Dates: Tuesday, November 27, from 9h30 am to 1h30 pm;
Wednesday, November 28, from 9h30 am to 1h30 pm;
Thursday, November 29, from 9h30 am to 1h30 pm.

Place: Escola das Artes, Universidade Católica Portuguesa
R. de Diogo Botelho, 1327, 4169-005 Porto

Course description:
The course is designed around four films, all directed by women, but produced within very divergent social and cultural contexts. The films revolve around stories of motherhood and depict the problems of finding adequate means of expression within the mother’s marginalized place within the patriarchal culture. The course suggests that ‘the text of muteness’ acknowledges the problem of expression and gestures towards a mode of articulation through the form and the materiality of the medium, in this case, the cinema as an expressive mode. The course will consider the significance of the woman director, the differing production backgrounds of the films as well as aesthetic questions such as narrative structure and performance.

Laura Mulvey is a professor at Birkbeck, University of London, and has worked for many years at the British Film Institute. She is the author of several books and articles, such as “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, published in 1975 by the journal Screen, and “Death 24x a second”, book of 2005. In the first, Mulvey discusses the masculine gaze in the cinema of Hollywood from a psychoanalytic grid; in the second, the author examines the new forms of cinephilia and the study of moving images with the emergence of digital technologies. Mulvey was also a director, with her husband Peter Wollen, during the 70's and 80's, of several films, based on a vanguard aesthetic. Her main work, “Riddles of the Sphinx” (1977), co-directed by Peter Wollen, will also be screened during Porto/Post/Doc.