Workgroups

To improve the relationship between members and to stimulate scientific partnerships, AIM urges members to set up specific Working Groups (WG). We are confidant that those organised groups will gather researchers sharing their specific scientific interests, and that this in turn will result in new scientific proposals.

We also encourage WG to act as a starting point for the submission of proposals for already established panels at AIM Annual Meetings. To join a WG, please go to the Member's area. See also our FAQ in the bottom of this page.

• Visual Digital Culture

  Responsible: MERINO, Francisco; NOGUEIRA, Luís; ALVES, Marta Pinho;

  This workgroup will address the different iterations of visual culture in digital contexts and the miscegenation of different visual regimes and practices of the gaze. We are interested as much in the ruptures as we are in the continuities brought upon by the transformations in the production, circulation, and appropriation of visual culture, such as those introduced by the Web 2.0, digital cinema, and the small screen media that connect the private and public spheres on a daily basis. We privilege historiographical, cultural, and aesthetic researches of the relations between the different visual regimes such as the cinematic, the televisual, or the artistic. We pay special attention to the theories of intermediality as a way to cross fertilize knowledge about "new" and "old" media and we summon the contributions of film studies, media theory, art history and art theory, to research digital visual culture.

• Ecocinemas

  Responsible: BÉRTOLO, José; COLBERT, Maile; Susana Mouzinho - Mouzinho, Susana;

  The Ecocinemas Working Group will map the relationship between cinema and what we call the natural world, recognizing the human as a mediating element of this articulation, while responding and reacting to the tendency towards anthropocentrism that is found in both film production, and in the plurality of critical approaches canonized in the context of film studies. It will promote a broad discussion of this problem without governance, a priori, by focus on specific time periods, geographical provenances or genres. It will explore the heterogeneity and rich configurations that the natural has obtained throughout the history of cinema, in fiction, documentary, and hybrid forms; in works that fit explicitly into the field of ecocriticism, as well as works that contain an ecological subtext that connotes an ecocinematic perspective. On the one hand, the reflection will explore the different ways in which cinema presents animals, plants, fungi, the elements, etc. On the other hand, it will look at the means by which cinema can question and transform these inhabitants and non-human elements of the planet, as well as the dynamics of power and influence that humans maintain with them. The breadth of the debate will involve crossovers between more strictly philosophical or aesthetic issues and topics more directly associated with environmentalism and political activism. With a foundation in the field of film studies, activities developed in this group will benefit from methods and epistemologies from other disciplinary areas, such as ecocriticism, philosophy, ecofeminism, queer studies, landscape and soundscape ecology, biology, botany, and geology, among others.
  

• Cinemas in Portuguese

  Responsible: CRUZ, Jorge Luiz; MENDONÇA, Leandro;

  O Grupo de Trabalho de Cinemas em Português tem como objetivo agregar investigadores interessados nas cinematografias da diáspora portuguesa, brasileira e dos países africanos. Pretende realizar a recolha destas cinematografias seja o campo da ficção seja no documental com objetivo da realização de análises de fundo histórico e estético. Propõe-se também a promover atividades culturais, curatorias e editoriais que se coadunem com os objetivos das investigações conduzidas pelos participantes. Os processos de pesquisa tem o viés da busca de fontes históricas que permitam não só o conhecimento do conjunto cinematográfico em tela mas também propiciar análises comparativas entre as várias cinematografias envolvidas. Utiliza-se como recorte temporal inicial, sem prejuízo de outros que possam também fazer parte de pesquisas do grupo, o período compreendido do fim da primeira grande guerra europeia aos dias de hoje, latu sensu, o século 20. A diretiva aqui é entender os processos de continuidade/descontinuidade enfrentados pelos territórios e, por conseguinte, com a produção cinematográfica. Por fim, o grupo tem como esteio a perceção sobre a necessidade de criar um espaço de entrecruzamento das pesquisas sobre o campo do cinema colonial/pós-colonial que se articule com os trabalhos com respeito ao cinema português e brasileiro.

• Landscape and Cinema

  Responsible: ROSÁRIO, Filipa; REBELATTO, Francieli ; FRANCISCO, André;

  The aim of this workgroup is to develop research lines addressing the dialogical study of landscape in fiction and documentary film. Landscape is the outcome of human interpretation, because, despite being built in space (condition), it is always an image of a particular time (theme). Cinema records its appearance over time, thereby offering environmental images that can be interpreted as testimonies of the historical perception of places. Accordingly, this workgroup is interested in all those formal and mise-en-scène strategies used in the construction of filmic space, paying particular attention to the objective and subjective temporalities recalled by these strategies. We will adopt an architectural and geographical approach to discuss the representation of urban, rural and middle landscapes, as well as the socio-historical transformations of these spaces. Furthermore, our research interests also include the cinematic aestheticization of landscape and its symbolic place in national cinemas, auteur theory and film genres.

