art news Birth (of the Image) of a Nation: Jean-Luc Godard in Mozambique + *Kuxa Kanema* documentary Birth (of the Image) of a Nation: Jean-Luc Godard in Mozambique + *Kuxa Kanema* documentary
Kuxa Kanema: The Birth of Cinema offers clips of rarely-seen footage from the INC films. It also looks into the offer by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard to create a national independent television network.... The first cultural act of the nascent Mozambique Government after independence in 1975 was to create the National Institute of Cinema (INC). The new president Samora Machel had a strong awareness of the power of the image, and understood he needed to use this power to build a socialist nation. INC's goal was to film the people, and to deliver these images back to the people. Today, the People's Republic of Mozambique is simply the Republic of Mozambique. Samora Machel's death marked the end of Mozambique's cinema (the current government prefers television). There is nothing left of the INC. The forgotten images that captured the first eleven years of independency - the years of the socialist revolution - are rotting, taking with them both the history of a period, and the history of hope. "The best film I've seen this year! One of the finest films about filmmaking ever created. Rarely has any film-related documentary presented its subject with such skill, maturity and intelligence... The interviews are professional, cogent and invigorating, as the NIC veterans recall with bittersweet fondness the initial promise and encroaching disappointment at the great experiment which never quite worked. The Kuxa Kanema newsreels are literally buried cinematic gems, regardless of ideology... Margarida Cardoso approaches subjects with intellectualism, objectivity and professionalism. A film of great power and vision! Those who find this film will come away enriched by what they find."—Film Threat "HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! The story of the National Institute of Cinema is very much a metaphor of the history of the Peoples' Republic of Mozambique itself. Rapidly paced, this enthralling documentary has woven together the reminiscences of the screenwriters, directors, and sound engineers with footage that recounts the experiences of the first ten years of independence. The story of KUXA KANEMA clearly has implications beyond its relationship to the political struggles of Mozambique itself. The film raises important questions about the nature of film, the effects of film on its audience, and the role of film in political ideology and cultural conflict."—Educational Media Reviews Online -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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I consider myself as an essayist, I make essays in the form of novels or novels in the form of essays: only I film them instead of writing them. If the cinema were to disappear I would move on to television, and if television were to disappear, I would go back to using pencil and paper. Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Their genealogies are very different, with Eisenstein’s film having already been completed before being destroyed by Soviet authorities and later recuperated on the basis of production stills, but the relationship between the version we now have access to, and the completed version as it could have existed, is the same: that of the trace. Before entering a more extensive discussion of Godard’s Mozambique adventure, it may be worthwhile to divulge some background information on the country itself. The area’s domination by Portugal dates back to the early 16th century, and by the late 20th century approximately 300,000 Portuguese settlers lived in the country, although very little miscegenation between the populations took place. By the 1960s, however, maintenance of a colonial presence was taking a major financial toll on the metropole, then under the military dictatorship of the Estado Novo regime, and more than 30% of Portugal’s budget was spent on maintaining order in its colonies in Africa and East Timor. In Mozambique the independence group Frente Liberacion de Mocambique (Frelimo) had begun guerrilla fighting, taking inspiration from the successful anti-colonial revolutions elsewhere in Africa. With the overthrow of the Estado Novo in Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution” in 1975, independence was granted to its colonies, and by this time Frelimo had not only hegemonized the independence movement, but had also taken a much more radical turn under its leader Samora Machel, who was to become the inaugural president. Explicitly identifying itself as a Marxist government, the People’s Republic of Mozambique was declared and allied itself with the Soviet Union, with the Portuguese settlers returning en masse to the metropole. It should be stressed that though the Mozambique government identified itself as Marxist, there was no pretence that they could undertake the construction of socialism in the country, which at that stage in its development would have been utopian. As Portuguese settlers had occupied virtually all of the technical and organizational posts in the country, a gaping hole was left which was unable to be filled by Mozambique’s indigenous population, until then largely kept in a state of poverty and under-education. To compound matters, in 1977 a civil war began with the South African/Rhodesian organized group Renamo, plunging the country into renewed chaos. Machel’s government therefore made the cultural education of the Mozambican population a central priority, although a generalized lack of expertise and resources engendered major limitations to the scope of the scheme. In addition to schooling and literacy programmes, the project of establishing the nation’s first television station was made a key goal – and this is where