Film and the city in Mozambican Cinema

Caio Fernando Abreu, a Brazilian writer, when speaking about his city of origin, wrote: “I live in Menino de Deus, of which Porto Alegre is just what there is around it”. For this author, his city is not everything that is around it, but his own small corner, his neighbourhood, his microcosm. And in this way he speaks to us of our relationship with the city – it is metonymic. We create our own cartography, which is composed of fragments that we assemble to fit the drawing of our desire. I leave my neighbourhood if my desire lies outside of it, but my house, my city, is much smaller and is circumscribed not only geographically but also emotionally. In order to assemble the puzzle of the urban space, we are guided by fundamental pieces that we detach from all the rest. And all the rest remains on the fringes. As in the cinema, that does not interest us lies outside the shot. In this way, my city is not just mine; I cannot share it, because it exists only in me. The other city, or the “real” city, is always another space, in which I walk but where I do not always see myself reflected. The psychoanalyst Maria Rita Kehl says that the city is the cradle of the common man – anonymous, part of the crowd. An ideal space for engaging in the necessary everyday forgetfulness about the fleeting nature of our experience in a space that is constantly changing. The real city is the space of otherness, where we do not recognise those that we come across every day. They are invisible (like us). I therefore intend to analyse the urban space as the place for the recognition of the fracturing of the contemporary man, the place for various experiences in life and the constant forgetting of the other, of ourselves, of what lies around us. In the second part of this work, some notes will be presented about two spaces that become entangled as a mark of modernity in the African continent: the city and the cinema. In this case, the city in the Mozambican cinema. I talk about the way in which the western urban experience alters the gaze of those who have different stories to tell. Art, according to Lyotard, does not say the unsayable, but it says it cannot say it. Through the viewing of some films from the Mozambican cinema, we shall therefore examine the way in which this urban space is put together. Cinema, which cannot say the unsayable, shows. In its own editing of the film, in its essence of consisting of fragments that are recomposed, it reveals a pain that cannot be sublimated, but which inhabits the inhabitants, who are frequently invisible in these cities. Film and the City in Mozambican Cinema I look at the map of the city Like someone examining The anatomy of a body...