José Bértolo
.José Bértolo (MA 2015; PhD 2019 — U. Lisbon) is a member of the University of Lisbon Centre for Comparative Studies, where he works within research cluster RIAL – Reality and Imagination in Art and Literature. He was awarded two FCT Scientific Research Grants in the Research Project False Movement: Studies in Writing and Film (Centre for Comparative Studies, 2012-2016) and an FCT PhD fellowship. He has been an Invited Teaching Assistant of Film Analysis, at the ULisbon School of Arts and Humanities (2017-2018). In the field of film studies, he has been doing research on film theory and film philosophy, the relations between film and other arts (literature, photography, painting), film analysis and film history, with an emphasis on Portuguese, French and American cinemas, as well as on silent film, the avant-gardes, new wave cinemas, experimental film and documentary. His work focuses mainly on issues of representation and figuration, ontology and phenomenology, the materiality of images, fiction and narrative. On a thematic level, he has been particularly interested in questioning the notions of real and imaginary in cinema, as well as in death and spectrality, eco-cinema and queer approaches. He authored the books Imagens em Fuga: Os Fantasmas de François Truffaut (Images on the Run: The Ghosts of François Truffaut, 2016), Sobreimpressões: Leituras de Filmes (Superimpositions: Film Readings, 2019), and Espectros do Cinema: Manoel de Oliveira e João Pedro Rodrigues (Specters of Cinema: Manoel de Oliveira and João Pedro Rodrigues, 2020), and co-edited the books A Escrita do Cinema: Ensaios (Film Writing: Essays, w/ C. Rowland, 2015), Morte e Espectralidade nas Artes e na Literatura (Death and Spectrality in Art and Literature, w/ F. Guerreiro, 2019) and Imitações da Vida: Cinema Clássico Americano (Imitations of Life: Classical Hollywood Film, w/ C. Rowland and F. Guerreiro, 2020). He also co-edited (w/ M. Medeiros) a special journal issue of the Journal of Communication and Languages on "Photography, Cinema, and the Ghostly" (2020).
Address: Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal
Address: Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal
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In English by José Bértolo
Keywords: Absence; Audiovisual essay; Alfred Hitchcock; Invisibility; Ricardo Vieira Lisboa; Spectrality
CFP (English) by José Bértolo
2i | JOURNAL OF IDENTITY AND INTERMEDIALITY STUDIES
Deadline for submissions of contributions: 15 July
Editors: Amândio Reis (U. Lisbon) and José Bértolo (NOVA U. Lisbon)
In the original sense, as a figure of rhetoric, prosopopoeia consists in “putting speech into the mouths of others”. Therefore, Quintilian defines it as a resource that allows us to “present the intimate thoughts of our adversaries as if they were speaking to themselves” (Institutio Oratoria IX: 2, 29-32). As such, be it a gift or an imposition of discourse, and even if guided by verisimilitude, prosopopoeia often brings into play a crisis of identity, a challenge to the precepts of realistic representation, and the materialization in language of a “natural impossibility” (Riffaterre 1985: 110).
The majority of conceptual definitions of prosopopoeia describe it as an attribution of life to the inanimate and/or of expression to the ineloquent, making it the key figure in the creation of fictional characters. Therefore, all acts associated with fiction and representation are somehow linked to the phenomenon of prosopopoeia. However, in a more precise usage, this figure tends to be associated mainly with personification, i.e., the attribution of human faculties to non-human objects or beings. In short, prosopopoeia utilizes language “to give a name, a face, or a voice to something that does not possess them” (Miller 2016: 107).
In literary history and criticism, prosopopoeia plays a discreet but important role. Fables, for example, are based on anthropomorphism; and Gothic literature offers a vast gallery of painted characters who free themselves from their frames, sculptures that come to life, or automata, of which Der Sandmann, by E.T.A. Hoffmann, is a major example, inspiring Sigmund Freud to conceive of the Unheimliche as a form of familiarity in strangeness.
But apart from its roots in rhetoric and literature, prosopopoeia extends into other arts. In the history of painting, there are frequent depictions of it, going back, for example, to the Ovidian episode of Galatea’s metamorphosis from ivory to flesh and blood by artists such as Edward Burne-Jones or Jean-Léon Gérôme. In cinema, prosopopoeia can be analyzed from a thematic — with ghost stories, automata, talking animals, robots — as well as a theoretical point of view. Several thinkers have endowed the camera with human qualities by describing it as a “cine-eye” (D. Vertov) and attributing to it “a machinic intelligence” (J. Epstein), that is, a form of subjectivity and consciousness. And cinema often shows subjective shots giving access to the point of view of non-human beings and inanimate objects (the donkey in Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, or the doll in Manoel de Oliveira’s Aniki Bobó). Moreover, given the nature of the medium, by associating images with words, or faces with speech, and its intrinsic relationship with ghosts and spectrality, cinema is especially suited to prosopopoeia as the “fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, dead, or voiceless entity, offering it the possibility of a response and conferring upon it the gift of the word” (De Man 1984: 77).
Since antiquity, but particularly in the multimedia context of today, in which it finds new functions and possibilities, prosopopoeia also serves poetic and political purposes. Along with studies in narratology and stylistics, animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism and thing theory have shown a growing interest in questioning anthropocentric conceptions of life and art, placing the non-human at the heart of inquiries and giving it a face and a voice. This issue of 2i intends to reevaluate conceptualizations and uses of prosopopoeia across the arts, throughout history, and in interdisciplinary contexts.
