Close Up On the Colony - Inside History Through the Camera Lens; Wide Screen 1.1 (2009) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Writing the Nation Beyond Resistance: Portuguese Film and the Colonial War
La Révolution des Œillets (avril 197 4), période charnière fondamentale de l’Histoire du Portugal, marque la fin d’une longue dictature et d’une douloureuse guerre coloniale. Cet événement historique déclenche un processus complexe, celui d’une reconfiguration de l’identité nationale qui s’appuie sur une révision de la mémoire collective officielle. Ainsi peut on remarquer plus de trente années après la fin du conflit, la persistance d’une réticence, ou devrait-on dire d’une résistance, à l’idée même d’évoquer les faits et les événements liés à la guerre coloniale. Cette résistance étant plus particulièrement perceptible dans la littérature et au cinéma, cette étude se penchera sur deux films majeurs : Non, ou la vaine gloire de commander (Non, ou a Vã Glória de Mandar) (1990), de Manoel de Oliveira, et Le Rivage des murmures (A Costa dos Murmúrios) (2004), de Margarida Cardoso — qui proposent une réflexion sur les questions de race, de genre, de classe et d’idéologie qui ont marqué l’agenda colonial, une réflexion qui alimente toujours le débat postcolonial portugais (tant sur les plans politiques, sociaux ou culturels), incapable de se délivrer de ces fantômes impériaux, qui hantent toujours le peuple portugais et qui invalident les rapports pouvant exister envers l’Autre.
Violence and the wretched: The Cinema of Gillo Pontecorvo
THE ITALIANIST (FILM ISSUE), 2009
The multimodal and dialogic resources of cinema make it a privileged means of experiencing the complex modalities of violent conflict in the modern world. In this sense we can say that the cinema of the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo offers an invaluable resource: the central role of mediatic depiction in the process of defining political action as legitimate or illegitimate insists we pay close attention to the work of a filmmaker who evinces a consistent and evolving concern with the nature and representation of political violence. (I'm embarrassed about this article now: the auteurist approach seems to me unreflective, and the piece recycles some cliches and errors, since pointed out by other more attentive scholars. But it represents a stage in thinking that achieved better results in my 2019 monograph on the film.)
NO FUTURE: The Colonial Gaze, Tales of Return in Recent Latin American Film
Humanities , 2022
The past is certain, the future an illusion. Contemporary films such as Ivy Maraey: land without evil (Juan Carlos Valdivia 2013), Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra 2015), The Fever (Maya Da Rin 2020), and Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles 2020) are border films, from the genre of contact films. They announce how coloniality maintains a grip on frontier territories in the Americas. These films also present particular indigenous visions that challenge western epistemes and confront audiences with particular ways of being in the world, where the modern subject finds its limit. The article introduces a critical perspective on cinema as a colonial tool, producing forms of capture that are part of the modern archive and the notion of linear time. These films also build on cinematic traditions such as tercer cine and afro-futurism, and are strong on concepts such as cosmopolitanism, resistance, and subalternity. They present forms of adaptation, reaction, return, and redemption while maintaining the status of cinema as a capturing device, entertainment, and capital investment (the triad of destruction in modernity/coloniality).
Drawing on philosophy in film (Deleuze, Carroll), and on emotional engagement theory (Panksepp, Plantinga), this article compares three different sensory landscapes of dictatorship in film: Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and Luis Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (2005). Although the three films deploy diverse aesthetic modes—Expressionism-Noir (Lang), Psychological-Realism (Llosa), and Gothic (del Toro)—they mutually reveal the existence of an ethics of resistance and insurgency during historical periods of oppressive rule. Tendo como perspectivas de análise a teoria da emoção (Panksepp, Plantinga) e estudos da filosofia no cinema (Deleuze, Carroll), este artigo compara três paisagens fílmicas da ditadura: O Testamento do Dr. Mabuse de Fritz Lang (1933), A Espinha do Diabo de Guillermo del Toro (2001), e A Festa do Bode de Luis Llosa (2005), revelando como através de modos estéticos distintos—Expressionismo Noir (Lang), Realismo Psicológico (Llosa) e Goticismo (del Toro)—os três filmes revelam uma ética semelhante, de resistência e insurgência, aos regimes de opressão a que se reportam.
The Vanishing Native: Torture and Settler Colonialism in Transnational French Cinema
Cultural Politics (2020) 16 (1): 24–43., 2020
The thematic foci of the Franco-Algerian war films of decolonization have shifted in the last few decades from evoking triumphalist discourses and redemptive fictional narratives to producing powerful transnational antiwar stories. While being critical of the violent history of colonization, defying earlier French governments' oppressive forms of censorship, and addressing the history of colonial barbarity in Algeria, many French documentarians and filmmakers have skillfully used moving images to critique and expose colonial transgressions. In their efforts to reimagine the horrors of violent encounters between the French army and Algerian guerilla fighters, their narratives cover daring eye-witness accounts of war crimes, including acts of torture at times described by the perpetrators themselves while catering to the expectations of a global audience. Florent Emilio Siri's L'ennemi intime (2007) and David Oelhoffen's Far from Men (2014) are among these transnational productions that accomplish both tasks. In the stories told by the two films, the plots show evidence of a fundamental thematic transformation in filmic representations that collapses the differences between colonizer and colonized, situating both as victims of colonization. The article argues that even though both films consistently reproduce the conventional portrait of the colonized as weak, passive, and deeply reliant on French guidance, Far from Men introduces the myth of the vanishing native, a theme that helps legitimize and normalize the settler's "right" to occupy the colonized space.
FULLTEXT http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-0-347156 The essay analyses Estas são as armas (1978), the first full-length documentary produced by the Instituto Nacional de Cinema (INC) in Mozambique. In a first step, the text provides background information regarding film productions in and about Mozambique as well as its historical frame considering both the colonial and postcolonial period. Then, the essay discusses the interplay between voice and image with regard to documentary films. The contextualization and theoretical reflection is followed by an in-depth study of Estas são as armas. By scrutinizing the different ways of dealing with archival material it becomes possible to reflect upon filmic memory politics and their relation to a historical master narrative developed by Frelimo as well as to shed light on the cultural dimensions of decolonization.