Sawyer Seminar Session Number One: National Culture and Post-Colonial Subjectivity
The imperative to form new national cultures and subjectivities out of the transition from the colonial to the post-colonial order inform the most formally and politically inventive films screened at the Sawyer: Mueda, memória e massacre and Afrique, je te plumeai. Mueda, memória e massacre, which was produced by Mozambique’s National Institute of Cinema, shows how alternative forms of filmmaking may develop in a newly formed nation lacking the cinematic histories that nations such as India possessed. On June 16, 1960 Portuguese troops massacred protestors gathering outside the police station in the village of Mueda in northern Mozambique. The event galvanized the Mozambican people in their struggle for liberation, a guerilla war that would last until independence was achieved in 1975. A vital feature of Mozambique’s anti-colonial imaginary, one that activist and scholar Prexy Nesbitt claimed was akin to the Sharpeville massacre that occurred three months earlier in South Africa, it was, until recently, re-enacted annually by survivors and current inhabitants on the original site. Performers play not only the role of victims, but perpetrators as well.
Mueda, memória e massacre depicts one such re-enactment, intercutting this extraordinary form of political remembrance with interviews with survivors. Director Ruy Guerra was one of the most celebrated political filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s. Born in Mozambique and raised in Brazil, he also spent a considerable amount of time in France, where he studied filmmaking and collaborated with key figures of the French New Wave, including Chris Marker, Alain Resnis, Agnès Varda, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s he was a pillar, along with Glauber Rocha, of Brazil’s Cinema Novo. In 1963, he released his second film, Os Fuzis (The Guns), a landmark contribution to international political cinema that the famed French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma hailed as one of the decade’s finest. Guerra’s cinematic teeth were thus cut in the context of international art cinema as opposed to colonial documentary institutions and informed his cinematic practice’s modernist politics.
Mueda, memória e massacre’s mission to visualize the re-enactment contributes to the formation of national culture by emphasizing the multiple and competing temporalities essential to the expanded subjectivity highlighted by Jaikumar. The film’s deceptively simple structure—the seemingly unmediated recording of that year’s re-enactment combined with interviews that comment upon it—shows how recursive and public displays of performance participate in the formation of a new body politic. “Not a holiday,” describes one of the interviewees, “but a day of remembrance and morals.” In fact, this emphasis on the morality of remembrance points to the nested temporalities evident in the film’s mise-en-scène as well as its montage. The re-enactment and interviews demonstrate how the past weighs upon the present. Moreover, the interviews, which break up the action and thus impede its continuous flow in a manner akin to Brecht, articulate the impossibility of accessing that past without the mediating influence of memory and testimony. At first blush, the recording of a re-enactment seems the perverse ossification of a living cultural practice. A second glance, however, reveals the performance to be a palimpsest, the imbrication of the past with the present and thus the future. Guerra emphasizes the film’s generative futurity during the credits, which he repeatedly interrupts to show footage of the re-enactment’s remaining participants milling about the public square. Frustrating closure, Mueda, memória e massacre generates in its form the very horizons of social experience necessary for new national imaginaries to come into existence.
Teno races through decades of Cameroon’s history, shuttling from the past through the present at dizzying speed in order to give shape to a Chinese proverb he quotes, with his own voice, over the soundtrack. “If a country has no past,” he tells us, “it has no present, and thus no future.” While Teno gestures towards the more general demands of working through multiple histories when building political consciousness, his film’s substance lies ultimately in his own subjectivity and its emergence from his encounter with the cinema. After the screening, Teno described the greatest difficulty he experienced as a filmmaker lay in his ability to say “I.” How, for example, if the cinema was marshaled by the colonial mission to subjugate peoples, could it likewise be a source of liberation? What types of non-hegemonic filmmaking practices and discourses could be arranged to speak truth to power? For the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze “the question of the I” was central to the anti-colonial consolidation of “a people.” And Teno’s practice tentatively suggests that a filmmaker may, in fact, stand as a metonym for the nation and its people as they come into historical existence. By placing different, and well-established, types of images, styles, and histories in conflict on-screen, he not only undoes the totalizing effects of normative documentary cinema and the tyranny of its “voice-of-god,” but also provides a cinematic framework of intersubjective exchange for filmmaker and audience alike. “To take the spectator on a journey,” as Teno claimed, into what I take to be their own subjectivity and thus historical consciousness is, in the end, one way to break free of the post/colonial impasse and politicize a cinema that once only affirmed the geopolitical world order.
Note:
Indiana University has a streaming license for Afrique, je te plumerai.
Anyone with an Indiana University login can watch the film or, if they're using a computer on campus, it'll load automatically.
Permalink: https://indiana.kanopystreaming.com/video/afrique-je-te-plumerai-africa-i-will-fleece-you
(Photos by Alexandra Cotofana)
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