Godard enters the stage. The government viewed it as desirable for the models of Western television to be avoided. While the mooted television station was to be a centralized, statecontrolled apparatus, much like the European model up until the iberalization/privatization of the 1970s–1980s, it was envisaged to have a primarily pedagogical purpose and encourage active popular involvement in production. In 1977, the government thus turned to a number of well-known leftist filmmakers for technical and theoretical collaboration. In addition to Godard, ethnological filmmaker Jean Rouch came to the country, to continue his work in Africa on such films as Moi, un noir (1959), as did Ruy Guerra, a major figure in the Brazilian Cinema Novo who was actually born in Mozambique. Guerra saw returning to the newly-independent country as a patriotic duty, and became director of the country’s National Film Institute, a body established along the lines of revolutionary Cuba’s film industry. All three were, of course, very different types of filmmakers, and had differing concepts of what the project should entail, which was to lead to a significant amount of friction. What attracted Godard to the concept was his notion of Mozambique as a country which, when it came to images, was “virgin territory” – film and television were unknown, and photography was extremely rare, so most of the population had simply never seen a mechanically reproduced image. Indeed, one can see echoes of projects such as Medvedkin’s “cine-train” in the Soviet Union of the 1920s, filming remote villages and immediately projecting the resultant films to the intrigued peasants. This was not, however, Godard’s first venture to the Third World: in 1968 he visited Cuba, and proposed a project there which was turned down by the Cuban government, while in 1970 he and Jean-Pierre Gorin spent extensive periods of time in Jordan with the Palestinian revolutionary movement in order to make a pro-Fatah film called Jusqu’a la victoire (Until Victory), also left unfinished, with footage later used for Here and Elsewhere. Interestingly, at the time of his Mozambique contract, the other main project Godard was working on, which also failed to reach fruition, was a Hollywood studio movie called The Story, centring on the Mafia origins of the Las Vegas gambling industry, to be produced by Francis Ford Coppola and, as Godard had hoped, starring Robert de Niro and Diane Keaton. Godard was manifestly aware of the irony of having two contemporaneous projects at diametrically opposite ends of the cultural power spectrum, remarking in an interview: In California, you have so many images, and in Mozambique, there are none. 80 percent of the population has never seen an image – only nature. It’s like a child opening his eyes and there’s no code, no sense; he’s just looking. In Mozambique, the image is the raw material. But in Hollywood, the images are so sophisticated you can’t even read them anymore. I live in the middle: I’m more influenced by California, but I have a need to go in the other direction because I want to make my own finished products, not someone else’s. A contract between Sonimage and Mozambique was thus signed, to last two years and involve six or seven voyages by Godard to the country. He saw this project as an opportunity to: “Profit from the audio-visual situation of the country to study television before it exists, before it inundates [...] the entire social and geographic Mozambican corpus. Study the image, the desire for images (the wish to remember, the wish to show this memory, to make a mark on it) [...] Study the production of these desires for images and their distribution via the airwaves (oh sirens!) or cables. Study, for once, production, before distribution comes into the mix. Study the programmes before making a grid out of them, behind which the spectators will be plonked, who will no longer know that that they are behind the television set [...] and not in front of it as they believe.” (Godard 1979, 73–74.) Gambo, meanwhile, interviewed in the documentary Kuxa Kanema, described the essence of the project as: “We filmed and captured the image of a countrywoman, then we showed her the image to see the reaction of this person who couldn’t read or write. This way, we saw who we needed to make television for. For the peasant or for the intellectual? And if it was to be for everyone, how would we do it?” (Brody 2008, 414.) In the end, by the middle of the first year of the contract, Godard and Mieville already began to have problems with the project, out of the six to seven trips envisaged, only two were made before they renounced returning to the country. In a lecture reprinted in The TVideo Politics of Jean-Luc Godard, African filmmaker and academic Manitha Diawara has given a valuable analysis of the reasons for the project’s failure, and, considering his intimate knowledge of the issues surrounding such a situation, it’s worth quoting him at length: “Many people see Godard as a hero of the liberation of the image and as a creator, an icon of cinema. Initially Guerra welcomed Godard, said ‘this is great let’s work together’ and it started out very well. Later on, however, Guerra felt that Godard was spending too much money on producing and theorising, not actually making his films. [...] With Godard there was too much mise en scene, theorising how to position an image in front of a camera, which camera to use, how to do it, etc. It never ended. So again, they were impatient with Godard. Ultimately, the contract was dissolved by the end of the year. There was no bitterness. Godard learned more about cinema: he came to his realisation that in a republic, you can’t make a film. He filmed some of Rouch’s super 8 films, left the equipment in Mozambique and went away.” (Diawara 2003, 105–107.) And further: Maybe Godard was not even interested in producing