Some of the topics we hope to explore in this issue include:
• Prosopopoeia and other figures of rhetoric (personification, apostrophe, allegory, dialogism, hypotyposis, ethopoeia);
• Fiction, narrative and embodiments of prosopopoeia: sculptures, portraits, automata, ghosts, deities and supernatural entities;
• Prosopopoeia and the Unheimliche;
• Prosopopoeia and death: spectrality and the ghostly;
• Prosopopoeia, dreams, hallucination and surrealism;
• Puppetry, ventriloquism and the mask;
• Prosopopoeia, description and allegory (landscapes, objects, abstractions);
• Theory of genres: horror, fairy tale, fable, science fiction, epitaph;
• Prosopopoeia as a challenge to anthropocentrism: animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism;
• Magic, animism, hierophany, possession;
• Prosopopoeia in the Anthropocene: the “life” of mineral and geological elements;
• Prosopopeic metaphors in thinking about art (the eye of the camera, the muteness or eloquence of the paper, the corporeality of the stone, etc.);
• “Thing theory” and the life of objects.
Articles may be written in Portuguese, English, French, or Spanish.
Works cited:
De Man, Paul (1984). The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP.
Epstein, Jean (2014). Écrits complets, Volume V, 1945-1951: L’Intelligence d’une machine, Le Cinéma du Diable et autres écrits. Paris: Independencia Éditions.
Miller, J. Hillis (2016). Western Theories of Poetry: Reading Wallace Stevens’s “The Motive for Metaphor”. In Ranjan Ghosh & J. Hillis Miller, Thinking Literature across Continents. Durham and London: Duke UP.
Quintilianus, M.F. (1959). The Institutio Oratoria, edited and translated by H.E. Butler. Cambridge: Harvard UP, The Loeb Classical Library.
Riffaterre, Michael (1985). Prosopopeia, Yale French Studies, No. 69, pp. 107-123.
Vertov, Dziga (1984). Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, edited by Annette Michelson and translated by Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: U California Press.
JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE STUDIES
CFP, no. 2
MATERIALITIES OF THE PHOTOBOOK
Deadline for submissions: July 31, 2022
Editors:
David Campany (International Center of Photography/U. Westminster)
José Bértolo (U. Nova de Lisboa/Caldas da Rainha School of Arts & Design)
Compendium invites submissions for its second issue on the theme of Materialities of the Photobook. This special issue welcomes essays that explore the photobook, contemporary or historical, as an art object, looking into the processes that guide its composition, its specific materiality and objecthood, its reception and the reading/seeing experience.
In the last decades, we have witnessed a “photobook phenomenon” corresponding with a significant rise in the publication, acquisition, and circulation of photobooks. Canons and counter-canons have been established, and the photobook has become a recognised form with a set of lineages. New independent and specialized publishers have emerged across the world, along with new audiences of not only collectors and photographers but also occasional and non-professional consumers.
While an exhibition demands consideration of elements such as spatiality, volume, scale and presentation, among others, the book asks for a different set of decisions. The specificities of the photobook imply a new object, and a new form, in which images, text, sequence, design and choices of materiality all play a part in the constitution of the work.
Photobooks have started to become objects of study and research for academics and critics. These initial studies are mostly centered on the art and book market (e.g., the work of publishers or the social profile of photobook consumers); the history of photobooks (e.g., how we arrived at this contemporary boom); or the photobook as a specific case in the wider context of photography studies (e.g., in the 19th issue of Aperture’s The PhotoBook Review, which aimed at assessing the state of photobook studies in our time, one of the leading questions was “What is the current state of photobook criticism?”). Much is yet to be learned and thought through about the photobook in itself as an object of observation and interpretation, or, in other words, as an object of interdisciplinary reading.
We invite prospective authors to look closer into photobooks as complex, unstable and hybridized artworks, considering their material specificities and the diversity of interpretive and sensorial experiences that they can offer, and the varied ways in which they engage with the world and find their place within it.
Some of the topics we hope to explore in this issue include:
• Case studies on specific books or bodies of work
• Comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to the photobook
• Book designers and the facets of authorship
• Sequence, narrativity and meaning
• Book design, printing, formats, paper
• Reading a photobook: reader-oriented perspectives
• Digital (im)materialities
• Photobooks, zines, photo-albums
• Image and text: possibilities, connections, and divergences
We especially encourage submissions on topics that reach beyond Western cultures, as well as submissions from doctoral students and independent or early-career researchers. Submitted articles may be written in English, Portuguese, Spanish, or French, and should range between 6,000 and 8,000 words, including notes, references, an abstract of 150 to 250 words, as well as 4 to 6 keywords. Authors must follow the formatting guidelines listed in the Submissions section under Author Guidelines on the journal’s website. Submissions must include a separate document containing a short biographical note of the author, up to 150 words. Online submission: to register and submit your article for peer review, please follow the hyperlink Make a Submission on the Compendium homepage before the 31st of July 2022.
compendium.letras.ulisboa.pt
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RCL — Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens / Journal of Communication and Languages
CALL FOR PAPERS
Photography, Cinema, and the Ghostly – RCL n. 53 (Autumn/Winter)
Editors:
José Bértolo (CEC, U. Lisbon)
Margarida Medeiros (ICNOVA — NOVA U. Lisbon)
Throughout the nineteenth century, the camera was believed to be a diabolical machine that could steal human souls. In one of the most notorious texts included in When I Was a Photographer (1899), Félix Nadar famously described how Honoré de Balzac thought that “each body in nature is composed of a series of specters”, and that each “Daguerreian operation” would retain one of these spectral layers until the human body of the photographed person amounted to nothing.
