FilmWriting: Port Speak World

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Portuguese-speaking world: The audiovisual industry has become an essential resource for disseminating knowledge, and access to the tools that create film and sound recordings is now nearly universal. In this course we will explore the theoretical, practical and ethical implications of the use of imaging using photography, videos and films of the Portuguese-speaking world. Students will also have access to introductory filming workshops with filmmakers in order to reflect on practical and ethical Issues. Students will experience some aspects of filmmaking techniques, while searching for point of views behind narratives, and examine how they express a way of knowing and being in the world. The main goal is to understand the interdependence and coexistence of visual and textual narratives in our contemporary societies. In order to achieve this goal, we will visualize several films and explore environmental and racial issues, politics and history, gender and sexuality of the Portuguese Speaking World. Six Memos for the next millennium by Italo Calvino inspired the structure of this course as well as his questioning about visual image, verbal expression and the “shift from the word to the visual image as a way of attaining knowledge”. It explores each one of the “memos” of Italo Calvino (lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity) through different Portuguese Speaking-World contemporary authors as an entry point to how Humanities artifacts have shaped our “humanity," both as a set of common practices that unite us and as a set of distinct traditions that celebrate our differences. Students will be invited to explore film and writing in a context of self-questioning and awareness about their experience of and in the world.