Whispers, Bullets and Absent Presences:
Africa in Portuguese Cinema
Paulo Filipe Monteiro
“We do not exist for having existed, nor do we live because we have lived.”
Oliveira Salazar
“A people’s past is never over, it is never completely dispensable.”
Theodore de Bary
This text studies Portuguese films (for cinema, not for TV) related to Africa. It
focuses on the period of New Portuguese Cinema (which started in the sixties), although
it provides an overview of preceding periods. We begin, obviously, during the age of
silent films, in which there was only one cinematic work about this theme, in the form
of animated silhouettes: A Lenda de Miragaia, made in 1931, inspired by the
Romanceiro by Almeida Garrett, about the battles of King Ramiro against a Moorish
ruler.
During the age of sound film, Portuguese fascism, like most other fascisms,
invested little in cinematic fiction and used documentary films for purposes of
propaganda. António Lopes Ribeiro, a filmmaker, created the Jornal Português,
financed directly by the Secretariat for National Propaganda that, from 1938 onwards,
produced more than 500 shorts for propaganda purposes, in which Africa was only
occasionally mentioned. For example: the departure of troops for Cape Verde in 1941,
or, in 1946, a report on the commemorations of the anniversary of the Battle of
Macontene, which Mouzinho de Albuquerque won in Mozambiquei. Three feature films
were also produced that were filmed in Africa: Viagem de Sª Exª o Presidente da
República a Angola, A Viagem do Chefe do Estado às Colónias de Angola e São Tomé e
Príncipe, dating from 1938 (in this case produced by the General Agency for the
Colonies/ Cinegraphic Mission for the African Colonies); A Segunda Visita Triunfal,
about the 1939 visit of the same President of the Republic, Óscar Carmona, to Cape
Verde, São Tomé, Mozambique, the South African Union and Angola; with material
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filmed in 1938 at the Cinegraphic Mission, Lopes Ribeiro also made Angola, uma Nova
Lusitânia some six years later.
In 1938 filming began for the work entitled O Feitiço do Império (which would
be released two years later), likewise produced by the General Agency for the Colonies/
Cinegraphic Mission for the African Colonies and directed by Lopes Ribeiro. It was
filmed in Lisbon, Guinea, São Tomé, Angola and Mozambique. It is one of those rare
films of propaganda fiction, though it skillfully incorporates documental images, even
inserting the protagonists within documental sequences filmed on other occasions (as
Ribeiro had also done in the past in the other fictional propaganda film, A Revolução de
Maio, made in 1937, thus inscribing “an uncontestable, disturbing and even innovative
matrix of verisimilitude within the visual and dramatic text” [Grilo,2006:65]).
“In general terms, Feitiço do Império narrates the process of Portuguese
‘naturalization’ of Luís Morais – the son of a Portuguese emigrant in the United States.
Luís Morais has already decided his destiny; he wants to become a naturalized
American and marry a rich American lady (Fay Gordon). Prior to this, however, his
father convinces him to make a journey to Portugal, more precisely to embark upon a
hunting trip in Angola (…), which will take Luís on a pilgrimage through Lisbon,
Guinea, S. Tomé (stopovers on his maritime voyage) and, later, Mozambique (where he
meets Fay again and calls off the marriage). His father tells him before he leaves: ‘You
are finally going to see your country. You’ll see that it’s beautiful. It’s the land of the
Sun, the land of eternal Spring!...’. In its own way, O Feitiço do Império is also, as Reis
Torgal astutely wrote, a ‘film of conversion’, in this case, of conversion to the ‘charm of
the Empire’ that Luís Morais gradually imbibes - spiritually and also physically (since
he falls in love with Mariazinha, the daughter of a colonist, Vitorino, in whose house he
seeks refuge after being injured in a pathetic attack by a lion).” The film highlights “the
path of the Empire and the Overseas Territories as a great opportunity for the
Portuguese people to understand the grandeur of their nation and its territory, far
removed from European convulsions. However, the film clearly reveals the way in
which this colonial inflection, i.e. the reinforcement of the Portuguese position in
Africa, represents, in an ultimate analysis, a truly geo-strategic statement, as a
justification of the neutrality of Portugal’s foreign policy at such a turbulent moment.”
[Grilo, 2006: 66-67].
Africa reappears in Portuguese film fiction only 13 years later: Chaimite, shot in
1951/52, released in 1953, was written, directed and edited by Jorge Brum do Canto,
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who was also the executive producer and one of the actors. This film uses a different
model: it is a historic film, which does not resort to documental images (nor could it,
since it is set in Mozambique in 1894) but instead reenacts the frequent attacks of Vatua
hordes on Lourenço Marques, the various plans and battles by which the Portuguese try
to “pacify” the colony, with a special emphasis on the feats of Mouzinho de
Albuquerque, especially the risky capture of the Vatua chief Gungunhana in the
stronghold of Chaimite. More than filming the passions of minor and totally fictional
characters, or even the romantic hero that Mouzinho became on account of his life and
suicide, Brum do Canto was especially adept at filming military action, following the
model, according to Manuel Cintra Ferreira, of the “classic films of colonial
adventures”, and, according to Grilo [2006:75], “the great lessons of American
Westerns, especially the cavalry films of John Ford.” Chaimite was released in the
largest cinema hall in Lisbon, with great pomp and circumstance. It received great
critical acclaim and two SNI awards and was screened in leading cities and in almost
every small town that had a cinema theatre. As Jorge Seabra has demonstratedii, the
success of Chaimite went beyond commercial screenings, since the film was used
intensively for celebratory screenings that commemorated different patriotic events.
One can thus agree with Grilo [2006:73-74], as he writes: “It is possible that, from
the point of view of production and the State’s political logic, operation Chaimite made
a great deal of sense: the film was released on the eve of the centenary commemorations
of Mouzinho de Albuquerque (1955), in itself a propitious moment to symbolically
reinforce Portuguese sovereignty over its African territories – now called the “overseas
provinces”– and likewise an occasion to attract the attention of youths in Portugal
towards the potential of the pacified colonies and the opportunities that were available
there. In this sense, Chaimite is a film that fits in perfectly with the colonial cycle of
Portuguese cinema during the 1940s, especially the documentaries directed by Lopes
Ribeiro, mentioned above”. All this makes the insistence on death and defeat that
permeates this film, just like in numerous other Portuguese films, seem even more
unusually jarring. “A man-statue, Mouzinho is filmed in Chaimite as a true living-dead,
a figure in limbo, inebriated with death and glory. It is no coincidence that, almost at the
end of the film (…), Brum do Canto concludes this character with the following line:
‘The barbarian empire is over. Ah, Maria José, what a great day to have died!’. And it is
also no coincidence (for the film’s dual landscape) that this ‘major’ chord is echoed by
the ‘minor’ chord of the future colonist Daniel, who, embracing his Maria, says: ‘Don’t
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say that, Godfather. The future from this day forth is what is worth living’” [Grilo,
2006:76].
The Colonial War
The 1950s followed, marked by a profound qualitative and even quantitative
decline in terms of Portuguese film fiction. It was characterized by almost humorless
comedies, the use of singing and bullfighting stars, recurrent folkloric elements and
neo-realism was more an exception than a rule. It is worth observing that when, in 1959,
Rapsódia Portuguesa was released, a project that was derived from the ideals of
António Ferro and sought to showcase “the soul of Portugal” by means of its folklore,
there were singing and dancing groups from the Minho to the Algarve, but none from
the “overseas provinces”.
When war broke out in these provinces, in 1961, it gave rise to a great deal of
investment in small documentary films, which show the departure of contingents for
Africa, Salazar’s addresses to the nation, visits and speeches by ministers in various
colonies and some festivals, agricultural and livestock exhibitions and the inauguration
of power plants overseas. A feature film entitled Baiete!!! Moçambique, produced by
Courinha Ramos, depicts the arrival of the President of the Republic, Américo Thomaz,
in Lourenço Marques, with journeys throughout the territory of Mozambique, with a
special emphasis on the Gorongosa National Park and the Oliveira Salazar dam. “For a
nation involved in a colonial war for almost twenty years, it is amazing to see how
coeval cinematographic documents (…) so methodically bypassed the different scenes
of war and instead concentrated on parades, speeches, celebrations and military marchpasts” [Grilo, 2006:55].
Some producers, both in European Portugal as well as in the colonies, understood
the growing interest in the colonies and embarked upon some more ambitious
documentary films (fictional works will be examined shortly). O Romance do Luachimo
– Lunda – Terra de Diamantes, made in 1969, directed and produced by Baptista Rosa,
narrates “the story of the Angola Diamond Company based in Lunda, from its
foundation (early 20th century) and development, encompassing its industrial, cultural
and social activities including support to personnel. The region’s flora, fauna and
ethnographic values are also portrayed”iii. Limpopo, dating from 1970, directed and
produced by Jorge de Sousa, is a story about safaris where the protagonist was a rich
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industrialist from Porto. It was filmed in Lourenço Marques, in the Limpopo colony and
the Maputo elephant reserve [Matos-Cruz:123]. Moçambique de Hoje, made during the
early 1970siv, written and directed by Luiz Beja, focused on the colony’s potential for
economic, industrial and urban growth.
In 1971, the Public Information Service of the Armed Forces and the Ministry of
Defense themselves commissioned a grand documentary about Angola and Lieutenant
Quirino Simões was summoned to direct the film. In 1967, in A Caçada do Malhadeiro,
this director had already filmed war scenes, in this case the Napoleonic invasions, and
later specialized in the field of military documentaries - Os Pára-Quedistas and Guiné68. The new film was called, significantly, Angola na Guerra e no Progresso and was
filmed in a lavish 70mm format. It was released with great pomp and fanfare on 10 June
1971, at the Tivoli cinema hall. The year it was released, the director said: “For the past
ten years thousands of Portuguese have done their best in the diverse battles (for war
and peace) that have taken place in Angola. And the film, on my part, is nothing but a
modest homage to this tenacity and confidence…” [Matos-Cruz,1981:129].
