International Symposium

Reality Effects:

Poetics of Locality, Memory, and the Body in Contemporary Argentine and Brazilian Cinema

Karim Ainouz          Martín Rejtman          Andrea Tonacci

Production still from Serras da Desordem (Andrea Tonacci, 2006)

With Gonzalo Aguilar, Jens Andermann, José Carlos Avellar, Ivana Bentes, Michael Chanan, Stephanie Dennison, Alvaro Fernández Bravo, John Kraniauskas, Maurício Lissovsky, Denilson Lopes, Mariano Mestman, Cláudia Mesquita, Lúcia Nagib, Gabriela Nouzeilles, Joanna Page, Sílvia Schwarzböck, Lisa Shaw, Sergio Wolf

Venue: Birkbeck Cinema, London,

Date: November 26-28, 2009

Bookings £ 15, concessions £ 5. Screenings and screen talks free.

In collaboration with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Brazilian Embassy, and the Discovering Latin America Film Festival.

Please click here for conference programme. To book a place, please contact Professor Jens Andermann.

One of the most salient achievements of recent Argentinean and Brazilian film, as highlighted by critics and audiences worldwide, has been a regained capacity for observing and exploring 'real worlds'. In new and exciting ways, the camera and sound recorder have captured urban marginality, rural spaces subjected to global crises, the milieus of sexual minorities or of childhood and youth cultures, and political and social memories previously sidelined by hegemonic historiography. The effect, very often, has been that of blurring boundaries between fiction and the documentary.

Yet the very same critical discourse that commends a particular, 'independent', cinema for having recovered its auteurial autonomy from the imperatives of TV and large industrial productions, also frequently relapses into a referentialism that takes Latin American cinema as an unquestioned site of  truth-production about its own socio-political context. In this way, film is reinstated as the prism through which one can access the real, either as symptom (the surface expression of a society's collective anxieties and obsessions) or as a recording device for real-life situations and constellations.

Bringing together some of the principal filmmakers and critics from recent years, the symposium will tackle these dominant narratives, inviting us to critically de- and re-construct notions of national cinema in an increasingly globalized image-world. In a series of screenings, panels and interviews, it focuses the question of the real on areas that resist allegorical readings, including figurations of the local and the intimate, the body, and the self. Thus, the event aims to re-conceptualize the real in contemporary cinema as separate from the referential.