DEMENTIA

THE KNOWLEDGE OF CINEMA, a spectator school, is a series of biweekly screenings that takes place from early fall to early summer, on Saturday mornings (10 a.m.–1 p.m.), at Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira. The films we will be screening will not be announced in advance.

The screenings, intended for an adult audience, will be preceded by a brief introduction and followed by a discussion that is intended to be fruitful and interactive. A handout containing an original text will be distributed at each session.
In collaboration with the Serralves Museum’s Educational Service, this programming series (five screenings) revolves around the theme of DEMENTIA. The films, selected by Regina Guimarães and Saguenail, will take madness as their central theme and explore this realm — as cursed as it is fascinating — but above all populated by beings, words, and gestures that have been marginalized.

Art-house cinema, whether labeled “fiction” or “documentary,” soon discovers that the realm of insanity opens up the possibility of constructing works that escape, circumvent, or question the logics that govern storytelling and the mapping of the world. By exploiting the blurred boundary between mental health and mental illness to broaden its scope of interest and formal resources, cinema pushes back the boundaries of what is possible. Perhaps it is not entirely unreasonable to say that the theme of madness proves liberating at every level of cinematic language. Madness cures the mind of the delusions of normality if we approach it without the burden of prejudice weighing us down.