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ABSTRACT
Nelisita (1982) was directed by the Angolan filmmaker, writer and anthropologist Ruy Duarte de Carvalho (1941–2010) in collaboration with the Mumuhuila of Huila, an ethnolinguistic group belonging to the Nyaneka-Humbe of south-west Angola, in the historical context of the Civil War (1975–2002). One of the most important films of the Angolan revolutionary cinema’s corpus, Nelisita shifts the boundaries of art and science, articulating aesthetic inventiveness with an anthropological dimension. Combining cultural critique, aesthetic analysis and a brief study of Carvalho’s theoretical writings, this paper aims to insert Nelisita, a prominent example of the intersections between avant-garde/experimental cinema and anthropology, in the history and main issues of Angolan ‘post-colonial’ national cultural-aesthetic project and revolutionary cinema, and to relate it to the tension between modernism and primitivism traversing the history of cinema. It examines, in particular, the way the film addresses the tension between the abstract universalism inherent to the construction of the ‘post-colonial’ nation-state and ethnicity. As it dissolves disciplinary boundaries, Nelisita questions the distinction between the aesthetic and the anthropological and interweaves the sequential time of history with the cyclical time of myth (Mumuhuila’s cosmology).
Note on the contributor
Raquel Schefer is a researcher, a filmmaker and a film curator. She holds a PhD in film studies from Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 University. Raquel published the book Self-Portrait in Documentary and was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. She currently teaches at Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 University. She is also a post-doctoral FCT fellow at the CEC/University of Lisbon and the University of the Western Cape, and a co-editor of the quarterly of theory and history of cinema La Furia Umana.
Notes
1 Ruy Duarte de Carvalho’s full name was Ruy Alberto Duarte Gomes de Carvalho; he signed his films alternately under the abbreviated names of ‘Rui Duarte’ and ‘Ruy Duarte’. He was credited as ‘Rui Duarte’ in Nelisita and Presente Angolano – Tempo Mumuila (1979). Concurrently, he used the name ‘Ruy Duarte de Carvalho’ in his theoretical production. As it approaches both his films and theoretical writings, and to standardise the nomenclature, this paper employs the name ‘Ruy Duarte de Carvalho’ and the abbreviation ‘Duarte de Carvalho’ when referring to his work in both fields of production.
2 Also known as ‘Mwila’ or ‘Mwela’.
3 Also known as the Haneka-Nkumbi.
4 For the sake of brevity, the categories of ‘avant-garde cinema’ and ‘experimental cinema’ will not be differentiated in the frame of this paper.
5 The application of the term ‘decolonial’ to Duarte de Carvalho’s work and methodologies might entail the risk of anachronism. However, the set of methodological choices of his film production – notably, in Nelisita – seeks to detach aesthetics epistemically from the paradigm of colonialism inseparable from modernity, in line with subsequent decolonial theory – the reason why the expression ‘decolonial’ is employed in this paper.
6 J. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 203.
7 In the film's ending credits and footnote no. 1. A experiência de Nelisita (1982)’, Carvalho puts a question mark after the name ‘Valentim’, generating, therefore, incertitude with regard to the sources of the two narratives. R.D. de Carvalho, ‘Da tradição oral à cópia standard: A experiência de Nelisita (1982)’, in R.D. de Carvalho, A Câmara, a Escrita e a Coisa Dita: Fitas, Textos e Palestras (Lisbon: Cotovia, 2008), 435.
8 C. Estermann, Cinquenta contos bantu do Sudoeste de Angola (Luanda: Instituto de Investigação Científica de Angola, 1971).
9 It is important to recall that the independence of Angola took place in 1975 already in a context of civil and international war after 14 years of nationalist armed struggle.
10 H. Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’, in G.E. Marcus and F.R. Myers, eds, The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 302–309.
11 Carvalho, ‘Da tradição oral à cópia standard’.
12 Ibid., my translation, 388–434. All translations are my own.
13 M.C. Piçarra, ‘Ruy Duarte: A Cinema of the Word Aspiring to Imagine Angolanness’, in M.C. Piçarra and T. Castro, eds, (Re)imagining African Independence: Film, Visual Arts and the Fall of the Portuguese Empire (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017), 25–45.