the images as much as he was in trying to define these images, trying to lay the groundwork, preparing the kind of television they should construct given the world situation. This is what he was doing, but what people were expecting (including Godard himself) was at least some examples of these images: the images we want and need. In some ways for materialists like myself, one can describe this project as a failure because he broke with Guerra and the Mozambican people. In that sense, there was an idea of failure, but for Godard in a way, the project was to provoke thinking about the image and to make people ask themselves, ‘what do we want when we have television? Another likely cause of the project’s failure lay in Godard’s near total unfamiliarity with the country, its history or culture. He could not speak Portuguese, let alone any of Mozambique’s native languages, and simply had no way to interact with the local people in the profound way that his plans required. Godard did not, however, see there being a particular impediment to the completion of his mooted television series Birth (of the image) of a Nation. In Cahiers he gave a fascinating precis of the format of the series. Following a “little television team” composed of a producer (a cipher for Godard himself), a television host/photographer (Mieville), a technician and a businessman, the five part series would have the following structure: “Films #1 and #5 will be focussed more particularly on the producer/television host couple, on their reflections far from their home (Film #1) during the shooting [in Mozambique], and then on their feelings upon returning to Europe (Film #5). The producer and the television host will be played by an actor and an actress. Films #2, #3 and #4 will be sketches, travelling diaries, thoughts, drawings, impressions, which express, in Film #2, the perspective of the producer, in Film #3 that of the businessman, and in Film #4 that of the television host/photographer. Film #2 (producer) will essentially be made of video interviews with those who still have never seen any images (the majority of the Mozambican population). Film #3 will be made of documents in Super 8 and 16mm, often projected analytically, like an amateur film made by a businessman for his family. Film #4 will above all be made of photos, mainly black and white ones, expressing the perspective of the photographer.” (Godard 1979, 77.) Probably the most interesting aspects of this scheme are the inventiveness involved in attempting to salvage a project which had yielded only a small proportion of the images that had been initially foreseen, and the range of image formats envisaged by Godard: video, Super 8 and 16mm film, stills, drawings and documents are all proposed to be utilized. Godard also proposed a range of distribution formats, with the five television episodes accompanied by cinema screenings showing episodes #1 and #5 backto- back, which, given projected episode lengths of 50 minutes to an hour, would have made for a feature length release. Delivery of the series was expected by December 1979. However, along with the Hollywood project (which unsurprisingly was unable to attract the participation of De Niro and Keaton), it was abandoned in favour of a comeback in the French cinema with Slow Motion, which precipitated the end of Sonimage’s television work. The rest of this paper will be devoted to looking at the “Report on Voyage No. 2A of the Sonimage Company in Mozambique,” an “Annex” of Last Dream of a Producer which comprises the last 50 of its 60 pages, and relates, in the form of a diary/photo-essay, Godard’s impressions of the trip he and Mieville made between August 24 and September 4, 1978. The first important thing to note is the form, and in particular the combination of text and image. This particular form of juxtaposing the written word with images has been a hallmark of Godard’s oeuvre since at least Le Gai Savoir (1969), and has been central to Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-98) among other later works. In particular, a hierarchy elevating either text or image to an authoritative status is absent in Godard’s practice. The image does not serve to illustrate what the text is saying, nor does the text function as a caption, elucidating the context of what the image is presenting, but rather, text and image exist in constant tension to each other, in what Jacques Ranciere has called a “sentence-image.” (Ranciere 2007, 45.) The images themselves have been criticized by Richard Brody for being “no more revealing than souvenir snapshots,” (Brody 2008, 414) but I personally found them to have a strong resonance, with some attaining a rare lyrical power. Secondly, the diary form of the texts lends the work a very confessional tone, and Godard often conveys a distinctly self-critical attitude to his involvement in the project, highlighting his self-perceived inadequacy in dealing with potential collaborators, let alone subjects. For instance, in a taut, telegraphic style, he writes: “Wednesday, August 30, 1978: Attempt to shoot video at the market. Not very productive. Material not sophisticated enough to record the beauty of the colours. Too cumbersome to film ‘on the run’. And this young girl probably finds the socalled white ‘sorcerer’ ridiculous as he pointlessly gets himself worked up.” (Godard 1979, 103.)  