• Economics and Management in Moving Image

  Responsible: COELHO, Inês Rebanda; FERREIRA FERNANDES, Cláudia; COUTINHO, ANGELICA ;

  The work group Economics and Management in Moving Image has as its main goal to encourage the study and research of subjects related to the production department, within the most diverse fields of moving image creation, with a special focus on cinema and audiovisual. It is intended to explore the particularities of the various professions and main tasks of the production department, from the most technical to the most creative ones. Therefore, we refer to research questions related to the different stages of production and duties associated with moving image creation, such as budgeting, scheduling, financial arrangements, partnerships, co-productions, contracts, legislation, tools and software to support management, coordination and selection of teams, among others seen as relevant and that may affect the final work directly or indirectly. It is also intended to study the most creative and artistic work of professions seen as technical and how they influence the final product achievement.

  This group aims to support researchers, students and professionals from the field in obtaining knowledge to overcome obstacles in the proper preparation and management of moving image works. For that, we intend to promote possible meetings and training aimed at the difficulties felt concerning the functioning of the film and audiovisual industries, with a special focus on the national panorama.
  

• Filmmakers on Film

  Responsible: PENAFRIA, Manuela; GRAÇA, André Rui; BELLO, Maria do Rosário Lupi;

  The main goal of the GT "Filmmakers on Film" is to bring together cinema theory and the thought and poetics coming from the filmmakers in their endeavor to understand either their own artwork or cinema itself. We intend to stimulate a cinema theory whose fundamental reference and main sources are the films and both oral and written manifestations of the filmmakers. On the one hand, we understand that the most important sources to develop and expand cinema theory are the direct ones, namely the films, interviews, books or texts written by the filmmakers. On the other hand, filmmaker is a concept that covers not only the director but also whoever presents a valuable contribution to the cinematographic art like actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, etc. The purpose of studying cinema searching for filmmakers support is in itself an alternative to classical and recent cinema theory that usually has gone to seek other disciplines as support. We intend to rise up and test the novelty and originality of a theoretical study that works closely with the filmmaker’s thought and poetics.

• Audiovisual Narratives

  Responsible: PALINHOS, Jorge; CASTRO, Maria Guilhermina; MARTINS, Filipe;

  Narrative always had, since the beginning of time, great importance for the existence of human beings and the life of societies. In its most basic meaning, narrative presupposes the evolution from one state (a beginning) to another (an end), a transition which occurs in time and is acted by someone (author, narrator, character) or something (camera, the film itself) (Jost and Gaudreault, 1990). This does not necessarily imply any measure of “truthfulness”. In the field of narratology (e.g. Gérard Genette), the act of narrating / enunciating is known as “storytelling”, and the content of the narrative / enunciation is the “story” [told]. AIM’s work group Audiovisual Narratives takes up the study of narrative content and form in all kinds of products and by all audio-visual processes, composed of images as well as sounds (together or separately), disseminated throughout all means, and for all types of audience. The sub-fields of literature, publicity, psychology, journalistic media, and the relationship with other art forms are considered relevant for this purpose, as long as presentations stick to narratologically-based form and content, as well as the narrative process and its outcome. We are looking for innovative proposals, original theories, creative film analysis and, of course, subject matter for long-lasting quality reflexion.

• Cinema and the Other Arts

  Responsible: MUANIS, Felipe; OLIVEIRA, Anabela Branco; BASTOS, Fernanda;

  This working group intends to bring together investigations about the artistic manifestations in the scope of the relations of the cinema with the other arts. The focus is on studies that rivet on the relationships between still image, moving image and experimental artistic processes. The cinema, the audiovisual and its hybrid forms are privileged fields to think not only the status of the image in contemporary times but also its ethical, aesthetic, political and affective uses. Through theoretical construction and the analysis of multiple artistic manifestations we intend to map and observe the various tensions around the relations between cinema and other arts in the creative process inherent in avant-garde, engaged or experimental cinema, videoart, expanded cinema, activism, artist cinema and installations. If cinema, in its multiple conceptions, has approached and deviated from a hegemonic model, then it is necessary to reflect on these processes according to the image and spectator regimes of each historical moment. Thinking about the cinema device, its meanings, its tensions and its reformulations from its technological, aesthetic, architectural, political and economic dynamics finds relevance as the relationships between these vectors will allow us to review both the intersections between cinema and art as well as their singularities and impossibilities. Thinkers, theorists, artists, and researchers have been wondering: what can an image do? What do images want? What does an image, image in movements, make see, make do? The WG aims to address these themes, asking the multiple cinemas and their techniques how to imagine the present.
  

