Mueda, Memory and Massacre (1979-1980), by Ruy Guerr a

Abstract

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.