Research Catalogue

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Filipe Luz, Conceição Costa, Anna Coutinho

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Filipe Luz, Conceição Costa, Anna Coutinho

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Ivan Barroso, Anna Coutinho
Relationships between gaming audiences and the industry workforce have been a significant factor for decades, becoming an economic driver for high-profile studios, which has led to an increase in budget size and a tightening of deadlines. The definition of creative media products under capitalism as “research, product planning and design, packaging, publicity and promotion, pricing policy, and sales and distribution” (Ryan, 1991, p.186) resonates perfectly with contemporary marketing strategies The inherent complexity of marketing strategy in this view accounts for heightened risks, which make the creation of original products from scratch a difficult proposition. This, in turn, can account for a certain aversion to risk, which makes sequels and serialization a preferred option, whereby games become mere products, and audience mere consumers. The aim of this article is to trace the process through which the games industry’s core audience became defined, as it relates to how certain game titles became established in the market, and how this affected working conditions for game developers. The scope of this article is big-budget game titles, and how these related to the establishment of certain pervasive, potentially harmful audience expectations in the games industry.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, artist(s)/author(s): Carla Sousa, Anna Coutinho
As with other populations, the usage of games by people with Intellectual Disability (ID) has been increasingly approached by research. Notwithstanding, the role of games in the lives of people with disabilities tends to be studied through a categorical picture that emphasizes its therapeutic characteristics and neglects games as recreation and as a form of cultural expression. The present work aims to review the main research outcomes of the last 10 years in the field of gaming and ID. It presents an analysis of the main research objectives and approaches to gaming adopted in the analysed studies, as a path to reflect on two specific concepts: empowerment and ownership. Therefore, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) methodology, accompanied by statistical and content analysis procedures, was adopted to analyse a sample of 61 peer-reviewed research papers (2010-2020) in this field. The obtained results emphasize the passive role of individuals with ID in games research, with gaming mainly seen through therapeutic our game-based learning approaches. The presented reflection on inclusive research, through the parallelism between game studies and critical disability studies, also highlights that the access to games, as a cultural expression, for people with ID could foster the inclusion of these individuals in the public sphere, both in media and in the democratic civic structures. The produced insights intend to frame future approaches that situate the potential of games and their accessibility as strategies to decrease environmental barriers and hindrances that people with ID face in their specific contexts and foster inclusion.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, artist(s)/author(s): Marco Fraga da Silva, Anna Coutinho
Because video games are still considered ’low culture’ by many whilst being one of the most important art forms of the XXI century, this pa­per proposes a new concept for the field of game studies with the main goal of being a useful tool for the consolidation of the artistic recognition of the medium. A few countries have officially recognized video games as an art form and im­plemented legislation to support video game artists and their work; unfortunately, many gov­ernments still do not recognize this artistic field. For video games to achieve a widespread artistic legitimation it is necessary more critical thinking and institutional validation. The proposed neolo­gism – ‘videogametism’ – is an appropriation of the Eisensteinian concept of ‘cinematism’ and, as Sergei Eisenstein’s legitimation term, ‘videog­ametism’ intends to support the recognition of video game artistic status, asserting that all art forms are present in this medium and that some artistic artifacts are ‘videogamatic’.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Pedro Pinto Neves, Leonel Morgado, Nelson Zagalo, Anna Coutinho
This paper showcases how the Contract Agency Model can be used to uncover literacy practices in videogame’s own terms as a complement to existing, more ‘indirect’ games literacies, using as an example the videogame Total War: Shogun 2. The paper first situates the Contract Agency Model within approaches to videogames and within approaches to media literacy. The paper then identifies three interesting literacy practices in the videogame, which also exemplify the eight levels of abstraction of the Contract Agency Model. The paper concludes by discussing the model’s implications to media literacy and videogames, namely that videogames effect a second-order mutual signalling with their players – agency as a conversation of commitment to meaning – that is humanizing of those players, and that the model can uncover this as an implicit contract of bio-costs, as a ‘direct’ literacy of videogames, i.e. a literacy in videogames’ own terms.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Adriana Baptista, Celda Morgado, José António Costa, João Azevedo, Anna Coutinho
Lexicon allows particular cosmovisions built up with varied semantic, formal and pragmatic-discursive relations (Coseriu, 1991; Teixeira, 2005). In teaching context, these variations are often replaced by dichotomous and decontextualized proposals of lexical organisation (Baptista et al., 2017). We hope changing some teaching practices, based on complex lexical relationships research, and on new didactic resources. Firstly, we account for the diversity of existing lexical relations (Choupina et al., 2013), considering different linguistic criteria (Lehmann & Martin-Berthet, 2008). Then, we present an exploratory study to see if primary school pupils’ mental lexicon is intuitively organised in a dichotomous way. Departing from three bimodal narratives where words show opposition relations, although not exclusive, within the story, sometimes oppositional relations become similarity relations. These relationships allow to group words such as word class, worldviews, socio-cultural references. Although this approach starts with antonyms and synonyms in second-grade classes (according to Portuguese primary school curriculum, Buescu et al., 2015), we registered varied students’ responses, reflecting a mental lexicon escaping the dichotomy of certain oppositions taught in a decontextualized way. Thirdly, we propose an augmented reality tool that allows children (and adults) to watch visual narrative representing actions from written narratives. As a matter of fact, within particular contexts, words may not relate to each other in an opposite way. If intuitive knowledge on words isn’t confined to rigid perspectives, teaching shouldn’t lead that way, but to promote a critical thinking approach supporting education for citizenship.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Patti Gaal-Holmes, Anna Coutinho
