Last Friday, Cineclube Maia were once again kind enough to collaborate with us in hosting the second and last session of our "Non-Places in Hitchcock" cinema cycle, for which we owe them a big "thank you". We also appreciate and thank every single cinephile who came and sat with us in watching this classic Hitchcock masterpiece!
This session constituted - just as the last one did - an exercise in the outreach of university activities, bringing these cultural initiatives outside of the environment of academia and reaching a wider, more diverse audience.
Once again, our thematic matrix was the concept of non-places, and this time we were fortunate enough to get the incredibly influential author, journalist and film critic Mário Augusto as a speaker, who we would also very much like to thank for his participation.
What Mário Augusto explained in his introduction, as an expert in film and the process of filmmaking, is that the art of filmmaking itself constitutes the construction of a non-place: filmmakers build these spaces through which we are only allowed to travel for a couple of hours at a time. In that way, we are all transient entities in the theater, letting go of our 'selves' and being absorbed by the narratives, sounds and visuals of this piece of art.
We are in that way similar to the protagonist of Hitchcocks famed spy thriller: he is always moving, never dwelling on a place for too long, spending a great chunk of the narrative in roads, trains and hotels.
For those who did not get the opportunity of attending our sessions, do not despair, for we are not done! We have more tricks up our sleeves for cinephiles. Stay tuned for future JRAAS cinema cycles!