14 Carvalho, A Câmara, a Escrita e a Coisa Dita.
15 M. Diawara, ‘African Cinema Today’, SVA Review, 6, 1 (1990), 65–74.
16 Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 117.
17 Ibid., 200.
18 Ibid.
19 C. Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999).
20 J. García Espinosa, ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’, Jump Cut, 20 (1979), 24–26.
21 Ibid., 25.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 26.
25 Carvalho, A Câmara, a Escrita e a Coisa Dita.
26 R. Gray, ‘Clear Lines on an Internationalist Map: Foreign Filmmakers in Angola at Independence’, in Piçarra and Castro, eds, (Re)imagining African Independence, 65.
27 Luandino Vieira (1935–) is an Angolan writer of short fiction and novels. Addressing the colonial situation and the anti-colonial resistance, his literary works are inspired by the structures of the African oral narrative. They stand as an example of the semantic and syntactic renewal of literary Portuguese in the context of the construction of ‘Angolanness’ before and after independence. He organised and was at the head of the Televisão Popular de Angola (Popular Television of Angola, TPA) from 1975 to 1978 and the Angolan Institute of Cinema (IAC) from 1979 to 1984, as will be developed later in this paper.
28 Ibid.
29 Regarding Olé, see further below.
30 Gray examines the presence of Unicité in Angola extensively. See Gray, ‘Clear Lines on an Internationalist Map’.
31 The work of Kiluanji Kia Henda (1979–) engages with the colonial past of Angola and the African continent. The photographic series and the video installations of Keyezua (1988–) combine formal innovation in a constant dialogue with traditional African visual forms and modern art with a reflection on historical, political and epistemic issues (colonialism and postcolonialism, the contemporary history of Angola, female condition).
32 C. Orenstein, Festive Revolutions: The Politics of Popular Theater and the San Francisco Mime Troupe (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1999), 29.
33 M. Bakhtine, L’œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
34 For an analysis of these issues in Mueda, Memória e Massacre, see R. Schefer, ‘Between the Visible and the Invisible: "Mueda, Memória e Massacre”’, by Ruy Guerra and the Cultural Forms of the Makonde Plateau’, in Piçarra and Castro, eds, (Re)imagining African Independence, 47–64.
35 Carvalho, A Câmara, a Escrita e a Coisa Dita.
36 The debate between Sembène and Jean Rouch on ethnographic filmic representation is well known. The Senegalese filmmaker refused Rouch’s conception that ethnology depended on an external gaze capable of seeing what the insider cannot and eventually accused him of observing Africans as if they were insects. O. Sembène and J. Rouch, ‘Tu nous regardes comme des insectes: confrontation entre Sembène Ousmane et Jean Rouch, 1965’, Dérives, available at http://derives.tv/tu-nous-regardes-comme-des/, accessed 22 November 2019.
37 R.D. de Carvalho, ‘Cinema e Antropologia para além do Filme Etnográfico’, in Carvalho, A Câmara, a Escrita e a Coisa Dita, 177.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., 425.
40 The term ‘post-colonial' is deliberately used in quotation marks to emphasize the persistence of colonialism – and colonial structures and forms – after the so-called ‘colonial period.'
41 Carvalho, ‘Da tradição oral à cópia standard’, 435.
42 García Espinosa, ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’.
43 L. Pawson, In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014).
44 C. Messiant, ‘Angola, les voies de l’ethnisation et de la décomposition’, I, ‘De la guerre à la paix (1975–1991): le conflit armé, les interventions internationales et le peuple angolais’, Lusotopie, 1 (1994), 178.
