoundly contrasting experiences. Because of his political activities against the Estado Novo dictatorship, he was conscripted into the Portuguese Commandos and participated in the conflict that unfolded in northern Mozambique. Conversely, she travelled from the Portuguese metropolis to Lourenço Marques as a child (following her grandfather’s promotion in public service), and had a happy childhood and adolescence, as documented in a collection of Super 8 films that were entrusted to me. How to reconcile such opposite experiences? And how to honour a legacy of images that do not cease to question me in the critical present? This photo-text essay focuses on a set of images that go beyond the commonly accepted depictions of Portuguese colonialism to problematize issues of resistance, indifference and complicity, showing how private and seemingly insignificant visual materials take part in collective forms of enunciation. It stresses the importance of landscape in conveying unassimilable and traumatic aspects of Portugal’s problematic history, examining how different discourses and imaginal references about war and colonialism reflect various perspectives, experiences and sensibilities, which may or may not align with each other. Ultimately, by drawing on an experimental, self-reflexive and visual approach to history, the essay encourages readers to actively engage in shaping alternative public memories, capable of encompassing the intricacies and diverse facets of history’s manifold manifestations.
Film and History and Other Cinemas by Miguel Mesquita Duarte
Despite the recognition of Walter Benjamin’s influence on Jean-Luc
Godard’s cinema, little in-depth comparative work has been conducted
on this relationship to date. The article provides a close
reading of Godard’s documentary political filmmaking and articulates
it with a large spectrum of Benjamin’s texts, from the early
writings and unpublished fragments to his latter and best-known
work. The article looks beyond methodological confluences
between Benjamin’s historiography and Godard’s cinema, enabling
the viewer to consider philosophical, philological, metahistorical
and aesthetic issues that chart new points of analysis for further
comparative work. The first sections examine the importance of
dream and spectral appearances in the redemptive historiography
of both authors; the middle sections problematise dialectical thinking,
image and language, investigating the specificities of both
Benjamin’s and Godard’s practices and theoretical approaches;
the final sections consider the theological and Messianic interpretation
of historical time, analysing the importance of ethical and
political aspects in the work of both authors. By exhaustively mapping
the specific moments in which Benjamin’s passages appear in
Godard’s films, the article offers a way of entering into some of the
most enigmatic formulations of Benjamin’s historiography, while
opening up Godard’s documentary cinema to new readings.
Godard’s assertion that the historian must “provide an accurate description of what has never happened” speaks eloquently to Benjamin’s equally provocative idea (taken from Hofmannsthal) that history allows one “to read what was never written”. For both - as well as for Warburg, who envisioned a “psychological history” capable of reproducing the latencies and survivals of the images of art history - historical knowledge is invaded by the irrational and the imagistic. But, for all of them, the potentiality of historical imagination is reciprocal to the requirement of truth, consubstantiated in the privilege commonly conceded to the categories of image and memory. The article examines the tripartite relationship between truth, imagination (the space of formation of dialectical images) and historical memory within a constellation of complementary philosophical references - from Proust’s involuntary memory and Bergson’s durée, to Deleuze’s thought of the outside, Derrida’s hauntology and Ricoeur’s epistemology of history - in order to reassess Godard’s documentary and political cinema. By proposing a shift in emphasis from methodological aspects to conceptual, philosophical and epistemological confluences, the article opens up the cinematography of Godard and the historiographies of both Benjamin and Warburg to new comparative analysis. The article’s last sections focus on the sequence of Histoire(s) 1A relating Giotto’s Magdalene and Elizabeth Taylor in George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun, in order to (re)discover issues of religion, art, nymphal impulse and historical trauma, which prove to be fundamental in the analysis of the political and ethical resonances of memory in the projects of the commented artist-historians.