“It is a sui generis case within Portuguese cinema. It is a grand “documentary”
(70 minutes in duration) that was meant to be screened commercially and to
circumscribe the problem of the colonial war, demonstrating the insignificance of this
issue in the light of the development of the ‘province’ of Angola implemented by the
Portuguese State and the colonists who settled in the region. The guerilla fighters of the
liberation movements (never depicted as such, obviously) are portrayed as “drug
inebriated bandits”, foreigners from the Congo (until 1963, the year of the ‘Portuguese
re-conquest’) and Zambia (after 1967), coming to enslave the indigenous population
and steal the wealth of Angola: coffee and diamonds. In a certain sense, Angola na
Guerra e no Progresso seeks to be a ‘cinematographic history’ of the colony. The film
is thus divided into three distinct segments. In the first part, Quirino Simões uses a
platoon of commandos to stage some military operations, disastrously (notwithstanding
the soldiers’ competence). In the second, and longest, section the film presents the
‘Angolan feat’, achieved in 1963 with the ‘pacification of the territory’ and the
‘expulsion of the enemy’. It showcases the usual items of Salazar’s propaganda: health,
education, public works, agricultural development (coffee), industrial development (iron
and diamonds), tourism and handicrafts. Finally, during the third and last segment of the
film – the most curious and ‘realistic’ part of the work – the director describes the
revival of the colonial conflict with the invasion of the Eastern part of the territory by
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‘terrorists from Zambia supported by China’, ‘followers of the Red Book’ and the war
fought against piracy by the valiant Portuguese army (‘for the liberation of the people’)
and by the ‘Flechas’ (‘fearsome fighters’, ‘terrorists who abandoned their chiefs and
joined our army’), presented here in the spotlight. This final segment, of a film that is
generally fastidious and technically disastrous, is interesting because it really provides a
glimpse of how miserable were the deeds that Portugal wanted or managed to achieve in
Angola’s interior areas; it is the moment in which the film is forced, by its ‘realist’
streak, to abandon the cosmopolitan scenarios of Luanda and the large cities along the
coast. What can be seen in these images – “permanent, cement constructions” – is the
anarchic form of Portuguese colonialism and the precarious living conditions that it
provided for populations subject to its administration” [Grilo,2006:84-85].
By showing African realities, some of the documentaries of this age run the risk
of not being part of the colonial discourse, increasingly censored during the war. There
were various such cases. Catembe, dating from 1964, written and directed by Faria de
Almeida, who also produced the film along with Cunha Telles, did not organize an
oppositional discourse; it provided a “Sunday report about the capital of Mozambique, a
tourist destination; a street survey in Lisbon about what people thought about Lourenço
Marques; in Xipamanine, a poor fishing neighborhood, a waitress at the Luso Bar
evoked the everyday life of this community.” However, the censors insisted that 103
cuts be made from the film, thus reducing it from 80 to 45 minutes [MatosCruz,1981:101]. Similarly, Esplendor Selvagem, from 1972, directed by António de
Sousa, with Jorge Redinha as ethnographic advisor, sought to show “Africa, that strange
and beautiful continent, with varied landscapes and an eternal authenticity. Its
communities, animals, rocks, wild landscapes, the symphony of colors, nature in
contrast with local life and customs. An exotic land of myths and rituals (circumcision,
initiation to puberty, marriage), the cycle of life, the seasons, the spell of a mysterious
and supernatural universe…” However, as the director explained in 1978, “it was
presented to the censors and, after two months, they deemed it to be anti-political. The
print could not be used in Angola, but another one was screened in Mozambique, in all
cinema theatres, and ended up by getting ruined…” [Matos-Cruz,1981:133].
In the same year, 1972, three fictional films appeared that were clearly anticolonial. One was not specifically African: in Índia, by António Faria, we see soldiers,
petrol, a black servant and a protagonist who, after wandering through monumental
Lisbon, the memory of the Empire, sets out on a critical quest for lost grandeur, heading
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to India, used as a metaphor [cf. Matos-Cruz,1981:139]. Radical but politically and
aesthetically poor, it was shot in secret and was only released in 1975. Deixem-me ao
menos Subir às Palmeiras was filmed in Mozambique, directed by Joaquim Lopes
Barbosa, produced by Courinha Ramos. It had dialogues in Ronga and English, with
Portuguese subtitles. It is a very curious film, also because it is the only one that focuses
on the intermediary agents of colonialism. “On a large estate, a black foreman, an agent
and lackey of the colonist, subjects locals to unending and backbreaking shifts of forced
labor cultivating fields, which frequently only ended when the weaker elements fainted.
One day, the foreman rapes the daughter of an elderly laborer and faces the fury of his
comrades who incite the old man to revolt. However, after years of exploitation, he is
unable to do so and accepts the insulting offer of a bottle of wine from the offender,
later succumbing to his sorrow…” [Matos-Cruz,1981:133]. It was obviously banned by
the censors. Sambizanga was likewise filmed in 1972, directed by Sarah Maldoror and
based on the work “A Vida Verdadeira de Domingos Xavier”, by Luandino Vieira.
“Arrested by the PIDEv, a member of the MPLA is beaten to death, without denouncing
the members of the clandestine movement to which he belongs, while his wife scours
the prisons of Luanda trying to ascertain his whereabouts…” Lauro António
commented: it is “a work of more human than political characteristics (…) It explains
how a revolution was born, and identifies some of its underlying causes.” [MatosCruz,1981:138].
Apart from documentaries, the Portuguese producer Manuel Queirós made the
fiction film A Voz do Sangue in Angola, in 1965, directed by another Portuguese,
Augusto Fraga. It presented the Portuguese star Virgílio Teixeira alongside actress
Carmen Mendes and some local actors. The melodrama – illicit love affairs, an
illegitimate child – was combined with a fragment of Angolan reality, the life of truckdrivers. It was released at the Odeon and Avis theatres, on 10 March 1965, without any
known censorship problems.
And what fictional works were being filmed in Portugal during the years of the
colonial war? 29 Irmãos was also released in 1965, directed by Augusto Fraga. “It is
interesting because it is based on a true story that took place in 1963, in Santa Maria de
Cárquere, a village near Resende. A peasant girl named Maria (…) waits, dispiritedly,
for her fiancé Ilídio to return (…), who had been sent to Angola for two years. During
this period – for unknown reasons –, Maria felt a ‘divine calling’. She wants to give
herself to God and not to her betrothed. In the midst of the confusion, a very ambiguous
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priest, Father Luís, intervenes (…) who, the best he can, tries to direct Maria back to the
arms of her fiancé. Everything is resolved when, in a heroic feat, Ilídio convinces his 28
friends in the village to harvest, during the night, the wheat fields of António (…), an
elderly man who is at death’s door and whom Maria is trying to help. The grandeur of
Ilídio’s sentiments impresses Maria and overcomes her resistance and she now meets
him passionately in the middle of the bridge leading to the hamlet.
Despite its obvious shortcomings, 29 Irmãos is a skilful film about the social
integration of a demobbed soldier during the colonial war. While depicting this process
it touches upon almost all aspects: amorous relations, integration into the community
(the film includes a lavish – and even somewhat disproportionate – reception for Ilídio)
and the mediating, comforting role of the church. To a certain extent, and from a
propaganda and ‘pedagogical’ perspective (of ‘educating the people for war’), the
reality represented in 29 Irmãos can be seen as a microcosm of the country itself and the
way in which the regime viewed the nation and its tasks in ‘bringing up the rear’”
[Grilo, 2006:82-83].
Going quickly through Estrada da Vida, dating from 1968, directed by Henrique
Campos, which was partially filmed in Angola: it is a conventional drama about a
coffee exporter, his secretary and his legitimate wife who, when betrayed, ends up by
rebuilding her life in Portugal, where her husband eventually joins her. Conversely,
Traição Inverosímil, dating from 1970, directed by Augusto Fraga, was made in
Portugal and revolves around a wife who betrays her husband, who had gone to work in
Angola. In these light films, Africa signified, above all, the distance that threatens
marriages, always between whites.
The drama of those who participated in the colonial war or were about to leave
was also portrayed, before the 25 April Revolution, in three other interesting films,
made from a perspective that was not inclined towards the regime, albeit with the
limitations inherent to a country subject to censorship. In Mudar de Vida, which Paulo
Rocha filmed in 1966, Adelino returns from Africa after completing his military service
and finds Júlia is already married to his brother, a fisherman like himself; and he ends
up by being attracted by the wild nature of another young girl. Perdido por Cem…,
written and directed by António-Pedro Vasconcelos, making his debut, and filmed in
1971, managed to be released in 1973 despite the strong presence of the shadow of the
colonial war, its traumas and the oppression that prevailed both in Africa as well as in
Portugal: one of the protagonists lives exiled in Paris, the other proposes to a girl with
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whom he is in love that they both flee to Rome, but her boyfriend, who has returned
from the war in Angola and goes looking for her, intercepts them at the airport and
shoots her dead.
O Mal-Amado went even further and was thus banned by the censors. Its
negatives were even confiscated and it was released only after the revolution. It was
directed by Fernando Matos Silva in 1972 and, just like the preceding film, knew how
to film reality in Lisbon in an almost documental manner, this time including, for
example, the Estrela garden full of blacks. The trauma of war is, in this case, borne by
Inês, who still loves her brother who was killed in the war in Angola: “I loved him, he
was destined for great things”. She says that this is why she likes João, the young man
who is to work under her at the office: she says that he reminds her of her brother, not
physically, but in his demeanor, his gaze. Inês speaks constantly of her dead brother,
inappropriately during the love moments; and, in an emblematic scene, once obliges
João to wear her dead brother’s camouflage uniform, in order to make love with him.
“A scene that is bound to cause laughter”, commented Eduardo Prado Coelhovi, “but a
scene that does not tolerate any laughter that it causes. Because it is there, in this idea of
bad taste, that the censors come, face to face, up against something that reveals the
clandestine link between the pathology of Inês’ behavior and the pathology of the
colonial war. Or how political repression and moral repression are confirmed and grow
to the point of distorting people and psychologies, to the point of transforming each
loved being into a (sadly) misloved being”. As João prefers another girl, with whom he
feels happy (for the director, the two women symbolized, respectively, the Empire and a
new Portugalvii), Inês kills him with a revolver that her brother had apprehended from a
“terrorist”. While killing him she says: “Essentially, you, me, we all die of nostalgia”
(the reference to reality slides, as is customary in Portuguese cinema, into the
metonymy of more timeless values). And she continues: we are all waiting for a dead
brother.
After April
Right after April 25 1974, many films about that revolution and its causes were
made, among which the colonial war stands out. We highlight the film Adeus, até ao
meu Regresso, directed by António-Pedro Vasconcelos, filmed in 16 mm but produced
by the Portuguese public broadcaster RTP, based on its archive images – in this case,
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the Christmas messages the military in Guinea recorded for the television reporters and
where one realizes the pathetic, the odd and the tragic of their situation, although always
ending with the exorcising sentence: “Goodbye, until my return”.
The films about the independence of Angola and Guinea-Bissau, directed by
António Escudeiro, were shot during those years [Grilo, 2006:89]. In Mozambique,
producer Courinha Ramos doesn’t hide his colonial affiliation: in Moçambique,
Documento vivo, of 1975, directed by Viriato Barreto, we have Mozambique’s history,
before and after decolonization, where “a ridiculed Samora Machel, with the voice of
Mickey Mouse, and Kaulza de Arriaga defending the Portuguese presence in
Mozambique, are the keynotes of a film”viii. In the previous year, Ramos had already
been involved in co-directing with F. Silva O Vendedor, in which freedom is only used
for a parody of porno movies, shot in Lourenço Marques, Matola and Inhaca.