If on the one hand there was this general idea that photography was a “killing instrument”, on the other hand it was clear from the beginning that photographs also granted new lives to human beings, animals, objects, etc. Being the “perfect” double of what was once seen in the visible world, the photograph becomes the space where that which is no longer alive can continue to exist. With this in mind, Roland Barthes wrote on his Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980) that this relatively new and mostly mechanical art form is responsible for the “return of the Dead”. Likewise, Susan Sontag (1977) also posited that “all photographs are memento mori”.
The correlation between photography and death is particularly striking in the last decades of the nineteenth century with the emergence of spirit photography. Through the extensive use of double exposures, William Mumler, William Hope, and others, demonstrated that photography not only dealt with physical reality, but could also place itself within the realms of imagination, magic and illusion.
Like photography, cinema has since its beginnings been associated with spectrality. As early as 1896, Georges Méliès was already directing films such as Le manoir du diable, where editing tricks were used in order to create a supernatural world inhabited by fantastic creatures. At the same time, the supposedly realistic films of brothers Lumière were also being perceived by some spectators as much more than direct and lifelike representations of the world. After watching a Lumière program in 1896, Maxim Gorky famously wrote: “Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows […] It is not life but its shadow, not motion but its soundless spectre”.
In the following decades, film critics, film theorists and philosophers as different as Ricciotto Canudo, Jean Epstein, Gilles Deleuze or Jean-Louis Leutrat explored ghostly metaphors in their inquiries on the nature of film. The prime example of this critical tendency occurs in an interview published in the Cahiers du Cinéma (2001), in which Jacques Derrida, almost a decade past the publication of Specters of Marx, characterized cinema as a “spectral technique of apparitions”.
In addition, scriptwriters and directors pertaining to different historical and cultural contexts are evidently interested in stories in which the ghostly, the oneiric and the immaterial play a special part. The exploration of such elements is not limited to German Expressionism, the American Gothic (Film) tradition of the 1940s, or the Italian Giallo, also playing an important role in the works of filmmakers as distinct and unique as Yevgeni Bauer, Luis Buñuel, Jacques Tourneur, Kaneto Shindo, Alain Resnais, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, or Pedro Costa.
Borrowing from several important studies on the ghostly published in the wake of the “spectral turn” popularized by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock in Spectral America (2004), this thematic issue aims to depart from and contribute to an ongoing debate which shows that many areas of spectrality in art are yet to explore. This special issue aims to reconsider the close link between photography, cinema and the ghostly, bringing together traditional and new historical, theoretical and philosophical approaches.
Papers can address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
• The nineteenth century, the emergence of new media, and the ghostly imagination
• Photography, memory, and death
• Spirit photography
• The ghostly in modern and contemporary photography
• Key issues related to the ontology of the photographic image: (un)reality, (im)materiality, (in)visibilitiy and the (un)seen
• Ghostly metaphors in film writing (criticism, theory, philosophy)
• The spectres of digital media and/or film (in photography and/or cinema)
• Experience, perception, subjective images and imagination
• The representation of dreams and hallucinations
• Special effects aiming to enhance the spectral dimension of photography and/or film (e.g. double exposure, superimposition, stop trick, rear projection, acousmatic sound)
• Ghostly or haunted media in fiction film (photography, radio, the Internet)
• Ghosts across different genres (e.g., horror, melodrama, comedy, war film)
• Critical and contemporary approaches to the concept of spectrality
The articles can be written in English, French, or Portuguese, and will be subject to a double-blind peer review. They must comply with the journal’s submission guidelines and be sent through the OJS platform until May 10th, 2020.
For queries, contact the editors José Bértolo ([email protected]) and/or Margarida Medeiros ([email protected]).
Guidelines for submission and Instructions for authors:
http://www.fcsh.unl.pt/rcl/index.php/rcl/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions
Website: https://www.fcsh.unl.pt/rcl/index.php/rcl/announcement/view/15
Heterotopic as it is, screen space juxtaposes several different spaces pertaining to different dimensions (Michael Chanan, The Documentary Chronotope, 2000): both mise en scène and cinematic dispositifs spatialize the gaze, the vanishing point where the filmic and the pro-filmic intersect. Space is therefore represented, conveyed and appropriated by the cinematic apparatus, calling into question the historical, political and philosophical aspects of an aesthetics of spatiality in a broad sense.
All of these distinct categories point to a fundamental idea: by definition, the moving image dinamizes space and spatializes time, thus contributing to the changing perceptions of space and time. We are interested in the concept of space as an inherently cinematic feature that led to specific developments in film language in early cinema, and which is still an on-going subject of debate. Its conceptualization around and translation into the film form has been the object of many theoretical and artistic approaches, which places this call for papers in an expanded field of work and research. We aim not only to look into the object-film itself, but also to enrol in creative and critical excursions in the form of papers or visual essays that somehow promote the discussion of space and cinema (and other moving image practices).
Potential papers can address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Cinematic space, place and time
- Building the filmic space: screenplay, mise-en-scène, editing, post-production
- Space and film genres
- Body, gender and space
- Film and landscape
- Architecture and cinema
- Space and ruin
- Space and national filmographies
- Colonial and postcolonial spaces
- Exile, shifting borders and displacement
- Space and collective occupations
- Outer space and utopia
- Cartographies, maps and archive
- Roads, paths and journeys
- Travelogue and documentary film
- Mental spaces: dream, hallucination, and virtual reality
The Conference’s working languages are Portuguese and English.
