Journal of African Cinemas - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2012

During the armed struggle and the revolution that followed independence in Mozambique, film-making was understood as operating on the 'cultural front' of an international struggle against capitalist imperialism. Shortly after independence in 1975, FRELIMO established an Instituto Nacional de Cinema (the INC), and Maputo became a key site in a network of African liberationist film-making that had been emerging since the late 1960s. In a country in which most of the population had no prior experience of the moving image, cinema offered FRELIMO the possibility of mobilizing around a new identity based on revolutionary nationalism, and teaching the Mozambican people about how the radical transformations of decolonization connected them to other peoples struggling for emancipation across the world. This article explores how the moving image operated during the Mozambican revolution as an agent of social change, and how this involved decolonizing film-making itself – in all its modes of production, distribution and screening.

In the offices of the Ebano film production house there is a black and white photograph. It shows a circle of young men, some with cameras, standing and kneeling for a group portrait. I recognize Licnio Azevedo, Camillo de Sousa and Joao Costa among them. The caption, in type-writer print, reads: 'Angola (Cahama) – Setembro 1981'. I ask Camillo about the photograph. He tells me how he, Licínio and Funcho came to be in Angola. They went at the time of the South African invasion and spent several weeks in trenches under fire working with the film-makers in the photograph to make Cinco Tiros de Mauser. Camillo points to them one by one: 'That one, Carlos Henriques, he died. Funcho made Pamberè ne Zimbabwe with him – the first Southern African film made without foreign support. We wanted to show that it was the same fight we were involved with together against Apartheid. This is something important that you should know. Our struggle wasn't about nationalism. It may sound strange these days, but their struggle was our struggle too.

The subject of this article is the monthly documentary series, Kuxa Kanema (birth of the image) produced in Mozambique from 1978 to 1986. The series recorded the blind optimism that follows the parturition of a nation, articulates cinematographic formal invention, and documents the decline of Mozambique into civil war. It essentially traces the birth and death of a fledgling socialist democracy and the similar rise and fall of cinema itself in that country. It is noteworthy that the National Institute of Cinema was created just five months after the independence of Mozambique in 1975, the government quickly mobilizing the power of the moving image in propagating its ideological message. As Kuxa Kanema was produced by the aforementioned state institute, it brandishes the trappings of being an official propaganda vector but its desire to allow the Mozambican people reappropriate their image helps it overcome these limitations as does its aesthetic originality.

In this article we propose a rereading of experiments in ideological and aesthetic engagement conducted by European and Latin-American film-makers in a bid to establish a post-colonial cinema in Mozambique. In order to do this we shall begin by locating this cinematographic 'Third Worldism' within the global context of ideas, utopias, and militant idealism that configured the ethics and aesthetics of the 'cinema-action' in vogue during the 1960s and 1970s. Next, we will discuss the vicissitudes and certain disenchantments that marked the participation of these European and Latin-American film-makers in this Mozambican adventure, hoping, by so doing, to evince the limits and contradictions of anti-colonialism and Third Worldism within the cinematographic field in general.

African cities have received filmic representation by politically engaged film-makers to discuss historical, political and social impacts on the different countries' populations. Similarly, certain Angolan post-civil war film-makers have set stories in an urban space to depict the consequences of over four decades of wars (1961-2002) in the country. This article therefore focuses on two films produced after 2002 and set in the capital Luanda to analyze such portrayals of Angola. It does this by conducting a close reading of passages from both films while incorporating studies about Angola's wars. The aims are to identify the ways in which the films hint at political and social issues in the country during two relatively peaceful periods and account for the difficulties Angolan civilians experienced because of the wars. The article concludes by commenting on the films' criticism of the country's current situation and the alternatives they suggest for Angolans to reconstruct their lives.

This article uses a reading of Zézé Gamboa's award-winning 2004 feature as a basis for an exploration of post-conflict Angolan screen culture and of its impact both at home and internationally. It considers how O Heri's depiction of a war-torn nation, and of the impediments to its reconstruction, negotiates between a socially-engaged film-making practice, informed by local tradition and the tenets of 'Third Cinema', and the demands of a globalised cinema market. The film achieves this compromise by deploying allegorical and symbolic tropes, familiar from the literature, cinema, and political discourse of the era of Angolan liberation (notably, the concept of a socialist 'new man'), to complicate a superficially optimistic story of post-conflict rehabilitation, and to insinuate a critique of the authoritarian practices and neo-liberal policies of the MPLA government. Further to this, the article identifies strategies through which the film advertises the gulf between its fiction of individual triumph over adversity and, on the other hand, the grimmer reality of Angola's post-conflict malaise. Finally, it considers how the film's construction of an encrypted allegory also prompts the question of whether or not film production that depends upon the funding and agendas of international capital and neo-colonial powers can ever foster the resurgence of a genuinely 'popular' and progressive culture in post-conflict Angola.

In the sequence of its adhesion to the European Community in 1986 and in search for a place in an increasingly globalized film market, Portugal established a vast amount of transnational cinematographic partnerships with the Luso-African countries Cape Verde, Mozambique, Angola and Guinea Bissau. The partnerships, which have resulted in twenty co-productions so far, have also had a profound meaning for the discussion of colonialism and post-colonialism that cannot be overemphasized. Since the aim of this article is to give a general overview of the Luso-African feature film landscape, it discusses the films in a resumed fashion within the context of the four co-producing PALOP (Países de Língua Oficial Portuguesa – Countries with Portuguese as Official Language). According to my understanding of transnationality as ambivalent, I will try to comprehend how the co-productions negotiate the elements of national and transnational identity. Are they capable of holding the post-colonial tensions? Are new and multilateral perspectives that confront outdated discourses the exception or the rule?