Let us take use of this digression to approach comedy, which, understandably,
has been distant from the theme of Africa: but when it does tackle it, it can expose
habits and prejudices hidden in more serious films. It is convenient to start with a flashback to 1954, when the extremely funny O Costa d’África, directed by João Mendes,
was released. It is centred on the actor Vasco Santana, who plays an uncle coming from
Africa to the metropolis for a few hours, but eventually staying on for 20 days. “I
always bring Lisbon in my heart” – and he takes a post card out of his jacket. The
nephew, to impress him, borrows a house from a rich friend. But the servants rebel and
run off, forcing the rich fellow to pretend he is a servant. The uncle mistreats that
pseudo-servant and even flirts with his wife, treating him like a ‘niger’. But later on, he
is capable of saying: “I want to go to the blacks, ‘cause I can’t understand the whites.”
In the final argument about who is brother of who (one of the servants turns out to be
the housewife’s brother) the uncle says: “Damn it! I’d rather find myself amongst the
blacks! They are savages, but at least they know their family!” In the end of the film,
the uncle returns to Africa, taking a woman not much younger than him: “Don’t worry!
In a few months, I’ll give her to an anthropophagous who is a friend of mine and I’ll
come back to get another one!”
The futuristic film, directed by Luís Galvão Teles in 1976, A Confederação, also
tries to have a stroke of comedy. In this film, everything is forgivable, because
everything is fake and nothing is worth while: “After all, the Empire was nothing but
scenery, accessories we bought”; “everything is a stage, the sleeping Empire is a stage”.
From a much more revolutionary point of view, we will have the irony of Artur Semedo
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in O Barão de Altamira, of 1985, about the reconquest of the small city of Olivença,
still “occupied” by the Spanish today. The satire is mordant, in the face of the
insignificance of that conquest project. They are imperialists without empire, like a
lieutenant-colonel who came to help the movement and says to a former agent of the
PIDE: “we haven’t seen each other since Angola! And now, here we are together to
rebuild the Empire!” In Um Crime de Luxo, by the same director, in 1989, characters
speak of the colonial war and the longing for Africa, in a scene at the Zoo, showing the
animals – monkeys, elephants, and giraffes: “doesn’t this remind you of the outskirts of
Luanda?”
The baron of Altamira’s horse was called Alcácer-Quibir and we can’t avoid
mentioning how that phantasm of the Portuguese presence in Africa, lived in the form
of a defeat, traverses Portuguese cinema. Even an epic film glorifying the greatest
national poet, Camões, Erros Meus, Má Fortuna, Amor Ardente, by Leitão de Barros,
released in 1946, showed the poet’s image overlapping the disaster of Alcácer-Quibir.
The travellings of the battle’s dead bodies would return in the film Non, which we will
discuss later on, or make the beginning of the adaptation of the classical play Frei Luís
de Sousa in the film Quem és Tu?, by João Botelho (2001). Because that phantasm is
present, as ex-libris of the defeat, in post-decolonization Portugal, a film about the
rebellion of farm workers in Alentejo (directed by Fonseca e Costa in 1975) is actually
called Os Demónios de Alcácer-Kibir: “During the police charge, which they face with
weapons in their hands, only black Africa appears free in the horizon…” [MatosCruz,1981:156].
In the film O Bobo, directed by José Álvaro Morais and shot between 1979 and
1987, a complex film where one of the portrayed times is Portugal’s foundation, Egas
returns from the campaigns in Africa and suffers because his wife is accused of having
betrayed him. Here, we deal with the north of Africa, which provided the Portuguese
films with some motives after 1974, in the perspective of a common and miscigeneous
origin. For example, A Moura Encantada, by Manuel Costa e Silva, begins with the
following written text: “Portugal was born from the struggle between Muslims and
Christians, with peasants freeing themselves from being traded among owners as part of
the land, and organizing counties. This film speaks of that time and of those struggles. It
doesn’t curse the Muslims, as Christian chronicles do, and neither does it curse the
Christians, as Muslims chronicles do. Muslims and Christians entered our blood.”
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Returning to black Africa and the films made about it after the April 25, we will
see that they almost invariably revolve around the colonial war. A theme the Portuguese
cinema has revealed to tackle with difficulty, slowly and scarcely.
The first step was taken by the film Acto dos Feitos da Guiné, directed in 1979
by Fernando Matos Silva: the same who had made O Mal Amado. “Neighbouring the
two films”, says João Mário Grilo [2006:91], “one might say the voice-off in Acto is the
voice of João, the unloved one (mal amado), if he had had another fate (the mobilization
to Guinea) and had survived the gunshots (…). But no; in Acto dos Feitos da Guiné, the
voice we hear is indeed the voice of the actor José Gomes, who says a text by Fernando
Matos Silva, one of those captains who played such an important role (as we shall see)
in the starting of the April 25, and who served, in Guinea and Angola, in the Army
Cartographic Services squad. In that context, Matos Silva directs and photographs a
series of military films, but uses his displacements to shoot in 16mm a series of small
campaign events, with the purpose of directing a future documentary.” That material
gathered in 1969-70, along with other materials gathered by French and Swedish
operatorsix working for the liberation movement PAIGC, shows us the war filmed from
another point of view and with a brutality never seen in Portuguese cinema: we have,
for instance, the death in combat of a Portuguese soldier, the inside of trees eaten by
ants, Salazar saying “It is not the land we explore. It is Portugal that revives”, the
declaration of independence of Guinea and an interview with PAIGC leader Amílcar
Cabral. To this documental material, superbly edited, the director added the invention of
theatrical scenes: because, as he explained in a round table in 1992 (see previous note)
“To make a film only about the war was too violent for those Portuguese who had little
to do with it: we had to see and understand how we had come to that. (…) Visiting
history shows how that war was far more violent and had perhaps less reason, it was
necessary to explain that very well. (...) This war is hidden inside of us; someone is
going to make the film.” The same director will continue to pursue that special film,
with what we might consider as the third part of his trilogy, in the film Ao Sul (1993),
about the (very) slow return to Portugal of a veteran of the colonial war.
A Portuguese Farewell
But perhaps the greatest film about the colonial war is Um Adeus Português,
directed in 1985 by João Botelho. Ignoring Acto dos Feitos da Guiné, Botelho claims:
12
“Adeus Português is the first film made in Portugal about the colonial wars. Twelve
years later. Twelve years after those wars ended. Before, there was nothing. Everything
was completely repressed. It took me nearly one year to convince the Portuguese Army
to participate in the film. The military had nothing against the story of the film; it was
the difficulty of talking about that past”.
Unlike almost all the other films, which are organized around a return from the
war, Um Adeus Português, just as O Mal Amado, starts from the no-return of a soldier
who died in Africa. But that absence is accentuated by the presence of that soldier in the
war, because the film trails two parallel stories, a method so dear to Botelho (follower
of the narrative model of Intolerance, by Griffith, so underused in cinema). Jane Rootx
makes the following synopsis: “Portuguese Africa, 1973 (black and white). Exhausted
troops trek through the jungle, stopping to eat and write bewildered letters home. They
catch a terrified native, interrogate and kill him; a mine seriously wounds one of the
black members of the unit, and another soldier proceeds to carry him on his back.
Portugal, 1985 (colour): An elderly couple travel by train to Lisbon to visit Alexandre,
their son, and Laura, widow of their other son Augusto, killed in the colonial wars. (…)
Portuguese Africa, 1973: The army unit rests under some trees; the wounded man is
given morphine. As they discuss their pride in what they are doing, they are ambushed
and the unit is virtually wiped out. Portugal, 1985: The couple returns to their home in
the country.”
Let us look closer at each of the storylines. In the first one, following the official
synopsis, “Entangled in a war where the enemy is never seen, muddy soldiers, execute
methodically, without grudges or glory, the last pilgrimage, the gentle farewell of a
generation to five centuries of Portuguese presence in Africa.” But, as Root notes
(ibidem), “The acceptance of Portugal’s ill-fated colonial wars does not mean
retrospective pretence that ‘ordinary people’ weren’t implicated in shameful events: in
the flashback sequences, Augusto is shown as filled with pride at what he sees as a
grand, heroic struggle. Augusto might have been the missing link in the lives of the four
central characters, but he does little to stop his troops from kicking a captured African
to death.”
Botelho tried a rigorous reconstitution of the war’s features. It’s true he filmed it
in Portugal, “12 miles from Lisbon. It’s a place where the Portuguese kings had grown a
forest by transplanting trees from Africa. It is the colonization in reverse. Combat
simulations were made there.”xi But he was, for example, thorough in maintaining in the
13
film the same proportion of wounded and dead men as statistics claim to have occurred
in the colonial war. “I’ve seen many documentaries. Because there were documentaries
made about the war, in particular by the very Army services, and to which I eventually
had access. And there were always kids marching about, lost in the forest, young men
eighteen years old. In the beginning of the war, soldiers were mainly professionals, but
by the end they were boys eighteen years old, who were attending the military service
and were sent in groups into the forest. Most of those who died, died of accident, of
insanity, or of isolation. Not because of the armed conflicts. In Guinea, yes. But in
Angola, there were five thousand soldiers in a country fourteen times bigger than
Portugal. They never met. It was a kind of ghost war. Like in Lost Patrol, by John Ford.
The enemy was invisible and one never knew what he was doing. (...) It is stronger to
show a Portuguese soldier teaching black children to read with Portugal’s geography. It
is racism in the head; it’s not a situation of Nazism, of massacre. There was a massacre
in Angola, in the beginning of the war; there was a strong war situation in Mozambique
in 67, but the rest was this: lost children. It was what one could see in documentaries:
sad people with the guns turned up side down, always. Most of the time, it was people
who left saying they were going on duty, they walked a mile or so outside the camp,
stayed in silence for six hours and then returned. They didn’t go on missions. Especially
in the end. It was a simulacra of a war” (ibidem).
But it is the other storyline, focused in the family of the soldier dead ten years
ago, which brings the meaning – and the lack of meaning – of those war scenes. As
Augusto M. Seabraxii wrote, “the biggest peculiarity in Um Adeus Português is that, by
inscribing History in the story, it questions it from inside, not from a public memory (of
the kind ‘this is how History was made’), but from an ensemble of private memories,
which makes standing out its lack of meaning. (…) Because it refuses to concede a
meaning to History, in the story proposed by Um Adeus Português there is no profit or
gain, just losses, just emptiness. (…) Um Adeus Português refuses to stage a show (the
war show) which has become trivial. These two refusals – of a meaning to History and
of the staging of violence, place this film in an apparently lateral field, if not totally
opposite: the field of those whom History stole a sense of struggle (it deals precisely
with defeat), the violence existing not in the space of a fight between opposite factions,
but between people inside themselves. (…) The meaning void causes the rarefaction of
language, feelings and thoughts are not verbalized. (‘What are you thinking of?’ asks
Alexandre; ‘Nothing; what should I be thinking of?’, Rosa answers)”.
