Cascais Cinema – documentary series
If cinema has, from the very beginning, claimed to be the art of illusion, the documentary is the genre that seems most intent on refuting this assertion. And we say, ‘seems’ because, in fact, a supposed ‘original purity’ of the documentary has never existed, not even when the starting gun was fired by the Lumière brothers’ ‘actualités’, since the simple act of pointing a camera immediately implies a point of view and a consequent taking of a stance.
Put another way, the much-vaunted opposition between reality and its recreation, between objectivity and subjectivity or ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’, is, at heart, a simplistic and reductive view: just as so-called ‘fictional’ cinema contains within itself the ‘document’ of its own making and its temporal context, so too does the documentary open itself up to a plurality of forms, from the ‘urban symphonies’ of the 1920s in the light of other artistic avant-gardes (Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s “Manhatta”, Walter Ruttmann’s “Berlin”, or the unmissable “Man with a Movie Camera” by Dziga Vertov) to the political propaganda films of the 1930s (sometimes combined with genuine poetic lyricism, as in the films of Leni Riefenstahl or the New Deal productions by figures such as Pare Lorentz or Leo Hurwitz), from the ‘epics’ of filmmaker-investigators-detectives such as Errol Morris and Michael Moore to the ‘fictions of reality’ currently so much in vogue almost everywhere.
These are just a few examples, but they serve to demonstrate the vitality of a genre that has managed to challenge and, at the same time, push the boundaries of cinema.
Further information:HERE
Information (D. Luís I Foundation): 214815660 | geral@fdl.pt
Organised by: D. Luís I Foundation, with the support of Cascais Municipal Council
