Volume 39.1/2025 [open]
Special Issue – Films about Films
Submission deadline: 30 de june, 2024
(The journal accepts submissions on a rolling basis for the Varia, Book Review, and Interview sections)
Guest Editors: Margarida E. Pereira (CEHUM/ELACH), Sérgio Sousa (CEHUM/ELACH) and Vítor Moura (CEHUM/ELACH)
As a discursive apparatus, what films show us is more than just stories. Regardless of its greater or lesser opposition to the masses, the seventh art also reveals us ways of reading itself. Similar to what happens in other expressive modalities (think of literature, amongst others), cinema, using multiple self-referential devices (myse en abîme, parody, pastiche, superimpositions and crossovers, metafictional moments and meta-artistic derivatives, etc.), effectively creates within its discursive space places of self-reflexivity. These are vast spaces with implications and consequences through which, by sharing with the spectator the mechanisms and the strategies of its fictional intelligence (such as revealing the technical functioning underlying the editing of a sequence, for example), the film offers visions of itself, proposes ways of our engagement with it, reflecting, after all, about the conditions that enable its existence as an art form.
The purpose of this issue of Diacrítica is to address the topic of films about films, surveying and problematizing those self-critical places or forms in which cinematic discourse, from within itself and with varying degrees of emphasis and geometry, seeks to translate the specific nature of its condition. Analysing films turned into thinking about themselves (often in a regime of self-derision, as exemplified by Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto, directed by Miguel Gomes), thus slightly shifting the focus of the discussion from the horizon where theory and criticism generally situate film analysis, will certainly deepen our understanding of remarkable and iconic films, whatever the phenomenology of perception that is invoked. This will, more broadly, allow us to effectively carry out a critical questioning of film grammar when, given to experimentation and self-reflexivity, it becomes its own subject. Above all, it will allow us to reflect on the way the seventh art internalises its place in the concert of the arts and in the broad context of empirical-social reality, contributing to an understanding of film in its various dimensions (aesthetic coding, media phenomenon, institutional reality, social practice, etc.).
At a time when the predominant digital audio-visual culture is taking us further and further away from the big screen, we are extending this call to articles that propose to analyse audio-visual products, such as series or films, particularly those produced for the new digital platforms (but not only), where the self-reflexive questioning of film is already being made from another time, medium, language or technology, but somehow incorporating a common film grammar.
