The 'Other Films'

Utility, amateur, orphan, and ephemeral films: Rethinking cinema through the ‘other films’

 

Film studies have largely been built on and around the fiction film, within a paradigm that has been predominantly aesthetic, auteur-centred and national.  Although they make up the largest part of world film production, non-fiction films as varied as travel films, utility films (industrial, touristic, educational, advertising), newsreels, amateur or domestic films, several short and medium-length films of difficult classification, and so-called ‘ephemeral’ and ‘orphan’ films have been systematically left out of canonical film histories and historiographies, nationally and internationally.

 

In Portugal, the importance of this vast production for the survival of the film industry did not prevent it from becoming, in Paulo Cunha’s words, an ‘invisible cinema’ (2014). The recent improvements in the access to moving image archives, together with the critique of dominant paradigms in favour of ‘a more historically neutral approach’ (Stephen Bottomore, 2001), have been encouraging research in this ‘uncharted territory’ (Daan Hertogs e Nico de Klerk, 1997), resulting in a significant increase in publications in this area.

 

This special issue seeks to bring together articles that address, not only questions directly related to these films – how they can be researched and to which purposes; what theoretical and methodological problems they raise; how they can be programmed – but also aspects pertaining to the field itself. Most importantly, what implications do new research objects have on the way we conceive of cinema and its history?  In other words, how can we rethink cinema through these ‘other films’?

 

We welcome contributions from such areas as film studies, cultural studies, history, sociology and anthropology. Original and well-researched case studies from different archives and cinematographies will be specially appreciated.

 

All articles will undergo a selection process followed by double blind peer-review. Before submitting your article, please read the journal’s section policies and the authors’ guidelines.

 

Since 2013, AIM’s working group “Other Films” has been coordinated by Sofia Sampaio, Raquel Schefer and Thaís Blank.

 

 

Sofia Sampaio, who has a PhD in Cultural Studies, is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA) in the ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon, where she is a member of the research group ‘Practices and Politics of Culture’. She has published articles and reviews in Portuguese and English, in journals such as: Textual Practice; Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change; Etnográfica; Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research; Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia; Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies; Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image; and Ler História. She is currently Principal Investigator of the research project ‘Behind the camera: Practices of visuality and mobility in the Portuguese tourist film’ (EXPL/IVC-ANT/1706/2013), funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT/MCTES).

 

Raquel Schefer is a researcher, filmmaker, and, film curator. She is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the Sorbonne - Nouvelle Paris 3 University, working on a dissertation on Mozambican revolutionary cinema. She published the book “El Autorretrato en el Documental” in 2008, in Argentina, where she received a master’s degree in Documentary Film. As a graduate in Communication Sciences from the New University of Lisbon, she is a member of the editorial board of the film journals La Furia Umana and General Intellect. She has published articles in journals such as Aniki; Cibertronic; Débordements; Imagofagía; La Clave; LaFuga; Kronos: Southern African Histories; Le Journal de la Triennale; Poiésis; Textos e Pretextos; Visaje, among others.

Thais Blank is a researcher, film editor, and filmmaker. She is a PhD candidate in Communication and Culture at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and in Art History at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She has a Masters in Communication and Culture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2010). She graduated in Social Communication from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (2007). She also supervises the Audiovisual and Documentary centre of CPDOC/Fundação Getulio Vargas. She has published articles in several journals, such as: Devires; Laika; Significação; Doc On-line; and História da Mídia.