Paula Albuquerque
17 June 2024 - 27 June 2024
1900 - 2100

THE OTHER FILM HISTORY Paula Albuquerque

This set of lectures has been designed to begin with film history and gradually move on to video art and new media art. It has been devised to accommodate differences in backgrounds, including those of participants who have less knowledge about audiovisual production beyond the mainstream. The main focus will be on providing a basic knowledge of Film History, with an emphasis on non-mainstream and non-white/non-male filmmakers. This includes an introduction to the main theories about artistic research, including voices from academia (university scholars) but also and mainly artists, who from their practices produce epistemic objects (artworks that contain and trigger their own theory); and a focus on my current project working with archival footage from the colonial section at the EYE Film Museum archive. There will be sessions dedicated to Early Cinema, concentrating on the women makers of silent cinema, as Alice Guy Blaché, Mary Pickford and Lois Weber, as well as the showcase of the first black independent filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux, who criticized the representation of black people by mainstream cinema as early as 1919; we will also dive into early LGBT productions including the work of Richard Oswald and Leontine Sagan from the 1930s. Soviet Cinema will get some attention, namely the works of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, but the session will also highlight a woman documentarist of the time, Esther Shub, whose vision produced the first documentary exclusively made with found footage in 1927. There will be an introduction to the work of Leni Riefenstahl to highlight a crucial example of when film becomes instrumentalized for propagandistic purposes in Europe. Moving throughout film history, we will closely analyse the European Post-War movements Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) including the work of Agnès Varda and Jean-Luc Godard. When arriving at the 1960s/70s we will discuss the rise of independent filmmaking, beginning with Maya Deren before engaging with the birth of the essay film in the work of Chris Marker, but also the poetic experiments of Jonas Mekas and his diaristic cinema documenting the experience as a refugee in NY. Shirley Clarke’s unconventional documentaries featuring the American social underbelly will also get some attention, as will the work of structuralist filmmakers who looked at film as a material to be engaged with, e.g. by painting directly on celluloid. And, finally, there will be a session dedicated to Third Cinema, which brings political upheaval and film together in Latin America and Africa, which has started in the 1960s and is still relevant today, with many voices speaking against oppression. To round off, I will share an overview of the relationship between surveillance and cinema, with a viewing of several pieces of my work on CCTV and an explanation of the main theories running through it, which bring the panopticon, colonialism and the archive together. In this session, there will be a focus on the work of several artists working with these found materials, such as Harun Farocki and Hito Steyerl.

Paula Albuquerque is an Amsterdam-based Portuguese artist and scholar showing work in solo exhibitions at galleries Zone2Source (2024); Bradwolff Projects (2023, 2018, 2015), Looiersgracht 60 (2023) and Nieuw Dakota (2020); with films at International Film Festivals DocLisboa (2023), Sheffield DOC|Fest (2020) and Rotterdam (2016); and presenting in conferences Media in Transition at MIT; NECSUS Conference; and Visible Evidence. She published the books Enter the Ghost—Haunted Media Ecologies (2020) and The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium (2018) and contributed with several articles and chapters to peer-reviewed journals and books. Her film Like the Glitch of a Ghost has been nominated for the DocAlliance Award in 2024. Besides a daily studio practice, Albuquerque is currently an Assistant Researcher at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, a Senior Researcher at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and a Supervisory Board member at Framed Framed – Contemporary Art Platform.