In the end, three themes come out clearly from the diary, which manifest themselves at different points in the work. The first is Godard’s idea that the practical questions surrounding the establishment of an audio-visual culture had immediate theoretical and political ramifications. Mozambicans are shown peering at or fiddling with the various pieces of equipment required to run a television station, and fundamental problems such as training people to fix the equipment when it breaks down are raised. For Godard, the very fact that, for instance, the sound recording equipment is manufactured by Sony means that imperialist dominance over Mozambique’s image production is already implanted – true independence is still a long way off, even, or especially, on a cultural level. Such choices have deep ramifications, as Godard later states: “Pal or Secam. France or Germany. Senegal or South Africa. Production first or broadcasting first. An image of me for others, or an image of others for me.” (Godard 1979, 105.) This associative thought process continues throughout the piece, as another extract demonstrates: “The signal. Traces. Illness, health, beauty. Formation, creation of forms, information. Memories. What goes well and what goes bad. How it goes well. How it goes bad. Inspection and diagnosis. Vague thoughts and clear images.” (Godard 1979, 85.)  An additional theme is demonstrated with the above image, accompanied by the caption “Always 2 for 1 image.” The concept of “One dividing into two” was a Maoist precept positing the infinite process of division within the dialectical conception of the universe (and was thus counter-posed to “Two goes into one” which saw the universe as undergoing a process of unification). It was taken up with gusto by Godard during his Maoist period, but even after his militancy waned, the notion still left numerous fertile traces in his later video work. In episode 5B of Six fois deux, for example, he objects to the mathematician Rene Thom in an interview for adhering to a version of the “Two goes into one” theory. Here it is clear that the “Two” that are required to make an image are the European, endowed with technical knowledge (i.e. cultural capital), and the African, who is to be instilled with this knowledge. Even with the best intentions, therefore, the cultural hegemony of the European cannot simply be wished away, as is shown by the following photo of a project meeting at the Electronic Centre, attended by “everyone”, and exclusively composed of Europeans.  Indeed, Godard himself acknowledged this fact with this photo of the shooting of an athletics event, accompanied by the text: “An image not to be seen any more. The white ‘Bwana.’ The specialist.” (Godard 1979, 95.)
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by Daniel Fairfax ................ While Jean-Luc Godard’s life and work has received a plethora of critical attention, a relatively uncharted episode occurred in 1977–1978, when, at the behest of the Samora Machel government, the filmmaker worked in Mozambique to assist in the establishment of the country’s first television station. Having newly acquired its independence from Portugal, the avowedly Marxist government of Machel embarked on a cultural policy emphasizing the country’s autonomy and intending to avoid simply replicating the media landscape of First World countries. Godard, meanwhile, had recently come out of an intense period of militant film practice in the post-1968 period, and was at the time ensconced in producing video and television works, many of which can be seen as models for what a revolutionary television in Mozambique could have looked like.
The concept of an image made by two is shared by his collaboration efforts through the 1970s, first with Jean-Pierre Gorin, and subsequently with Mieville, and his summation of the experience is: “Power of images. Abuse of power, Always be two to watch an image, and split the difference between the two. Image as proof. Image as justice, as the result of an accord.” (Godard 1979, 125.) The third “theme” dominates the end of the sequence and concerns the children of Mozambique. Godard’s interest in children and their relationship with the image was already central to his work France/detour, and here the images of Mozambican children encountered by chance constitute one of the highlights of the work. Godard describes his experience thus: “En route to the village where the comrades with the Super 8 stock are going to project their film. Stop on the banks of the Limpopo River. Children. A Polaroid colour instamatic. The first image. Of men. And of women.” (Godard 1979, 119.) We then are shown a young Mozambican being schooled in the techniques of camera operation and TV presentation, as clear parallels are made between the youthfulness of the Mozambican population, and its “newborn” status as a nation, having only just won independence. One image in particular strongly recalls the opening credits of France/detour. 
Last Dream of a Producer ends with the following catechism: “Who is responsible for oppression remaining? We are. Who is responsible for oppression disappearing? We are.” (Godard 1979, 127.) 
This is juxtaposed with perhaps the most enigmatic yet strangely moving image of the entire work: a young Mozambican child, cast half in shadow, looks, entranced, towards his right. 
The planned work’s long-term value can also be testified by the theoretical document drawn up by Godard in response to the situation in which he found himself. Partly reprinted in translated form in MacCabe’s 1980 monograph, and described by him as “one of the clearest statements of Godard’s thinking on television,” (MacCabe 1980, 138) the statement contained a section entitled “Principles of reflection,” which we reproduce here. [Fig. 11.] When asked by MacCabe, in the same book, as to the prospects of founding a radical alternative to the dominant practice of television networks in Third World countries such as Mozambique, Godard taciturnly responded: “There was a chance. A chance. It’s over.” (1979, 156.) By that point the project’s failure had evidently become apparent to him. And yet we hope to have shown that the experience in Mozambique not only left behind a number of fascinating trace documents – worthy of analysis in their own right – but that it has also informed much of Godard’s subsequent work in video and in the cinema.