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Thus, the film deals with the “inner rip the war has left in of us, a wound that, for
the most contrary reasons, we silenced together”, as Jorge Leitão Ramos wrote in the
newspaper Expresso. In The New York Times, Vincent Canby noted, with some
amazement: “Though Augusto was killed 12 years earlier, they all behave like people
walking around with raw wounds.” Perhaps 12 years is not enough to mourn such a big
trauma. But there’s more than that. The film “identifies perhaps a certain (Portuguese)
lack of sense of History with the incapacity to mourn inevitable losses and, therefore, to
escape depression and confront the future”, wrote A. Roma Torresxiii. It is as if the
contemporary Portuguese had a great difficulty in inscribing the events they go through
or went through, as José Gil has recently arguedxiv. Thus, “this is the film of a
mourning. But a paradoxal mourning. A mourning has its rituals; it takes place in a
representation. This is a very tender mourning and is unspoken. It could only say, as the
film seems to do: ‘It’s like this (…) It’s not a silence heavy of meaning, this silence is
its own meaning: the repression of that past”xv.
“This repression is the film”, says the director [1987], speaking more on this
matter: “The Portuguese don’t speak of the pain, they shut it up. They suffer in silence.
Our attitude is one of contemplation, not of action. About the colonial wars, almost
nothing is mentioned. Hence the story of this small family. I’m from the north of
Portugal. I know people like that, small land owners, their reactions. I have a brother
who died when I was ten. In my family, no one talked about this brother for ten years.
Never. It’s the same in the rest of the country.”
I see in these statements, by the director and the critics, a certain extrapolation,
that maybe the film doesn’t allow. Surely it is not called Um Adeus Português by
chance. It refers to a certain ideology of the national character, the “art of being
Portuguese”, by Pascoaes, the “suicidal people”, which was what Miguel de Unamuno
called us. For some, like Grilo [2006], “the greatest virtue about Um Adeus Português –
formal virtue, exclusively – is having transformed those pains, so specific and
particular, in a Portuguese universal, in a ‘Portuguese Farewell’, which is precisely the
title of the film.” Also for Marc Chevrie [1987], “what is more remarkable is, at the
same time, the scope of its ambition, fitted for a whole country and its History (the end
of five centuries of Portuguese colonialism in Africa, and its repercussion in the
consciousness of all) and its sense of the infinitely small, of the reduction (in the
culinary sense of the word: of extracting the quintessence of something), the delicate
precision used to approach its theme and to build its seismograph.”
15
Against that essentialism, we can recall several elements of the film. To the oldest
generation, the mourning is in fact mitigated: the father can eventually visit his son’s
grave but not much else; a barrier of emptiness and silence seems to separate him from
his wife. But in the case of the children, not only the silence is smaller (Laura tells her
mother she was pregnant when Augusto was killed), as they go on with their
professional and emotional lives: by the end, both of them meet with their lovers, who
were only hiding during the bothering visit of the other generation. It should also be
noted the strong African presence in Lisbon, in the underground, in bars, in a night-club
where the son takes his father and makes him dance with a black woman.
Everything happens on the level of intimate relationships, and that’s another
feature in most of the films about the colonial war. Still in the words of Botelho [1987],
“It is a film about family and memory (the first title was If memory exists), it is not a
film about the war. (…) The purpose was not to explain or analyse the war, it was to
show a small story.” But there are in Portuguese cinema, at least, two important
exceptions to this intimacy. Gestos e Fragmentos, filmed by Alberto Seixas Santos in
1981, seeks to be a filmic essay, where Eduardo Lourenço, Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho
and the very film, personified in American director Robert Kramer, try to explain the
revolution. Otelo explains, for example, how the military who had served in several
military commissions felt threatened by the arrival of officers integrated compulsorily,
without any experience or vocation, but enjoying the same benefits: of that revolt was
born the captains’ movement which originated April 25.
Also macro, so macro that it covers all of Portugal’s History since Viriato, is the
film Non, ou a Vã Glória de Mandar, by Manoel de Oliveira, of 1989. It’s in a military
company somewhere in Africa that the junior officer Cabrita, like some Vasco da Gama
in the Lusíadas, starts narrating: not the great deeds, but the successive defeats of the
Portuguese, as if they were bound by that terrible Latin “non”, which Padre António
Vieira said to be the most terrible word, for the denial can be read onwards and
backwards.
The greater age
With A Idade Maiorxvi, Teresa Villaverde’s first film, shot when she was twentyfour and which was released in 1991, the colonial war issue is again placed under the
16
archetypes of family and return. More precisely, in this case, a departure that
disintegrates the family so completely, the return becomes impossible.
The director claimsxvii that despite the war theme, it’s a film different from those
by Botelho and Oliveira. But her statements are close to Botelho’s. She says: “of course
this is not a film about the war; the kid feels the war is something stupid because, as the
plot is set in 1972/73, he knows that a year later this story with his parents wouldn’t
have happened. (…) And that’s where his rage comes from, in the beginning of the
film.”
The film begins with the documental sound of a news coverage about the
departure of a military contingent overseas, while the credits are running on the screen.
The primal scene consists of Pedro leaving for the war in Africa. He leaves his wife
Manuela and his unborn son Alex, who will become the narrator of almost all the film.
In the beginning, there are the uncertain ties of correspondence. Pedro writes from Beira
and from Tete: “this is a barren land, in the best years of my life, in everybody’s best
years”. Then he stops writing. Mário is the first one to return, who was in the war as well.
When Alex realizes it’s not his father who returns, he bursts in fury. His father sends no
news for nearly six months. And then, when he eventually writes, it is to Mario, advising:
“I’m arriving in a fortnight, don’t say anything”. When he arrives, it is Mario who awaits
him at the station; when Pedro sees the town’s plates, he says: “let’s go. To your house.”
This situation reminds me of the famous 1936 text by Walter Benjamin, “Der
Erzähler”xviii, where he says the First World War soldiers came back with nothing to tell,
devoid of experience and words: “the experience is at a crisis and so it will remain
indefinitely. (…) With the World War, began the manifestation of a process which, since
then, has never stopped. Isn’t it true, in the end of the war, people came back mute from
the battle fields? And they returned not richer, but poorer in communicable experience.”
And so is Pedro, who prefers to share his space with his army colleague.
This is the best idea in the screenplay, unexpected, bothering, because we see mother
and son moving on with their expectant lives and we know more than they do: that the
father has already arrived, he is just around the corner and doesn’t go see them. The
development of this idea is what proves to be difficult, because that father who comes to
surprise and destabilize doesn’t have any will power nor any objectives that can take the
film somewhere else. Let us see.
In a night of heavy rain, the mother grabs a few old rags – we presume it’s the
father’s clothes. The kid watches her leaving and says “I know what my mother is going to
17
do.” She dives into the water, perhaps to throw it all away into the river. Mário, who was
driving by on a motorcycle, sees her lying on the ground and advises her to go home.
Mário goes home, there is the father holding a radio: it’s a scene of large silences, until
Mário makes up his mind and talks. He just says “see you later” and leaves. Mário tells
Manuela he has news about Pedro: he reads an old letter where Pedro says things like: “it
wasn’t so important to return alive after all. I’ve destroyed all the pictures I’ve been sent of
my wife and my son. I still have one of my parent’s marriage. For over a year, my greatest
dream is to die. I can’t remember her face anymore. It started to rain now. (...) I know I
have a gun and I can shoot my brains off. But I want them to kill me. Dead and buried,
that’s where I wanted to be. I see the return as something farther each day, as if it were lies
we were told, and we were born here after all and have never been anywhere else. I’m
even ashamed of not having known how to make a daughter, instead of a son.” (And Alex
is listening to this). He says he took part in “it”, he doesn’t say in what, maybe a massacre,
“I wasn’t watching, I was doing.” Later, Pedro will tell a friend of his wife how he raped a
few girls in Africa: he didn’t want but the other encouraged him; it was the unhappiest day
of his life.
After reading the letter, Mário shoots: “Pedro is back, he’s already here. He arrived
a few months ago.” Manuela meets him the next day, but doesn’t know what to do with
him, mainly because he doesn’t know what to do with her and his son, nor does that seem
to bother him – it is a non-dramatical relationship. The first conversation between father
and son is very abstract: “what shames you today, doesn’t shame you tomorrow”, explains
Pedro, it’s a question of numbers (you lose your shame with one, then with five…). “I
didn’t come because I didn’t want to.” Thus, happiness doesn’t come along with the father
and Alex gets even sadder for this: the new distance is more painful. “It’s almost worse
than when you went to Africa”, Manuela will say to Pedro.
Later, Alex asks: “How is this going to end, Mário?” And Mário answers: “It will
end fine. To end is a manner of saying, Alex. You know there are things which don’t have
an end.” Without understandable reason, Pedro sets Mario’s house on fire, and Mario
warns Manuela: “It was Pedro. You must be careful about him.” But Pedro and Manuela
eventually go out together, they dance, he gives in more, they kiss. We then see them in the
car, she’s driving, and suddenly, she turns her head towards him, kisses him and the car
rolls downhill. Alex will be the first to reach his parents, who lie dead. In this case,
characters don’t die in Africa but because of Africa, or of the layers of deep pain and
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unconfessability the war created in the military and in their families. There are, indeed,
things that do not seem to end.
The trauma show
In the following year, 1992, is released a film which is a case of its own, in the first
place because it was an international co-production with a big budget, Aqui d’el Rei,
directed by António-Pedro Vasconcelos. It starts with a voice over the image of a
Portuguese flag: “by the end of the XIX century, Portugal is one of the greatest colonial
empires of the world and one of the most coveted”. And what he films, in Lisbon, is the
return of some of those military, namely Mouzinho de Albuquerque and one of his pupils,
Lieutenant Nuno Lorena, who will be the centre of the entire romantic plot. Lorena tells his
bride everything was much more alive in Africa: she replies that if he wishes to return to
Africa, she’s willing to help him. But that return is postponed, firstly because of the
flirtations of a married countess: the first conversation is about the prison of Gungunhana,
the first erotic move is when she’s reading Mouzinho’s book, ending up in a room, with
her declaring: “I am your prisoner like Gungunhana. Do whatever you want with me.”
Later, there will be an argument about the polygamy of Gungunhana.
On its turn, Mouzinho hesitates: “of what good was to serve in the colonies, if the
Country is moribund, or nearly?” Nuno objects: “My major has no right to abdicate.” “It is
not I who abdicate, Nuno. It is this time.” “If I understand it well, it’s not only the king
who doesn’t want to rule. You don’t want it either, major. So, in your view, there’s nothing
to be done?” “There is. We can try not to fail our own death.” Nuno keeps talking against
what Mouzinho has taught us to despise, lies and compromise. Later he decides to help
Mouzinho in a new mission, but Mouzinho eventually kills himself. And, very suddenly,
the romantic affairs are undone, giving way to the legitimate couples – and the film ends.
In the turn of the century, with a greater distance, colonial war began to appear
more frequently, and in another form, in action and entertainment films. In the beginning,
without shooting the war: the action takes place in Portugal, provoked by the veterans’
traumas. Let us see how this plot is repeated. In Inferno (1999), by Joaquim Leitão, ten
men who had been part of the Rangers, fighting side by side in Mozambique, maintain
their companionship with annual gatherings in Alentejo. But everything gets complicated
when a prostitute and a drug dealer get in the way of the story and everything ends in a
violent fight with a lot of blood and many victims.