This article discusses encounters occurring between the hand of the artist and filmmaking processes that may bypass the intellect, identifying themselves through intuitive modes of production to reveal integral relationships between film form, materiality and content. In this way the results of non-human agency, registered within film chemistry and processes of production – physical, intellectual, ‘spiritual’, (un)conscious – interact as the filmmaker takes an idea from conception to projection. Jane Bennett’s theorization of ‘vital materialism’ is important for investigations (2010), as is the role of chance discussed by William Kentridge (1993), whereby deliberations include the fortuitous manifestations occurring as encounters between hand, page and camera coalesce in the production of films. Additionally, approaches are informed by Vilém Flusser’s description of the photographer as a ‘Functionary: ‘a person who plays with apparatus and acts as a function of apparatus’ (Flusser 2007, p.83). This is, arguably, equally pertinent for the cinematographer/animator/artist who can ‘creep into the camera [and processing/editing equipment] in order to bring to light the tricks concealed within’ (Flusser, p.27).

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Terry Wragg, Anna Coutinho
For over four decades I have been part of a women’s film collective, Leeds Animation Workshop, set up to make films about social issues. As a founder member, I have had some level of involvement with all the Workshop’s 40 or so films. During this period we have employed a variety of techniques, including fully-painted cel, 3D, mixed media, and cut-outs; but the focus of our collective work remains, as it always has been, on using animation to raise awareness, and to provoke questions and discussion of social issues. This paper consists of a practitioner’s reflections, on the use of animation for documentary and on our collective working practice.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Susan J. Hanna, Anna Coutinho
This paper provides a detailed analysis of an example of personal practice in the creation of collaborative contemporary poetry animation as an example of Ecstatic Truth. It cites a rationale for translation, transcription and remodeling of poems into new animated visual and sonic experiences. This investigation into creation and ritique of shared language between poetry and animation includes critical commentary and some historical context, as well as supplying comparative exemplars from poets, animators and collaborators. It suggests that poetry animation is an emergent genre in its own right, and that this has expanding potential for engaging specialist and non-specialist audiences.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Jennifer Nightingale, Anna Coutinho
The Cornish Knitting Pattern Series is a collection of 16mm animation landscape films that use a single frame production technique to translate Guernsey knitting patterns into film. In doing so, the films set up a structural relationship between that of a knitted stitch and a frame of film—drawing out analogies between both forms of production. The article considers methods and processes of the films’ production, including the role of the film charts and location-as-editing system. The film charts are explored as examples of an approach to systems-based editing and a single frame production in the context of experimental film. They are also discussed as visualizations of the knitting patterns; pragmatic preproduction material; notation documentation and retrospectively a significant aid to reflection on the work carried out. Key aspects of the film series such as how gesture, landscape and film are ‘knitted together’ in the film as a material object, are also highlighted. Further to this the article explores how these aspects reveal readings of the films’ relationship to Landscape, knitting practices and the historical and cultural aspects of the Cornish Guernsey patterns.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Natalie Woolf, Carolina Martins, Anna Coutinho
This paper looks at materialities of expression through expanded animation. In particular, it details the evelopment of a creative approach for the production of artworks for an installation that will provide a shared understanding of spatial phobias and their physical and psychological symptoms.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Birgitta Hosea, Pedro Serrazina, Tereza Stehlikova, Anna Coutinho

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Michael Peter Schofield, Anna Coutinho
This research examines the spectrality of animation and other media based on the photographic trace. Using diverse examples from popular culture and the author’s own investigative practice in media art, this paper looks at how archival media is re-used and can be brought back to life in new moving image works, in a gesture we might call hauntological appropriation. While sampling and re-using old materials is nothing new, over the last 15 years we have seen an ongoing tendency to foreground the ghostly qualities of vintage recordings and found footage, and a recurrent fetishisation and simulation of obsolete technologies. Here we examine the philosophies and productions behind this hauntological turn and why the materiality of still and moving image media has become such a focus. We ask how that materiality effects the machines that remember for us, and how we re-use these analogue memories in digital cultures. Due to the multimodal nature of the author’s creative practice, photography, video art, documentary film and animation, are interrogated here theoretically. Re-animating the ghosts of old media can reveal ontological differences between these forms, and a ghostly synergy between the animated and the photographic.

