Introduction: On Portuguese Cinema

Clara Rowland; Estela Vieira

doi:10.21471/jls.v2i1.160

Clara Rowland Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Estela Vieira Indiana University Bloomington

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21471/jls.v2i1.160

Keywords: Film, Portugal, nation, aesthetics, image

Abstract

From the beginning, our chief aim in bringing together this special dossier been to provide, through a combination of different contributions, a response to the very concept of "Portuguese cinema." With their own varied critical standpoints, the essays brought together here point to a possible cartography of Portuguese film based not on a previous delimitation of the implications of the adjective "Portuguese" in historical, geographical, or even national terms, but instead determined precisely by indeterminacy.

Author Biographies

Clara Rowland, Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Clara Rowland is Associate Professor in the Department of Portuguese Studies at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Her main areas of research are Brazilian Literature, Interart and Comparative Studies, focusing on issues of representation and materiality. Her work on the book as a material object in the fiction of João Guimarães Rosa was published in Brazil (A Forma do Meio, Unicamp, 2011). She co-edited, with Tom Conley, the volume, Falso Movimento: ensaios sobre escrita e cinema (Cotovia, 2016), and with José Bértolo, A Escrita do Cinema: ensaios (Documenta, 2015).

Estela Vieira, Indiana University Bloomington

Estela Vieira is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University Bloomington. Her teaching focuses on the literatures and cultures of Portugal, Brazil, and Lusophone Africa. She is author of Interiors and Narrative: The Spatial Poetics of Machado de Assis, Eça de Queirós, and Leopoldo Alas, and her current book project is on nineteenth-century Portuguese women writers. She has published articles on a range of topics, including cultural memory in film and literature, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the nineteenth-century realist novel, and modernist poetics.