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Four years later, Os Imortais, by António-Pedro Vasconcelos, has the same
starting point. Four veterans who had fought in a former Portuguese colony in Africa, also
in the elite troops, continue to meet every year, to maintain the group spirit alive and to
remember war times. The difference is that the traumas of war are shown in brief
flashbacks of an operation in which they had participated. Displaced from the society
around them, they have a compulsive need for action and risk and, in one of those
meetings, they decide to rob a bank. The police investigation is conducted by an
inspector who understands the psychology of this group, because he too is marked by
the colonial war, that left him with a dead son and the other children morally dead or
merely waiting to die.
Different, because entirely shot in Mozambique and also because it’s completely
submerged in the war, is Preto e Branco, from the homonymous short story by Mário de
Carvalho, filmed by José Carlos Oliveira and released in 2003. A patrol of three troops
of the elite force capture a guerrilla man in the Mozambique savannah, in 1972.
Because they don’t understand the language he “speaks”, and believing he was a
“foreigner” worth questioning by the PIDE, they decide to spare his life and take him to
the headquarters. An arduous march of a hundred kilometres awaits them, during which
an attack and a mine kill two of the soldiers. The sergeant and the prisoner are left
alone: the first is white, born and raised in Mozambique and never visited Portugal; the
second one is black, studied Engineering at of the best public universities in Lisbon,
coming to Africa only after his studies, then joining the independentist movement
Frelimo. This original idea of subverting the stereotypes is the most interesting thing in
the film, where both men go from animosity to admiration, and eventually to
complicity.
The taboo of not shooting the colonial war, except very partially, continued to be
raised in 2006 by the film 20.13, again by Joaquim Leitão (being the second film of a
trilogy about the colonial war, corresponding to Purgatory, after Inferno, the Paradise
remaining announced for the future). It is set in the north of Mozambique, in the
Christmas Eve of 1969. A patrol drives through the bushes, returning to the
headquarters, bringing a prisoner. They are counting on a quiet night, without any
shootings, because of the usual tacit truce. But it will not be a peaceful night. The
Captain’s wife is coming to spend Christmas and their mutual uncontentment is visible.
The prisoner is found dead during the night, as one of the soldiers. And without
knowing why, they start being heavily bombarded.
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Let us make a quick reference to two films for TV, produced by television
broadcaster SIC in 2000, sharing the same entertainment purposes. In Monsanto,
directed by Ruy Guerra, again we have a meeting between former military men, deeply
marked by war memories; one of them commits suicide in the beginning of the film;
another one goes insane after the meeting is over, throws his car downhill, hallucinated,
thinking he is in the middle of the colonial war again, reacting to the police searches as
if they were terrorists – and we see how, in flashback, the war is happening in his mind.
A Noiva, directed by Luís Galvão Teles, part of an original text by journalist José
António Saraiva, which is the most interesting element of the project, because it
combines the model of absence with the model of return: a junior officer has
disappeared in Guinea, his bride awaits him in vain and they eventually perform his
burial. She plans to get married with another man. But the young officer had been made
prisoner by the PAIGC, in the sequence of an ambush, where several of his companions
died. On the very day of the wedding, at the entrance of the church, the news of his
reappearance is out. Laura reencounters him, at the cemetery, leaning over his own
grave and they both reconcile: with each other and with the traumatic past.
The films of miscegenation
But during the 1990’s had also appeared a new kind of films, shot in Africa,
generally co-productions, which express the characters’ or the director’s love for the
magic of that continent, as geography and as culture.
O Miradouro da Lua, shot in 1992 in Angola, tells the story of João, a young
man from Lisbon, who arrives in Angola looking for the father he doesn’t know. At the
end of the film, he decides to stay in Angola, almost like the director himself, Jorge
António, who is the foreign director who shot more films in the Angolan territory.
Ilhéu de Contenda, by Leão Lopes, 1994, filmed in Cape Verde but with a
mainly Portuguese crew and cast, assumes itself as a film of miscegenation:
“Sea/Island, symbol of miscegenation”, reads the film’s synopsis. “Its identity is Capeverdean, a culture where differences meet. (...) It reveals the historical and cultural
origin of the archipelago (prologue to a Creole culture) and a moment in its route (…)
Under the grandiosity of the volcano, traditional society is transformed. The old
aristocracy, owner of the land as well as of businesses, pillar of power, starts to
disintegrate. A new class of mulattos appear, whose economic power rests mainly on
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commerce. Slowly, a new identity is born, a mixture of old and new, of the African
culture and the Portuguese culture, with an intense sensuality and a profound love for
the land.”
O Testamento do Senhor Napumoceno, based on the homonymous book by
Cape-verdean writer Germano Almeida, directed in 1997 by Francisco Manso, is a coproduction between Portugal, France, Belgium, Cape-Verde and Brazil, counting on
Brazilian actors and screenwriter, aspiring to be distributed in Latin America. The film
follows the trajectory of Mr. Napumoceno, one of the richest men of the Cape-Verde
archipelago. When he dies, the sole beneficiary of the fortune is Graça, fruit of an affair
with a black woman. He leaves his daughter not only the money, but also a series of
tapes, in which he tells all of his life, from the arrival to Cape Verde in 1928, when he
was 15 years-old, to his success as trader. The tapes reveal an ambitious and
opportunistic man, but also sensitive and passionate, bringing Graça closer to the father
she never met.
Comédia Infantil, by Solveig Nordlund, 1997, is a co-production between
Portugal, Sweden and Mozambique, based on the novel by Swedish author Henning
Mankel, but with an extract of the play "Meninos de Ninguém" by Mutumbela Gogo. It
tells the story of Nélio, a small Mozambican boy, who loses all his family in the civil
war. He is taken to a training camp for young soldiers, but manages to evade himself
and during a long escape from the War he encounters several strange and divine beings.
He reaches the capital, not yet engulfed by the war, and finds refuge in a hollow statue
from colonial times. He quickly becomes the leader of all the children in the city, and
the rumour he’s a “healer” is spread, claiming he is capable of curing diseases and
bringing dead people back to life.
More complex is A Tempestade na Terra, 1997, directed by Fernando
d’Almeida e Silva and shot in Mozambique and Portugal. The trailer announces: “a plot
where the strong ties of friendship win the divergences of History”. It sounds
sentimental, but it’s one of the films which take the dissection of the historical processes
further: colonialism at its peak, the colonial war and the post-independence. The main
character is Lena, who we are going to follow since she was a little girl, when she
created a great friendship with Ningo, a black boy of her age who was employed at her
parent’s house. Still as children, a ritual performed by his grandmother unites them,
even if History is going to separate them. Lena reveals, from early age, her
independence and her love for Mozambique: “Father, there you go again! Portugal is so
22
far away!” “The metropolis, that’s all that matters to you.” When she starts dating Jorge,
a young white man who wants to go study in Lisbon, she also protests: “The Torre de
Belém, the caravels, that’s what you like.” The colonial repression is shown, many
young men beaten up and arrested, under colonialist slogans, like the phrase by Salazar,
“We are also an African nation”, or a sign proclaiming “Mozambique is only
Mozambique because it is Portugal”. Lena revolts: “Inside, a kind of wild scream, fire
and ash, burning my veins.” Her mother comments, referring to Ningo: “He and his
grandmother must have cast some spell on you, to leave you like that.” Meanwhile,
Jorge returns, not with the expected graduation, but as an employee of PIDE. This is
revealed to Lena by her friend Geraldo, who has photos that denounce massacres and
therefore is barbarously tortured. Lena will help him, against Jorge, in a bold escape
where she also manages to take Ningo out of Mozambique.
After the independence, Ningo looks for Lena and finds her in a re-education
camp, where she has been taken because, apparently, she has been mistaken for a
prostitute outside a movie theatre. “Work sets the people free”, is written on the camp’s
wall. Lena is again revolted; she remembers the sorcerers killed by the new black
power, the grandmother Ningo had to hide. He answers: “Spoiled girl. The revolution is
not a dinner invitation.” Geraldo as well, who has returned from his exile in Brazil, is
very sceptical about the new reality. He refuses to go to the independence party, he says
there are too many slogans around: “Revolutionaries in Mercedes? You must be
joking.”
Years later, it is Lena’s mother who calls Ningo, asking him to help her find her
missing daughter. Ningo immediately comes to Portugal, where he ends up discovering
that her father, who had returned from Africa without any possessions, handed Lena
over to Jorge, in exchange for a farm. Jorge is keeping Lena arrested but Ningo rescues
her, thanks to his grandmother’s spell or the fear the former PIDE has of that magical
power. Curiously enough, never the so independent and subversive Lena considers the
hypothesis of uniting herself with the black Ningo, despite the love she feels for him,
confessed in a diary as a taboo: “Oh, Ningo, can’t you see love and friendship have
never been so close?” She confesses her desire for him, but says it’s a “forbidden love”.
In a letter, she writes: “Where are you? You were the other half of me, the contrast (…)
We remained under the protection of the ancestral spirits summoned by your
grandmother. The markings of blood, spit and ash, I know now, for ever inscribed in
23
this body, in the drift my life has been. I needed you so many times by my side.” But
the fact remains that she never went to his side.
In Zona J, 1998, by Leonel Vieira, the miscegenation takes place in Portugal,
where the film is entirely shot. It tells the story of a group of teenagers from a
neighbourhood in Lisbon’s periphery. Tó, black, whose parents are both Angolan, and
Carla, white, fall in love. Tó dreams to go live in Angola and Carla accepts to follow
him without hesitation; but she gets pregnant. Tó is fired, he ends up robbing a
jewellery shop. Tó and Carla run to the airport but can’t go on board. In between,
accounts of men who cut their stomachs wide open, to bring five carat diamonds from
Angola, worth ten cars.
We return to colonial Africa with O Gotejar da Luz, of 2002, by Fernando
Vendrell, a Portuguese-Mozambican co-production. The action is set in the 1950’s in
Mozambique. It portraits the life of an adolescent who lived his childhood in a forsaken
village in the woods. Son of Portuguese colones, he learned at young age to recognise
two realities, the European and the African. His life was scarred by a permanent option
between the two margins of Punge River: two cultures, the white and the black, the
master and the “slave”, violence and peace, love and passion. Confronted with the tragic
and inevitable destruction of his childhood, at the age of 14, Rui Pedro eventually
chooses his margin. He now seeks the remainings of the cotton plantations where he
was born. He finds an old friend, Jacopo, his black “father”, who taught him to respect
African nature and culture.
Fernando Vendrell produces (with Angola and France), the film O Herói, by
Angolan director Zézé Gamboa, with a screenplay by Portuguese Carla Baptista,
released in 2004, wining in 2005 the jury’s award for best foreign drama movie at the
Sundance Film Festival. It tells the story of Vitório, who was forced to take weapons
when he was 15: the war stole him his youth, separated him from his family and just
around the end of the conflict Vitório steps on a mine and his leg is amputated. One
among so many mutilated and crippled by the war, who return to Luanda, overcrowding
it, the “hero” anxiously waits for the prosthetics promised to him at the hospital.
