(S8) HOLDS THE “CREATURES OF LIGHT” (“CRIATURAS DA LUZ”) WORKSHOPS BY PORTUGUESE ART SCHOOLS

Dec 1, 2023 | Featured, News

“School Trip” is the name given to the educational and training space dedicated to the Porto/Post/Doc Festival, in which the directors of (S8), Ana Dominguez and Ángel Rueda, drew up and taught the Experimental Cinema Workshop “Criaturas da Luz”. The workshop was held last week, from 21^st to 23^rd November, in several secondary schools in Porto and its metropolitan area that teach artistic education: Escola da Ponte in Santo Tirso, the Soares dos Reis Artistic School and the Árvore Artistic and Professional School.

More than 60 students from a new generation of artists who have not been in contact with the material nature of cinema were able to gain practical experience in the essence of film creation and its main elements: light, shade and movement.

The workshop sought first of all to dispense with the technological dependencies that cinema has come to represent, in order familiarize them with creative, organic and sensitive processes; with the cinema of ideas, the mystery of the shaft of light and tactile magic, provided by Germaine Dulac, Nathaniel Dorsky, Paolo Gioli, Ute Aurand, Cécile Fontaine and Matthias Müller.

The films by these filmmakers were shown in two programmes in their natural 16mm format: one that was screened at the outset, focusing on the three primary elements of cinema; and a second, screened as the workshop came to a close, showing an auteur perspective and the creation of new cinematographic languages.

In addition to exploring cinema on physical film and fostering contact with its primordial machinery, becoming familiar with concepts such as the persistence of vision and the properties of the basic elements, the workshops also included activities such as how to construct a camera obscura, photographically recording frames printed on film, and how to handle analogue cameras. These were very participatory workshops in which the students themselves freely experimented with transforming a beam of light, playing and intervening to generate sensations via its plastic properties. They experienced a veritable immersion into the depths of cinema, from which they emerged transformed into true “creatures of light.”