Filmic Mediations of Gender and the Archive in Contemporary Portuguese Film

Abstract: 

This paper discusses representations of women during Salazar’s New State in Susana Sousa Dias’s filmography. Departing from a diversity of archival materials, public and private memories, this paper will examine how the filmmaker explores the epistemological gaps of the archive to reflect on how the latter, besides unveiling the intricate processes of ideological manipulation that illustrate the violence of the archive and its disciplinary power (Foucault 1972; Derrida 1995), interrogate cinema as a privileged means of formation, circulation and reconfiguration of cultural memory.