45 Ibid.
46 The TPA started operating in October of 1975, approximatively one month before the independence of Angola.
47 Piçarra, ‘Ruy Duarte: A Cinema of the Word Aspiring to Imagine Angolanness’, 42.
48 Ibid., 43.
49 The MPLA and its rivals, the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).
50 The allies of the three movements reflect the geopolitics of the Cold War. Due to its geographical position and natural resources, among other factors, Angola was indeed one of the most important battlefields of the Cold War. In a very simplified and schematic way: Cuba, the Soviet Union, East Germany and other countries of the Eastern Bloc supported the MPLA, while the FNLA, initially designed to defend the interests of the Bakongo people, was assisted by Zaire and China in the anti-colonial struggle and later, during the Civil War, by the USA and the apartheid regime of South Africa. During the anti-colonial struggle, China switched its support to the UNITA, initially a Maoist formation. In the Civil War, UNITA was also supported by the USA and South Africa (about the FNLA-UNITA alliance, see footnote 70). Messiant notes UNITA’s ‘ideological lability’ and ‘its ability to make the most anti-natural alliances’. The author highlights its ‘collaboration with the Portuguese army during the anti-colonial struggle; against “Russo–Cuban colonisation” [sic], an alliance with the apartheid regime […] to ensure the victory of the Black people’. See Messiant, ‘Angola, les voies de l’ethnisation’, 169.
51 The notion of ‘Third Cinema’ was problematised by Getino and Solanas in their 1969 manifesto ‘Hacia un tercer cine: Apuntes y experiencias para el desarrollo de un cine de en el tercer mundo.' O. Getino and F. Solanas, ‘Hacia un tercer cine: Apuntes y experiencias para el desarrollo de un cine de liberación en el tercer mundo’, Revista Universitária do Audiovisual (2010), available at http://www.rua.ufscar.br/hacia-un-tercer-cine/, accessed 21 January 2020.
52 Although there are historico-political and formal correspondences and points of intersection between Third Cinema, New Latin-American Cinema and Tricontinental Cinema, each one of them was defined as an independent category. These three categories may be inscribed in the cartography of the Cinema of Liberation. For the sake of brevity, their specificities cannot be developed in the frame of this paper.
53 M. Laranjeira Rodrigues de Areia, ‘A diversidade cultural e a construção do Estado-nação em Angola’, in L. Reis Torgal, F. Tavares Pimenta and J. Soares Sousa, eds, Comunidades imaginadas: Nação e nacionalismos em África (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2008), 78.
54 Carvalho, A Câmara, a Escrita e a Coisa Dita.
55 Particularly the already mentioned Mueda, Memória e Massacre. See above.
56 M. Foucault and G. Deleuze, ‘Les intellectuels et le pouvoir: Entretien de Michel Foucault avec Gilles Deleuze’, in M. Foucault, Dits et écrits, 1, 1954–1975 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 311.
57 C. Serrano, ‘O processo de constituição dos estados nacionais e as questões culturais’, in Países africanos de língua oficial portuguesa: reflexões sobre a história, desenvolvimento e administração (São Paulo, FUNDAP, 1991), available at https://www.ueangola.com/criticas-e-ensaios/item/159-o-processo-da-constitui%C3%A7%C3%A3o-dos-estados-nacionais-em-%C3%A1frica, accessed 7 February 2020.
58 M. Laranjeira Rodrigues de Areia, ‘A diversidade cultural e a construção do Estado-nação em Angola’, in L. Reis Torgal, F. Tavares Pimenta and J. Soares Sousa, eds, Comunidades imaginadas: Nação e nacionalismos em África (Coimbra, Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2008), 76.
59 Messiant, ‘Angola, les voies de l’ethnisation’, 159.
60 See footnote 50.
61 Messiant, ‘Angola, les voies de l’ethnisation’, 160.
62 Ibid., 161.
63 Ibid., 170.
64 Ibid., 170.
65 Ibid., 175.
66 The Eastern Revolt makes part of a series of internal schisms in the MPLA, including the Active Revolt (1974). In 1973, Daniel Chipenda, chief commander of the MPLA eastern forces of Ovimbundu origin as Jonas Savimbi, leader of the UNITA, forms the Eastern Revolt against the supposed privileges of the intellectuals, multiracial, whites and northerners of the movement, mainly of Mbundu origin.
67 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York, Verso, 1991), 181.
68 P. Clastres, Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology (New York: Urizen, 1977).
69 Carvalho, ‘Da tradição oral à cópia standard’, 438.
70 South African involvement in Angola started in 1966. In August 1975, before the independence of Angola in November of that year, South African military forces came to the aid of the FNLA-UNITA alliance. From then, South Africa repeatedly invaded southern Angola.
