Thursday, May 8 at 3 pm
Buchanan Tower 225
Free to attend and no need to RSVP
Join us for a talk by visiting PhD student, Adrián Sánchez-Martínez from Pompeu Fabra University, “If You Don’t Catch Us Live, You Don’t Catch Us At All”: Performative Narration in Contemporary Cinema.
This talk will focus on examining the aesthetics of three recent films, all of which are collaborative efforts developed at the margins of the film industry by a steady group of people: La flor (Mariano Llinás, 2018), Quién lo impide (Jonás Trueba, 2021), and Magic Spot (Charlie Roxburgh, 2022). While rooted in very different traditions, what these three films have in common is that, rather than presenting self-contained worlds, their fictions reveal themselves as enactments of the vital function of micro-communities of participants forged over long periods of time. Consequently, their narrations are presented not only as something valuable for the way it shapes the viewer’s gaze in relation to the stories, but also for the very act of its development. In this sense, narration emerges as the result of a performative process. With this in mind, this talk will take a close look at what textual strategies enhance this quality and how this engages with discourses surrounding the binomials of play/work and community/individuality that are often present in performance aesthetics.
About Adrián Sánchez-Martínez:
Adrián Sánchez is a teacher, film critic and PhD student in Communication at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. His work focuses on the relations between cinema and performativity, narratology studies and representations of the city, resulting in academic publications in magazines such as Fotocinema and La Cifra Impar. He has also reviewed films in various media such as the Diari de Barcelona, the Diari del Festival de Sitges and the Filmin blog, as well as lecturing in criticism at La Casa del Cine, giving seminars and regularly teaching on the Origins of Cinema course.