• Cinema and Education

  Responsible: MENDES, Elsa Maria Carneiro; MOREIRA, José António; DIAS-TRINDADE, Sara;

  The main purpose of the Working Group "Cinema and Education" is to promote ideas and research proposals that study, analyse and produce resources and pedagogical applications of Cinema in an educational context. It is considered essential to study the inclusion of Cinema in policies, programs, models and teaching methodologies. Cinema can become a fruitful mechanism for the training and development of students, channelling the huge pragmatic-filmic potential of informal learning through formal programs, which have both pedagogical use and positioning. The presence of Cinema in educational institutions can also contribute to the creation of new Cinema audiences (not only of students, but also of an extended school community), capable of going beyond consumption and an interest in the so-called "commercial" films and also understand, interpret and appreciate other types of cinematography. Among these are, of course, the presence and appreciation of Portuguese Cinema amid these audiences, which will enhance the classroom space (both real and virtual) and its educational contexts and become important dynamos for the dissemination and knowledge of both past, present and future national Cinema.

• Post colonial and outer cinemas

  Responsible: CUNHA, Paulo; SALES, Michelle; LEROUX, Liliane;

  The WG presented here is interested in the discussion of emerging cinemas in postcolonial contexts, many of which are the margins of national cinematography, usually in urban peripheries. By deepening the debate about the presence of "peripheries and margins" in postcolonial and outer cinemas around the world, in addition to conceptually organizing and systematizing a postcolonial cinema, we want to move in the direction that has presented itself as the most fundamental for these cinematographies: the image as representation and (more recently) as self-presentation in the cinema realized in the margins and peripheries of the world. We are interested in the critical revision of hegemonic and eurocentric forms and representations, as well as the social, cultural and artistic movements that have promoted the emergence of marginal artists in the film and art market, imposing images and other representations, as well as the production of artists from the diaspora , and the collective production of minority political groups. In Europe and the United States, this movement is accompanied by the emergence of voices, usually immigrants from ex-colonies as well as from social movements whose artistic power has been able to assert sensitivities in a growing wave of questioning of imperial molds and global aspects of contemporary life. In African countries, where the image was used as an instrument of colonial domination, an anti-colonial and denouncing cinema emerges, which continues to expand in terms of genres and themes. In Latin America, especially in Brazil, the representation of places and cultures is assumed by the groups themselves. Indigenous filmmakers are emerging and film collectives emerge in favelas and peripheries. Within this panorama, we want to discuss who are the artists and peripheral groups that are emerging in contemporary cinema and the visual arts, imposing a new agenda for the production of images in general, able to discuss the forms of invisibility and forgetfulness with respect to the ancient and recent modes of exclusion and re- colonisation.

• Cinema and Materiality

  Responsible: CUCINOTTA, Caterina; BRANCO, Sérgio Dias; PALAZON, Alfonso;

  Starting from a literary studies approach explicitly focused on the domains of materialities and communication, and media studies, the term Materialities, when applied to cinema, convokes the different elements (or areas) which interact in the materialisation of a film project: choice of recording support, art direction, costumes, sound and light. Consequently, it considers the different professionals across these areas who, giving preference to certain options to the detriment of others and employing their specific practices, interfere directly with the film’s conception, transforming and helping materialise fisically the initial concept into the final work, and favouring a certain aesthetic intellection of it. The aim of this Work Group is to complement existing theoretical investigation on cinema with the researching of the material, physical and industrial dimensions at the heart of every film project; promoting debate about the communicative and expressive power inscribed in the many elements that comprise and harmonise an oeuvre; apprehending filmmaking as a complex process partitioned between specific teams, which contributes towards a final work that is inevitably “inter-artistic”, since a wide range of arts and crafts collaborates in the construction of the cinematic object. Rather than focusing on the analysis of the numerous cinematographic codes, on what they enclose and signify, a materialities methodology seeks to isolate each material dimension in its specificity, with a view to examining its function in the construction of the object “film”. The celluloid’s physical qualities, the forms. Textures and lines of costumes and the scenography, the composing in interior and exterior settings, the work on sound and the acoustics: the entire final abstraction we call a Film is based upon a set of concrete and material realities, transforming itself in the study object. Accordingly, this presupposes the “disassembling” of every component at the heart of all “practical” structuring of the film to treat individual piece as an object worthy of analysis and study. When António Reis referred to “the Aesthetics of materials” (1997) he meant the rigor in choosing the physical elements that compose the cinematographic frame and all the consequences that these options produce. Thus, words like “crafts”, “composition”, “materialisation”, “artefact” become decisive when trying to define this research object which fails to entirely coincide with both narrative and visual matter, and instead concurs with forms, cuts, materials, and the styles proposed by the several professional teams involved in the creative materialities process. The definition of filmmaking as “a tailor’s work in progress” propounds the idea of craft-in-itself, as if the film could be conceived as a mass which is mouldable into sculpture; made out of shapeless cloths that can be shaped into garments; of sounds’ block that can be organised into music, voices and silences; of lights captured by the tape that can lighten and darken.

