The use of photographs in the (re)construction of collective memory: the case of Dundo, colonial memory, documentary by Diana Andringa[1]
O uso de fotografias na (re)construção da memória coletiva: o caso de Dundo, memória colonial, documentário de Diana Andringa
Márcio Aurélio Recchia
Universidade de São Paulo, Brasil
Abstract:
This article aims to analyze the use of some photographs in the documentary Dundo, Colonial Memory (2009), by Portuguese documentary filmmaker Diana Andringa, born in Dundo, Angola, in 1947. The film deals with her return to her homeland, accompanied by her daughter, after five decades. Belonging to the local European elite, her father worked as a mining engineer in a diamond company, and later became general director, denoting the race and class privileges that the family held in that colonial context. This figure is recovered in contexts that can both function to re-establish his memory and can also point to colonial issues that are still open, given the participation of former black employees of the company where he was a director. The documentary uses photographs that end up corroborating the documentary filmmaker's point of view and help her reflect on issues related to her identity as well as her colonial memory.
Resumo:
Este artigo visa analisar o uso de algumas fotografias no documentário Dundo, memória colonial (2009), da documentarista portuguesa Diana Andringa, nascida no Dundo, Angola, em 1947. O filme aborda o seu retorno à sua terra natal, acompanhada pela filha, após cinco décadas. Pertencentes à elite europeia local, o seu pai trabalhava como engenheiro de minas em uma empresa diamantífera e, posteriormente, tornou-se diretor geral, denotando os privilégios de raça e de classe que a família detinha naquele contexto colonial. Tal figura é recuperada em contextos que podem tanto funcionar para restabelecer sua memória, como também podem apontar para questões coloniais que ainda se encontram em aberto, dada a participação de antigos funcionários negros da empresa onde ele fora diretor. O documentário utiliza-se de fotografias que acabam por corroborar o ponto de vista da realizadora e a ajudam a refletir sobre questões relacionadas à sua identidade bem como à memória colonial.
Keywords: Portuguese cinema; Documentaries; Photography; Colonial memory; Identity.
Palavras-chave: Cinema português; Documentário; Fotografia; Memória colonial; Identidade.
1. Introduction
Born on 21 August 1947 in the city of Dundo, in the province of Lunda Norte, north-east Angola, the daughter of mining engineer Gijsbert Paz Andringa and Amarina Correia Dias Andringa, Diana Andringa recognizes that she had a childhood marked by the privileges of race and class within a colonial context: "It was good to be a child in Dundo when you were white and the daughter of an engineer" (Andringa, 2009, 2m30s-2m34s). Coming from an elite belonging to high-ranking executives of the Angola Diamond Company (Diamang) – her father had been the company's general director in Lunda – the family left Dundo and moved to Portugal in 1958 when Diana Andringa had just turned eleven years old.
During her unfinished university course in medicine, she got in touch with the student movement fighting against the Salazar dictatorship. She began to write articles in defense of students imprisoned by the repression of the Estado Novo and to take part in demonstrations calling for their release. She began working as a translator and journalist, and later as a copywriter for an advertising agency, when she was arrested by the political police in 1970 for having collaborated with the Angolan independence struggle.
Andringa was sentenced to twenty months in prison and, after being released, she established herself as a journalist, working for various media outlets, especially Rádio e Televisão de Portugal (RTP), where she began to collaborate as a writer and/or director of documentaries. When she left RTP in 2001, she became an independent documentary maker, making documentaries that mainly deal with historical, social, and political issues related to Portugal and its former colonies, in particular As duas faces da Guerra (2007), in partnership with Guinean filmmaker Flora Gomes, Dundo, memória colonial (2009), about her return to her homeland and the subject of this article, and Tarrafal - memórias do campo da morte lenta (2011), about the Estado Novo concentration camp in Cape Verde. This sequence highlights Andringa's interests in making documentaries in a consistent way, using archive material, photography, and interviews.
Absent from her homeland for five decades, it is in Dundo, colonial memory (Diana Andringa, 2009) that the filmmaker records her return to her homeland, accompanied by her daughter Sofia, to whom she presents – as well as to the viewers – some of the important places from her childhood, such as the hospital where she was born or the houses where she lived. This documentary is part of a wider context referred to by Robert Stock (2018) as "Filmic Geography of Return and Politics of History" since
it sketches a geography of return in which the filmmaker revisits the sites of her past and colonial history. Consequently, Andringa's production is part of a documentary practice where the return to a specific place of biographical or historical significance is an important move for developing the argument of the film (Stock, 2018, p. 229).
