The meeting of two disciplines doesn't happen when one starts to reflect on the other, but when

one realises that it must solve a problem of its own and with its own means

problem similar to the one posed in another.

Gilles Deleuze, "Le cerveau, c'est l'écran" (Cahiers du Cinema, 1986)

Cinema has always been a variant of the imaginary museum, or a museum without walls, using André Malraux's definition.

In the same way that the visitor to a museum walks around the exhibition contemplating the works of art, the aim of this cycle is to allow the spectator to take a journey through films that are in themselves a walk through the history(s) of art and contaminated by it. Just as we have works that are part of our imaginary museum, we also have films that are part of our imaginary film library.

In his seminal book Ways of Seeing, John Berger states that looking is always an act of choice (...); we don't just look at one thing; we are always looking at the relationship between things and ourselves.

This is a central question that runs through films about art or artists: is it possible, through a film, to redefine the spectator's relationship with the act of seeing a work of art?

In the reflection proposed through this cycle, the film is understood as a machine for organising other arts. This means that, by being connected to things, to materials, to various realities, films can, through this physical connection with reality, enable new conceptual and sensitive discoveries. Luís Buñuel's quote "I expect a film to discover something for me" is well known.

In Portugal, more than 150 films about art and/or artists have been made over a period of just over half a century, with an exponential growth in these films since the 1990s as a result of the democratisation made possible by digital, also in the field of reception. Throughout this cycle, films made about Portuguese artists will be presented in different periods, but also films made at different times in the history of cinema and art by filmmakers from different origins and generations who, although linked by the desire for cinema, have enunciated different ways of thinking about and looking at art. Thus, the films chosen respond in different ways to the problems raised by the transition from the work of art to cinema.

In the various sessions we will try to answer the following questions, among others: How do you portray an artist and their work through cinema? How are the codes of one language translated into another? What is the boundary between fiction and documentary in the approach to artists' work? How does the work of a given artist influence image construction models? Can cinema as a visibility device, as a form that thinks, be a museum without walls?

Ways of Seeing: Histories(s) of art in cinema thus proposes, over the course of a year and a series of film screenings and dialogues with directors, artists, art and film critics, the construction of a way of thinking about images that can reflect, from different cinematographic approaches, on the experimental and ekphrastic dialogues between cinema and art.

The motto for this cycle came from the three films that Manoel de Oliveira made about artists and works of art over the course of half a century: "O Pintor e a Cidade" (1956), "As Pinturas do meu Irmão Júlio" (1965) and "Os Painéis de São Vicente de Fora, Visão Poética" (2010). These films, diverse in their approach to the artistic phenomenon, show how Oliveira admired artists and highlight the relationship between his cinema and painting in terms of both the construction of the shot and the construction of the object. "O Pintor e a Cidade" (The Painter and the City) from 1956 is a major example and a milestone in art films made in Portugal. It was one of the first to address the universe of the arts and to inaugurate a new type of approach in this field, as it has characteristics that distinguish it from other similar films, establishing a number of assumptions that we will find in future great examples of the genre that followed it.

It is my conviction that a film about an artist can arouse the viewer's curiosity about a work and can even provide clues for understanding it, giving them tools for comprehension, but it can never claim to explain a work of art, because it is always an open road to discovery.

- Isabel Gomes