ABSTRACT SUBMISSIONS
Please send the Organizing Committee 500-word abstracts for 20-minute presentations, as well as a brief biographical note (circa 200 words), to [email protected] by May 31, 2016.
Please use this template when submitting your proposal.
Notification of acceptance will be given by July 15, 2016.
Books (Portuguese) by José Bértolo
Explorando dinâmicas complexas entre corpo e imagem, realidade e sonho, matéria e fantasma, as personagens de François Truffaut reflectem a instabi-lidade ontológica própria do cinema, que, como identificou Derrida, se concretiza na aparição e na desaparição de imagens fixas. Persiste a imagem em fuga no ecrã, a que os filmes em estudo neste livro parecem reportar-se por meio da ficção.
Edited Books (Portuguese) by José Bértolo
Org. Clara Rowland e José Bértolo
Lisboa: Documenta
2015
Ensaios de:
Adrian Martin
Amândio Reis
Clara Rowland
Emília Pinto de Almeida
Fernando Guerreiro
Guillaume Bourgois
Hajnal Kiraly
Joana Matos Frias
Joana Moura
José Bértolo
Luís Mendonça
Maria Filomena Molder
Mário Jorge Torres
Pedro Eiras
Rita Benis
Rosa Maria Martelo
Sonia Miceli
Susana Nascimento Duarte
Timothy Corrigan
Tom Conley
Este volume tem origem em dois encontros organizados no âmbito do projecto “RIAL – Realidade e Imaginação nas Artes e na Literatura”, sedeado no Centro de Estudos Comparatistas da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, designadamente a Jornada “Máscaras de Cera: O Espectáculo da Morte na Literatura e nas Artes dos Séculos XIX e XX” (2017, em colaboração com a linha de investigação “Teatro e Imagem” do Centro de Estudos de Teatro da FLUL) e o Seminário “O Realismo Espectral da Imagem Fotográfica” (2018).
Os ensaios reunidos são da autoria de Amândio Reis, Ana Campos, Fernando Guerreiro, Filipe Figueiredo, Golgona Anghel, José Bértolo, José Duarte, Kelly Basílio, Luís Mendonça, Margarida Medeiros, Patrícia Soares Martins e Susana Lourenço Marques.
Keywords: Absence; Audiovisual essay; Alfred Hitchcock; Invisibility; Ricardo Vieira Lisboa; Spectrality
2i | JOURNAL OF IDENTITY AND INTERMEDIALITY STUDIES
Deadline for submissions of contributions: 15 July
Editors: Amândio Reis (U. Lisbon) and José Bértolo (NOVA U. Lisbon)
In the original sense, as a figure of rhetoric, prosopopoeia consists in “putting speech into the mouths of others”. Therefore, Quintilian defines it as a resource that allows us to “present the intimate thoughts of our adversaries as if they were speaking to themselves” (Institutio Oratoria IX: 2, 29-32). As such, be it a gift or an imposition of discourse, and even if guided by verisimilitude, prosopopoeia often brings into play a crisis of identity, a challenge to the precepts of realistic representation, and the materialization in language of a “natural impossibility” (Riffaterre 1985: 110).
The majority of conceptual definitions of prosopopoeia describe it as an attribution of life to the inanimate and/or of expression to the ineloquent, making it the key figure in the creation of fictional characters. Therefore, all acts associated with fiction and representation are somehow linked to the phenomenon of prosopopoeia. However, in a more precise usage, this figure tends to be associated mainly with personification, i.e., the attribution of human faculties to non-human objects or beings. In short, prosopopoeia utilizes language “to give a name, a face, or a voice to something that does not possess them” (Miller 2016: 107).
In literary history and criticism, prosopopoeia plays a discreet but important role. Fables, for example, are based on anthropomorphism; and Gothic literature offers a vast gallery of painted characters who free themselves from their frames, sculptures that come to life, or automata, of which Der Sandmann, by E.T.A. Hoffmann, is a major example, inspiring Sigmund Freud to conceive of the Unheimliche as a form of familiarity in strangeness.
But apart from its roots in rhetoric and literature, prosopopoeia extends into other arts. In the history of painting, there are frequent depictions of it, going back, for example, to the Ovidian episode of Galatea’s metamorphosis from ivory to flesh and blood by artists such as Edward Burne-Jones or Jean-Léon Gérôme. In cinema, prosopopoeia can be analyzed from a thematic — with ghost stories, automata, talking animals, robots — as well as a theoretical point of view. Several thinkers have endowed the camera with human qualities by describing it as a “cine-eye” (D. Vertov) and attributing to it “a machinic intelligence” (J. Epstein), that is, a form of subjectivity and consciousness. And cinema often shows subjective shots giving access to the point of view of non-human beings and inanimate objects (the donkey in Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, or the doll in Manoel de Oliveira’s Aniki Bobó). Moreover, given the nature of the medium, by associating images with words, or faces with speech, and its intrinsic relationship with ghosts and spectrality, cinema is especially suited to prosopopoeia as the “fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, dead, or voiceless entity, offering it the possibility of a response and conferring upon it the gift of the word” (De Man 1984: 77).
Since antiquity, but particularly in the multimedia context of today, in which it finds new functions and possibilities, prosopopoeia also serves poetic and political purposes. Along with studies in narratology and stylistics, animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism and thing theory have shown a growing interest in questioning anthropocentric conceptions of life and art, placing the non-human at the heart of inquiries and giving it a face and a voice. This issue of 2i intends to reevaluate conceptualizations and uses of prosopopoeia across the arts, throughout history, and in interdisciplinary contexts.