From Proust to Modigliani, Hedayat, Chopin and Mercoeur, in Forever we follow Honigmann in her journey through the mythical Père-Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris. Evoking the artistic legacies through the testimonies of those, anonymous people, who pay their homage to the most cherished artists, Honiggman’s Forever constitutes an alternative way of reading art history, a memorial mosaic more and more haunted with ghosts and with reflections about life and death, joy and sorrow, memory and forgetfulness. The article argues that Forever constitutes an act of historical imagination that can be read through the notion of prosthetic memory (A.Landsberg, 2004) - a type of memory enabled by mediated representations of the past, and intersections between private and collective memories - offering an elaborative discussion of notions related to empathy, otherness and the politics of alterity. A specific relationship between Honigmann’s documentary and Benjamin’s thought is also established, stressing the ability of film to construct alternative modes of narrating the past. Drawing upon concepts from the fields of literature, history and film studies, the article claims that in Forever the poetics of documentary is contemporaneous to an ethical relation by which the persistence of time should be understood as change and redemption.
Key words: Writing, Testimony, Fiction, Time, Video.
""
This paper argues that though the dismantling of voyeurism by the experimental cinema of the 1960 and 70s is often associated with a feminist perspective, there are significant male counter examples, from both queer and heterosexual viewpoints. Warhol and Sarmento question an orthodox feminist theory bound to a binary analysis (male/female, activity/passivity, watching/being watched, voyeur/exhibitionist, subject/object) and show that the subject of voyeurism is far more ambivalent, heterodox and complex.
Photography, Archives, Intermediality by Miguel Mesquita Duarte
Este artigo procura estabelecer alguns paralelismos entre o Atlas de Gerhard Richter (1962-2013) e o Atlas Mnemosyne (1924-29) de Aby Warburg, apesar das diferenças históricas e temáticas que separam os dois projetos. Partindo da ampla relação entre arquivo, memória e imagem, o artigo foca três aspetos fundamentais: a montagem-conhecimento como base para a constituição de uma história sem texto; a importância da componente autobiográfica e ficcional nos projetos historiográficos destes dois autores; e a centralidade dos processos de inscrição, transformação e sobrevivência das imagens, bem como a respetiva correlação com o espaço da memória cultural, aqui abordada na sua multiplicidade de saberes e objetos, mas também como princípio ético-científico de simbologia e interpretação do conhecimento histórico. Fornecendo pistas para novos estudos comparativos entre Richter e Warburg, - até hoje praticamente inexistentes na literatura especializada (o texto de Buchloh sobre o arquivo anómico, de 1999, aborda essa relação apenas superficialmente), - o artigo pretende também contribuir para a reavaliação epistemológica de alguns dos significados, valências e conceitos inerentes aos atlas destes dois “historiadores-artistas” alemães.
REVIEWERS: Dietmar Elger and Paul B.Jaskot
Gerhard Richter's Atlas is a collection of photographs and sketches that the artist started to assemble in 1961. This article aims to demonstrate that Holocaust imagery plays a unique and irreplaceable function in Atlas, creating paths throughout the project and pointing towards some of Richter's most important ideas and contexts within which his pictorial work comes into being. The article places particular emphasis on the photographs assembled in panels 807 and 808 of Atlas, which are the basis for Richter's series of abstract paintings entitled Birkenau paintings, from 2014. The article argues the importance of this series, making a case for a different interpretation of Atlas's dynamics, and pointing out alternative ways of addressing the tensions between photography and painting – and, in particular, figuration and abstraction – that pervade Richter's practice. The themes concerning Richter's position on photography and the role played by the medium in the pictorial exploration of the traumatic past are thoroughly discussed in the article, generating new insights into the concept of the historical image in the work of the German artist.
This article was prompted by James Elkins’s argument — developed in his book, What Photography Is, from 2011 — that there is no actual relationship between Roland Barthes’s theory of photography and Maurice Blanchot’s philosophy. Drawing on considerations of an historical, philosophical, and literary nature, the article argues for the importance of a dialogic encounter between Barthes and Blanchot, demonstrating that the interconnection between the concepts of intimacy, image, and writing, appears as a crucial aspect in the theory of both authors. At the same time, by contesting Elkins’s wider criticism of Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1982), the article aims to develop better-informed theoretical understandings of Barthes’s thoughts on photography. The final section of the article attempts to map promising points of connection between Barthes, Blanchot, and Proust, in order to reassess the notion of punctum in its broader relation with the concepts of time and death.
