My research explores the forms and practices of the cinema in Portugal after the April Revolution of 1974 until the socalled period of political stabilisation/normalisation at the end of the 1970s, and how they can shape a certain memory of history and revolution.

After 40 years of Salazar dictatorship, the April Revolution transformed the political, social and cultural structures in Portugal. For a period of approximately three years, film technicians and directors came together to record a huge amount of film. Free from the restrictions of censorship and inspired by experiences elsewhere (the Soviet Union, France and Latin America, for example), film crews travelled around the country to document revolutionary events - demonstrations, occupations, collective experiences, cooperatives - and showed them to their protagonists in special screening sessions, claiming the extraordinary ability of moving images to permeate and transform people's thoughts and actions.

The first stage of my project entails research at ANIM (Arquivo Nacional de Imagens em Movimento) and the personal archives of directors Rui Simões and Fernando Matos Silva, to identify and collate all the dispersed and missing information on the films produced during that period. The films themselves should highlight similarities and variations in cinema specific to the era - subjects, principles of dramatic and rhetoric construction, miseenscène, treatment of time and space, framing, editing, use of sound - that can be systematised and conceptualised.

This will provide the groundwork for a wider investigation, of the memories constructed by those images and the way these films work on us still, illuminating and playing with connections and conventions about history, ideology and revolution: cinema as an expression of mental processes and thought as image. From this stem other questions: what is the possible political management of those revolutionary images, and to what extent are they supposed to mould mindsets and behaviour?