Furthermore, the film is dedicated to the memory of the filmmaker's parents, so it has a condescending bias, especially towards the father figure, who was, at least momentarily, the representative of local colonialism par excellence, given the position he held in the hierarchy of the diamond company.
Of the documentary's sixty minutes, just under twenty percent take place in Portugal and make up the opening scenes. In them, we see Andringa showing her daughter both photos of her childhood and personal documents attesting to her Angolan origin, we see her consulting archive material about Diamang and, finally, attending an annual luncheon for former employees of the mining company, where she interviews participants.
The other over-eighty percent of the film takes place in Dundo, where mother and daughter visit old places linked to the documentarian's childhood. However, there is one element that goes beyond a simple individual recovery of a happy and distant past: the accounts of several elderly Angolans, black people who remember what it was like to live under the Portuguese colonial system and work for Diamang – with this contrast, Dundo is no longer just a documentary about its film director, but an instrument that touches on the still open wounds caused by the Portuguese in Africa.
It calls our attention to the fact that Andringa shows old photographs in several of the dialogues with her interlocutors, weaving the narrative of reconstructing this past. Regarding studies on photography, even though in its early days it was considered by many scholars to be irrefutable proof of what actually happened, the use of deepfakes and countless image editing programs show the artificiality of the truth of the photo. Even those not manipulated in this way are the possible result of a technology made up of limits inherent to its materiality. Furthermore, the photo also represents the set of readings made of it. Therefore, when captured by the cinematographic camera and incorporated into a film, the filmmaker's point of view cannot be ignored, since there is no neutrality in its use.
The hypothesis supported in this article, then, is that, in Dundo, the use of photographs, combined with the use of personal documents, fulfills a function within the filmic diegesis, since it helps to construct its narrative based on the filmmaker's point of view, as we intend to demonstrate.
To this end, this article is divided into three sections that analyze some of the photographs in the documentary, the first of which is dedicated to the use of photos from Andringa's childhood in Dundo. In the second section, we look at the use of photographs in an annual event for former Diamang employees who get together to reminisce about the time they lived in Dundo. Finally, in the last section, we analyze passages in the film in which photographs of her father are used in ambiguous situations, which can either retrieve the memory of that character or evoke memories of the colonial past on the part of black people who lived under Portuguese colonialism.
2. The filmmaker's childhood through photos and documents
The documentary opens with a close-up showing Sofia's hands holding an old photograph of her mother as a baby on her grandfather's lap [F1]. We hear the filmmaker's voice-over saying: "That's me on my father's lap. It must be my first official photograph, I don't know, in Dundo" (Andringa, 2009, 00m06s-00m15s). It is curious to note that the first image chosen to open the documentary is a picture featuring the filmmaker and her father, a character who features prominently in the film's development, as we will see below. It is even more interesting to see how the scene unites three generations of that family since it is Sofia, the only one who had never been to Dundo before, who holds the photo of her grandfather with her mother on his lap, referring to Roland Barthes:
Photography sometimes brings out what we never realize about a real face (or one reflected in a mirror): a genetic trait, a piece of oneself, or a relative that comes from an ancestor. In that photo, I have the 'snout' of my father's sister. Photography gives a little truth, on the condition that it cuts up the body (Barthes, 1984, p. 153).
The filmmaker continues to pass on to her daughter more portraits of her childhood in Dundo and to show other family members, such as her mother, sister, and maternal grandparents, totaling six photos. When talking about the use of photographs in filmmaking, Chilean documentary maker Patricio Guzmán (2017, p. 92) points out that photos are excellent narrative agents in filmmaking, as well as "a way of going back in time in an individual's biography", which seems to be the filmmaker's intention.