This photographic essay was motivated by a reflection on a set of photographs, taken and found from 10 years ago, and the concomitant rediscovery of some of my wife’s youthful writings. By combining creative writing with philosophical debate and photographic imagery, the essay aims at constructing an alternative experience of time, loss and inter-subjectivity. Grounded in a poetical dialogue with theorists and artists such as Barthes, Chris Marker, Blanchot, Levinas, Godard, Derrida, Benjamin, Freud, Susan Sontag and Allan Poe, among others, the work entwines analytical thinking, personal memories, vernacular records and fictional readings. It thus tries to offer a space for imaginal reflexion about the precariousness of memory and the redemptive potentiality of the photographic image, here probed in its simultaneously reciprocal and asynchronous relationship with self-reflexivity and poetico-philosophical writing.
Videographic Films by Miguel Mesquita Duarte
- Laura Rascaroli
I doubt that we can learn something from Miguel Mesquita Duarte video essay if "learning" is meant as the ability to reproduce a clearly circumscribed body of knowledge presented to us in an audiovisual form. Like in his earlier video essays "The Birds After Hitchcock" where he erased the characters from the titular film so that its empty rooms can become populated by ghosts or in his "Grammatology of the Nymph" where he literally re-imagines Aby Warburg's montage technique, also this video essay instead of teaching is doing. And instead of teaching us this video essay is also "doing us": making us aware how much we are already doing these very image processes that we thought we are just witnessing. Or to misquote Jacques Lacan: A letter not only always arrives at its destination, we are actually already writing it.
- Johannes Binotto
"[Duarte’s] audiovisual intervention in and reworking of Godard’s dense montages offers an original way of entering into and opening up Histoire(s) du cinéma for questioning and comparative analysis. His strategy of isolating and animating fragments from Mnemosyne, and setting these in tension with sections of Histoire(s) du cinéma, offers a simple but highly effective way of foregrounding and exploring selected motifs and themes across the two projects. His achievement is to have devised an experimental audiovisual laboratory that enables the viewer to consider the two projects - and the representation of the female body within them – from the perspective of the other".
- Michael Witt, [in]Transition 8.1, 2021.
***
To take the cinema’s attempt at the creation of an atlas, as Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma does, and cast it back onto the work of an obsessive archivist of modernity is a complex and original contribution to our understanding of both projects. To do so using the mediums in which they were both produced—film and video, and guided by text—is all the more felicitous. Miguel Mesquita Duarte presents foremost here this understanding: that the cinematic can only be judged in its own language, montage. [...] Duarte has recognised the significance of the nymph for Warburg, and in Godard’s figure of the woman understood this gendered image to motivate the events traversed and repeated ad infinitum. [...] Duarte ultimately makes a case for the memory of attraction, whose norms and habits no longer apply to us today. This is why the Grammatology of the Nymph is a ghost story, it is an undead idea that continues to haunt us every time we stare into the abyss.
- Giles Fielke, [in]Transition 8.1, 2021.
"There are basically two very bold interventions into Hitchcock’s The Birds made by this video; stopping the motion and removing the figures. This immediately transforms the object and the viewers relation to it, opening the original film up to a potential space ‘beyond the movement of cinema’ [...] The still images of the interior still sets most effectively point to the ‘beyond’ of movement in cinema by being haunted by the voices and fixed shadows of the missing figures. The ground of the still image has apparently swallowed them up before the birds arrive to decompose the image and replace it with sound. Duarte’s interventions into The Birds collude with the malevolent non-human agency that is present throughout the original in order to successfully extract from it another film. In this way the piece raises the idea that experimental video essays of this kind are always, to some extent, attacks on the fabric of film from within the form".
- Gordon Hon, [in]Transition 5.4, 2019.