Some of the topics we hope to explore in this issue include:
• Prosopopoeia and other figures of rhetoric (personification, apostrophe, allegory, dialogism, hypotyposis, ethopoeia);
• Fiction, narrative and embodiments of prosopopoeia: sculptures, portraits, automata, ghosts, deities and supernatural entities;
• Prosopopoeia and the Unheimliche;
• Prosopopoeia and death: spectrality and the ghostly;
• Prosopopoeia, dreams, hallucination and surrealism;
• Puppetry, ventriloquism and the mask;
• Prosopopoeia, description and allegory (landscapes, objects, abstractions);
• Theory of genres: horror, fairy tale, fable, science fiction, epitaph;
• Prosopopoeia as a challenge to anthropocentrism: animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism;
• Magic, animism, hierophany, possession;
• Prosopopoeia in the Anthropocene: the “life” of mineral and geological elements;
• Prosopopeic metaphors in thinking about art (the eye of the camera, the muteness or eloquence of the paper, the corporeality of the stone, etc.);
• “Thing theory” and the life of objects.
Articles may be written in Portuguese, English, French, or Spanish.
Works cited:
De Man, Paul (1984). The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP.
Epstein, Jean (2014). Écrits complets, Volume V, 1945-1951: L’Intelligence d’une machine, Le Cinéma du Diable et autres écrits. Paris: Independencia Éditions.
Miller, J. Hillis (2016). Western Theories of Poetry: Reading Wallace Stevens’s “The Motive for Metaphor”. In Ranjan Ghosh & J. Hillis Miller, Thinking Literature across Continents. Durham and London: Duke UP.
Quintilianus, M.F. (1959). The Institutio Oratoria, edited and translated by H.E. Butler. Cambridge: Harvard UP, The Loeb Classical Library.
Riffaterre, Michael (1985). Prosopopeia, Yale French Studies, No. 69, pp. 107-123.
Vertov, Dziga (1984). Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, edited by Annette Michelson and translated by Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: U California Press.
JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE STUDIES
CFP, no. 2
MATERIALITIES OF THE PHOTOBOOK
Deadline for submissions: July 31, 2022
Editors:
David Campany (International Center of Photography/U. Westminster)
José Bértolo (U. Nova de Lisboa/Caldas da Rainha School of Arts & Design)
Compendium invites submissions for its second issue on the theme of Materialities of the Photobook. This special issue welcomes essays that explore the photobook, contemporary or historical, as an art object, looking into the processes that guide its composition, its specific materiality and objecthood, its reception and the reading/seeing experience.
In the last decades, we have witnessed a “photobook phenomenon” corresponding with a significant rise in the publication, acquisition, and circulation of photobooks. Canons and counter-canons have been established, and the photobook has become a recognised form with a set of lineages. New independent and specialized publishers have emerged across the world, along with new audiences of not only collectors and photographers but also occasional and non-professional consumers.
While an exhibition demands consideration of elements such as spatiality, volume, scale and presentation, among others, the book asks for a different set of decisions. The specificities of the photobook imply a new object, and a new form, in which images, text, sequence, design and choices of materiality all play a part in the constitution of the work.
Photobooks have started to become objects of study and research for academics and critics. These initial studies are mostly centered on the art and book market (e.g., the work of publishers or the social profile of photobook consumers); the history of photobooks (e.g., how we arrived at this contemporary boom); or the photobook as a specific case in the wider context of photography studies (e.g., in the 19th issue of Aperture’s The PhotoBook Review, which aimed at assessing the state of photobook studies in our time, one of the leading questions was “What is the current state of photobook criticism?”). Much is yet to be learned and thought through about the photobook in itself as an object of observation and interpretation, or, in other words, as an object of interdisciplinary reading.
We invite prospective authors to look closer into photobooks as complex, unstable and hybridized artworks, considering their material specificities and the diversity of interpretive and sensorial experiences that they can offer, and the varied ways in which they engage with the world and find their place within it.
Some of the topics we hope to explore in this issue include:
• Case studies on specific books or bodies of work
• Comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to the photobook
• Book designers and the facets of authorship
• Sequence, narrativity and meaning
• Book design, printing, formats, paper
• Reading a photobook: reader-oriented perspectives
• Digital (im)materialities
• Photobooks, zines, photo-albums
• Image and text: possibilities, connections, and divergences
We especially encourage submissions on topics that reach beyond Western cultures, as well as submissions from doctoral students and independent or early-career researchers. Submitted articles may be written in English, Portuguese, Spanish, or French, and should range between 6,000 and 8,000 words, including notes, references, an abstract of 150 to 250 words, as well as 4 to 6 keywords. Authors must follow the formatting guidelines listed in the Submissions section under Author Guidelines on the journal’s website. Submissions must include a separate document containing a short biographical note of the author, up to 150 words. Online submission: to register and submit your article for peer review, please follow the hyperlink Make a Submission on the Compendium homepage before the 31st of July 2022.
compendium.letras.ulisboa.pt
-------------------------------------------------------
RCL — Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens / Journal of Communication and Languages
CALL FOR PAPERS
Photography, Cinema, and the Ghostly – RCL n. 53 (Autumn/Winter)
Editors:
José Bértolo (CEC, U. Lisbon)
Margarida Medeiros (ICNOVA — NOVA U. Lisbon)
Throughout the nineteenth century, the camera was believed to be a diabolical machine that could steal human souls. In one of the most notorious texts included in When I Was a Photographer (1899), Félix Nadar famously described how Honoré de Balzac thought that “each body in nature is composed of a series of specters”, and that each “Daguerreian operation” would retain one of these spectral layers until the human body of the photographed person amounted to nothing.
