Cinema has been witness to (and participant in) some of the most important periods of recent Mozambican history, from conflicts and revolutions to ideological and demographic shifts and to the subtly changing patterns of everyday life. This paper looks at the colonial, anti-colonial and post-colonial emergence of cinema in Mozambique and at the multiple and complex times and spaces that are contained within the history of Mozambican cinematic representation. During the colonial period in Mozambique the Portuguese largely ignored the indigenous population who rarely appeared in colonial films except as ‘terrorists’, as mythologized ethnographic subjects or as the passive recipients of colonial development aid. A range of ‘post-colonial’ Mozambican subjectivities were constructed through film and so the historical analysis of cinema in Mozambique can raise important questions about the construction of Mozambican subjectivities and about the cultural meanings of Moambicanidade. Audiovisual geographies in contemporary Mozambique have become increasingly detached from the symbolic spaces of national culture as the processes of national identity formation have become ever more transnational. Notes, ref., summ. in French, Portugese and English (p. 472). [Journal abstract]