F1. Photogram of Dundo, colonial memory
Andringa then shows her daughter some personal documents, namely: her baptismal certificate, the transcript of her birth certificate, in which the filmmaker's voice-over emphasizes that she is "a white race female individual" (Andringa, 2009, 1m17s- 1m20s) and her personal identity card. Andringa affirms that these words set her up, "from the outset, in the ambiguity of a status of inferiority, due to her sex, and superiority, due to the color of her skin" (Andringa, 2019, online). Concerning filming documents, Guzmán explains that
Filming documents is another interesting find: flying over old birth certificates, family passbooks, school certificates, military enlistment certificates, account books, passports, receipts, notes, cheques, diplomas, handwritten statements. You can make entire films based on paper. The character of 'evidence' permeates this type of material (Guzmán, 2017, p. 92).
So, by starting the documentary by showing photographs of her childhood with family members, Andringa seems to want to attest to her place of belonging to that clan, which would authorize her to make a documentary dedicated to the memory of her parents, leading the narrative through a certain bias, since she is a person implicated in that story. After all, "Lineage provides a stronger identity, more interesting than civil identity – more reassuring too, because the thought of origin appeases us" (Barthes, 1984, pp. 154-156). The presentation of her personal documents, on the other hand, would represent a need to prove the legitimacy of her origins and, furthermore, her emotional connection to Dundo, which, in theory, would qualify her to make a film about her homeland.
It is no coincidence that, while holding her mother's personal identity card, Sofia reads aloud the place of birth printed on it [F2]: "Dundo, Chitato district, Angola province" (Andringa, 2009, 1m33s-1m37s). This is the motto for Andringa, in voice-over, to then add: "And so my destiny as a second-class Portuguese woman was mapped out" (Andringa, 2009, 1m38s-1m41s). Among the various meanings, the term "second-class Portuguese" can be applied to children and grandchildren of Portuguese born in colonial territories who later moved to Portugal – it is used pejoratively in opposition to the "first-class Portuguese", i.e. those born in the metropolis. By including this observation in the film, Andringa suggests a certain distance from fully Portuguese citizenship, therefore, "second class", defending her Angolan origin.
Stock (2018, pp. 229-230) points out that, "By pointing to discourses of race and national identity, the scene situates Andringa's individual story within the much broader socio-political context of Portuguese colonialism in Angola in the twentieth century", which would indicate a key to reading Dundo beyond the dimensions of its author's personal sphere. The model of society in Dundo at the time was extremely racist, segregating black people from the environments occupied by Diamang white employees and their families, a theme that is also addressed in the documentary.
F2. Photogram of Dundo, colonial memory
The first images in Dundo are of K10, the house where Andringa lived for the longest time and to which she is most attached. As we said, Sofia accompanies her mother on her return after over fifty years. According to Macedo, Cabecinhas, and Abadia (2013, p. 165), "She took her daughter with her because she needed someone with whom to share their memories and the results of the confrontation with the people and places of her childhood".
Significantly, Sofia accompanies her on this trip, as there seems to be a need for the mother's emotional memories to be passed on to the daughter, even though they both have different perceptions of the place. Regarding Sofia's role in Dundo, Fátima Bueno ponders:
The presence of the filmmaker's daughter in this documentary seems significant to me, because in this process of recovering memory, based on the personal stories and images that the mother shows her daughter, there is a guarantee of the transmission of a part of the history of the Portuguese past, of which Andringa was a witness, a transmission that starts from her memories and family photos, characteristics of the oral transmission of the past, first made from generation to generation, and which is reproduced in this documentary (Bueno, 2020, p. 278).
The house is not well preserved, and the images of the diegetic present seem to conflict with the ones in the filmmaker's memory. While Sofia sees for the first time what her eyes capture, her mother sees both the images of the present and the past through the lens of memory, trying to give a sense to those perceptions. She is suspicious of her memories and, in voice-over, says: "I think I recognize the entrance, the veranda, which has since been extended, the trees themselves, the backyard. But to what extent, so many years later, can I trust my memory?" (Andringa, 2009, 11m40s-11m58s). Andringa's question is pertinent because more than fifty years later, the images recorded by the child's eyes and stored in her memory for so many decades do not seem to match what the adult sees.
There is a cut after the narration above and the new shot begins with the camera capturing Sofia's hands holding a photograph of little Diana with her mother Amarina, in a close-up – Diana and Sofia are in the backyard. Then Andringa hands her another photo, this time of little Diana with Paz Andringa, totaling two portraits [F3].