If on the one hand there was this general idea that photography was a “killing instrument”, on the other hand it was clear from the beginning that photographs also granted new lives to human beings, animals, objects, etc. Being the “perfect” double of what was once seen in the visible world, the photograph becomes the space where that which is no longer alive can continue to exist. With this in mind, Roland Barthes wrote on his Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980) that this relatively new and mostly mechanical art form is responsible for the “return of the Dead”. Likewise, Susan Sontag (1977) also posited that “all photographs are memento mori”.
The correlation between photography and death is particularly striking in the last decades of the nineteenth century with the emergence of spirit photography. Through the extensive use of double exposures, William Mumler, William Hope, and others, demonstrated that photography not only dealt with physical reality, but could also place itself within the realms of imagination, magic and illusion.
Like photography, cinema has since its beginnings been associated with spectrality. As early as 1896, Georges Méliès was already directing films such as Le manoir du diable, where editing tricks were used in order to create a supernatural world inhabited by fantastic creatures. At the same time, the supposedly realistic films of brothers Lumière were also being perceived by some spectators as much more than direct and lifelike representations of the world. After watching a Lumière program in 1896, Maxim Gorky famously wrote: “Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows […] It is not life but its shadow, not motion but its soundless spectre”.
In the following decades, film critics, film theorists and philosophers as different as Ricciotto Canudo, Jean Epstein, Gilles Deleuze or Jean-Louis Leutrat explored ghostly metaphors in their inquiries on the nature of film. The prime example of this critical tendency occurs in an interview published in the Cahiers du Cinéma (2001), in which Jacques Derrida, almost a decade past the publication of Specters of Marx, characterized cinema as a “spectral technique of apparitions”.
In addition, scriptwriters and directors pertaining to different historical and cultural contexts are evidently interested in stories in which the ghostly, the oneiric and the immaterial play a special part. The exploration of such elements is not limited to German Expressionism, the American Gothic (Film) tradition of the 1940s, or the Italian Giallo, also playing an important role in the works of filmmakers as distinct and unique as Yevgeni Bauer, Luis Buñuel, Jacques Tourneur, Kaneto Shindo, Alain Resnais, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, or Pedro Costa.
Borrowing from several important studies on the ghostly published in the wake of the “spectral turn” popularized by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock in Spectral America (2004), this thematic issue aims to depart from and contribute to an ongoing debate which shows that many areas of spectrality in art are yet to explore. This special issue aims to reconsider the close link between photography, cinema and the ghostly, bringing together traditional and new historical, theoretical and philosophical approaches.
Papers can address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
• The nineteenth century, the emergence of new media, and the ghostly imagination
• Photography, memory, and death
• Spirit photography
• The ghostly in modern and contemporary photography
• Key issues related to the ontology of the photographic image: (un)reality, (im)materiality, (in)visibilitiy and the (un)seen
• Ghostly metaphors in film writing (criticism, theory, philosophy)
• The spectres of digital media and/or film (in photography and/or cinema)
• Experience, perception, subjective images and imagination
• The representation of dreams and hallucinations
• Special effects aiming to enhance the spectral dimension of photography and/or film (e.g. double exposure, superimposition, stop trick, rear projection, acousmatic sound)
• Ghostly or haunted media in fiction film (photography, radio, the Internet)
• Ghosts across different genres (e.g., horror, melodrama, comedy, war film)
• Critical and contemporary approaches to the concept of spectrality
The articles can be written in English, French, or Portuguese, and will be subject to a double-blind peer review. They must comply with the journal’s submission guidelines and be sent through the OJS platform until May 10th, 2020.
For queries, contact the editors José Bértolo ([email protected]) and/or Margarida Medeiros ([email protected]).
Guidelines for submission and Instructions for authors:
http://www.fcsh.unl.pt/rcl/index.php/rcl/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions
Website: https://www.fcsh.unl.pt/rcl/index.php/rcl/announcement/view/15
Heterotopic as it is, screen space juxtaposes several different spaces pertaining to different dimensions (Michael Chanan, The Documentary Chronotope, 2000): both mise en scène and cinematic dispositifs spatialize the gaze, the vanishing point where the filmic and the pro-filmic intersect. Space is therefore represented, conveyed and appropriated by the cinematic apparatus, calling into question the historical, political and philosophical aspects of an aesthetics of spatiality in a broad sense.
All of these distinct categories point to a fundamental idea: by definition, the moving image dinamizes space and spatializes time, thus contributing to the changing perceptions of space and time. We are interested in the concept of space as an inherently cinematic feature that led to specific developments in film language in early cinema, and which is still an on-going subject of debate. Its conceptualization around and translation into the film form has been the object of many theoretical and artistic approaches, which places this call for papers in an expanded field of work and research. We aim not only to look into the object-film itself, but also to enrol in creative and critical excursions in the form of papers or visual essays that somehow promote the discussion of space and cinema (and other moving image practices).
