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- ‘Why study cinema?’ experiences of crisis and future making in the Portuguese film production sectorPublication . Sampaio, SofiaThe article examines the discourses and positions that emerged in the Summer and Autumn of 2020, during the public discussion of bill 44/XIV, which regulated the operation of subscription video on demand (SVOD) services in Portugal. The bill was perceived as a moment of change and impending crisis and divided the film-making sector. Based on a longitudinal ethnographic study of film production practices in Portugal, I ask what made this crisis different from previous and ongoing experiences of crisis. I draw on interviews, informal conversations, participant observation, and published documents to discuss how ideas of the local, national and transnational, discourses of quality and diversity, and practices of future making and life making converged in the defence of a film production culture to which older and younger practitioners attributed a non-economic (or more-than-economic) value considered worth preserving.
- Portuguese cinema and its discontents: a view from the film archivePublication . Sampaio, SofiaThe article revisits the main arguments and underlying premises of the protracted debate on ‘national art cinema’ that has shaped Portuguese film studies for many decades. Drawing on international scholarly work on national cinemas and on my own experience as a researcher in the National Archive of the Moving Images (ANIM) of the Portuguese Cinematheque (Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema), I argue for a definition of ‘Portuguese cinema’ that takes into account the vast collections of non-fiction films that have been excluded from this debate. My proposal entails a shift away from prescriptive to descriptive understandings of Portuguese cinema, thus recognising its diversity, in the past as well as in the present. I therefore endorse a conception of national cinema that takes heed of wider and deeper historical processes, international ‘constellations’ and other (often contested or unacknowledged) traditions and practices. The argument builds on the analysis of Adriano Ramos Pinto – Vinho do Porto (attributed title), a short non-fiction utility film made in the late 1930s that belongs to ANIM’s holdings.