Margin in a way : the case of Catembe censorship.

  • Maria do Carmo Piçarra Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Instituto de Comunicação da NOVA: Lisboa, PT (ICNOVA-FCSH)
Keywords: “Policy of the Spirit”; New Cinema; colonialism; Portugality; Catembe; Mozambique.

Abstract

Through the analysis of the censorship of Catembe, I intend to show how the Portuguese dictatorship sought to fully control the cinematographic projection of colonialism, considered, after the beginning of the colonial war in 1961, a mainstay of the regime and an essential condition of Portugal and of an idea about the “Portuguese way of being in the world”. I contextualize the emergence of censorship after the May Revolution of 1926, characterizing its application to cinema and particularizing how it was instrumentalized by the “Politics of the Spirit”. I then identify the main guidelines on the basis of which the censors exercised their function and describe the importance of cinema to project the nation and an idea of ​​Portugueseness that established that it was their purpose to possess colonies as a historical right. Finally, I summarize the changes in the colonial model before going deeper into the case study under analysis.

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Author Biography

Maria do Carmo Piçarra, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Instituto de Comunicação da NOVA: Lisboa, PT (ICNOVA-FCSH)

Maria do Carmo Piçarra (Communication Sciences PhD, New University of Lisbon) is a researcher at ICNova. Since 2014 until 2018 she was an FCT Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre of the Communication and Society Research of the Universidade do Minho and at Centre for Film Studies and Aesthetics of the University of Reading. Founder and co-editor, until 2018, of Aniki – Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image, she created the Aleph network, an action research project that undertakes joint work with national and international archives holding colonial collections, in order to raise public and political awareness as to the importance of archive accessibility and preservation of films.

References

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Published
2022-04-13
How to Cite
Piçarra, M. do C. (2022). Margin in a way : the case of Catembe censorship. Dialogos, 26(1), 62-82. https://doi.org/10.4025/dialogos.v26i1.61947