Publication: Article, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Victor Flores, Anna Coutinho
‘Flow and Archive’, the theme of the current issue of the International Journal of Film and Media Arts (IJFMA), seems to be synonyms of ‘past’ and ‘future’ when we speak of television, as well as to identify two challenges (both technical and political) which have always been present in the history of this medium.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Lothar Mikos, Anna Coutinho
The development of television is never complete. It is a medium in permanent change, even if some aspects of television outlasted several decades. Television in the second decade of the 21st century looks different than in the 1950s of the 20th century. The screens are bigger, the picture is colourful, and the reception possibilities are more diverse, even mobile. Since the invention of television in the 1920s, the medium has undergone major changes, both in terms of technology and content. Television can therefore be seen on the one hand as a transitional medium - quasi a medium in permanent transition, because it repeatedly takes up and unites various technical developments. On the other hand, television can also be described as a transmedial medium because it incorporates aesthetic and narrative forms from other media into its programmes and at the same time has developed programme forms that radiate onto other, newer media (e.g. forms of television series form an important content on the Internet as web series or as an offer on streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime Video. Movistar+, Viaplay or Netflix). This double configuration of television as a transitional and transmedial medium makes up its fluid character. In the following, an initial attempt will be made to approach television in order to work out what actually constitutes this medium. Afterwards, the technical and institutional development of television is dealt with, before the development of programme forms is described. Finally, current developments resulting from the digitalization of television are presented.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Manuel José Damásio, Jorge Paixão da Costa, Anna Coutinho
In the context of ever greater circulation of televisual content of all genres and formats, this paper focuses on the intersections between the global and the local to understand how a specific genre – soap opera – was localised in a specific cultural and geographical setting giving origin to a production model that gained local prominence and nowadays faces a number of new challenges. Our general argument draws on the empirical find-ings of original research on the molding of this specific televisual genre and format called “telenovela”, and the specific production mode associated with it, and reflects on its historical emergence and the contingencies of such a process. Our goal is to identify the variables that allowed this genre to gain local dominance and later achieve interna-tional circulation. Following the results of quantitative and qualitative research, we ar-gue that the structure of the local production and distribution settings and the dominant ideology of the associated production culture promoted the emergence of an original lo-cal production culture and sustains it until today.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Mario Bressan, Heloisa Moraes, Anna Coutinho
This study aims to expose some thoughts about the reformulation of the social bond constituted with the television, through remembrances evoked among television viewers involving a tele-affective memory and new formats inside audiovisual consumption. In addition to this, it analyses the comments of people that watched a remake of the Brazilian program Cassino do Chacrinha (Chacrinha’s Casino), which aired in 2017 on Rede Globo de Televisão (TV Globo) and Canal Viva (Viva), commemorating the centenary of Abelardo Barbosa, a very important Brazilian TV host who acted between the ’70s and ’80s. Our methodology follows the Content Analysis mobilised by Laurence Bardin (2011) in relation to texts posted on Twitter containing the expression “Cassino do Chacrinha” in August 3, 2017 (aired on Viva) and September 6, 2017 (aired on TV Globo). We want to discuss the relationship between imaginary, memory, and social bond starting from a televisual archive, where we present tele-affective marks of memory through substantial and shared images that appear in these analysed comments.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Célia Quico, Anna Coutinho
Television was born analogue, almost 100 years ago: first broadcast across airwaves, then delivered via analogue cable and satellite, to reach millions and millions of people around the world. Like many other industries, television has been under the process of digital transformation, integrating digital technologies in all parts of its value chain, from content production to content distribution. Today, inseparable from the digital transformation process is the large, diverse and ever-growing volume of data created, captured, analyzed and applied – also known as Big Data. Television is being reshaped by Big Data, with newcomers to the industry such as Netflix leading the way, for others to follow - and for others to fail. The concepts of Platform Capitalism, Surveillance Capitalism and Dataism may illuminate many of the challenges faced by the main stakeholders in the television industry, with implications that go much beyond this field. Lastly, Netflix’s impact on the production, distribution and consumption of audiovisual content is still to be understood in a small market such as Portugal: the current exploratory paper is also meant to be the basis of future research in Portugal about internet-distributed television.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Mateus Vilela, Anna Coutinho
