Of Westerns, Women, and War: Re-Situating Angolan Cinema and the Nation

Today, evidence of cinematic desuetude in Luanda abounds. No films have been produced locally in at least the past thirteen years. Angola's directorial hopefuls Antonio Ole and Rui Duarte de Carvalho have ceased filmic activity, the former for painting and the latter to continue his trajectory as anthropologist and poet. The once thriving cinemas of Luanda's downtown, with revolutionary nationalist names like the Karl Marx Cinema, the First of May Cinema, and the National Theater are all closed and some even occupied by refugees of the civil war. Video rental clubs abound, signaling the national crisis in a retreat from the symbolic gathering of the nation in cinemas (Shohat and Stam 103), to the constitution of other collectivities organized around family, generation, or gender. At the same time, cinemas are sometimes opened for musical concerts, like a series of peace concerts that have toured since 1997 in hopes of mobilizing support for national reconstruction and reconciliation. Lastly, the national assembly where the parliament convenes is housed in what was, during the colonial period, the largest cinema in the city and the symbol of colonial cultural tastes. Following this establishing shot, it becomes possible, even necessary, to think of cinema from something other than a nationalist perspective, that is, from a postcolonial perspective. The concern is then not so much to delineate the films and define the characteristics of a national cinema but to analyze the relationship between film, cinema, and the nation.

Consequently, the aim of this article is threefold: to sketch briefly the history of cinema in colonial Angola; to reconsider the history of Angola's revolutionary film production (in particular the film Sambizanga); and, in light of those two assessments, to think the relationship between cinema and the nation in Angola through a postcolonial optic.

Unlike the other European colonizers of Africa, that is, the British and the French who used films for didactic and exhortative purposes (Ukadike, Black African Cinema 29-35), the Portuguese employed newsreel solely for propaganda and neither established production facilities in the colonies nor trained Africans in production (Diawara, ch. 6). However, the Portuguese colonies were not innocent of colonial representational practices. Newspapers and popular magazines from the period, as well as interviews with Angolans who lived during the late colonial era, suggest that popularly frequented cinemas offered a variety of films from the European continent and from Hollywood.

Theater schedules in the newsweekly Noite e Dia/Night and Day (predominantly oriented to the white urban middle class) and the newspaper Jornal de Angola/Angolan Journal ¹ (published by Anangola, a social-cultural organization for mestiços, whites born in Angola, and some blacks) from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, list films from Europe, the United States, Mexico, Hong Kong, and Brazil that ran in Luanda's cinemas. Interviews with writers and other cultural figures who were young adults in this period emphasize, in particular, the popularity of American westerns ("cowboiadas") and Asian kung-fu films (Laban, Angola; Mário Pinto de Andrade 30-31; pers. interviews).

European art films were the fare at what were until late 1961 predominantly white cinemas, and westerns and kung-fu films played mostly at the few cinemas in black neighborhoods. Luanda's downtown area was peppered with cinemas for the white and assimilado colonial elite ² (e.g., the National Cinema and the Restoration Cinema), while the city's black suburbs housed a few cinemas for Luanda's African population (e.g., the Colonial Cinema and the Ngola Cinema); more were constructed following the colonial reforms introduced in late 1961. Cinemas were thus social spaces where de jure (until 1961) and de facto segregation and the juridical categories of the indigenato system were produced and lived. Even the names of the cinemas themselves belie the imperial imaginary. The "National" was for whites and for those select Africans who qualified...