Introduction

PPGCine – Graduate Program in Film and Audiovisual focuses on the theories and analyses that articulate different approaches regarding film and audiovisual, emphasizing the cultural, political, subjective, technological, and experimental processes that constitute these fields. In this sense, the universe of image and sound presents itself as a problematization arena that allows for investigations of aesthetic, media, economic, historical, narrative, pedagogical and technological contributions.

Approved by Capes in 2017, at master’s and PhD levels, PPGCINE reflects a maturation of the research field related to cinema and audiovisual tied to the area of communication, a scenario dating back to a 50-year tradition, since the first undergraduate studies in film was established in Rio de Janeiro from the inauguration of the Cine Arte UFF on September 12, 1968, embryo of UFF’s Undergraduate Program in Film and its Institute of Art and Social Communication (IACS).

By investigating the context of Brazilian theoretical production, we observe that the Euro-American tradition of film studies ended up being translated into two key terms that, ultimately, reflect broad theoretical and methodological approaches: the understandings of film and audiovisual as experience and as discourse. To reflect this general context, PPGCine is structured in two lines of research: one entitled Narratives and Aesthetics, seeking to understand film and audiovisual based on its materiality and aesthetics; and the other, History and Politics, which contemplates the interfaces between film and audiovisual with history, politics and education.

Thus, PPGCine promotes research from discussions about the centrality of audiovisual culture and by understanding that film and audiovisual are matrices for building communicative experiences and producing knowledge and meaning. This complexification of image and sound from its technological references, devices, forms of use and production, shows the central role audiovisual has in producing societal life, subjective processes and in shaping culture. In the field more linked to the arts, the notion of an “expanded cinema” surpasses the dimension of the traditional form of audiovisual production and consumption (narrative films with collective screening), pointing to new spectatorship devices and practices, with strong political-subjective implications.