In times of technological change, television and social media are increasingly intertwined. Watching a serial fiction, for example, is no longer a solitary task and, from the popularity of this format, this research conducted content analysis of the comments regarding the fifth season of Game of Thrones on Facebook and Twitter in Brazil and in Portugal. From the collected data, the act of check-in in the episodes was symptomatic for questions of belonging, affection and pleasure. Therefore, the existence of an emotional connection between the fandom, beyond the perception of the series as part of the self, was observed, shaping relations and behaviours.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Sergio Salazar Cavazos, Anna Coutinho
The following paper offers an analysis of the development process of “Roof Knocking” (2017), a studio short film set in Gaza, spoken entirely in Palestinian Arabic, produced in Estonia, with a given budget of €5,000 euros. The purpose is to introduce a set of practices based on entrepreneurship principles that can apply to similar projects, serving filmmakers to build resources timely and mindfully.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Manuel José Damásio, Anna Coutinho

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Isabel Bañuelos Loreto, Anna Coutinho
The exploration of this research is the effect of the sound design in a long take to reveal a powerful narrative structure. The research proposes a new term: rhizomatic sound design, which seeks to bind together the rhizome theory with the sound design practice. Analyzing the acoustic elements that configures the long take, the result of this research invites the team members of a film to apply the rhizomatic sound design concept in their own fields, to gain a deeper understanding of the cinematic language and acknowledge new ways to create the architecture of the narrative.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Madlen Sieghartsleitner, Anna Coutinho
Temporal omissions can be found in the most diverse manifestations of various genres and film cultures. However, the ellipsis as a narrative tool has seldom been addressed in film theory, and when it has, it has tended to be treated in a manner of purely instrumental qualities of skipping the unimportant parts of a plot, to cover vast stretches of story time or as a pure mean of scene transitions.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir, Anna Coutinho
This paper will conceptually apply and analyze Gilles Deleuze’s concept of affection-image, using The Death of Louis XIV (2016), to determine what the affection-image depicts and how it depicts it. Deleuze’s concept is singular in its reconceptualization of the close-up shot where he removes the dimensions, i.e. size and scale, of the shot from its definition and instead argues that the meaning of the shot depends upon the value (quality and power) it manifests. Deleuze calls this value ‘the affect’, and ‘the affect’ is the singular requirement for an image to be categorized as affection-image.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Jerónimo Sarmiento, Anna Coutinho
This paper provides an overview on the concept of musicality in fiction cinema language, understanding the comparative analysis of both art forms and considering cinema as a potentially musical construction. Furthermore, the examination of polyphonic musical textures and its methodical application in the formal analysis of Lucrecia Martel’s cinema (namely in her 2007 film The Headless Woman) provides a new perspective on the aesthetical values of the Argentinean filmmaker’s work with sound and image, which unveils other forms of assuming fiction film narration.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Ana victoria Falcon Araujo, Anna Coutinho
Digital distribution led to the rise of next-generation filmmakers, whose content (both short and feature length) was created for and distributed to online audiences (Ryan & Hearn, 2010). Independent companies and large studios (Netflix, Amazon Studios, Hulu) producing next-generation film do not rely on theatrical success, since they work on micropayment, subscription or advertising-driven business models. This paper includes a literary review that maps the digital marketing strategies over the purchase journey, and define key performance indicators for each digital marketing strategy. To explore how next-generation film distributors are currently employing digital marketing strategies, a survey and a multiple case study methodology was designed and then implemented. The findings of the literary review, the survey, and case study are used to point out the limitations, industry challenges and research opportunities in the field of next-generation cinema.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Yijing Wang, Anna Coutinho
This research proposes animation as a form of ethnographic documentary, exploring animation’s potential to document the underrepresented cultures (e.g. oral culture) of minorities. Drawing upon a critical analysis of the approaches and methods used in animated documentaries that involve minority issues, alongside preliminary studies of the Longhorn Miao, this project will result in an animated documentary that explores aspects of the cultural practices the group undertakes. This project’s contribution to knowledge lies in expanding the use of animation as an innovative form of ethnographic documentary, defining an emerging territory of ethnographic animation and expanding of participatory design principles to represent the Longhorn Miao people.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Chantal Poch, Anna Coutinho
Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time puts the latest technology into the search for the oldest images we can think about, those of our origin. Taking this paradox as a starting point, we will explore precedents of visual effects in science documentaries and their role in Malick’s particular quest for wonder. Are VFX capable of truth?

