The Representation of Ritual and Cinema as a Ritual in Revolutionary Mozambique: Ruy Guerra’s 'Mueda, Memória e Massacre

This chapter assesses the complex relationships between politics and ritual, myth, and history in revolutionary Mozambique and Mozambican revolutionary cinema. It focuses on Ruy Guerra's Mueda, Memoria e Massacre to examine this question, as this film might be considered as one of the most relevant examples of Mozambican revolutionary cinema from an aesthetico-political perspective as well as from the point of view of its material history. Cinema articulates the representation of ritual with ritualization. Approaching cinema from the perspective of ritual implies thinking moving images as points of fixation of reality that aim to transform it and not just to reproduce it. The Mueda Massacre is one of the 20th century's most symbolic events of resistance against Portuguese colonialism. Mueda documents a collective Makonde reenactment of the Mueda Massacre, which may be defined as an interstitial cultural practice between ritual and politics.