Post-imperial Nostalgia and Miguel Gomes’ Tabu

Abstract

With Europe in a prolonged and threatening political crisis, post-imperial nostalgia, the dreaming of a glorious past that never was, is a current threat. Fuelled by instability, a loss of hope for a better future, and the collapse of emancipatory ideologies in the face of a seemingly unstoppable global capitalism that has entered a savage phase, imperial nostalgia is more than a simple palliative for the present malaise. In the case of Portugal, with a still-fragile democratic society after many decades of numbing totalitarian rule, imperial nostalgia is all the more ominous given the fact that the loss of empire has not yet been properly assimilated by the society at large. Miguel Gomes’ recent and internationally acclaimed film Tabu (2012) plays along this fraught ideological terrain by imagining a ‘lost Africa’ that plays in aesthetically seductive imagery, shot in black and white, the dream of a more innocent and hopeful era in the current imagination of a Portugal wrecked by debilitating and systemic sovereign debt. The film, also effusively received by the general public, appeals to the past and ironizes it, both in historical terms as well as in relation to other cinema and especially its cited predecessor, Friedrich W. Murnau's eponymous 1931 film. A more detailed analysis of the film's imbrication in cinematic and imperial histories can help sketch out an analysis of the complexity of post-imperial nostalgia.

• Gomes, Miguel
• Murnau, Friedrich W
• Portuguese film
• post-imperial nostalgia
• postcolonial cinema
• Tabu

ORCID

Paulo de Medeiros http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2166-6293

Notes

1 Admittedly, for both Robert J. Flaherty and Friedrich W. Murnau, Tabu may have been conceived as an attempt to evade studio control and the dominant Hollywood mould. However, Murnau ended up making a deal with Paramount, and the film itself, though in many ways masterful and somewhat critical of western decadence, depends on, and reinforces, the exoticization of the natives it depicts. For details of how Flaherty and Murnau came to film Tabu, Lotte H. Eisner's classic study Murnau (1973) remains instructive. For a sharp critique of the instrumentalization and objectification of the natives for the purpose of appealing to western audiences, the study of historian Tessel Pollmann on ‘Margaret Mead's Balinese’ (1990) is very relevant.

2 Critical reflection on Portuguese film is still relatively scarce. However, Mendes (2012), Cunha and Sales (2013) and Ferreira (2014a) provide useful entry points.

3 For a critical analysis of Cardoso's film that takes into account issues of nostalgia, see Sabine (2009, 2010). For a complementary reading focusing on postcolonial film and the issue of violence, see Medeiros (2014).

4 1961 has been accepted as the date to mark the start of armed conflict in Angola. In Mozambique, the war of liberation starts officially in September 1964. For more details, see Newitt (1995, 517) and Brandão (2008).

5 Ferreira (2014b) compares Tabu to other Portuguese films. However, she never even once mentions Cardoso's film.

6 See the seminal essay by Santos (2002) on the semi-peripheral condition of Portugal and its imperial pretentions.

7 Rony (1996) remains a key source for understanding the functioning of film within the various ‘dreams' of ethnography and the longing for a purer, more original, authentic, form of existence that get equated with the ‘primitive’. Murnau's Tabu is seen as a crucial film in a process of assigning the ‘natives' their proper place, outside of history, that, as she sees it, would culminate in King Kong (Rony 1996, 155).