Eighth session of the film programme Modos de Rever: História(s) da Arte no Cinema, concebido por Isabel Lopes Gomes. The session will feature a brief presentation, followed by the screening of Alain Resnais' "Van Gogh" (1948), Alain Resnais and Chris Marker's "The Statues Also Die" (1953), Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville "The Old Place" (1999) and Michelangelo Antonioni's "Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo" (2004), and a conversation between the professor and art critic Eduardo Paz Barroso and the professor and filmmaker Eduardo Brito, moderated by Isabel Lopes Gomes.

VAN GOGH

Alain Resnais | FRA | 1948 | 18'

“I was interested in black and white because it offered a way of unifying the film regardless of its content. As the paintings were not chosen according to their chronology, this allowed me to explore the space freely, to travel within the painting, without worrying about the heterogeneity that color would have imposed on me. I've always wanted to experiment with this kind of displacement in a plastic material that gave me total freedom in the editing... It was a question of finding out if the painted trees and houses could, through editing, be the real objects in the story and if, in that case, it would be possible for the viewer to replace the inner world of an artist with the world revealed by the photograph...” (Alain Resnais).

LES STATUES MEURENT AUSSI | THE STATUES ALSO DIE

Alain Resnais e Chris Marker | FRA | 1953 | 30'

Short documentary commissioned by the magazine Présence Africaine. From the question “Why is the African in the anthropology museum while Greek or Egyptian art are in the Louvre?”, the directors expose and criticize the lack of consideration for African art. The film was censored in France for eight years because of its anti-colonial perspective.

THE OLD PLACE

Jean-Luc Godard e Anne-Marie Miéville | FRA | 1999 | 47'

Commissioned by New Yorks MoMA to create an essay on the role of the fine arts at the end of the 20th century, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville came up with this invigorating video spectacle. In the same way that the filmmakers have approached their joint visual essays for the past thirty years, Godard and Miéville use The Old Place to voice their own personal philosophies. Incorporating a wide variety of imagery, including original nature footage shot for the video, film clips from various periods of cinematic history, and famous photographs from around the world, the team also quotes from a variety of textual sources, including the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Thomas Mann, Henri Bergson and Jorge Luis Borges. The result of their questioning is an even deeper inquiry into humanity, time itself, as well as the worlds current cultural climate. (Peter Borgward)

LO SGUARDO DI MICHELANGELO

Michelangelo Antonioni | ITA | 2004 | 18'

The final work by Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni sets off from his own visit to St. Peter's church in Rome, where it lays the enigmatic sculpture of Moses, by the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarotti. Besides its artistic outlook and the possible relations between both Michelangelos, this final film is mainly a meditation on death.