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Jaime López Díez, Anna Coutinho
The aim of this study is to seek the ecstatic truth that lies in the Spanish filmmaker, J. A. Bayona. In order to do so we have analyzed his four films, The Orphanage (2007), The Impossible (2012), A Monster Calls (2016), and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), as well as the first episode of the television series Penny Dreadful (2014). Our perspective has been a psychological one. Bayona defines his first three films as a trilogy on the mother-child relationship and death. Thus, we have studied his films from the point of view of Freud’s theory of the unconscious and the primal scene. Our research shows that Bayona’s films may be failing in trying to deal with two unconscious conflicts: 1) his need to detach from an archaic mother figure; and 2) his need to get rid of the nguish caused by the possibility of not being born, which is also related to the first conflict.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Paulo Viveiros, Anna Coutinho

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Alex Widdowson, Anna Coutinho
Music & Clowns is an animated documentary that intimately portrays the subjectivity and relationships between my brother, our parents, and myself. This film will function as a case study to facilitate a reflective exploration and practice-informed analysis of some of the theoretical frameworks relevant to animated documentary discourse. Placing emphasis on Bill Nichols’ modes of documentary, I trace the influences, interactions, and specific application that this theoretical topology has had on Music & Clowns. Expanding upon Nichols’ framework by way of visual metaphors, I develop increasingly sophisticated models of the interactions between practice and theory, maintaining Nichols’ topology to integrate live-action and animated documentary traditions.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Tara Purnima Douglas, Anna Coutinho
Indigenous cultures worldwide have long held distinctive beliefs that ascribed a living soul or anima to biological and non-biological entities including plants, particular inanimate objects and to natural phenomena. To the people who belonged to these traditional social groups, organic matter was vibrant, sentient and existed in dynamic relationship to Humankind. Anthropological studies seek to decode the nuances of tribal rituals and the traditional practices of ‘other’ cultures; however, the underpinning of objectivity is challenged by indigenous research, to question the underlying authority. For these societies, the merit is present in the interconnections and relationships. In India, liminal local perspectives have been largely excluded from mainstream media and this project nvestigates ethnographic film and animation as articipatory media practice by indigenous storytellers in collaborations with the film-maker. The aim is to also present the contemporary experiences recounted by the participants as we revisit their timeless narratives. In the process this becomes a transformative experience that reconnects us with the social function of the artistic practices that have sustained traditional societies.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Faniel Cardoso, Filipe Costa Luz, Anna Coutinho

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Jacopo Wassermann, Anna Coutinho
Trouble awaits the scholar who decides to study movie adaptations of videogames – or, as they are more commonly called, ‘videogame adap¬tations’. Literary and post-literary biases, an unfriendly critical environment and the lack of systematic references are but a few of the many obstacles on her or his path. By addressing these issues and attempting to understand them against the historical and the¬oretical backdrop that informed them in the first place, this paper aims at a reevaluation, however partial, of these productions as symptoms of a self-reflexive tendency present in contemporary commercial cinema. In the process of nearing a new understand¬ing of these cultural and industrial artifacts, a cross-examination of key concepts belonging to three fields of studies (game studies, film stud¬ies and adaptation studies) opens up the pos¬sibility of an interdisciplinary cooperation aimed at the adjustment and rectification of mutual assumptions and misconceptions.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Sofia Romualdo, Anna Coutinho
Videogames can be found in a diversity of museums as tools for engagement, mediation, and interpretation, but their relatively recent inclusion as collection objects in institutions such as the moma and the v&a raises ensions between the medium and the exhibition spaces. This paper aims to present an overview of the strategies employed in the exhibition of videogames, and to uggest curatorial methodologies that can be adapted in order to effectively introduce videogames into spaces dedicated to the exhibition of art. Curators are currently at a stage of experimentation in the field of videogames in useums, a time of both challenges and opportunities to study, develop and test new practices. More than providing a comprehensive guide to the history of videogames exhibitions, the intention of this paper is to devise suggestions for curatorial strategies and models for consideration and testing, and future work will etermine their potential advantages and disadvantages.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Eva R. Filipe, Anna Coutinho
With the paradox of interactive emotion as a starting point, this study will try to understand what is the cause for this limitation of videogames’ emotional power, identifying some requirements for it to be overcome. Through this singling out, the concept of disempowerment is drafted as a model for theoretical inquiry, critical counterpoint and set of practices that stand opposed to the forces that go through, define and are themselves firmed on the diverse layers of the interactive experience. Beyond trying to grasp the emotional potential yet to realize and how the rupture with the established and expected practices may unlock it, the proposal of the disempowerment model will overflow the inside of the game experience. From its construction within a game to its use on discourse about video games, its importance on broader and interwoven dynamics will be highlighted. All along the way, a critical proposal will gain shape, which will seek to, cyclically, magnify videogame’s power as a medium of experiences and the power of the medium as a cultural object.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Lluís Sayol, Àngel Colom Pons, Anna Coutinho
