Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

(Re)imagining African Independence: Film, Visual Arts and the Fall of the Portuguese Empire by Maria do Carmo Piçarra and Teresa Castro

2018; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/port.2018.0011

2222-4270

Emanuelle Santos,

African history and culture studies

Reviews 241 Maria do Carmo Piçarra and Teresa Castro (editors), (Re)imagining African Independence: Film, Visual Arts and the Fall of the Portuguese Empire (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017). 287 pages. Print and e-book. Reviewed by Emanuelle Santos, University of Birmingham This edited volume certainly constitutes an important contribution to the studies of film, image and visual arts concerned with state propaganda during the Portuguese Estado Novo, the early days of Angolan and Mozambican film and their memory. With a multitalented team of contributors whose work often involves more than one area in the production and circulation of images, this book conjugates the views of academics, filmmakers, artists and curators. The volume’s numerous perspectives are also reflected in the wide range of angles taken by the different contributors, who are not only capable of competently analysing the specificities of Portuguese colonialism and anti-colonialism of Portuguese-speaking Africa, but who can also place them beyond the ‘lusophone’ confines and within world history, through their currency in the Cold War. The thirteen chapters of the book are divided into the four main parts: ‘The Birth [through images] of African Nations’; ‘The Fall of the Portuguese Empire: Foreign Gazes during the Cold War’; ‘Moving Images, Post-colonial Representations and the Archive’; and ‘Rethinking (Post-)colonial Narratives: Artistic Takes’. The first part of the book is composed of four chapters that focus on different episodes in the initial phase of the history of Angolan and Mozambican film, with special attention to political, material and ideological conditions of production. The analysis addresses the emergence of Angolanness in the film work of Rui Duarte, the film Mueda, memória e massacre by Ruy Guerra, Cuban and French collaborations to filmmaking in Angola, and testimony film. Issues raised include the role played by the tension between state cinema and auteur cinema in both countries, discussions on anthropological film, the relevance of international collaborations in these countries’ filmmaking, and the role of film produced in these circumstances for national memory politics. As is the case with all remaining three sections, the second part of the book is composed of three chapters. In a transition that seems almost organic, the focus on colonial violence that closes the previous section is continued, and Portuguese colonialism and African socialism are seen through the lens of Cold War politics. Through the analysis of investigative documentary, fictional representation and photography, the authors draw attention to both US capitalist and Romanian socialist relations to the colonial project of Portugal and the revolutionary governments of Angola and Mozambique, providing this specific part of the history of the Portuguese-speaking world with a crucial international perspective and enriching the range of the volume as a whole. The essays of the third part of the book explore questions of memory through the analysis of the archive, which is approached in concrete terms in Reviews 242 the intervention by the Director of the Cinemateca Portuguesa, and in artistic terms through the study of art installations and artistic films. The fourth part which closes the volume offers the reader unique artistic perspectives on the demise of Portuguese colonialism and the development of Angola as a postcolonial society through the trails of postmemory. The ease with which each section seems to flow into the next clearly attests to the skilled organization of the many chapters of this volume, which, in a certain way, does what it advocates by conjugating history and archival memory as it counts both on rigorous research work and on first-person artistic accounts. Unfortunately, though, very few of these intentions are explicit in the introduction to the book, whose actual take on the (re)imagination of African independence and its relationship with the fall of the Portuguese empire is rather unclear. The introductory chapter titled ‘Colonial Reflections, Postcolonial Refractions: Film and the Moving Image in the Portuguese (Post-) colonial Situation’ does quite a good job introducing the history of colonial propaganda film during the Portuguese Estado Novo, highlighting the work of some dissident Portuguese filmmakers and quickly introducing the relevance of film to the revolutionary governments of Angola and Mozambique. However, the introductory text struggles to spell out how Portuguese colonial propaganda film...