Archive
José Bértolo
Contemporary cinema and photography: some ghosts
This talk will tackle the question of spectrality—understood both in thematic and theoretical or reflexive terms—within the context of photography and cinema in the 21st century, seen in different configurations, perspectives and geographical provenances. After a brief introduction to spectrality as a theme in the context of the arts, we will focus on the ways in which some photographers and filmmakers accommodate the spectral issue in their practices, using it as means to meditate both on aesthetics and politics.
José Bértolo (PhD U.Lisbon, 2019) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in IELT—Nova University of Lisbon and invited adjunct professor in ESAD-CR. His research focuses on film studies, photography and intermediality, dealing particularly with questions related to the ontology of images, their materiality, and spectrality as a subject and a broad theoretical issue. He attended several scientific events in Portugal, France, the UK and Estonia, and published articles, book chapters and books. He authored the books Imagens em Fuga: Os Fantasmas de François Truffaut (2015), Sobreimpressões: Leituras de Filmes (2019) and Espectros do Cinema: Manoel de Oliveira e João Pedro Rodrigues (2020), published by Documenta, and he co-edited three books, among them Imitações da Vida: Cinema Clássico Americano (Bookbuilders, 2019, w/ Clara Rowland and Fernando Guerreiro). He is also a photographer (www.josebertolo.com).