About the Journal

The international journal Cinema & Território brings together the visual arts with anthropology and the notion of territoriality. Within this main line, it covers scientific reflection of a performative nature in the areas of dance, music and theatre.

The originality of visual anthropology is that it contradicts the traditional anthropological paradigm: language. However, the verbal language of one culture does not adapt itself to describe another culture. The visual method broadens the verbal vocabulary deemed inaccurate to describe emotions, gestures, postures and interactions... such as, for instance, a dance: only images can show all the poetry of the body movements, the harmony of colours, the originality of the costumes, the changes in rhythm and the music that accompanies it. Words are limited to describe gestures and movements without, however, revealing the enchantment of the moment.

Cinema and anthropology have one thing in common: both observe and appropriate the human being, through the image. Filmmakers, photographers, ethnologists are sensors of moments and stories whose gaze is faced with the complexity of the representation of the Other - pictorial, mental, social and/or intimate representation. This "object", highlighted by the image professional inserts itself into either a frame - from the camera lens or the landscape frame, producing an enclosed area shared by the actors - a cinematic territory.

Today, cinema seems, more than ever, to be challenged by the issue of territory, its crossing and limits. Certainly, mobility has marked the cinematograph since its birth: mobility of the image (moving pictures), mobility of filmed subjects, mechanics, animals, humans (galloping horses, humans crossing the square, trains arriving at the station), camera mobility (travellings and other panoramic), operator mobility (Francis Doublier, one of the operators who travelled the world to collect images - Munich, Berlin, Warsaw, St. Petersburg - joined Felix Mesguich, operator of Louis Lumière: « J’allais dans toutes les villes du monde où il y avait l’électricité »[1]).

This border crossing has continued in the history of cinema, particularly within film distribution, allowing both greater knowledge of cinema (horizontal borders) and a sometimes-uneven distribution of production (vertical borders). In fact, there is a bold cinematic revival coming from the “South” (from the Third World as opposed to the “North” of rich countries), from poor economic and institutional contexts. Walking through space, a way of expressing the exploration of new territories, it is followed by many young Mediterranean and Asian filmmakers (Algeria, Iran, India, Tibet) whose works are often classified as “experimental cinema” for having stepped outside the formatted framework “cultural cinema”.

The film moves even faster because it has lost materiality (numeration of the production chain, editing and projection), but the directors, actors, technicians themselves, constantly migrate according to various modalities and motivations (economic, political and aesthetic, among others).

The very poetics of the film has been affected. Geographic borders are no longer the only ones being called into question; those of genres (documentary/fiction, short/feature film, experimental/commercial, modern/classic, including new formats used in social networks) up to the existential question of the film itself (see the question raised by the film critic André Bazin, What is cinema today?) as a specific art, they moved, crossing the borders that once separated, for example, music, literature, theatre and the visual arts.

The concept of Territory - multidimensional - allows the visual and image professionals to be questioned about the different forms of cinematographic production (Henri Lefebvre) - both as a space for artistic mediation and as a power (political, economic and cultural cinema).

The Direction
The Scientific Commission

 

Bazin, A. (1961). «What's the movie? ». Cinéma et Sociologie. t. III. In Communications, 1, 1961. pp. 211-220.
Lefebvre, H. (1974) «La production de l'espace». L'Homme et la société, N. 31-32, 1974. Sociologie de la connaissance marxisme et anthropologie. pp. 15-32. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3406/homso.1974.1855

 

[1]  Cité par Michaël Mandl, in Inédits du cinéma muet, Archives MM ©, 2017.