71 Carvalho, ‘Cinema e Antropologia para além do Filme Etnográfico’, 389.
72 Ibid.
73 The discussion on the boundaries of documentary and fiction is extensive. In this paper, documentary and fiction are envisaged as systems of representation and cinematic constructions of ‘reality’, separated only by a different set of conventions, norms and ideological presuppositions.
74 Carvalho, ‘Da tradição oral à cópia standard’, 444–445.
75 Gilles Deleuze alludes to ‘fabulation’, a Bergsonian concept, as the process proper to the enunciation of a ‘people to come’. Fabulation opens to the construction of a new mode of collective agency, a collective assemblage of enunciation, promoting the invention of a people. This aspect may be related to Nelisita’s collective enunciative modes, besides its collective modes of production, as a means towards the invention of the Angolan people as a social collectivity to come. The French philosopher also considers, following Henri Bergson, the process of fabulation as giving rise to hallucinatory images that disrupt conventional perspectives and narratives, which can be linked to the representation of ritual and the ritualisation of filmmaking in Nelisita. G. Deleuze, Cinéma 2: L’Image-Temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985), Chapter VIII.
76 Ibid., 436.
77 Clastres, Society Against the State, 19–20.
78 Ibid., 20.
79 Ibid.
80 Anderson, Imagined Communities.
81 M. Lança, ‘“Foi a partir do cinema que me tornei antropólogo”. Pensar por imagens’, Buala (2020), available at https://www.buala.org/pt/ruy-duarte-de-carvalho/foi-a-partir-do-cinema-que-me-tornei-antropologo-pensar-por-imagens?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+buala-pt+%28BUALA%29, accessed 7 February 2020.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid.
84 As argued before, even if the Civil War cannot be reduced to an ethnic conflict, the first group is the main social basis of the UNITA, while the FNLA historically emerges as a Bakongo ethno-nationalist movement. At the time, the MPLA was mainly a Mbundu-based organisation.
85 J. Rancière, Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique (Paris: La Fabrique Éditions, 2000).
86 H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 2.
87 Deleuze, Cinéma 2: L’Image-Temps.
88 I am using Gérard Genette’s terminology. G. Genette, Nouveau discours du récit (Paris: Seuil, 2007).
89 Carvalho, ‘Da tradição oral à cópia standard’, 435.
90 Ibid., 444.
91 Nelisita is tempted by the spirits to receive a motorbike and a car. He refuses each temptation. This plotline evokes the Temptation of Christ, alluding to processes of transculturation between Mumuhuila’s culture and the biblical narrative.
92 Like Hercules in Greek mythology, Nelisita is sent by the spirits to perform a series of difficult feats, labours. This plotline also points to complex processes of transculturation.
93 According to Carvalho, Da tradição oral à cópia standard (444), this interpenetration is the result of a spontaneous decision of the participants in the film.
94 L. Lévy-Bruhl, L'Âme primitive (Paris: PUF, 2000).
95 S. Eisenstein, Sergueï, La non-indifférente nature (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1976).
96 J. Epstein, Écrits sur le cinéma (Seghers: Cinéma club, 1975, v. II).
97 D. MacDougall, Film, Ethnography, and the Senses: The Corporeal Image (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 57.
98 Deleuze, Cinéma 2: L’Image-Temps, 285.
99 F. Niney, L'Épreuve du réel à l'écran: essai sur le principe de réalité documentaire (Paris: De Boeck Université, 2002).
100 J.-A. Fieschi, ‘Derives de la fiction: notes sur le cinéma de Jean Rouch’, in D. Noguez, ed., Cinéma, théorie et lectures (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978), 255–264.
101 Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 118.
102 Carvalho, ‘Da tradição oral à cópia standard’, 455.
103 Ibid.
104 Ibid.
105 Ibid., 449.
106 Ibid., 455.
107 Ibid.
108 Carvalho, ‘Cinema e Antropologia para além do Filme Etnográfico’.