Aesthetic Authenticity in Cinema

From the introduction: “All art seeks some kind of authenticity or “truth”. We can recognize it in fiction or documentary, in painting or photography, in the abstract or the figurative. Authenticity can be pointed out in the immediacy of the senses or in the honesty of a purely conceptual proposal; it can emanate from the aura of the singular object or prevail in the multiple and the ephemeral; it can relate to objective exteriority or appeal to a phenomenological interiority (or even install itself on the perceptive threshold between exterior and interior, as in Impressionism); It can be mimetic, the result of a technical effort of meticulous recreation, or, on the contrary, it can invest in the opposite of technique and structuring, praising the artist’s chaos, randomness or passivity, so that the raw virginity of the real is not corrupted.
Authenticity appears to be involved in aesthetic fruition in different ways, forming one of the axiological pillars of the artistic field, regardless of the historical regime in which one addresses it. But art’s implicit contract with authenticity is in stark contrast to the polysemy of the latter concept. How to describe this authenticity in its transversality to the most diverse forms of artistic expression? How does it operate in the process of validating the different poetics? How does it manifest itself throughout different historical regimes and what resists over the successive paradigmatic revolutions in the art world? What is the properly aesthetic authenticity?”

CONTENTS

Introduction to Aesthetic Authenticity in Cinema
Filipe Martins

From Authenticity to Authentication:
cinaesthetics and auteurship in the age of AI
David LaRocca

The Construction of Chance in Cinema: contingency figures
Filipe Martins

Film Poetics of Authenticity: between fact and fiction, document and aesthetic experience
Susana Nascimento Duarte

Allocution: an inverted wager
Peter Freund

ABC: Aesthetics→Cinema: Adorno/Akerman; Baudelaire/Benjamin; cinema/cooking
Paula Rabinowitz

Os Verdes Anos: bridging the visible and the legible in cinema
Maria Augusta Babo

Genuine Poetics: expressive authenticity in film
Sérgio Dias Branco

“Permafrost (Barentsburg)”: fiction as counter-memory
Fernando José Pereira

Lying with Truth: anthropological quests for authenticity when making sense of the Other in film
Humberto Martins

Visibility of Gestures: from filmic to computational logics
Christa Blumlinger

Bio-bibliographic Notes