Potential papers can address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Cinematic space, place and time
- Building the filmic space: screenplay, mise-en-scène, editing, post-production
- Space and film genres
- Body, gender and space
- Film and landscape
- Architecture and cinema
- Space and ruin
- Space and national filmographies
- Colonial and postcolonial spaces
- Exile, shifting borders and displacement
- Space and collective occupations
- Outer space and utopia
- Cartographies, maps and archive
- Roads, paths and journeys
- Travelogue and documentary film
- Mental spaces: dream, hallucination, and virtual reality
The Conference’s working languages are Portuguese and English.
ABSTRACT SUBMISSIONS
Please send the Organizing Committee 500-word abstracts for 20-minute presentations, as well as a brief biographical note (circa 200 words), to [email protected] by May 31, 2016.
Please use this template when submitting your proposal.
Notification of acceptance will be given by July 15, 2016.
Explorando dinâmicas complexas entre corpo e imagem, realidade e sonho, matéria e fantasma, as personagens de François Truffaut reflectem a instabi-lidade ontológica própria do cinema, que, como identificou Derrida, se concretiza na aparição e na desaparição de imagens fixas. Persiste a imagem em fuga no ecrã, a que os filmes em estudo neste livro parecem reportar-se por meio da ficção.
Org. Clara Rowland e José Bértolo
Lisboa: Documenta
2015
Ensaios de:
Adrian Martin
Amândio Reis
Clara Rowland
Emília Pinto de Almeida
Fernando Guerreiro
Guillaume Bourgois
Hajnal Kiraly
Joana Matos Frias
Joana Moura
José Bértolo
Luís Mendonça
Maria Filomena Molder
Mário Jorge Torres
Pedro Eiras
Rita Benis
Rosa Maria Martelo
Sonia Miceli
Susana Nascimento Duarte
Timothy Corrigan
Tom Conley
Este volume tem origem em dois encontros organizados no âmbito do projecto “RIAL – Realidade e Imaginação nas Artes e na Literatura”, sedeado no Centro de Estudos Comparatistas da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, designadamente a Jornada “Máscaras de Cera: O Espectáculo da Morte na Literatura e nas Artes dos Séculos XIX e XX” (2017, em colaboração com a linha de investigação “Teatro e Imagem” do Centro de Estudos de Teatro da FLUL) e o Seminário “O Realismo Espectral da Imagem Fotográfica” (2018).
Os ensaios reunidos são da autoria de Amândio Reis, Ana Campos, Fernando Guerreiro, Filipe Figueiredo, Golgona Anghel, José Bértolo, José Duarte, Kelly Basílio, Luís Mendonça, Margarida Medeiros, Patrícia Soares Martins e Susana Lourenço Marques.
Film Analysis — Ghost — João Pedro Rodrigues — Manoel de Oliveira — Ontology — Portuguese Cinema — Spectrality
Este artigo propõe uma reflexão sobre A Dança dos Paroxismos (1929), de Jorge Brum do Canto (1910-1994), motivada por diversas pistas de interpretação lançadas nos intertítulos iniciais, designadamente a apresentação da obra como um “ensaio visual” e como um “filme português”, e a dedicatória ao cineasta Marcel L’Herbier. Perspetivando o filme em função de alguns pressupostos do cinema da Primeira Vanguarda Francesa, na qual se inscreve L’Herbier, identifica-se e caracteriza-se um programa estético que, no filme de Brum do Canto, se materializa numa questão que, sendo primariamente diegética, transporta também implicações teóricas determinantes: todo o filme corresponde à alucinação de um moribundo. Através de uma análise aproximada de A Dança dos Paroxismos, investiga-se, por fim, de que modo este filme — um dos primeiros casos de “cinema onírico” — pode constituir um complexo “ensaio visual” sobre o cinema da Primeira Vanguarda Francesa.
Dados o vigor e a intensidade dos retratos que os filmes traçam das suas protagonistas, o espectador abandona a sala de cinema com uma sensação de assombro, isto é, sai do filme assombrado. Para isso contribui o facto de as três protagonistas comportarem uma assinalável dose de mistério, proporcional ao seu poder de fascinação. As suas histórias terminam sem que saibamos exactamente quem elas são, nem as razões do efeito hipnótico que têm sobre nós. Mulheres de poucas palavras, elas escondem, por debaixo da expressividade dos seus rostos e dos seus corpos, um mundo de ideias ao qual não nos é possível aceder inteiramente.
Marianne, Nelly e Vitalina são, simultaneamente, mulheres e símbolos, e Peter Handke, Christian Petzold e Pedro Costa partem dos seus dramas pessoais para reflectir, também, sobre o novo existencialismo burguês dos anos 70, as tensões profundas na Alemanha do pós-guerra, e a rota de destroços deixada pelo colonialismo português.
Neste ensaio, atenta-se no modo como, em La Glace à trois faces (1927), Jean Epstein se apropria da complexa estrutura do conto homónimo de Paul Morand para desenvolver uma investigação sobre algumas questões relacionadas com o cinema, em particular com a narrativa cinematográfica. Convocando dois ensaios da autoria do cineasta, cuja publicação acompanhou a estreia do filme, e analisando algumas das sequências cruciais deste, argumenta-se que Epstein trabalha o motivo do acidente (no caso, um acidente de automóvel) de forma a propor uma ideia de cinema enquanto "arte do evento".
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Abstract:
In this essay, I consider the ways in which, in La Glace à trois faces (1927), Jean Epstein puts to work the complex structure of Paul Morand's homonymous short story in order to investigate on some questions related to cinema as medium, and particularly on cinematographic narrative. Discussing two essays by the filmmaker which were published in the same year La Glace à trois faces was first screened, and analyzing crucial sequences of the film, I will then argue that Epstein uses the motif of the accident (in this case, an automobile accident) in a way that enables him to meditate on cinema as an "art of the event".