We put forward a suitable analytical model for studying suspense in video games. This model is based on the analysis of perspective, localiza¬tion and the figure of the implied player, which is fundamental to understand the relationship be¬tween game, player and emotional effects. We critically review the previous research on point of view in films and video games with the aim of achieving a better understanding of audiovi¬sual narration. The resulting model is a proposal for, in the first place, systematising the relation¬ship between the player -considered here as a theoretical concept: the implied player- and the game. Once this is done, it allows us to study suspense in video games from a narrative per¬spective and leads us to the conclusion that in video games suspense is not related to a wait¬ing situation –like in films- but to the effort of overcoming difficulties that we know from a previous play.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Sylke Rene Meyer, Anna Coutinho
Based on studies of affect, and on theoretical works concerning spatial semantics by Yuri Lotman, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault and others, spatial story design provides a seven step algorithm of story development for interactive audio-visual narrative. Following spatial semantics and its application in interactive storytelling, the author no longer creates the protagonist, his or her want or need, nor controls the story arc. Instead, spatial story design allows the author(s) to make the formative creative decisions by designing a narrative space, and spatial dynamics that then translate into user generated storylines. Spatial story design serves as a framework for interdisciplinary collaborations, and can be used to not only create interactive digital narrative but also screenplays, improvisational theatre, 360° films, and walk-in story world experiences for a number of users in either live or holographic virtual reality spaces. Spatial story design could inspire creators of interactive narrative, storytellers in time-based media, and possibly also technology developers for authoring tools.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Paulo Viveiros, Anna Coutinho
What are the effects of digital technologies on film language? This is the central question of this paper and is analyzed regarding the lightness of the new equipment and the technical competence of the new generations. The framework is the Hollywood blockbusters.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Ivan Marino, Anna Coutinho
El siguiente artículo explora los primeros ensayos soviéticos destinados a investigar la función del «efecto» en el discurso audiovisual, relacionándolos a su vez con las corrientes del pensamiento dominante de su época. El objetivo de esta investigación consiste en volver a las fuentes de la retórica del audiovisual —una de las técnicas discursivas de mayor eficacia y capacidad persuasiva de la cultura contemporánea— para identificar elípticamente sus reminiscencias en los discursos actuales del cine y la televisión. Siguiendo esta línea de trabajo, analizamos, entre otras, las primeras ideas de Pudovkin (2006), Kuleshov (1974) y Eisenstein (2010a) en torno al tema planteado, deteniéndonos con especial interés en las nociones de «atracción» y «efecto» que, a nuestro criterio, subyacen transformadas en los discursos audiovisuales del presente.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Natália Fábics, Anna Coutinho
Based on the study of contemporary action/fantasy/ horror blockbusters adopted from video games, with a special focus on Assassin’s Creed (Kurzel, 2016), the paper examines the influence of new media, and especially video games on contemporary cinema storytelling, with a special focus on how they reshape narrative structures and logic through adding a novel spatial dimension and incorporating a new form of reality based on the rules of video games. This reality of imagined spaces create a narrative that from many aspects break away from the rules and the logic of a more ‘tightly-woven’ storytelling, and – among many other things – introduce the presence of the non-present, unfold their plots through discovering the unknown spaces of imaginary universes. While this ‘new real’ is emerging in contemporary cinema, as the presentpaper will argue, in years to come it might easily become a set of ‘new rules of the game’ for a film industry targeting a new generation of movie-goers who grew up with touchscreens and apps, and are just entering their teenage years.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Manuel José Damásio, Anna Coutinho

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Brecht Debackere, Anna Coutinho
The present case study focuses on ‘Memories in Decay’ is a 360º immersive experience which explores what happens when the past meets the present using the cinematic medium of the future: omnidirectional video. This project is a VR documentary which does not only transport the immersant – the ‘spectator’ of an immersive experience – to the ruins of a long-forgotten place, but also balances between past and pres¬ent, providing access to a different time through the use of oral histories and archive photos and documents. During the paper, the author not only discusses the potential of VR but how it af¬fects traditional cinema and its processes. invest in its illusion.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Tony Costa, Anna Coutinho
This paper approaches the two situations by being part of a conference on teaching cinema¬tography and the real experience of being one shooting in a remote areas like Africa with very little resources and conditions to do so. This ar¬ticle divides itself into two distinct moments: 1) one where an account of the teaching of cine¬matography is elaborated against the backdrop of the conclusions of the Teaching Cinematog¬raphy Conference of 2017, of which the author was one of the organizers; and 2) a concrete case study of the author’s experience as a cin¬ematographer for the film A Ilha dos Cães [The Island of Dogs], which premiered in theatres in Portugal in April 2017, and which corresponds precisely to an illustration of what the exercise of cinematography is today, in the European context. The articulation between these two cases allows us to understand how, while the essential nature of the relationship between ar¬tistic practice and teaching has not changed in the case of the cinematography, a very signifi¬cant set of transformations requires a rethink¬ing of the methods and processes in which this relationship might be built.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Peter Moyes, Louise Harvey, Anna Coutinho
We report on the conception, production and delivery of the live music, live performance, 3D animated project She’s Not There that opened the CILECT congress in Brisbane November 2016. We discuss the operations of the virtual camera in framing the virtual 3D space within the real space of the theatre stage. We muse on this Mixed Reality mode within the context of Goudal’s conception of cinema as fostering in its audience a ‘conscious hallucination’ (1925); the appeal of our project is contingent upon the audience being able to view outside of the frame while enjoying the fantasy within, to knowingly invest in its illusion.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Simone Stewens, Anna Coutinho
