Curated by Alexey Artamonov, Denis Ruzaev e Ines Branco Lopez
Confronting the Gaze is born out of the desire to pay tribute to the films that have interrogated the complex and controversial nature of cinematic images while trying to relieve cinema from its hegemonic gaze and embark on the search for new authentic perspectives.
The purpose of this program can be illustrated with the words of Laura Mulvey when she questioned if cinema, in a patriarchal society, was guilty of adhering to male gaze and whether it could be freed from these repressive mechanisms. But her stand on narrative was later confronted with the not so-ironical question made by bell hooks "Are we really to imagine that feminist theorists writing only about images of white women ... do not 'see' the whiteness of the image?", thus introducing black experience through the concept of oppositional gaze.
While the concept of gaze was primarily introduced in film studies through feminist critique, it has continually been explored through different perspectives – those of gender and race, of class and colonial struggle, etc. –, creating the possibility of confronting the gaze’s infinite.
How can we display this complex tangle of perspectives? By organizing a series of double features, the goal is not to simply posit oppositions, but to stimulate a more diverse and ambiguous conversation.
For a detailed description of the programme click here.