Postcolonial Readings in Lusophone Film 1937-1985

This thesis explores the concept of Lusophone identity in colonialist and anticolonial films produced and/or sanctioned by Portugal’s Estado Novo and Mozambique’s political and military movement Frelimo from 1937 to 1985. The scope of research is informed by Lusophone history, postcolonial theory and Lacanian-focussed film studies and this approach is used to interpret filmic representations of colonizer and colonized subjects in relation to intraand inter-gender dynamics, rationality, race, language, and space. In tandem, I argue that the representation of Lusophone colonizer and colonized identities, which draw on role-model masculinities, is framed within historical traumas and subalternity. To date only a few studies on the film representation of the Portuguese colonies have been published, and most of these have typically been historically based studies. In this thesis, Lusophone films are analysed through the lens provided by the postcolonial writings of Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, and Homi K. Bhabha to argue that Lusophone colonialist and anti-colonial films are framed and betrayed by their implicit and direct responses to national and racial Othering. By comparing the representation of the dynamics of colonizer/colonized and white/black subjects in these Lusophone films with the portrayal of these themes in key colonialist Anglophone and anti-colonial Francophone films, as well as in U.S. silent films, I demonstrate that colonialist and anti-colonial Portuguese language films point to a unique colonizer/colonized psychodynamics. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first chapter outlines the historical and theoretical foundations of this study. Chapter two analyses the ideological development of Portugal’s Estado Novo and its dictatorship, as well as Mozambique’s Marxist Frelimo movement, and argues that their leaders attempted to construct nationalist identities based on the exclusionary concept of a new man. In the third chapter I discuss the ways in which the Estado Novo and Frelimo, drawing on their objective of legitimising power, used film in such a way as to impose a normative national identity which portrayed ‘otherness’ in terms of gender, race, and language. The colonialist film Chaimite (1953) and the anti-colonial film O Tempo dos Leopardos (1985) are examples of the practice used by the Estado Novo and Frelimo respectively and are chosen as key film texts for the purpose of this study. The interpretation of the contrasting representations of Portuguese colonialism in these two films suggests that whilst Portuguese masculinity is characterized by feelings of inferiority in relation to major European powers, the masculinity invoked in Frelimo’s anti-colonial role model reflects the paradoxical process whereby colonialist doctrine had been internalized by Lusophone colonized subjects