Cinema from Ears: Orality, Memory and Identity in Lusophone African Cinemas

Abstract

 Orality, whether in the form of tales, oral tradition stories, or songs, is an aspect present in several African cultures and will be considered here based on film productions made in Portuguese-speaking African countries, namely Angola (O ritmo do N’Gola Ritmos, 1978; Nelisita, 1982; Kuduro: fogo no Museke, 2007), Guinea-Bissau (Po di Sangui, 1996; Kadjike, 2013; Memória/Calling Cabral, 2022) e Mozambique (Canta meu irmão e ajuda-me a cantar, 1982). The aim of this article is to understand how expressions of oral tradition, transmitted intergenerationally, when incorporated into audiovisual works, operate a “presentification” of traditions (Hampâté Bâ, 2010) and transmit a collective memory whose values ​​serve as a subsidy for weaving criticisms about dilemmas that are contemporary to the period in which the film was made (Gama, 2020). Through film analysis and the historical contextualization of the works, it is noted that orality goes beyond words and impacts the very aesthetics of the film by generating narratives marked by the intrinsic relationship between factual and figurative, past and present.