• Cinema, Sound, Music and Language

  Responsible: RUIZ, Carlos ; Faleiro Rodrigues, Érica; CAPELLER, Ivan;

  The workgroup Cinema, Sound, Music and Language researches the relationship between the sonic elements in film and the moving image. Its main research goal is the subversion of subject area hierarchies, with the aim of exploring, developing and expanding the investigation of all sonic forms as these interrelate with the moving image and the archive. It seeks to promote the multiplication and diversification of perspectives grounded on the exploration and analysis of the myriad flows between sound and moving image, encompassing, as a language, the whole spectrum of human voice. It aims to articulate contemporary moving image theory with sound studies, exploring questions pertaining to the presence or absence of sound in the moving image, to discuss the ontological and phenomenological problems arising from the relationship between sound theory and practice and moving image theory and practice. The limits proposed by this group comprise different social, artistic and technological contexts, encompassing various questions pertaining to the relationship between sound and moving image, from pre-cinema to the so- called classical models, the avantgarde (mainstream and experimental), the film-concert, the musical film genre, video art, expanded cinema or any other type of audio-visual moving image device. Observing a film-orientated sound studies methodology, the WG’s objective is to map the political, cultural and social context around audio-visual creation devices, through the study of specific cases (from film archives to current digital formats), seen as technical devices for the recording and control of collective memory; thus allowing for a clearer understanding of the roles sound, music and language play in these semiotic games between seeing and hearing, and the interplay of images and sounds so widespread in our contemporary culture.

• Silent Cinema and Early Cinema

  Responsible: SAMPAIO, Sofia; SILVA, Manuel Deniz; CARVALHO, Bárbara;

  This WG aims to contribute to the research of cinema’s early years and cinema history by focusing on the development and reception of specific modes of production-distribution-exhibition that circulated under the broader category of ‘silent cinema’. We are particularly interested in the period starting with the public projection of moving images (around 1895) up to the establishment of sound cinema in the 1930s, without discarding other contributions that go beyond this timeline. We are also concerned with the ‘persistence of mute cinema’, whether in new productions or through the restoration (and musical synchronization) of old productions and their reprogramming and reception in new or ‘displaced’ contexts.

  As its main objectives, the WG intends to (1) promote theoretical, methodological, analytical and historiographical discussion on the objects and themes in focus; (2) encourage historical and empirical research (e.g., in archives) and the exchange of empirical data; (3) foster interdisciplinary collaborations; (4) engage with international networks that share the same research interests; and (5) stimulate the publication of original research in this field of study. Contributions from fields such as film studies, cultural studies, communication and media studies, musicology, history, and anthropology, as well as perspectives derived from new cinema history, film music studies and media archaeology, among others, are welcome.
  

FAQ Workgroups

How do I create a workgroup?

Any member should access his Member's area, and on the relevant form propose himself as coordinator of a workgroup, presenting a brief but objective account of its purpose, in Portuguese and English. Each workgroup should be proposed by three coordinators. The proposal will be sent to two or three members of the Advisory Board, whose opinions will drive the AIM's Board decision whether to endorse the proposal. Once approved, the working group will be listed in the open area of the site and any member may join it. It is for the coordinators to manage communication with the other members of the working group, and they will submit activity reports and activity plans at the General Assembly of AIM.

How to be added to the workgroups?

Any active member may join any existing workgroup on AIM. Signing up to a workgroup is done through the Member's area. The operation of each group is of the coordinators responsability.

Please write with any questions or suggestions to gt@aim.org.pt.