Wandering in the streets where he sleeps, he realizes the medal he insists on wearing in
his chest, distinguishing him as a sergeant, is not helping him at all, not even to get a
job. During almost the entire film, the poorest and most degraded part of Luanda is
shown, the devastation caused by the war, the separation or destruction of many
families but also by post-colonial corruption.
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In 2004, by the same partnership of Carla Baptista as screenwriter and Fernando
Vendrell as director, comes the film Pele (adapted from a novel by Henrique Galvão),
dedicated this time “to a nearly essential level, focusing on the paradigm of the identity
search”, according to the director’s words. We follow the misfortunes of Olga, a young
mulatta, daughter of an affair in Angola between her father and a black woman;
nevertheless, she is well accepted by the white rich family of her father, in Lisbon,
where she is about to finish her degree in Medicine. She is actually invited for a position
at the University, but the prejudices are so strong in 1972 that she is excluded.
Searching for another place that could be her own, she ends up performing the “black
pearl” act in a small cabaret, under the applauses of part of the white “family”.
The same year, 2004, saw the release of A Costa dos Murmúrios, based on a
novel by the same name written by Lídia Jorge. The director Margarida Cardoso had
already made films about Mozambique twice in the past. She had deep ties with this
nation since, being the daughter of an air force officer, she had lived in Mozambique
between the age of 2 and 12 years. At the age of 41, she finally made a fictional feature
film, partially shot in Mozambique. She set her film in an unspecified Portuguese
colony, between the late 1960s and the early 1970s. “The film is more about violence, it
is a terrible question mark about ourselves and about wars. The film doesn’t even say
which war this is. I wanted it to be like that.”xix
Commenting about the film in the Expresso newspaper, Lídia Jorge said that
both she and Margarida Cardoso had “the same desire to create a fictional space where
something outside the paradigm takes place, the same desire that this should happen
under the impact of images created by the hallucinations of memories.” It is true that
Margarida Cardoso begins the film in a more documental manner, like a chronicle or
news report: “It is only later that the film starts to transform itself into the phantom that
memories alter. (…) The importance attributed to the role of women is also different.
Margarida concentrated the action on the two protagonists, she assigned them
practically all of the internal pulse and all the awareness of the historic moment. (…)
What is lacking in terms of an open veranda before the comets and the dead, is
developed in a heightened internal drama. The same holds true with regard to the
intensity of the violence. (…) It is a violence that speaks of violence without showing it,
as rarely happens in cinema.”
In the director’s own wordsxx: “I wanted to transmit my ideas through the
emotions and violence of war. A war that, contained in the men, affects the women and
25
everything else, but like an echo, a murmur.” It is “A film about the collateral effects of
wars.” Its treatment of women reminded me of a dialogue from Chaimite, in which
Mouzinho’s wife says: “The wife of a hero had to be a heroine”. And the woman she’s
talking to responds: “No, Maria. The wives of heroes have to know how to be women”.
In A Costa dos Murmúrios, the women know how to be women while the men
extinguish themselves in an increasingly absurd war. Margarida Cardoso recalls
requesting the actor who portrayed a second-lieutenant to "pretend you’re not here". She
wanted, she says, that “absence of a guy who’s there but isn’t there, because it’s as
though he had already died”.
The director also stated: “Today, with the different views of what happened,
we’ve already started doing History instead of oblivion. Because we begin to accept
what happened, albeit with a continued feeling of guilt. I myself, who only lived in
colonial Mozambique during my childhood, have this feeling of guilt, because when we
revisit impossible societies such as the one over there, the only thing that I can think of
is this: ‘Something is wrong here. A big mistake happened here’. Well, this big mistake,
it was us, the Portuguese, who caused it. And even I, who did not go around killing
anyone in Mozambique, I feel guilty about this mistake.” In an interview with the
newspaper Jornal de Notícias, she went even further: “In the same way that we have
immense complexes and some guilt with regard to the colonial past, they also have a
great historical exaggeration that was inculcated in them with regard to whites. But this
is also becoming diluted. I just think that they do not need to hear the same discourse as
us. What Mozambique and Africa need is to free themselves of us for good. From
humanitarian questions, from our guilt. They need to reconstitute their past, but not with
us.”
The following year, 2005, Um Rio, by José Carlos de Oliveira, adapted an
interesting novel written by Mia Couto but was unable to transpose to cinema the
richness of the written words or even the narrative, nor was it salvaged by the “social
themes” that it sought to highlight (the memory of colonialism, racism, now seen from
an opposite angle, when the culture of the African people looks suspiciously at the
return of those who exploited them in the past). The film speaks of Conceição, a woman
whose soul is divided between the city of Porto, where she lives with her husband, and
Africa, where the foundations of her emotional edifice are rooted. If living far away, in
an existence filled with tattered memories, is painful for her, it is also not any easier to
return to Africa, to a country doubly destroyed, by the colonial war and by the civil war.
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One year prior to this, a different kind of experience. Lisboetas, by Sérgio
Tréfaut, 2004, is a “political documentary”, which seeks, “from a cinematographic
perspective”, to provide “a portrait of a unique moment in which the country and the
city were undergoing an irreversible process of transformation”. From being a land of
emigrants, Portugal began, at the turn of the millennium, to receive a massive influx of
immigrants: almost a million, in a decade. It was the Parc de la Vilette, in Paris, that
commissioned Tréfaut to do a project about Lisbon; he focused on Martim Moniz, a
Lisbon square that is "Little China", "Little Bangladesh" and "Little Africa", all at the
same time. This then gave rise to "Novos Lisboetas", a film-installation presented at the
La Vilette exhibition, in January 2003, with two simultaneous screens. Later, the project
continued for another year, with a further 60 hours of footage, especially giving a voice
to new arrivals, amidst individual portraits and community congregations. It depicts,
above all, Russian and Ukrainian immigrants. However, there is also a sermon in an
improvised Nigerian church, housed in a gymnasium, with the pastor invoking the
parable of Jacob from the Old Testament to speak about the condition of immigrants:
“He worked very hard during seven years, and then he was cheated! This is the fate of
immigrants: They work much and they end low.” The Cahiers du Cinémaxxi said of
Lisboetas that it was the heir to the vigor of Pedro Costa: the filmmaker to whom the
final part of this study is dedicated.
Pedro Costa
Amongst Portuguese filmmakers, Pedro Costa has proved to be the darkest of
all, in several senses. From his second film onwards, all his feature films have centered
around Cape Verdean spaces, both in Africa as well as in Portugal.
It is worth examining briefly each one of his movies (except for his first film,
Sangue, which is not linked with this African theme). Casa de Lava (1995) begins in
Portugal, with various black construction workers in the midst of the ruins of the Chiado
quarter. One of them, Leão, falls (“nobody knows how it happened”) and remains in a
deep coma for two months. The hospital receives a letter and a check to send him to his
birthplace in Cape Verde. A nurse named Mariana accompanies him on the journey but
nobody is waiting for them when they get there. The helicopter pilots have to go back
and leave the nurse and the patient behind: “He feels at home already”, they say. A
statement that will be disproved by the entire film, in which nobody feels at home. At
27
the ramshackle local hospital (an erstwhile leper colony), the black doctor is amazed:
“It’s not usual. Nobody comes back. I see them leave every day. But to come back,
especially like this...” And, in truth, during the film, we see many young men preparing
to leave (the women appear to stay behind): “It’s fate. Mariana arrives and we leave.
(...) Sacavémxxii. Is it beautiful?”
The official synopsis of the film sums it up thus: “In the beginning there is
noise, desperation and abuse. Mariana wants to get out of the Inferno. She reaches out
to a half dead man, Leão. Mariana, full of life, thinks that perhaps they can escape from
Hell together. She believes that she can bring a dead man back to the world of the
living. Seven days and seven nights later she realizes that she was wrong. She brought a
live man into the midst of the dead.”
In Cape Verde they are not really dead, but a kind of living-dead. Even Leão,
who apparently continues to be in a coma but occasionally lifts his head: for example,
when he is attacked by a boy, Tano, who is afraid of the man in a coma (“The dead guy
wants to kill me. (…) The dead guy wants to grab hold of me”), a boy who pulls him
out of bed and drags him down the stairs, Leão says: “My land”. It’s a film replete with
falls, in which the characters constantly fall or throw themselves to the ground.
Only the doctor speaks Portuguese. He is seconded by an assistant who, he
explains, “was a cook at Tarrafal: she used to make lunches and dinners for 180
wretches. Some things are impossible to forget.”xxiii Everyone else only speaks Creole:
even the two whites, a mother called Edite and her son. They came to the island to
accompany the boy’s father who had been imprisoned for political reasons, and when he
died they did not wish to leave. The islanders helped them, they stayed on, and even
today they still receive a pension from Portugal but they divide the money amongst the
local inhabitants, to “help them get away from here”. Despite Mariana’s best efforts,
they always answer her in Creole (only on one occasion does the son mix Creole with a
few words of Portuguese).
Mariana begins to vaccinate the children on the island: “even if I have to go to
each and every house”. But she gradually begins to drown in that inferno, or purgatory.
She goes swimming in the sea, at night, and a black almost rapes her. She creates
fragile, tumultuous bonds with several of the island’s inhabitants: for a sexual, and
perhaps even passionate, relationship, she chooses the only white man around, Edite’s
son. Who is also the only one who does not want to leave, thus infuriating the other
men, who insult him during a farewell serenade. But immediately afterwards they
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themselves decide to stay on a little longer, to finish Leão’s house: “He’ll come through
that door on his feet”. Mariana asks: “Did you ever think that he perhaps does not want
to be cured?”
Everything then revolves around this desire to leave on the part of all the men on
the island, and the lack of desire - to leave or to stay or for anything at all - on the part
of the whites who ended up there. The Portuguese adopt Creole ways and the Cape
Verdeans (at least the men) all want to leave and go to Portugal.
The Harvard Film Archive recently held a comprehensive retrospective of Pedro
Costa’s films, which were described as being (with the exception of his first film) neorealistic works. However, despite the poverty, or the misery, of the spaces and the
people, despite some rare political references, what really seems to interest Pedro Costa
is the irremediable isolation of his characters, whom he makes live and die without any
true human meeting. As an old lying man says when Mariana passes by: “Young lady, if
you don’t understand me, how can I understand you?” As Eduardo Prado Coelho
observedxxiv, “Mariana seems to increasingly become a hostage of the land where she
disembarked”, she is the one who says “As soon as I arrived, I was lost”: “The entrance
into the Cape Verdean space and time is a long and hallucinating process of
disfiguration.” The director explains that he began the film with images of the volcano
on the island of Fogo, filmed by a geographer named Orlando Ribeiro in 1951, because
“Inês’ character was destined to disintegrate, almost in an atomic sense of the word.
(…) To go back to the beginning: that in that land of the dead, the Cape Verdeans
would stay alive and Inês would disintegrate.”
