The Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars: Natacha Gallucci

June’s Film-Phil Lisbon Seminar will be led by Natacha Gallucci (Federal University of Alagoas), who will talk about “Cinema and Death in Latin American Perspective — Phase I: 1960–1980”. This will be a hybrid session and will be held on 2 June 2026 at 16:00 WEST, in room B203 at NOVA FCSH (Berna Campus), and on Microsoft Teams. To receive information about joining the meeting online, it’s mandatory to register in advance here.

Abstract

In this first phase of the research project Cinema and Death in Latin American Perspective, a film corpus from the 1960s to the 1980s is approached philosophically as a space for the aesthetic elaboration of colonial trauma, in which film practices configure regimes of temporality traversed by ancestral thought. Rodolfo Kusch’s notions of “being” (estar) in America, “negation,” “fagocitation,” “seminality,” and “geoculture” are mobilized as conceptual operators for analyzing filmography as a collective and situated experience of the ritualization of death. The film corpus — bringing together works by Gabriel Figueroa, René Mugica, Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Jorge Sanjinés, Raymundo Gleyzer, Leonardo Favio, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and Fernando Solanas — is traversed by narratives of drought in the sertão, Andean popular festivities, mestizo corporealities, prayers, werewolves, and political allegories whose imagetic regimes destabilize temporality through encounters with a past that becomes autonomous from action. Temporal suspension, trance states, Amerindian cosmology, processions, the return of the absent, and zones of indiscernibility are approached through a method of film cartography of the body-archives of popular culture from three perspectives: on-stage (scenic emulation), back-stage (transmission of knowledge), and off-stage (ritualization experience), in dialogue with formal theoretical approaches concerning the structural insufficiency of the Western cinematic image and the constitutive lack of the image.

Bio

Natacha Muriel López Gallucci is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Federal University of Alagoas (PPGFIL/UFAL), Brazil, and leader of the research group Filomove: Philosophy, Arts, and Aesthetics of Latin America (CNPq). Her work brings together philosophy, cinema, psychoanalysis, literature, artistic creative processes, and contemporary aesthetics, with research focused on Walter Benjamin, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Rodolfo Kusch, and Latin American cinema. She has published in international journals such as Educar em Revista, Vivomatografias, Revista Nupeart, Extraprensa, Revista Pensando, the Brazilian Journal of Dance Studies, Lampião, and Antígona: Journal of Psychoanalysis. She is the organiser of the series Estamos aqui: debates afrolatino-americanos em perspectiva Brasil/Argentina (vols. 1 and 2), dedicated to contemporary debates on Afro-Latin American, performance philosophy and the arts. She has also organised the dossier Archive, Memory, and Performance for Lampião and the dossier Cariri(s) for Vazantes.