The present paper discusses the impacts and changes brought about by digital technologies and the transformations they entail for the different areas of film production, development and education. By focusing on the particular case of one school – The Cologne Film School (ifs) – and how this school has embraced digital disruption, the paper scrutinizes all areas that are impacted by the digital and how film schools can and should react.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Edmundo Cordeiro, Anna Coutinho
Pedro Costa’s last film, Cavalo Dinheiro [Horse Money, 2014], continues the work with Ventura in a way that could be seen to overtake Vanda’s role in his series of films since Ossos [Bones, 1997]. In Juventude em Marcha [Colossal Youth, 2006], by means of «the power of the false» (Deleuze), Ventura is a stratigraphic character, the result of a confrontation between fictional and documentary powers which permanently shifts, in Ventura himself, the actually existing Ventura from the invented Ventura. This builds a portrait that, with the ritornello of the film — Ventura’s insistent recitation of a love letter —, moves across centuries of Portugal and world’s history. But in Horse Money, both concentration and fragmentation increase. There are all kind of coincidences and clashes between the past and the present time, which are presented in a glossolalia, voices that spread memory everywhere, as in the final sequence in the elevator, when we have Ventura and a soldier of the 25 April Revolution completely mummified, transformed into a golden statue. In this paper, I highlight the everlasting present created through the length of time and the scarcity of space. This is not a time that corresponds to confusion or delirium; this is the time built by the film, and I will particularly focus my paper on this coincident mental and historical landscape that, by entailing the body and the life of a person transformed into a character, allows to the filmmaker to ride through history with Ventura’s horse Money.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Sara Raposo, Anna Coutinho
Once the material of playful gatherings, stereoscopic photographs of cities, the moon, landscapes and fashion scenes are now cherished collectors’ items that keep on inspiring new generations of enthusiasts. Nevertheless, for a stereoblind observer, a stereoscopic photograph will merely be two similar images placed side by side. The perspective created by stereoscopic fusion can only be experienced by those who have binocular vision, or stereopsis. There are several causes of a lack of stereopsis. They include eye disorders such as strabismus with double vision. Interestingly, stereoscopy can be used as a therapy for that condition. This paper approaches this kind of therapy through the exploration of North American collections of stereoscopic charts that were used for diagnosis and training purposes until recently.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Maria Cristina Miranda da Silva, Anna Coutinho
This study presents a preliminary systematisation of the stereographs that are part of the public collections of Rio de Janeiro. We start with an investigation of the presence of optical devices in nineteenth century Brazil, especially in the city of Rio de Janeiro, examining both users and diffusers, as well as the forms of observation and social contexts of their use. Our original research was based on the studies of the first cinema, especially the work of Tom Gunning and Charles Musser, and on art history by Jonathan Crary, authors who helped us analyse, respectively, the re-contextualization process regarding the use of optical devices and the resizing of the observer of modernity. Our empirical work was based on the systematic study of advertisements published in the newspapers of the period in question, especially in the Jornal do Commercio, between the 1850s and the 1870s. We conducted a survey of the establishments that imported and marketed these devices during the period, using advertisements published in Almanak Laemmert, between the years 1844 and 1889. We place a special emphasis on the arrival of photography in Brazil and to the precocity with which stereoscopy was developed here by the photographer Revert Henrique Klumb. We mapped themes as a reference for Brazilian visuality, and made an inventory of the Brazilian photographers who developed this technique in their works. From the information gathered, we answered research questions about the presence of optical devices in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century, especially stereoscopy considering its particularities in the historical, economic and social context of the time.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Juan A. F. Rivero, Anna Coutinho
Unlike French stereo photographers, who flooded the market with Spanish views, the most important British publishers and photographers rarely made Spanish views. Quite possibly this was precisely because of the rapid market penetration of the French, such as Gaudin, Ferrier and others, and in spite of the leading British photographic houses, such as Frith or George W. Wilson, also wanting to include Spanish views in their catalogues. The photographer Frank Good would be the only British photographic editor to make a collection of some importance of Spanish stereoscopic views during the first decades of the history of photography, visiting and photographing the cities of San Sebastian, Zaragoza, Barcelona, Tarragona, Valencia, Seville and Cordoba. About one hundred views, of which more than half are of Cordoba and Seville, do not include, strangely, cities such as Madrid, Toledo and Granada.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Rod Bantjes, Anna Coutinho
