Maria do Carmo Piçarra organizes an international scientific event

“(Post) Colonial Images: an intermedial approach” is the title of the scientific event that Maria do Carmo Piçarra is organizing at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom to be held on June 21.

Maria do Carmo Piçarra, a researcher at CECS, will present a communication on “the building of a new ‘imagined community’, where Portugal’s colonial ‘provinces’ played a pivotal role, was key to the Estado Novo dictatorship.

In order to “re-imagine” Portuguese colonialism and African Independence, some intermedial approaches to traumatic events are worth analysing. This presentation provides an analysis of the iconography of the Portuguese (anti/post)colonial situation.

Maria do Carmo will start with an overview of representations of the Portuguese dictatorship propaganda films, focusing on the first fiction film of colonial propaganda, The Spell of the Empire (1940), and, in reverse shot, on the first Mozambican fiction film “Mueda, Memory and Massacre” (1979). After analyzing two re-enactment sequences on these films, she will contrast them with montage sequences of two forbidden “Portuguese” films – Catembe (1965), and At least let me climb the palm trees… (1972). Finally, she will present an analysis of one anti-colonial film, Sarah Maldoror’s Monangambé (1968). What Maria do Carmo wants to discuss are the continuities but also how cinema images, introducing dissensus, challenge their own limits and the power of representation.

More information here.