***
"Duarte’s use of digital manipulation is certainly the less popular choice for intervention upon a film/text, with most essays in the journal favouring the compile/compare/contrast/accentuate provisions lent by re-editing. As such, the essay contributes a valuable example for scholarship, providing another way in which one can intervene upon a film/text. [...] Duarte’s essay uses digital tools to intervene upon The Birds in an interesting way; it offers a counter-pointing example for audio-visual criticism of an attempt to reveal an ‘alternative reading’, through stilling moving images rather than retaining their motion".
- Catherine Fowler, [in]Transition 5.4, 2019.
Books by Miguel Mesquita Duarte
Este estudo sustenta que o arquivo é um material activo sujeito a transformações, releituras e sobrevivências. O material de arquivo relaciona-se com o passado enquanto espaço de latência e de desejo, sobrevindo como um ponto de partida criativo que se opõe ao fechamento das taxonomias racionais e descritivas. Articulando diversos autores e conceitos oriundos dos campos da filosofia, da história da arte, da literatura, da psicanálise e da teoria da imagem, o autor examina a passagem que vai do arquivo ao atlas, interessando-se pelas implicações estéticas, epistémicas e ontológicas desse movimento. Mostra-se que o atlas rompe com a habitual ordem do arquivo de imagens, fornecendo ao passado uma dimensão vertical associada ao modelo de tempo mnemotécnico, noção aqui revelada na sua componente simultaneamente técnica, imaginativa e afectiva. Através da exploração do cinema documental ficcional de Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg e Chris Marker, e estabelecendo ligações aos projectos de historiadores como Aby Warburg e Walter Benjamin, o autor demonstra que a potencialidade contra-narrativa do filme é comparável a uma historiografia alternativa, a uma forma de pensamento por imagens que permite ao sujeito acercar-se das zonas de sombra da história. Ao reconhecer a importância de uma arquiviologia das imagens que incorpora as suas múltiplas histórias e tradições, o estudo abre novas perspectivas sobre os efeitos da imagem-arquivo e o modo como esta molda e reconfigura a nossa relação com o passado, individual e colectivo.
This article explores the interplay of visual representation and oral testimony in Diana Andringa’s documentary films focusing on the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–1974), the Estado Novo dictatorship (1933–1974), and the transformative events of the 1974 April Revolution. Through a detailed examination of a key segment of Andringa’s filmography, I argue that her practice, by interweaving autobiography and personal testimonies with broader socio-historical analysis, not only embodies but also expands the concept of microhistorical documentaries, providing a multi-layered and insightful portrayal of Portugal’s complex and contentious recent history. Key themes addressed include the relationship between archival imagery and witness testimony in postcolonial documentary politics; the interaction between autobiographical inquiry and public memory in an intercultural context; trauma landscape and the challenges of representing suffering and historical upheaval in documentary filmmaking.
In 1975, my parents-in-law met in Lourenço Marques (Maputo, Mozambique). The period preceding their engagement was marked by profoundly contrasting experiences. Because of his political activities against the Estado Novo dictatorship, he was conscripted into the Portuguese Commandos and participated in the conflict that unfolded in northern Mozambique. Conversely, she travelled from the Portuguese metropolis to Lourenço Marques as a child (following her grandfather’s promotion in public service), and had a happy childhood and adolescence, as documented in a collection of Super 8 films that were entrusted to me. How to reconcile such opposite experiences? And how to honour a legacy of images that do not cease to question me in the critical present? This photo-text essay focuses on a set of images that go beyond the commonly accepted depictions of Portuguese colonialism to problematize issues of resistance, indifference and complicity, showing how private and seemingly insignificant visual materials take part in collective forms of enunciation. It stresses the importance of landscape in conveying unassimilable and traumatic aspects of Portugal’s problematic history, examining how different discourses and imaginal references about war and colonialism reflect various perspectives, experiences and sensibilities, which may or may not align with each other. Ultimately, by drawing on an experimental, self-reflexive and visual approach to history, the essay encourages readers to actively engage in shaping alternative public memories, capable of encompassing the intricacies and diverse facets of history’s manifold manifestations.