F3. Photogram of Dundo, colonial memory
By filming those photographs taken decades ago in the same place where they are, the filmmaker is trying to show the viewer and prove to her daughter that her memories are real, because they have been materialized in those images, in her hands, and therefore tangible. It is a way of confronting childhood memories with the reality that is unveiled in the present, according to the dialogue that follows:
— Diana Andringa (D A): These are photographs from when I was about seven, eight years old, look!
— Sofia (S): So beautiful.
— D A: This is my father and me in the backyard.
— S: Out here...
— D A: Here, in the backyard, more precisely that, the backyard was all surrounded by hedges, the houses were separated, you can still see the remains today, it wasn't by walls, it was by bougainvillea hedges. (Andringa, 2009, 12m10s-12m27s).
In the present, there are no longer the bougainvillea hedges that used to separate the houses, but "today you can see the remains", which indicates irrefutable proof that what was recorded in her childhood memory really did exist. It is no coincidence that, after this dialogue, the narrator ponders:
I show Sofia, not the backyard she sees, but another one that only I see, where there's a swing suspended under a mango tree, a cat and a rabbit called Jeca and the voice of my mum talking to Caquece in the kitchen (Andringa, 2009, 12m31s- 12m45s).
The montage of this excerpt overlaps the images of a degraded environment captured by the camera with those found in the filmmaker's memories. In this respect, Stock (2018, p. 235) explains that this strategy allows "the inscription of divergent temporal layers in the moving images, in which it becomes possible for past and present to coexist side by side". Furthermore, the concurrence of times "is underscored by the use of the pan shot, stressing integrity of space and time and suggesting the possible coexistence of past and present". Finally, "the film [...] proposes that different presents - the colonial and the postcolonial - might gain presence simultaneously" (Stock, 2018, p. 235).
In addition to the house, Dundo itself ends up becoming a place full of emotional memories for the director. Furthermore, taking her daughter with her and introducing her to her homeland is, in a way, an attempt to stimulate or develop a "feeling of belonging". In this sense, Pollak explains that
Very distant places, outside the space-time of a person's life, can be important places for the memory of the group, and therefore of the person themselves, either by chance or by belonging to that group. Here I am referring to the example of certain Europeans with origins in the colonies. The memory of Africa [...] can form part of the family heritage so strongly that it practically becomes a feeling of belonging (Pollak, 1992, p. 202).
Andringa's daughter's feelings for Angola or Dundo are unknown. It is not known whether she identifies with her mother's land. Unlike her mother, Sofia was born and raised in Portugal and did not experience a geographic-social rupture during her childhood, so this feeling of family belonging, if it exists, would be part of a "family inheritance", in other words, a "group memory", passed down from her mother - who actually lived through the experiences – to her daughter.
Finally, the last photographs of Andringa's childhood are shown in the final scenes of the documentary, when mother and daughter meet at K18, the house the family lived in when Paz Andringa became Diamang's managing director in Lunda. However, the presence of a grey duiker kid (Sylvicapra grimmia), a wild specimen, brings back good memories and it is these memories that she wants to share with her daughter. The close-up of the camera captures Sofia's hands looking at the photographs of her mother with the kid, called "Khai" [F4], which in the language spoken in Lunda, Tchokwe, designates this species of animal.
While Sofia looks at the photos, her mum tells her how the animal ended up in her house:
This house had another absolutely fantastic thing: Khai. Hunting, they had killed the mother, and when they went to get the mother, there was the kid. Unfortunately, she fell once and broke her paw, and the night she died, she ran, ran, ran around the house, and screamed a lot before she died. The servants told me [that] animals believe that death is in a place. And so, if they run away from that place, death won't catch them. And that's why they are, they usually die running. So that was it, I was left without Khai. And after a while, as well as being without Khai, we went to Lisbon, and, as they tell me here, 'they went on holiday' and we never came back, so this is the house from where I left (Andringa, 2009, 58m21s-59m08s).
F4. Photogram of Dundo, colonial memory
The photograph of Andringa with the kid is significant because it is only at this point that it will be contextualized, as it is the picture chosen to announce the name of the documentary and its director right at the start, serving as the opening and being shown for fourteen seconds (Andringa, 2009, 1m47s-2m01s). Concerning one of the essences of photography, it is worth pointing out that, for Walter Benjamin,
The nature that speaks to the camera is not the same as the nature that speaks to the eye; it is different, especially because it replaces a space consciously worked by mankind with a space that they unconsciously traverse. [...] Only photography reveals this optical unconscious, just as only psychoanalysis reveals the impulsive unconscious (Benjamin, 1996, p. 94).
