Suchergebnisse

This article examines Nelisita (Carvalho, 1982), an Olunyaneka-language feature fiction film made in the early years of Angolan cinema, and draws a historiography of its marginal production and ensuing scattered reception. Combining a historical approach to the film's production and circulation, with an ethnographically-driven analysis of its recent screenings at a village sharing an Olunyaneka background, I discuss insights gained from its reception by an audience familiar with the cultural context portrayed on screen. Along with the history of the film's production and circulation, the villagers' engagement with the film sheds light on the evolving politics of cinema in Africa, particularly the complex relationships between popular and film festival audiences, film studies and visual anthropology. I examine shifting continuities and ruptures with regards to the film's intricate social history, and analyse the production and reception of Nelisita as an experiment that highlights differing ways in which films can work as a contact zone. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

In my dissertation I analyze how politics and film interact in Lusophone (i.e., Portuguese- speaking) countries in Europe (Portugal), South America (Brazil) and Africa (Mozambique and Angola) between the 1950s and the 1980s. During this period the countries in question were undergoing significant political changes, and film was an important medium used in the process of transformation. Portugal went from a fascist dictatorship to a democracy in 1974, Angola and Mozambique became independent in 1975, and Brazil became a military dictatorship in 1964. One of the purposes of my study is to explore and contrast the film-related policies in effect under different governments. In the case of Portugal, fascist colonialism used film as a form of propaganda to support its occupation of Mozambique, Angola, Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau. With the 1974 April revolution that ended the dictatorship, film was used to advance the democratic values of the revolution. The previously mentioned African countries, especially Angola and Mozambique, used Third Cinema as a counter-discourse to Portuguese propaganda, showing in a series of documentaries how their struggle for independence was legitimate. In the case of Brazil, directors of Cinema Novo criticized neocolonialism in Brazil; the movement began in the late fifties, but underwent through significant changes when a military coup established a dictatorship that would last until 1985. In spite of the extensive common ground among the diverse Lusophone countries, very few studies have thus far used a transatlantic approach. I start from Gilroy's conception of the Atlantic Ocean as a space of cultural exchange, and from Shu Mei Shih and Fran?oise Lionnet's notion of minor transnationalism to explore such issues.

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 Herói'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.

Abstract: This essay stages a three-way encounter between the 1972 anticolonial film Sambizanga , Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of cinema, and a Fanonian and Afropessimist critique of the human. Directed by the Black Caribbean-French filmmaker Sarah Maldoror (1929–2020), who recently passed away from complications of COVID-19, Sambizanga dramatizes a moment in the Black Angolan revolutionary struggle against Portuguese colonialism. This essay explores how the images of Sambizanga both exemplify key aspects of the modernist time-image, as formulated in Deleuze's two books on cinema (1986, 1989), and simultaneously demonstrate the time-image concept's inadequacy in describing global fundamental aspects of Black film; Sambizanga materializes a problematization of the cinematic image itself, and demands a new kind of movement. This reading of Maldoror's film facilitates an encounter between Deleuze and Afropessimism, pointing toward an antimmanent orientation. By appropriating a Deleuzian approach to cinema—the analysis of images as presentations of movement and time—for Afropessimist ends, the essay extends Frank Wilderson's (2010) critique of progressivist film narrative to indict the most basic material components of cinema. Utilizing Fanon's auto-theorizing on time and space in Black Skin, White Masks (1952/2008) to denaturalize temporal capacity itself and argue for its fundamental anti-Blackness, the essay locates within Sambizanga two related images of Blackness: the image of incoherence and the image of persistence.