Despite the recognition of Walter Benjamin’s influence on Jean-Luc
Godard’s cinema, little in-depth comparative work has been conducted
on this relationship to date. The article provides a close
reading of Godard’s documentary political filmmaking and articulates
it with a large spectrum of Benjamin’s texts, from the early
writings and unpublished fragments to his latter and best-known
work. The article looks beyond methodological confluences
between Benjamin’s historiography and Godard’s cinema, enabling
the viewer to consider philosophical, philological, metahistorical
and aesthetic issues that chart new points of analysis for further
comparative work. The first sections examine the importance of
dream and spectral appearances in the redemptive historiography
of both authors; the middle sections problematise dialectical thinking,
image and language, investigating the specificities of both
Benjamin’s and Godard’s practices and theoretical approaches;
the final sections consider the theological and Messianic interpretation
of historical time, analysing the importance of ethical and
political aspects in the work of both authors. By exhaustively mapping
the specific moments in which Benjamin’s passages appear in
Godard’s films, the article offers a way of entering into some of the
most enigmatic formulations of Benjamin’s historiography, while
opening up Godard’s documentary cinema to new readings.
Godard’s assertion that the historian must “provide an accurate description of what has never happened” speaks eloquently to Benjamin’s equally provocative idea (taken from Hofmannsthal) that history allows one “to read what was never written”. For both - as well as for Warburg, who envisioned a “psychological history” capable of reproducing the latencies and survivals of the images of art history - historical knowledge is invaded by the irrational and the imagistic. But, for all of them, the potentiality of historical imagination is reciprocal to the requirement of truth, consubstantiated in the privilege commonly conceded to the categories of image and memory. The article examines the tripartite relationship between truth, imagination (the space of formation of dialectical images) and historical memory within a constellation of complementary philosophical references - from Proust’s involuntary memory and Bergson’s durée, to Deleuze’s thought of the outside, Derrida’s hauntology and Ricoeur’s epistemology of history - in order to reassess Godard’s documentary and political cinema. By proposing a shift in emphasis from methodological aspects to conceptual, philosophical and epistemological confluences, the article opens up the cinematography of Godard and the historiographies of both Benjamin and Warburg to new comparative analysis. The article’s last sections focus on the sequence of Histoire(s) 1A relating Giotto’s Magdalene and Elizabeth Taylor in George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun, in order to (re)discover issues of religion, art, nymphal impulse and historical trauma, which prove to be fundamental in the analysis of the political and ethical resonances of memory in the projects of the commented artist-historians.
From Proust to Modigliani, Hedayat, Chopin and Mercoeur, in Forever we follow Honigmann in her journey through the mythical Père-Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris. Evoking the artistic legacies through the testimonies of those, anonymous people, who pay their homage to the most cherished artists, Honiggman’s Forever constitutes an alternative way of reading art history, a memorial mosaic more and more haunted with ghosts and with reflections about life and death, joy and sorrow, memory and forgetfulness. The article argues that Forever constitutes an act of historical imagination that can be read through the notion of prosthetic memory (A.Landsberg, 2004) - a type of memory enabled by mediated representations of the past, and intersections between private and collective memories - offering an elaborative discussion of notions related to empathy, otherness and the politics of alterity. A specific relationship between Honigmann’s documentary and Benjamin’s thought is also established, stressing the ability of film to construct alternative modes of narrating the past. Drawing upon concepts from the fields of literature, history and film studies, the article claims that in Forever the poetics of documentary is contemporaneous to an ethical relation by which the persistence of time should be understood as change and redemption.
Key words: Writing, Testimony, Fiction, Time, Video.
""
This paper argues that though the dismantling of voyeurism by the experimental cinema of the 1960 and 70s is often associated with a feminist perspective, there are significant male counter examples, from both queer and heterosexual viewpoints. Warhol and Sarmento question an orthodox feminist theory bound to a binary analysis (male/female, activity/passivity, watching/being watched, voyeur/exhibitionist, subject/object) and show that the subject of voyeurism is far more ambivalent, heterodox and complex.
