Ruy Guerra; Mueda, memory and massacre; Mozambican cinema

Reenactment, historical documentary, political fiction, ethnographic film, all those genres are evoked, at first glance, by Mueda, Memória e Massacre (‘Mueda, Memory and Massacre), a 1979-1980 Mozambican feature film directed by Ruy Guerra, one of Cinema Novo’s most important film directors, born in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) in 1931. Mueda, Memória e Massacre is generally considered to be the first fiction feature film of independente Mozambique. Nevertheless, the film creates a profound synthesis between cinematographic genres, overriding all efforts at generic classification, and thus opening the category of cinematographic oeuvre, as a cultural form, up to new dimensions that include cinema, theatre, and collective memory’s modes of expression as well as Mozambique’s political project, in which cinema played a fundamental role. At the same time, the film’s diegetic structure reveals a complex intertextual conception of the historical narrative - and of filmic object as a form of historical representation -, questioning the validity of the operative categories of documentary and fiction, and giving the cinematographic procedures of reenactment new meanings. A close and critical analysis of the film’s context of production as well as of its aesthetic, narrative, ideological and thematic features allows us to sketch out a genealogy of Mozambican revolutionary cinema, and to begin the development of na archaeology of its fictional forms.Reenactment, historical documentary, political fiction, ethnographic film, all those genres are evoked, at first glance, by Mueda, Memória e Massacre (‘Mueda, Memory and Massacre), a 1979-1980 Mozambican feature film directed by Ruy Guerra, one of Cinema Novo’s most important film directors, born in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) in 1931. Mueda, Memória e Massacre is generally considered to be the first fiction feature film of independente Mozambique. Nevertheless, the film creates a profound synthesis between cinematographic genres, overriding all efforts at generic classification, and thus opening the category of cinematographic oeuvre, as a cultural form, up to new dimensions that include cinema, theatre, and collective memory’s modes of expression as well as Mozambique’s political project, in which cinema played a fundamental role. At the same time, the film’s diegetic structure reveals a complex intertextual conception of the historical narrative - and of filmic object as a form of historical representation -, questioning the validity of the operative categories of documentary and fiction, and giving the cinematographic procedures of reenactment new meanings. A close and critical analysis of the film’s context of production as well as of its aesthetic, narrative, ideological and thematic features allows us to sketch out a genealogy of Mozambican revolutionary cinema, and to begin the development of na archaeology of its fictional forms