Historias sin argumento. The films of Pere Portabella

Portabella’s work opens a portal to the artistic and political practices of the 1960s and 70s that broke with the past, and to aspects of some of the less-explored periods in the history of Spanish cinema. The films in the programme are presented by critics, historians and filmmakers and the screenings are divided into two sessions. The first is a sort of assembly of films directed by Portabella and other directors like Jean-Luc Godard (Paris, 1930), Ingmar Bergman (Uppsala, 1918 - Fårö, 2007), Jean-Marie Straub (Metz, 1933) and Danièle Huillet (Paris, 1936 - Cholet, 2006), Alexander Kluge (Halberstadt, 1932), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bologna, 1922 - Ostia, 1975) and Glauber Rocha (Vitória da Conquista, 1939 - Río de Janeiro, 1981), while the second presents films produced by Portabella including works by Antonio Maenza (Teruel, 1948-Zaragoza, 1969) and José Luis Guerín (Barcelona, 1960). The programme is guided by various themes including the idea of challenging the forms of illusion in films, the materialism of images, questioning forms of social identity and exploring the processes of viewer identification, the analysis of society and culture through reflections on aesthetic practices, and the status of images, memory, history and politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Historias sin argumento is, in short, an invitation to reflect on the contemporary forms of narrating memory and history through audiovisual practices.