Mariana abandons the white boy, who is heartbroken, and returns to Lisbon,
even though she does not have anybody there waiting for her. But she is not the only
one to experience such a star-crossed fate, it seems to be a generalized condition. For
example, Mariana finds a beautiful love letter that Leão had written to someone on the
island; but despite her best efforts she never manages to find out who the woman was;
Leão even denies having ever written the letter: he says he does not even know how to
write.
These divergences occur irrespective of race. All the characters resist
communicating. In his letter to his virtual beloved, Leão speaks of inventing a secret
language: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could learn a new language, one that is
tailor-made just for the two of us?” It’s as though each character was a prisoner in their
world and the director who films them in this manner (and creates them in this way to
29
film them, since it is fiction) wished, above all, to highlight each individual’s resistance,
the way in which each one stubbornly affirms themselves in the precarious and
enclosured world that is their own.
This is one of Pedro Costa’s main characteristics, not just in this movie but also
in subsequent works. Two years later, in 1997, he filmed Ossos. This was the first film
of what would be a trilogy shot in an extremely poor neighborhood called Fontaínhas,
on the outskirts of Lisbon. In the words of the director himselfxxv, “it’s a shanty town
that houses more than five thousand people and will shortly be demolished. Most of the
population is Creolexxvi and it was built about twenty years ago by first generation
immigrants. The streets are just like the streets in Cape Verde. It has a primitive,
underground economy, the largest market is the drug trade. It’s a bit like Kafka’s The
Castle, the entrances are closely guarded and one needs to know the passwords. It’s a
secret world, that contains unattainable dark things.” The film entailed a long period of
preparation, from March to November 1996. About nine months during which Pedro
Costa did nothing else but become familiar with the neighborhood. He was initially
received by the United Cape Verdeans Association. The actual filming took less time:
from November 1996 to February 1997xxvii.
However, the protagonists of this film are not blacks, nor mulattos, although
they live amongst them. The two leading characters in the film (i.e. the young couple)
are played by a young homeless who was not from the quarter and a Russian actress
who the director discovered in Moscow. Another protagonist, Clotilde, has a black
husband and children; she was portrayed by Vanda Duarte (who would play such a vital
role in this and subsequent films), a resident of the shanty town, but a white: both her
parents had come there from Chaves, they were one of the first families to settle in
Fontaínhas, where they built a shack, and then a brick house.
The official synopsis reads thus: “In a black neighborhood on the outskirts of
Lisbon, a young couple has just had a son. The child, barely a few days old, will survive
several deaths. Tina, his young mother, is desperate and switches on the gas. She is
saved by the child’s father, who takes the boy with him, begging and sleeping in the
streets, giving the child milk offered by charitable people. Twice he is tempted: to sell
the boy, out of despair, out of love, for anything. Tina, who does not forget him, joins a
street gang and goes in search of revenge. A social worker gets lost in the labyrinth.”
There is no need to describe the story further, which we try to understand amongst the
30
many ellipses and as the characters are introduced and placed, slowly, going against the
rules of classic screenwriting.
Basically, the film consists of stony characters, who sometimes laugh
mysteriously and deeply; a run down neighborhood that produces starkly beautiful
images; a young father who wanders around with a baby in his arms and even tries to
sell the child; the young mother who does not fight for her son and tries to kill herself;
Clotilde, a friend who instills in all of them a desire to live and accomplish things,
which they lack. When Clotilde asks the young father if he wants to kill the young
mother from worry and disappointment, he answers: “I don’t want anything”. In this,
Pedro Costa is the heir to an akrasia we’ve noticed in many films previously described
and that in fact is extremely common in new Portuguese cinema: films that develop
(and you can imagine how this is achieved only in the hands of great filmmakers) not
because of the objectives of the characters, but despite the fact that the characters have
no objectives, desire or direction in life.
One could even risk saying that in this world of people on the brink of survival,
Pedro Costa has found a strong and adequate universe for characters that will not go
very far, partly because they have no means of doing so (there is a social justification,
although it is not developed) and partly because they have no desire to do so: they
struggle to survive and the director manages to capture the underlying strength in their
precarious everyday lives and in some of their smiles or small gestures.
From this film onwards, Pedro Costa chose to pursue a more radical form of
cinema. In Ossos he mixed professional actors with inhabitants of the Fontaínhas
neighborhood. The woman who played Clotilde, Vanda Duarte, rebelled against the
director’s instructions: if he asked her to cry, she was capable of answering, “And why
should I not laugh?” She proposed that he make a film about her. Thus was born No
Quarto da Vanda, in which Pedro Costa revolutionized his way of making movies: “I
chose to take a step backwards in order to leap forwards”xxviii. Casa de Lava had a script
that had been endorsed and even sponsored by the European Script Fund. The credits of
Ossos made no mention of a scriptwriter, but it is clearly a work of fiction set in that
neighborhood (and the DVD attributed the script to the director). From No Quarto da
Vanda onwards Costa decided to dispense with the entire team that is always involved
in making a feature film and to go it alone, with a mini-DV camera, a tripod and three
polystyrene reflectors (ibidem), every day for two years, filming the inhabitants of the
neighborhood, without professional technicians or actors and without a script.
31
This is not a documentary, because from the 130 hours of filmed material the
editing was able to create a “possible world” that approaches fiction. It goes further in
his rejection of the conventions of narration but maintains the desire to create fiction. In
the words of Jean Renoir, repeated by Pedro Costa, he wanted “to make a documentary
film that didn’t seem like one”. It takes great skill to link fragments from these 130 hours
of footage in such a way that the work exists as an autonomous entity that is not a
documentary. Are those people who talk and move as though they were not being filmed
characters? If, upon seeing the film more than once, we notice that some movement has
been captured at the beginning and then at the end, at another side of the room, by the sole
cameraman, who was also the director, we conclude that he must have asked the
protagonists to repeat the act. The director himself revealedxxix that he asked Vanda and the
flower boy to repeat a conversation that had taken place during filming six months before.
There is also, obviously, the pictorial dimension, the effect of chiaroscuro, achieved
during filming and the post-production process, as well as a distinctive interplay between
multiple sources of sound. However, since manipulation while filming appears to have
been reduced to the minimum, we are presented (to use Jean Mitry’s words) with bricks
extracted from reality that cinema later organizes into a discourse.
One of the most striking elements of the film, which haunts the characters,
forcing them into movement, is the fact that the neighborhood is being destroyed by
bulldozersxxx, whose sound is frequently audible and that oblige the inhabitants to move
from their homes, entering and leaving via windows, carrying their meager belongings
with them. Even more firmly integrated into the neighborhood and its code words, this
time Pedro Costa can focus on the question of drugs: which undermine the characters
even more in their fragile struggle for survival.
Pedro Costa returned to the Fontaínhas neighborhood to film Juventude em
Marcha: 15 months of filming, once again on his own, resulted in 320 hours of material,
which was later edited into a 155 minute film, released in 2006. Vanda and her sister are
also present but this time the protagonist is a mulatto man, Mr. Ventura, a Cape
Verdean who is relocated from the run down neighborhood to an apartment in a social
housing complex. His new house is almost an aseptic fantasy and he constantly returns
to his dilapidated shack. Once again, it is a film about displacement and about feeling
displaced.
All these films by Pedro Costa stir up geographical questions. On the one hand,
they are films about Portugal. About Ossos, Pedro Costa saidxxxi: “This film is the
32
offspring of sadness. (…) Sadness for the country, for its miserable political, social and
artistic humiliation, for this passive and mean people, sadness for myself.” As for No
Quarto da Vanda, Costa said that he wanted to provide an eyewitness account of “a
large part of Portugal”, at a moment when “drugs, poor youths, gangs, attacks, are all
becoming fashionable in preformatted fiction.” So, there is a political choice of making
this world visible, without resorting to the romanesque versions of film noir: showing a
territory that generally remains invisible or which people prefer to ignore, where the
police themselves find it hard to enter, the misery of the suburbs, the struggle for
survival by those who do the heaviest kind of work - infrastructures, the metro,
construction.
As opposed to exclusion, it is a choice in favor of inclusion, to give these
peripheral beings center-stage and the right to images and to fiction: “These people I
show do not have a real story, instead they have everyday lives in which they are
dragged along, carried away by the passage of time. And they are, above all, people
who are too simple to be able to and to know how to express feelings. I believe that
cinema also belongs to them, to these people who do not have words to speak about
themselves, but only glances and a few gestures to make themselves understood”xxxii.
But his films are anti-misery, they portray “beings with an amazing dignity, an
amazing toughness, an almost tangible asperity, men and women, whose reality or
unreality, whose presence or whose phantasm start living with us after the film”xxxiii.
Presence and phantasm make up the “paradoxical nature” of Pedro Costa’s brand of
cinema: the fact that “pure realism projects us to the boundaries of the supernatural”, as
Olivier Seguret wrote in Libérationxxxiv.
The idea of foreignness is thus confused with that of strangeness. Another critic,
Serge Kaganskixxxv, pointed out that the characters in Costa’s films – thin, pale, with
feverish eyes, in a catatonic state – echo fantastic films about ghosts, zombies, the living
dead, which are frequently a political metaphor; the director himself acknowledges
having been inspired by films about zombies. Kaganski added that Ossos and Vanda
could also be viewed as Westerns, in which the inhabitants of the neighborhood are the
Indians of modern Portugal, who have nothing except the bare essentials.
Various commentators have said that Pedro Costa films “the damned of the
earth”xxxvi: “Costa makes a cinema of the firs men” [Burdeau, 1997]. Or else, and it’s
almost the same end result but is fairer with regard to this cinema, is like someone “who
films the last men on Earth”xxxvii. With regard to Casa de Lava, critic João Lopesxxxviii
33
noted that it contained a certain mythology of a lost purity and an original truth, of the
world as well as of cinema; but perhaps it would be more appropriate to speak of a
mythology about the end of the world and of cinema, a post-human and post-cinema
era.
It is during this quest for the first or last men, during this conscious choice of
listening to and highlighting those who are excluded and their values that Africa enters
Pedro Costa’s brand of cinema and remains there. Like the Other that, in his difference,
paradoxically preserves our own values. To quote Pedro Costa himself: “Portugal is
running too fast towards Europe, losing sentiments and culture along the way.
Moreover, I don’t believe that my country is part of Europe, rather it is part of Africa, or
at least part of some other shores”xxxix. “It might seem absurd, but it’s true: to go to
Cape Verde is to find a quality in appearances and glances that are being massacred in
Portugal and nobody seems to be aware of this scandal.” “I have never been interested
in ‘political things’. But the truth is that, at this moment, I do not like Portugal, I do not
like the people who are in power in institutions. (…) This film also came about because
of this: it’s good to go far away to do things that are closest to us. There is something
good about us in Cape Verde… I hope that this sorrow passes, and I would like us to see
ourselves in this film again, in the eyes of those people” [in Câmara, 1994].
It is worth thinking reflecting upon the ambiguity of this journey to Cape Verde.
