Filming ethnographic Portugal: Miguel Gomes and the last taboo

Hilary Owen*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This article sets out to trace three frames of Portuguese cinematic archive reference (silenced imperial Portuguese propaganda; 1950s romantic comedy, and auto-ethnographic cinema) in Miguel Gomes's film Tabu (2012). Asking how Portugal situates itself meta-cinematically in relation to the problems of colonial nostalgia and imperial disavowal, this article analyses the image of imperial Africa that an austerity-stricken Portugal re-invents in Tabu as the 'other-where' of its own dislocation in Europe. The risk that emerges in this sub-textual tracing of a Portuguese colonial cinema aesthetic is not, or not principally, that of nostalgia but rather that of the film's complicity with the discourse of subaltern postcolonial difference and exceptionalism that Gomes ostensibly sets out to critique. In conclusion, I compare Gomes's use of African colonial memory to engage with a similar problematic, this time explicitly framed in terms of Portugal's relations with the EU, in his short film Redencao/ Redemption, from 2013.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)58-75
Number of pages18
JournalJournal of Romance Studies
Volume16
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2016

Keywords

  • European Union
  • Lusophone Africa
  • Miguel Gomes
  • Nostalgia
  • Portugal
  • Postcolonial cinema
  • Romance

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