Este artigo procura estabelecer alguns paralelismos entre o Atlas de Gerhard Richter (1962-2013) e o Atlas Mnemosyne (1924-29) de Aby Warburg, apesar das diferenças históricas e temáticas que separam os dois projetos. Partindo da ampla relação entre arquivo, memória e imagem, o artigo foca três aspetos fundamentais: a montagem-conhecimento como base para a constituição de uma história sem texto; a importância da componente autobiográfica e ficcional nos projetos historiográficos destes dois autores; e a centralidade dos processos de inscrição, transformação e sobrevivência das imagens, bem como a respetiva correlação com o espaço da memória cultural, aqui abordada na sua multiplicidade de saberes e objetos, mas também como princípio ético-científico de simbologia e interpretação do conhecimento histórico. Fornecendo pistas para novos estudos comparativos entre Richter e Warburg, - até hoje praticamente inexistentes na literatura especializada (o texto de Buchloh sobre o arquivo anómico, de 1999, aborda essa relação apenas superficialmente), - o artigo pretende também contribuir para a reavaliação epistemológica de alguns dos significados, valências e conceitos inerentes aos atlas destes dois “historiadores-artistas” alemães.
REVIEWERS: Dietmar Elger and Paul B.Jaskot
Gerhard Richter's Atlas is a collection of photographs and sketches that the artist started to assemble in 1961. This article aims to demonstrate that Holocaust imagery plays a unique and irreplaceable function in Atlas, creating paths throughout the project and pointing towards some of Richter's most important ideas and contexts within which his pictorial work comes into being. The article places particular emphasis on the photographs assembled in panels 807 and 808 of Atlas, which are the basis for Richter's series of abstract paintings entitled Birkenau paintings, from 2014. The article argues the importance of this series, making a case for a different interpretation of Atlas's dynamics, and pointing out alternative ways of addressing the tensions between photography and painting – and, in particular, figuration and abstraction – that pervade Richter's practice. The themes concerning Richter's position on photography and the role played by the medium in the pictorial exploration of the traumatic past are thoroughly discussed in the article, generating new insights into the concept of the historical image in the work of the German artist.
This article was prompted by James Elkins’s argument — developed in his book, What Photography Is, from 2011 — that there is no actual relationship between Roland Barthes’s theory of photography and Maurice Blanchot’s philosophy. Drawing on considerations of an historical, philosophical, and literary nature, the article argues for the importance of a dialogic encounter between Barthes and Blanchot, demonstrating that the interconnection between the concepts of intimacy, image, and writing, appears as a crucial aspect in the theory of both authors. At the same time, by contesting Elkins’s wider criticism of Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1982), the article aims to develop better-informed theoretical understandings of Barthes’s thoughts on photography. The final section of the article attempts to map promising points of connection between Barthes, Blanchot, and Proust, in order to reassess the notion of punctum in its broader relation with the concepts of time and death.
This photographic essay was motivated by a reflection on a set of photographs, taken and found from 10 years ago, and the concomitant rediscovery of some of my wife’s youthful writings. By combining creative writing with philosophical debate and photographic imagery, the essay aims at constructing an alternative experience of time, loss and inter-subjectivity. Grounded in a poetical dialogue with theorists and artists such as Barthes, Chris Marker, Blanchot, Levinas, Godard, Derrida, Benjamin, Freud, Susan Sontag and Allan Poe, among others, the work entwines analytical thinking, personal memories, vernacular records and fictional readings. It thus tries to offer a space for imaginal reflexion about the precariousness of memory and the redemptive potentiality of the photographic image, here probed in its simultaneously reciprocal and asynchronous relationship with self-reflexivity and poetico-philosophical writing.
- Laura Rascaroli
I doubt that we can learn something from Miguel Mesquita Duarte video essay if "learning" is meant as the ability to reproduce a clearly circumscribed body of knowledge presented to us in an audiovisual form. Like in his earlier video essays "The Birds After Hitchcock" where he erased the characters from the titular film so that its empty rooms can become populated by ghosts or in his "Grammatology of the Nymph" where he literally re-imagines Aby Warburg's montage technique, also this video essay instead of teaching is doing. And instead of teaching us this video essay is also "doing us": making us aware how much we are already doing these very image processes that we thought we are just witnessing. Or to misquote Jacques Lacan: A letter not only always arrives at its destination, we are actually already writing it.