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Abstract: In “Tentative d’évasion”, a poem from Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance (1919), Jean Cocteau dedicates a few verses to the Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition to the Antarctic (1910-1913), in which the British explorer died without being able to become, as he intended, the first man to set foot on the South Pole. The expedition was accompanied by photographer Herbert Ponting, who was responsible for the pictures that inspired the poet to write these verses. In his poem, Cocteau transforms the documental nature of Ponting’s images, turning them into a “film surnaturel” in which “Scott et ses amis / retournent mourir / jadis / chaque soir”. Some important traits of Cocteau’s film theory are outlined in these verses, which were written more than ten years before Le sang d’un poète (1932), namely: the dynamics between reality and unreality, cinema as a medium able to render the invisible visible, the workings of death over bodies and in art.
Palavras-chave: cinema português; ficção; imaginário; João Rui Guerra da Mata e João Pedro Rodrigues; Oriente; realidade.
Palavras-chave: cinema clássico americano; George Cukor; ontologia; realidade; representação.
Abstract: This paper offers a reading of George Cukor’s A Double Life (1947) based on the analysis of the first nine minutes of the film. In line with the tradition of explication de texte represented by, among others, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, I argue that it is possible to pinpoint many narrative, figural and theoretical motives in this film by paying close attention to its introductory sequences, consequently identifying and characterizing different primordial aspects related to questions of figuration, editing and mise en scène.
Keywords: classical American film; George Cukor; ontology; reality; representation.
Abstract: Having directed a group of films between 1922 and 1928 in the style of the First French Wave, Jean Epstein left Paris for Finistère, in Brittany, where he would shoot, between Finis Terrae (1929) and Les Feux de la Mer (1948), a set of films known as his " Breton cycle ". These films were distant from the artifice and stylization that characterized the early stages of Epstein's filmography, as the director adopted a new aesthetics in which the use of real locations and non-professional actors played a fundamental role. However, the sea seems to be the most important element in these films, where it stands out as a symbolic figure of cinema. In the following notes I analyze a few of the theoretical and philosophical implications of Epstein's voyage from Paris to the end of the world.
PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Edgar Allan Poe; Jean Epstein; ontologia; representação.
Life of images: The Fall of the House of Usher, according to Jean Epstein
ABSTRACT: This article is based on the idea that, being more than a regular adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale of the same title, Jean Epstein’s La chute de la maison Usher (1928) explores many of Poe’s narrative motives, symbolic figures and theoretical and philosophical ideas. My main argument is that Epstein uses Poe’s literary enquiries on the relations between literature and reality in order to develop his own reflection on the dynamics between film and physical reality. With this in mind, and taking into account La chute’s pivotal place in Epstein’s filmography, as a stepping-stone between his first, more avant garde phase, and his second phase composed of naturalist films shot in Brittany, I aim to recognize the fundamental role Poe had in the evolution of Epstein as a theorist and as a film director.
KEYWORDS: Edgar Allan Poe; Jean Epstein; ontology; representation.
This essay is a close analysis of Mysterious Object at Noon, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in which are considered questions of narration motivated by the central place the act of storytelling holds in the film structure. Problems such as the nonexistence of a script and the way the film seems structured by oral narration, in loco, as if the film were being written as it is told, will be analyzed. Finally, I describe how, through this structure, the film reflects upon the specificity of cinema as a way of telling/showing stories.
O segundo número da revista Falso Movimento pretende continuar a divulgar pensamento e produção crítica desenvolvidos no encontro entre o cinema e diversas noções de escrita. A maioria dos artigos que compõem este número nasceu de uma colaboração especial entre investigadores do projecto Falso Movimento – estudos sobre escrita e cinema, do Centro de Estudos Comparatistas da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, e investigadores da rede de pesquisa internacional LyraCompoetics, do Instituto de Literatura Comparada Margarida Losa da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto. A parceria entre os dois grupos de investigação, cujos resultados aqui apresentamos, foi celebrada na Jornada “Cinema, poesia e escrita”, na Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, no dia 17 de Outubro de 2014.
Girando em torno dos encontros propostos naquela Jornada, Susana Nascimento Duarte investiga as configurações possíveis do conceito lyotardiano de “figural” enquanto manifestação poética no cinema; Pedro Eiras centra a sua reflexão num poema de Luiza Neto Jorge e na analogia erótica entre filmar e escrever; Rosa Maria Martelo parte da conceptualização genettiana da metalepse para pensar sobre a presença de poemas no cinema e de filmes na poesia; Joana Matos Frias atenta nas dinâmicas entre literatura e cinema na poesia reflexiva de Marília Garcia; e Mário Jorge Torres regressa à city symphony de Paul Strand e Charles Sheeler para desenvolver o diálogo de Manhatta com a poesia de Walt Whitman. Fora deste conjunto, mas respondendo a cruzamentos e tensões semelhantes, Amândio Reis reflecte sobre a escrita enquanto manifestação de um sistema de referencialidade importante no cinema de François Truffaut; e José Bértolo explora a potência criadora da escrita, segundo um conto de Jorge Luis Borges e um filme de David Cronenberg.
Os editores,
Amândio Reis
Filipa Rosário
José Bértolo
Rita Benis
In Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, N.º 8, 165-172. https://goo.gl/MJZGRk