In its first issue, JACK travelled to the 60s and dedicated its dossier to Paulo Rocha’s seminal work, the film Os Verdes Anos. In its second issue, JACK comes back by moving forward and into the 90s, more specifically into Corte de Cabelo, by Joaquim Sapinho, who, coincidently, was Paulo Rocha’s student and worked as his assistant, in the late 80s. Following the pre-revolutionary decade of the first issue, JACK now moves into the decade subsequent to Portugal’s entry to the EEC, which naturally brought on a new sense of self to the country’s path of democratic reconstruction. Both through the Corte de Cabelo dossier and the ensuing interview with architect Manuel Graça Dias, JACK revisits this period of political, social and cultural regeneration, acknowledging its historical realities and nuances by addressing its representations in film, in architecture and in the increasingly and definitive urban, postmodern culture that was taking shape.

Drawing from a range of diverse disciplinary approaches, JACK looks at how architectural and urban space, real or staged, are fundamental to cinema and the way in which film, in its multiple dimensions, may become a key instrument within the creative process and the perception of architecture. JACK explores this juxtaposition of filmic discourse and architectural design, to propose a spatial reading of film and a filmic take on architecture, crossing and diluting the boundaries between the two. This is, therefore, a journal in which architecture and cinema are never to be taken separately.