“It’s the only thing of which I am sure: cinema is a land of the dead. One wanders there
as though in a cemetery. But there is no morbidity, nostalgia or pleasure in what I say. It
is simply a land of the dead, it always was and it always will be. The only magic of
cinema is to dig deeper and try to discover the small sparks of life that rarely happen
(…) If I think that, I would have to seek out a land of the dead and Cape Verde is
precisely that. It is a land everyone wants to run away from and it has something
imposing about it” [ibidem].
The ambiguity lies also in the fact that in this land of the dead he also finds an
affirmation of life. Even though God also seems to have died in Cape Verde too. In the
archipelago, “whenever I met someone, I would be completely in love and would want
to film them”. Before Cape Verde, “the film [Casa de Lava] was something absolutely
romantic, derived from novels and from a film I really like: I walked with a Zombie, by
Jacques Tourneur. But I arrived there, I got to know those people and it would have
been criminal not to transmit all this. I don’t know what was captured, but one thing
certainly was: an attempt to do justice to the beauty, pain and secret of those people”
34
[ibidem]. “There are things there that I liked immensely, desolate girls, suffering
mothers. Everything that reacts in an immobile violence. (…) And by being there, we
are also contaminated by a kind of sickness that makes you seem quite unlike anyone
else”xl.
A no-man’s land, from where men leave: this cinema is not one of reconciliation
with any geography. As Eduardo Prado Coelho notedxli [1995], in Casa de Lava
“Mariana repeats, under the weight of a kind of fascinating fatality, Edite’s trajectory
(…), a blind relationship with a body and a place. What she will learn is that Edite’s
relationship with Cape Verde is unrepeatable”. Mariana leaves and the film ends with a
Cape Verdean woman saying: “I want to die in Sacavém”. From this film onwards, we
will get the Fontaínhas neighborhood, a new place or non-place for these excluded
souls, who seek survival and live in purgatory, a tribe of displaced sedentary folk, sans
geography.
João Miguel Fernandes Jorge, a well-known poet and critic, wrotexlii a long text
about Ossos. He began by inscribing it in Portugal: “I believe that Portugal is
particularly this film: hunger, blacks and whites, indistinguishable in their common
horizon of misery.” However, the critic then went on to develop his entire argument
around the overcoming of national or geographic boundaries. “Ossos is a film about
ruptures. It seems to talk of a Portuguese post-humanity, if, by some chance, traces of
nationalities linger in the ciphered language of replicants. This film shows how a
historical and social age was overcome. How the community that frames us is already
different. How it is no longer at the exact point where each one of us still conceives it to
be. (…) Of all the Portuguese films I have seen, this is a film which already begins to be
not even Portuguese. (…) it goes beyond the traditional concept of frontiers. It lives and
breathes a generalized suburbia (…). It is a film that pre-comprehends the world. A
world that we still consider to be Portuguese, but one that is already something else.
Something that is already only a ‘world’ – nothing at all. (…) The film preserves an
(authentic) field of philosophy and non-technical politics. And this takes place in a
geographic territory in which neither thing exists, which is a pity. But is it really a pity?
If they existed perhaps we would not have Ossos to see.” Citing this text, Bénard da
Costa would state (on the DVD edition) that this is a “film about mutants”.
The loss of references that is evidenced from Casa de Lava onwards is thus not
merely geographic: it is also temporal. On the one hand, there is a colonial past that
contaminates not only the characters but also the director’s interest in them, in Africa or
35
in Fontaínhas. Eduardo Lourenço, who liked Ossos immensely, spoke about it in the
context of the fabric that an empire weavesxliii. But in this post-human state, in this
almost zombie-like record, temporalities are superimposed or suspended. As can be
seen above all in Casa de Lava: “The question lies in the fact that Mariana moves
within stories that have already happened and rarely manages to escape the clutches of a
past that, at every step, defocuses the intelligibility of the present. (…) Everything that
happens seems to have happened in a mythic past of that happening” [Coelho, 1995].
In Costa’s films, in which the contents are so intensely affirmed by means of
form, it would now be necessary to develop the formal aspects, if we had the time for it.
We will only say that he develops a style that is akin to the characters he films so
frontallyxliv: between immobility, small sparks of life and a rare flight, between
claustrophobia and points of escape, in what is glimpsed and in the many things that are
heard: in this land of the dead that he says is cinema, but always fiercely and stubbornly
seeking a life pulse and volcanic energy.
Bibliography
BENJAMIN, Walter, “O narrador: reflexões sobre a obra de Nicolai Lesskov”, in
Benjamin, Sobre Arte, Técnica, Linguagem e Política, Lisboa, Relógio d’Agua, 1992
(1936)
COELHO, Eduardo Prado, Vinte Anos de Cinema Português, Lisboa, Instituto
de Cultura e Língua Portuguesa, 1983
CHEVRIE, Marc, « Entre-temps », Cahiers du Cinéma, nº 393, March 1987
GIL, José, Portugal, Hoje: o medo de existir, Lisboa, Relógio d’Água, 2004
GRILO, João Mário, O Cinema da Não-Ilusão: histórias para o cinema português,
Lisboa, Horizonte, 2006
MATOS-CRUZ, José de, O Cais do Olhar: fonocinema português, Lisboa, Cinemateca
Portuguesa, 1981
MATOS-CRUZ, José de, O Cais do Olhar: o cinema português de longa-metragem e a
ficção muda, Lisboa, Cinemateca Portuguesa, 1999
SEABRA, Augusto M., “Um Adeus Português”, in João Botelho, catalogue of Pesaro
Film Festival, June 1988
SEABRA, Jorge, Cinema, Império, Memória. O Caso “Chaimite”, de Jorge Brum
do Canto, thesis for Master’s degree, Coimbra, Faculdade de Letras, 1993
36
i
Cf. João Mário Grilo, “Gestos e fragmentos: cronologia crítica do ‘cinema de guerra’ português”, first
published in Nova História Militar de Portugal, vol. V, Lisboa, Círculo de Leitores, 2004, and
republished in Grilo, O Cinema da Não-Ilusão: histórias para o cinema português, Lisboa, Horizonte,
2006. We will use this later edition.
ii
Jorge Seabra, Cinema, Império, Memória. O Caso “Chaimite”, de Jorge Brum do Canto, thesis for
Master’s degree, Coimbra, Faculdade de Letras, 1993.
iii
José de Matos-Cruz, O Cais do Olhar: fonocinema português, Lisboa, Cinemateca Portuguesa, 1981, p.
120.
iv
José de Matos-Cruz, O Cais do Olhar: o cinema português de longa-metragem e a ficção muda, Lisboa,
Cinemateca Portuguesa, 1999, p. 145, suggests as “probable” the year 1971, according to a director’s
reference.
v
PIDE was the political police of the fascist regime.
vi
Eduardo Prado Coelho, Vinte Anos de Cinema Português, Lisboa, Instituto de Cultura e Língua
Portuguesa, 1983.
vii
According to personal information the actor who played the main role, João Mota, gave me in 1994.
viii
According to what the newspaper Diário de Notícias wrote in 1977, apud Matos-Cruz, 1981:151.
ix
Their nationality was revealed by the director at a public debate held in 1992 at Calouste Gulbenkian
Foundation.
x
In Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 54, nº 636, January 1987, p. 14.
xi
João Botelho, “Si la mémoire existe: conversation avec João Botelho”, Cahiers du Cinéma, 393, 1987,
p. 19.
xii
In João Botelho, catalogue of Pesaro Film Festival, June 1988, p. 15.
xiii
A Grande Ilusão, nº 7.
xiv
Portugal, Hoje: o medo de existir, Lisboa, Relógio d’Água, 2004.
xv
Marc Chevrie, « Entre-temps », Cahiers du Cinéma, nº 393, Março de 1987.
xvi
It translates literally as “The Greater Age”, but in the USA the title Alex was used.
xvii
Teresa Villaverde, in an interview to the newspaper Expresso, 31 August 1991.
xviii
“O narrador: reflexões sobre a obra de Nicolai Lesskov”, in Benjamin, Sobre Arte, Técnica,
Linguagem e Política, Lisboa, Relógio d’Agua, 1992. I quote from p. 28.
xix
Interviewed by João Antunes, "África tem de se livrar de nós para sempre", Jornal de Notícias.
xx
Interviewed by Rodrigues da Silva in Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias.
xxi
Emmanuel Burdeau and Jean-Philippe Tessé, Cahiers du Cinéma, December 2004.
xxii
Sacavém is a poor and chaotic suburb of Lisbon.
xxiii
Tarrafal was a fascist concentration camp, about which Pedro Costa would later make a documentary
in 2007. In an interview by Vasco Câmara, Público, 21 May 1994, Costa says: “One of the women in that
film is the daughter of another woman who interacted with the PIDE and was a cook at Tarrafal. There is
a very strong political secret, like in one of the great films about political truth: Muriel, by Alain
Resnais”.
xxiv
Público, 28 January 1995.
xxv
In an interview by Cristina Piccino, Il Manifesto, 3 September 1997.
xxvi
Although there are Indian, Pakistani and Roma minorities, according to Rodrigues da Silva, Jornal de
Letras, Artes e Ideias, 5 November 1997.
xxvii
According to Rodrigues da Silva, ibidem.
xxviii
Pedro Costa in an interview by Francisco Ferreira, Expresso, 26 August 2000.
xxix
In Pierre Marie Goulet (org.), Um Rio – Duas Margens, I – entre Nostalgia e Utopia, Lisbon,
AporDOC, 2002, pp. 165-166.
xxx
Casa de Lava, after the documental images of the volcano, begins the fictional plot also with a
bulldozer razing everything in its path in the area where Cape Verdean labourers are working.
xxxi
In an interview, quoted in Autêntica, No. 4, the magazine that accompanies the Público newspaper,
February 1995.
xxxii
Pedro Costa quoted by Roberta Ronconi, Liberazione, 3 September 1997.
xxxiii
Bénard da Costa, statement on the DVD edition of the film Ossos.
xxxiv
About Casa de Lava, cit. in Público, 18 March 1995.
xxxv
Statement on the DVD edition of the film Ossos.
xxxvi
Kaganski, ibidem, who says that this is applicable even to Costa’s film about the filmmakers JeanMarie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Où gît votre sourire enfouît?, 2001.
xxxvii
Vasco Câmara, Público, 21 May 1994.
xxxviii
In the newspaper Expresso, 28 May 1994.
xxxix
Pedro Costa in Roberta Ronconi, Liberazione, 3 September 1997.
37
xl
Pedro Costa, interviewed by Cristina Piccino, Il Manifesto, 3 September 1997.
In the newspaper Público, 28 January 1995.
xlii
Semanário, 25 October 1997.
xliii
According to Rodrigues da Silva, Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias, 5 November 1997. The expression
comes from Fernando Pessoa’s verse, “malhas que o Império tece”.
xliv
Jean Michel Frodon, Le Monde, 3 September 1997, said about Ossos that “this film chooses to
resemble its characters”.
xli
38