Carlos Melo Ferreira - As Poéticas do Cinema

First conceived as a scientific and technical invention, cinema quickly evolved into a spectacle and soon became an industry. From its early days, it was also recognized as a unique art form, built upon its own distinct language.

Now, more than a century after its creation—and at the turn of a new century and millennium—it is valuable to reassess its artistic status in an era of major technological transformations in image and sound production. To do so, this study draws on the concept of Poetics, rooted in Aristotle’s philosophy and further developed by Hegel, who examined poetics as both a distinct art form and a criterion for evaluating the artistic nature of other arts. It also takes into account more contemporary interpretations of poetics, particularly those that emerged alongside cinema itself. Additionally, the book questions the very concept of cinema, a particularly relevant inquiry in an age of rapid technological change. It examines how cinematic images fit within a world increasingly dominated by diverse forms of visual media, where the boundaries between different image-based art forms continue to blur.