- Johannes Binotto
"[Duarte’s] audiovisual intervention in and reworking of Godard’s dense montages offers an original way of entering into and opening up Histoire(s) du cinéma for questioning and comparative analysis. His strategy of isolating and animating fragments from Mnemosyne, and setting these in tension with sections of Histoire(s) du cinéma, offers a simple but highly effective way of foregrounding and exploring selected motifs and themes across the two projects. His achievement is to have devised an experimental audiovisual laboratory that enables the viewer to consider the two projects - and the representation of the female body within them – from the perspective of the other".
- Michael Witt, [in]Transition 8.1, 2021.
***
To take the cinema’s attempt at the creation of an atlas, as Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma does, and cast it back onto the work of an obsessive archivist of modernity is a complex and original contribution to our understanding of both projects. To do so using the mediums in which they were both produced—film and video, and guided by text—is all the more felicitous. Miguel Mesquita Duarte presents foremost here this understanding: that the cinematic can only be judged in its own language, montage. [...] Duarte has recognised the significance of the nymph for Warburg, and in Godard’s figure of the woman understood this gendered image to motivate the events traversed and repeated ad infinitum. [...] Duarte ultimately makes a case for the memory of attraction, whose norms and habits no longer apply to us today. This is why the Grammatology of the Nymph is a ghost story, it is an undead idea that continues to haunt us every time we stare into the abyss.
- Giles Fielke, [in]Transition 8.1, 2021.
"There are basically two very bold interventions into Hitchcock’s The Birds made by this video; stopping the motion and removing the figures. This immediately transforms the object and the viewers relation to it, opening the original film up to a potential space ‘beyond the movement of cinema’ [...] The still images of the interior still sets most effectively point to the ‘beyond’ of movement in cinema by being haunted by the voices and fixed shadows of the missing figures. The ground of the still image has apparently swallowed them up before the birds arrive to decompose the image and replace it with sound. Duarte’s interventions into The Birds collude with the malevolent non-human agency that is present throughout the original in order to successfully extract from it another film. In this way the piece raises the idea that experimental video essays of this kind are always, to some extent, attacks on the fabric of film from within the form".
- Gordon Hon, [in]Transition 5.4, 2019.
***
"Duarte’s use of digital manipulation is certainly the less popular choice for intervention upon a film/text, with most essays in the journal favouring the compile/compare/contrast/accentuate provisions lent by re-editing. As such, the essay contributes a valuable example for scholarship, providing another way in which one can intervene upon a film/text. [...] Duarte’s essay uses digital tools to intervene upon The Birds in an interesting way; it offers a counter-pointing example for audio-visual criticism of an attempt to reveal an ‘alternative reading’, through stilling moving images rather than retaining their motion".
- Catherine Fowler, [in]Transition 5.4, 2019.
Este estudo sustenta que o arquivo é um material activo sujeito a transformações, releituras e sobrevivências. O material de arquivo relaciona-se com o passado enquanto espaço de latência e de desejo, sobrevindo como um ponto de partida criativo que se opõe ao fechamento das taxonomias racionais e descritivas. Articulando diversos autores e conceitos oriundos dos campos da filosofia, da história da arte, da literatura, da psicanálise e da teoria da imagem, o autor examina a passagem que vai do arquivo ao atlas, interessando-se pelas implicações estéticas, epistémicas e ontológicas desse movimento. Mostra-se que o atlas rompe com a habitual ordem do arquivo de imagens, fornecendo ao passado uma dimensão vertical associada ao modelo de tempo mnemotécnico, noção aqui revelada na sua componente simultaneamente técnica, imaginativa e afectiva. Através da exploração do cinema documental ficcional de Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg e Chris Marker, e estabelecendo ligações aos projectos de historiadores como Aby Warburg e Walter Benjamin, o autor demonstra que a potencialidade contra-narrativa do filme é comparável a uma historiografia alternativa, a uma forma de pensamento por imagens que permite ao sujeito acercar-se das zonas de sombra da história. Ao reconhecer a importância de uma arquiviologia das imagens que incorpora as suas múltiplas histórias e tradições, o estudo abre novas perspectivas sobre os efeitos da imagem-arquivo e o modo como esta molda e reconfigura a nossa relação com o passado, individual e colectivo.
