Locating post-conflict cinema in Mozambique

: a contribution to the debate

Abstract

This thesis explores the specificities of the officially post-conflict condition of Mozambique as represented in fiction and documentary films that reflect on its complex and violent history. The research took the form of a sustained analysis of a corpus of five films directed by contemporary Portuguese-speaking filmmakers born or resident in Mozambique or whose work is directly concerned with this location and produced in the period following Mozambique’s officially recognised cessation of conflict on 4th October 1992. The thesis has two aims. Firstly, through a highly situated analysis of cinematic treatments of the Mozambican post-conflict period, I aim to demonstrate how the specificities of the conflict and its aftermath interact with pre-existing social, political, and cultural factors to create a singular body of cinema. Secondly, I critically engage with emergent thinking on post-conflict cinema as a category, opening a debate concerning the stability of the term ‘post-conflict cinema’ and the degree to which such a category can ‘travel’ (Said 1984) beyond the context in which it originated. Based on the premise that these aims were incompatible with analysing the films as textual documents alone, I applied an interdisciplinary framework drawn from Lusophone Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Memory Studies, Film Studies, and Anthropology, among others, while situating the films within the context from which they emerged. Throughout, I have drawn on theorisations and insights from Conflict and Peace Research based on decades of research into the causes, consequences and resolutions of conflict and identification of nuanced forms of violence, conflict, and peace. This original approach provided the foundation for analysing how film reflects on these issues within Mozambique. My point of departure was an examination of the temporal and definitional complexities of the category of post-conflict cinema, including differentiating between personal (physical) violence and structural violence (Galtung 1969), negative and positive peace (Galtung 1964), ‘crisis as context’ (Vigh 2008), and the Peacemakers’ Dilemma (Macamo and Neubert 2003). I brought this framework to bear in analysing how film responds to past conflict and its latency and legacies in the present, yet also provides visions of the future, hopeful or otherwise, while also exploring themes such as memory, history, gender relations, and the politics of representation. As conflict entails physical violence, which is assumed to end with the official declaration of peace, the evidence of enduring structural violence in Mozambique presented in these case studies opens space for reflection on the instabilities and ambiguities inherent in the designation ‘post-conflict cinema’ to categorise such films. My research indicated that definitions of conflict, violence or peace encompass such an expanse of meanings that the post-conflict condition that results from the confluence of these factors is definitionally inherently unstable. This situated analysis thus contributes to a necessary debate about how to define and delineate post-conflict cinema.  

Date of Award	Jul 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Sponsors	AHRC Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership
Supervisor	Maria Tavares (Supervisor) & Tori Holmes (Supervisor)