Envisioned in the context of the Black Pushkin discursive strand, this event reflects on and discusses the importance of cinema to histories and theories of decolonisation and to the construction of postcolonial identities, seeking to understand their role and possibility in today’s political and film landscape. It does so through a screening and discussion of the 2003 documentary film Kuxa Kanema, directed by award-winning filmmaker Margarida Cardoso and led by Prof Maite Conde.
The title of Cardoso’s film was the name of a weekly newsreel in Mozambique with which the new post-independent government of Samora Machel regained control over the moving image from Portugal as a conscious act of decolonisation. The newsreel was screened via mobile cinema units throughout the newly independent country, including in rural areas. Using archival images from the newsreel, Cardoso’s film reconstructs and reflects on the revolutionary foundations of Mozambique and on the crucial role that cinema and image-making played in constructing the new space of the postcolonial nation and its peoples. As her film shows, this national history was profoundly international, with armed and cinematic movements relying on the endeavours and assistance of other nations, including the Soviet Union. Kuxa Kanema thus reveals the necessity of the postcolonial not only as a category for the national cinemas of formerly colonised countries, but as a mode of thinking about global systems, including cinema, showing the imbrication of the postcolonial, the national and the worldly.
The collapse of socialism put an end to the revolutionary spirit of Mozambique and a new media landscape has made the production of its cinema anachronistic. While Cardoso’s contemporary film reveals this, however, it also retrieves and recirculates the physical and material traces of Kuxa Kanema in ways that reanimate its presence for contemporary viewers, presenting us with a dreamworld of the cinematic and political past. Borrowed from Walter Benjamín, the notion of a dreamworld is a poetic description of a collective mental state and an analytical concept central to the politics of modernity as the re-enchantment of the world. The term acknowledges the inherent transience of modernity, whose constant changing opens up hope for a better future. The dreamworld, then, is not for the past but for a vision of the future that has become obsolete.
What is at stake, cinematically and politically, in Kuxa Kanema’s afterimages of the revolution? Can its reanimation of the past provide us with a cinematic and political constellation for reanimating political cinema today? Reflecting on these questions through a reading of Cardoso’s compilation film, this talk will engage with notions of decolonial filmmaking, examining how Cardoso’s retrieval of a cinematic past forges a film based on a dialectics of the old and the new, of life and death. Can this dialectic produce new and innovative ways of thinking about the relationship between cinema and the political today, and not just for Mozambique?
ABOUT THE Speaker
Maite Conde is Professor of Brazilian Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. She has previously taught at King’s College, London, Columbia University, New York and the University of California, Los Angeles. Maite is the author of Foundational Films, Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil (2012) and Consuming Visions, Cinema, Writing and Modernity in Rio de Janeiro (2018). She is the editor of Manifesting Democracy? Urban Protests and the Politics of Representation in Brazil 2013 (2022), Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes: On Brazil and Global Cinema (2018) and Between Conformity and Resistance: Essays on Politics, Culture and the State by Marilena Chauí (2011).