While recent scholarship has emphasised the narratives of immersive realism that surrounded the parlour stereoscope, my aim in this paper is to better understand the counter-currents of nineteenth century stereoscopic culture – the artefacts, practices and discourses that powerfully undermined realist assumptions about spatial perception and the “truth” of stereoscopic representation. Wheatstone’s original stereoscopes were designed to “hack” spatial perception and subject each of its component principles to artificial manipulation. What Wheatstone uncovered were glaring anomalies in the prevailing theories of veridical sight, which had relied upon the principle of binocular convergence (understood as a precise trigonometric measure of depth). Following a popular tradition of critical inquiry known as “rational recreation,” amateurs too used their stereoscopes to reflect on the perplexities of binocular spatial perception. Analytic line drawings highlighted the inexplicable binocular suture of strikingly disparate images. Stereoviews with their images transposed revealed the capacity of the mind to constitute volumetric objects irrespective of binocular cues. Hyper-stereo images (taken from a wide separation and therefore at an increased angle of binocular convergence) sparked debate and perceptual uncertainty as to whether their 3D effects, or indeed all stereoviews, were distorted – elongated along the z axis and/or miniaturised. Realists, including some astronomers hoping to use hyper-stereo photographs as visual evidence of the shape of the moon’s surface, sought unsuccessfully to solve the problem of elongation by ensuring that the angles at which stereo photographs were taken were reproduced in the angles at which the eyes viewed them in the stereoscope. Astronomers were forced to quietly abandon the stereoscope as a reliable witness of spatial form. Others, artists in particular, revelled in the anti-realist implications of a spatial imagination which constructed the perceptual world in a sometimes capricious fashion.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Nikita Mathias, Anna Coutinho
Deviating from Oliver Grau’s notion of the panorama’s immersive features, this article will discuss the receptive impact of virtual travel media of the 19th century in a more ambivalent and nuanced manner by employing two theoretical texts by Walter Benjamin, Clemens Brentano and Heinrich von Kleist. In Berlin Childhood around 1900 Benjamin draws on and reflects his childhood experience of the Kaiserpanorama in Berlin. Brentano and Kleist’s text elucidates the authors’ ‘strange feeling’ towards Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Monk by the Sea. What both texts share is a fundamental experience of ambivalence regarding the topographies depicted in both media. Other than merely being ‘enchanted’ and taken into a far distant land, it is precisely the mediality of the Kaiserpanorama and the Friedrich painting that provides a more complex experience, oscillating between distance and familiar terrain, between immersion and media reflexivity, between past, present and future. After introducing and discussing both theoretical accounts, I will apply their receptive principles to the analysis of the virtual travel media panorama and early cinema.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Paolo Parmeggiani, Anna Coutinho
One of the most interesting features of the travel stereoview series is not their three-dimensional effect but rather the intertwined outcome of realism and “being-thereness” in the experience of early twentieth century armchair travellers. On the set of Italy through the Stereoscope, the viewer’s “path of the gaze” was a novelty compared to two-dimensional photographs and stereoviews. The Underwood & Underwood publishing company created a stereoscopic multimodal tour to improve the impression of realism with a proprioceptive perception of the scene. The procedure of textual débrayage, the description of the experience as it is happening here and now, the direction of the viewer’s gaze with a narrative itinerary, the changing of the visual convergence with the variation in the points of attention: all of these elements fostered a synaesthesia for the spectator. The result was immersion in an explorable space between the “point of view” (2D images) and the “point of being” (virtual reality).

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Jan Nals, Anna Coutinho
How to represent the suffering of distant others? An international exchange program between Africa and Europe was set up in 2006 to tackle this issue with the help of documentary filmmaking. A result was A Kosovo Fairytale (2009), a case study of how animated documentary can provide insights in how to represent ‘the other’.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Filipe Costa Luz, Anna Coutinho
Filmmakers aim to deliver some emotional and aesthetic coin to their works, which makes it possible that the boundaries between fiction and documentary genres could be diluted artistically.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Paulo Viveiros, Manuel José Damásio, Anna Coutinho

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): M. Alexandra Abreu Lima, Anna Coutinho
From the contemporary panorama of creative media, the animation documentary A Journey to Cape Verde (2010, Viagem a Cabo Verde) is analysed in terms of its content concerning biodiversity and plant issues. The concept of ‘plant blindness’ is revisited, a term introduced by Wandersee and Schussler in 1998 (Allen, 2003) to describe “the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment” and their importance in the biosphere. Some future considerations are discussed. It is hoped this casestudy displays a picture of what can be done to improve collective knowledge about biodiversity issues and could inspire and help others to develop awareness raising projects about them.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Annabelle Honess Roe, Anna Coutinho
Animated documentaries have been written about in a mostly positive way that explores the way the form enhances and expands the documentary agenda. This is true of scholarly and academic writing as well as that in the popular press and film reviews. However, some authors have taken issue with the ascription of the term ‘documentary’ to animated documentaries. In addition, there are potential issues regarding audience response to animated documentaries and the technical proficiency of the films themselves as they become more ubiquitous. This chapter explores the existing, and potential objections to and criticisms of animated documentary and suggests that a more ‘360-degree’ discussion of the form will enrich the scholarly discourse on animated documentary.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Paul Wells, Anna Coutinho
This short discussion provides some introductory remarks on writing for the documentary form in animation. Taking into account theories of the place of animation in utilitarian films, avant-garde works and the essay film, the analysis, based on auto-ethnographic insights, provides some methods and approaches to developing animated documentary work. These include ‘Making Animation Choices’, ‘Staging in Space’, ‘Using Attachment and Detachment’, developing ‘Episodic lists and Micro-Narratives’, and deploying ‘Transition and Associative Relations’. The analysis seeks to show that these approaches to the animated documentary reveal and evidence a theory of practice, and a practice of theory.

Publication: Paper, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University, artist(s)/author(s): Pedro Serrazina, Anna Coutinho
Since its early days, animation film has always reflected its cultural context at the time of creation. Nevertheless, it is still widely perceived as kid’s entertainment.