The diversity of thought with cinema. Thus the text as an image, the relations between image and sound, are part of personal films with an autobiographical dimension. Themes such as the contemporary consumer society, advertising, representation of women and neocolonialism are the focus of several sessions. While others show the film in a situation where celluloid and video speak their differences through the film as sculpture. The issue of the media, placing film and video in different sites, ranging from theater to the gallery, will also be addressed in the sessions. The films will be screened with subtitles in Portuguese and those will be available for filmmakers, and / or distributors.

The exhibition that MuMa dedicates to Nicolas de Staël gives us the opportunity to question the materiality of the image. Light as a raw material. It passes through the eye of a painter who restores it in his landscapes: glowing in the South, changing in the North. In the films of Nathaniel Dorsky and Paul Clipson, it flows into the camera lens and fixes into film, writing that subtle partition of clear and dark, revealing the optical magic of the recording device.

Device set aside by practitioners of direct cinema, cameraless film, who paint directly on the film as Stan Brakhage and Emmanuel Lefrant. The film strip is no longer simply the space where the image is formed, it increases in thickness and becomes the concrete support of the pictorial material. A different material for the image, the pixel has only temporal reality, but may be subject to speculation. In the work of Jacques Perconte, compressions and decompressions allow passages from the figurative to the abstract, without opposing them, as in the painting of Staël.

Wry and formally ingenious, John Smith’s films are playful explorations of the language of cinema and thought-provoking reflections on the image’s role in politics, war, and the global economy. The 2013 Jarman Award winner will screen and discuss a selection of films from throughout his career including Slow Glass (1988-91), an exploration of memory, perception and change through the stories of a nostalgic glazier; Blight (1994-96) a stunning montage depicting the destruction of a London street to make way for new roads; and Pyramids / Skunk (Hotel Diaries #5) (2006-07), in which a chocolate bar in a Rotterdam hotel room eventually reminds the filmmaker that there are important things going on in the world outside. (76 minutes)