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News: Artists in Residence

Current Artists-in-Residence


There are no current Artist-in-Residence at this time.

Please see the links below for information on past Artists-in-Residence and Lecturers

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Writer-in-Residence Spring 2008: Ruy Duarte de Carvalho

Regents' Lecturer Spring 2008: Pedro Costa


Ruy Duarte de Carvalho


Writer in Residence – Spring 2008

April 7th - May 3rd

Ruy Duarte de Carvalho

Sponsor: Portuguese Studies Program

Co-sponsors: Spanish and Portuguese Department and Instituto Camões

Ruy Duarte de Carvalho was born in Santarém, Portugal, in 1941. He grew up in the south of Angola, where he accompanied his father – adventurer and elephant hunter – on trips through the Namibian desert. He later studied cinematography in London and anthropology at the École des Hautes Études (Sciences Sociales) in Paris. Having returned to Angola, he worked as a sheep farmer and studied traditional oral poetry in various African languages. He also devoted himself to studying, photographing and filming the desert peoples of his country and their traditions. At present he is a professor at the University of Luanda. He is also active as an anthropologist, prose writer, filmmaker, photographer, researcher and painter, but is best known as a poet. He is considered not only to be Angola’s most prestigious poet but also one of the most important poets of the Portuguese language area, on a par with, for example, the Brazilian Ferreira Gullar or the Portuguese Nuno Júdice – both old acquaintances of Poetry.

August Willemsen  (Translated by Martin Earl)

Some Publications:

Chão de oferta (1972); Decisão de idade (1976); Exercícios de crueldade (1978); Sinais misteriosos… Já se vê…(1979); Ondula, savana branca (1982); Lavra paralela (1987); Hábito da terra (1988); Memória de tanta guerra (1992, anthology); Ordem de esquecimento (1997); Observação Directa (2000); Actas da Maianga (2003); Vou lá Visitar Pastores (1999); Os papéis do Inglês (2000); as paisagens propícias (2005).

A rare multiplicity of texts is intertwined in Ruy Duarte de Carvalho’s work, in each one of his books. Hence, this fiction author - who is also ethnographer, anthropologist, and essayist – brings the cinematographic and photographic imagination to his work: as an ethnographer, the auto-reflexivity of an essayist is mingled with the analysis and the description’s accuracy; as a photographer or as a film director, it is also present the density of the written text, and the agronomist’s attention to the geographical and human landscapes; also, in his whole work, the poet is always present, in an incessant quest “ for the adaptation of the word to the experience’s condition”, exploring deliberately “the semantic flesh of the words”.

A new book by Ruy Duarte de Carvalho was just released (Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisboa, February 2008), focusing on cinema and on its connexions to literature and to anthropology.

José António B. Fernandes Dias (adapt.)

Events in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese

(Open to all interested)

April

Professor Ruy Duarte de Carvalho will have an office in the Spanish and Portuguese Department. Please check his office hours in Dwinelle 5219.


Pedro Costa

Pedro Costa is an artist in residence at UC Berkeley - Department of Spanish & Portuguese, March 1 through 9, and presents the Regents’ Lecture at PFA on March 9.

Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa

“I think that Costa is genuinely great.”—Jacques Rivette

Acclaimed in Artforum, Cahiers du cinéma, Film Comment, and Cinema Scope, the Portuguese director Pedro Costa is possibly the most intriguing, relevant filmmaker at work today, captivating viewers with his spare, austere aesthetic, willful ambiguity, and combination of documentary, avant-garde, and fiction. While his slow-burn, trancelike style is wholly his own, Costa’s earthy portraits of the immigrant and marginalized communities of Lisbon’s slums have emerged from a recognizable, classic narrative background of Ford, Lang, Ozu, and Chaplin, touched with the more modernist palette of Straub-Huillet and Béla Tarr.

Born in Lisbon in 1959, the former rock guitarist Costa entered the then nascent Lisbon Film School in 1977, existing on a steady diet of cinema classics and contemporary criticism that were soon channeled into his astounding debut film, The Blood. His later features, especially his Fontaínhas neighborhood trilogy, abandoned the hectic cineaste’s dazzle of The Blood for a nuanced, intimate, rigorous aesthetic of observation and poetic interludes, marked by Vermeer-like domestic tableaux and a compassionate attention to his dispossessed, forgotten characters. Costa’s method, shooting over extended periods and working with non-actors “playing” fictional versions of themselves, adds an intimacy unprecedented in either fiction or documentary. “Few movies,” wrote Dennis Lim in the New York Times, “are as concretely rooted in physical reality or as profoundly attentive to their social context as Mr. Costa’s. Staking out a radical middle between documentary and fiction, he has invented a heroic and quite literal form of arte povera, a monumental cinema of humble means.”

Jason Sanders
Associate Film Notes Writer  

The Pedro Costa retrospective was organized by Ricardo Matos Cabo, Lisbon, and is coordinated at PFA by Kathy Geritz. Pedro Costa’s Regents’ Lectureship at UC Berkeley is sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. We are grateful to the following institutions and individuals for making this series possible: Cinemateca Portuguesa-Museu do Cinema, Instituto do Cinema e Audiovisual (ICA), Ministério da Cultura; Instituto Camões - Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros; Portuguese Studies Program/Institute of European Studies, UC Berkeley;Lusomundo Audiovisuais, and Midas Filmes, Portugal; Thom Andersen; João Bénard da Costa; Haden Guest; and James Quandt.


Mr. Pedro Costa
2007-08 Regents' Lecturer

Schedule of Events

Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Student Sessions with Mr. Pedro Costa

Monday, March 3, 6:30pm
Spanish & Portuguese Library
5125 Dwinelle Hall, UCB

Friday March 7, 2:00pm
Spanish & Portuguese Library
142  Dwinelle Hall, UCB

Film Presentations and Public Lecture

Pacific Film Archive Theater
Location:  2575 Bancroft Way, Berkeley

Saturday, March 1, 2008 
6:30 p.m.Colossal Youth
Widely acclaimed as one of the best films of 2006, this experimental docu-fiction captures life in a Cape Verdean neighborhood of Lisbon. “A work of cinematic art.”—N.Y. Times.

Sunday, March 2, 2008
3:00 p.m.The Blood
Two young boys flee through nocturnal Portugal in this shimmering tribute to ’50s noir.

Sunday, March 2, 2008
5:30 p.m.Bones
Costa’s austere portrait of Lisbon’s junkies, schemers, and dreamers. “Out-Bressons Bresson.”—Cinematheque Ontario. With short Ne change rien.

Thursday, March 6, 2008
6:00 p.m.Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?
This documentary on legendary filmmaking duo Straub/Huillet is “quite simply a masterpiece.”—Senses of Cinema.

Thursday, March 6, 2008
8:45 p.m.Sicilia!
Straub/Huillet’s adaptation of the notorious political novel Conversations in Sicily. “See Sicilia! And live again!”—Libération. With Costa short 6 Bagatelas.

Saturday, March 8, 2008
7:00 p.m.In Vanda’s Room
Vermeer-like, becalmed portrait of twilight Lisbon. “A standard by which to judge humanist cinema.”—Cinematheque Ontario.

Sunday, March 9, 2008
3:00 p.m. University of California, Regents’ Lecture by Pedro Costa (Admission Free!)
Costa discusses his remarkable films that mix documentary and fictional elements, focusing on his Fontaínhas trilogy.

Sunday, March 9, 2008
5:00 p.m.Down to Earth
Costa’s politicized reimagining of Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie. With short Tarrafal.