As part of her project on "Cinema and Death from a Latin American Perspective. Phase I (1960–1980)", developed under a Senior Technological Development and Innovation Abroad Fellowship (CNPq ERC-DES), Natacha Gallucci, visiting researcher at the FILM AND DEATH project, will deliver an online course composed by a series of seminars dedicated to the theme "Cinema and Philosophy: Death-Image and Popular Cultures in Latin America".
The course proposes a critical approach to the intersections between cinema, philosophy, and popular cultures in Latin America, deploying the notion of the death-image as an aesthetic and epistemological operator. Drawing upon a dialogue among film studies, performance studies, and situated epistemologies, the seminar examines how Latin American audiovisual production generates sensitive regimes of memory, territory, body, and time that constitute spaces for meditation on death. Focusing on an initial film corpus produced between 1960 and 1980, each session is structured around fundamental concepts from the philosophy of Rodolfo Kusch: estar em américa (deeply-rooted dwelling/being in America), geocultura (geoculture), and fagocitação (cultural phagocytosis).
The selected filmography is investigated by producing tensions between the unfilmable, representation and experience, gesturality, myth and ritual, and the body as an archive. Furthermore, the course discusses cinema as a form of thought and as a apparatus (dispositif) for meditation on death, historical violence, and the processes of "re-existence" enacted by subjects and communities within popular cultures. The death-image is understood not merely as a representation of finitude, but as an analytical category capable of revealing modes of inscribing memory, mourning, ancestry, and cultural survival within images, ranging from their production (taking) to their critique (retaking).
The course will comprise lecture-discussions, film clip analysis, discussions of philosophical texts, and guided debates, articulating conceptual readings, the interpretation of audiovisual works, and critical reflection on the death-image in Latin American filmographies.
It will be a 15-hour course happening on July 10, 11 and 13 and will be composed by 9 hours of synchronous and 6 hours of asynchronous seminars.
All participants are required to deliver an assignment on August 14 in order to obtain a certificate.
July 10: 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM (Brazil) | 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM (Portugal)
July 11: 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM (Brazil) | 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM (Portugal)
July 13: 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM (Brazil) | 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM (Portugal)
August 14: Assignment due date
All seminars will be delivered in portuguese.
For more information on the seminar's methodology, goals and for a detailed description of each session, please access the full program here (ENG) or here (PT).
You can register here.
📷 Kukuli [1961], by Luis Figueroa, Eulogio Nishiyama e César Villanueva