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‘This extraordinary glossary leverages the power of interdisciplinary research in art and human sciences and invites the reader to consider the beauty of these disciplines by embracing multiple genres in and about the work of philosopher, thinker, poet Georges Didi-Huberman.
- Barbara Baert, KU Leuven
Propomo-nos a abordar alguns dos aspectos mais importantes tratados por Rosalind Krauss nos seus ensaios sobre a Fotografia e o Surrealismo (reunidos na obra O Fotográfico), dando a conhecer e clarificando as linhas de força do pensamento da autora sobre a prática fotográfica e, mais propriamente, sobre essa noção central relativa ao fotográfico, noção que lhe é tão cara e que passou recorrentemente a ser utilizada nos actuais discursos sobre a imagem fotográfica, embora nem sempre da forma mais adequada. Mas o nosso interesse por essa noção tem fundamentalmente que ver com a possibilidade de, a partir dela, ensaiarmos a hipótese de uma reflexão, tão aprofundada quanto possível, no espaço que nos é reservado, sobre alguns dos principais conceitos suscitados por um pensamento sobre a Fotografia.
Como referia Deleuze, a propósito do cinema, uma teoria do cinema não é sobre o cinema, mas sobre os conceitos do cinema, devidamente relacionados e articulados com conjuntos de outros conceitos que lhes são externos, porém contíguos. Também da nossa parte acolheremos essa metodologia, direccionando a nossa análise no sentido de uma exigência, - que, de resto, é uma exigência da própria Fotografia enquanto meio híbrido e pluridisciplinar,- que nos leva a articular os conceitos da Fotografia com outras áreas de expressão e do conhecimento, como o sejam a literatura, a pintura, mas também a linguística, a psicanálise e a filosofia da imagem hodierna. Porque o que parece estar em causa, num estudo sobre a especificidade da imagem fotográfica, é um pensamento sobre a imagem, na sua dimensão mais ampla e complexa, o que refere, no essencial, um pensamento relativo às modalidades de produção de conhecimento sobre o mundo e sobre o próprio indivíduo.
De um ponto de vista meramente esquemático, a sessão organizar-se-á em três partes, sendo cada uma delas composta por um conjunto de tópicos principais que, desde já, avançamos a título introdutório:
I. A Fotografia como Escrita Automática
A interrupção do real pela imagem fotográfica e a estética do quotidiano nos surrealistas. – A natureza indicial da imagem fotográfica: a problematização da referencialidade e a desestruturação da construção linguística e icónica. – O automatismo psíquico e a automaticidade da câmara fotográfica: a câmara é um instrumento cego (Breton)
II. Enquadramento. Espaçamento. Texto. A dimensão fabulada (sur-real) do real
O enquadramento como operação de corte. Enquadramentro e fora de campo – O espaçamento de leitura em Mallarmé (Un Coup de Dés...) – A filosofia da diferença de Jacques Derrida – A natureza indicial «e» deíctica da imagem fotográfica: L’Amour Fou, de Breton, e a sedimentação temporal do inconsciente em Freud.
III. A Desantropomorfização do Olhar e a Representação do Irrepresentável.
O especular na obra fotográfica de Brassai. – A dimensão do transvisual e a definição do realismo em Carl Einstein: o verdadeiro realismo não quer dizer imitação, mas criação de objectos. – O baixo materialismo e o informe em Bataille. – A fotografia do corpo (Man Ray, J.A.-Boiffard e Raoul Ubac). – O escopismo do olhar em Lacan. – O espaçamento e o intervalo como zonas de conceptualização: a lógica da fotografia não é fenomenológica, mas metafenomenológica, tropológica, ou mental.
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