Porto Summer School on Art & Cinema

The Porto Summer School on Art & Cinema — organised by the School of Arts and the Centre for Research in Science and Technology of the Arts of Universidade Católica Portuguesa — is an advanced course on new practices in cinema and the visual arts, combining critical thinking and contact with creators of contemporary cinema and art. The 2025 edition has the theme of Technology/Transformation, looking at the experimental practices that shaped the avant-gardes of the 1960s-1980s in the contemporary context. In addition to daily workshops, the Summer School includes a public programme made up of film screenings, conferences and exhibitions. Batalha is hosting one of these screenings, presenting a selection of short films by Deborah Stratman — one of the most fascinating authors of contemporary experimental cinema — followed by a conversation with the filmmaker:

Hacked Circuit
2014, 15 min.
A single-shot, choreographed portrait of the Foley process, revealing multiple layers of fabrication and imposition. The circular camera path moves us inside and back out of a Foley stage in Burbank, CA. While portraying sound artists at work, typically invisible support mechanisms of filmmaking are exposed, as are, by extension and quotation, governmental violations of individual privacy.
The scene being foleyed is the final sequence from The Conversation where Gene Hackman's character Harry Caul tears apart his room searching for a 'bug' that he suspects has been covertly planted. The look of Caul's apartment as he tears it apart mirrors the visual chaos of the Foley stage. This mirroring is also evident in the dual portraits of sonic espionage expert Caul and Foley artist Gregg Barbanell, for whom professionalism is marked by an invisibility of craft. And in the doubling produced by Hackman's second appearance as a surveillance hack, twenty-four years later in Enemy of the State.
These filmic quotations ground Hacked Circuit, evoking paranoia, and a sense of conviction alongside a lack of certainty about what is visible. The complication of the seen, the known, the heard and the undetectable provides thematic parallels between the stagecraft of Foley and a pervasive climate of government surveillance.

Last Things
16 mm, 2023, 50 min.
Evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks and various future others. The geo-biosphere is introduced as a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures.

More information at artes.ucp.pt

Free entrance upon ticket pickup on the same day. Limited to two tickets per person.