The German philosopher differentiates the nature of the image captured by the camera from that captured by the human retina, given that a photograph awakens in the viewer the power to reveal elements of the unconscious. The image of the photographed object is preserved, representing that instant in which it was frozen in time, thus enabling the observer to raise questions about the observed object, "something that cannot be silenced, that insists on being named [...], that is also real in the photograph, and that does not want to be extinguished in 'art'" (Benjamin, 1996, p. 93).
Taken from one of the Andringa family's photo albums to compose Dundo, that picture takes on new meanings. By announcing the name and the making of the documentary through the image of the girl stroking the grey duiker kid, the viewer makes associations, conscious or not, about the filmmaker's childhood in an environment considered exotic, given the presence of the wild animal, and the white girl with glasses and short hair, in a backyard.
It is curious how Andringa chooses to end her documentary from the place where she left, closing a cycle. The choice of a melancholic tone, evoked through those photographs, reveals two losses that occurred during her childhood: the tragic death of her pet and her definitive departure for Portugal, ending her "golden age". Her connection to her homeland is very strong, and the fact that she left without being able to return for several decades constitutes a break from what had been her home until then. It took fifty years for her to make the journey back to Dundo, in a completely different context to the one in which she left.
When she departed, during the colonial period, the land was exploited by Portugal, her family was part of the local elite, and her class and racial status placed her in a privileged position. When she returned for filming in 2008, Angola had been independent for just over thirty years and the marks of the colonial period, the wars for independence, and the recently ended civil war were still present, contrasting the filmmaker's memories with the images captured by the camera.
3. The 26th Diamang Encounter and collective memory through photos
Before traveling to Dundo, Andringa attends the 26th Diamang Encounter, an annual luncheon organized by the former Portuguese mining company employees and their families, which aims to reminisce about the time they lived in Dundo. Although not verbally enunciated, there is a close-up on a spreadsheet that reveals that Andringa sits next to Physician Santos David and his wife Maria João. The engineer's daughter, the physician, and the other people gathered around that table represent a section of high society in the colonial period. A group of standing people [F5], including the three mentioned, analyze black and white photographs printed on sheets of paper, stimulating Santos David's and Maria João's memories of their time in Dundo, as read in the following dialogue:
— Diana Andringa (D A): The houses...
— Santos David (S D): The old house where you, where I met him, no, no, no, I don't have that one. But this one is, this house is K10.
— Maria João (M J): Well, this is the K10 in your father's time.
— S D: It has already been changed.
— M J: It has a veranda... Then this was closed, there was a veranda here, and the entrance was that way.
— S D: That's the chikuku, that's the chikuku of the house, that's the chikuku, which was the house's backyard. This is your father talking to Maria Helena Noronha Feyo.
— M J: Well, your father was a handsome bloke, wasn't he?
— D A: (laughs).
— M J: Oh, they made a lovely couple, because your mom was beautiful and your dad was what you know, what you call 'a hunky guy'.
— D A: (laughs).
— M J: The ones where your father was are there.
— S D: This is for you.
— D A: Fantastic! (Andringa, 2009, 8m11s-8m56s).
It is worth noting that when they see the filmmaker's father, the physician simply identifies him and shows him to his daughter, while his wife makes comments praising the Andringa couple's beauty, to which the filmmaker responds with a disconcerting smile. There seems to be a certain embarrassment on the part of the couple's daughter and, in fact, the superficiality of the theme is uncomfortable because it lacks critical reflection on the problems generated by colonialism.
F5. Photogram of Dundo, colonial memory
As we know, the filmmaker's father held a position of power within that society, which in turn existed because of the exploitation of diamonds obtained using poorly paid labor by Angolan natives. By praising the couple's beauty, the physician’s wife reaffirms the place she occupied within that stratified society, reinforces that she circulated in the same spaces frequented by the elite of the time, and, aware of the making of the documentary, flatters the filmmaker. In short, the futility of the subject matter causes discomfort, because as well as exalting the celebration of a colonial past that has been closed for decades, but which insists on being uncritically reminisced about in environments such as this fraternization, it ignores the damage caused to local populations.
In a subsequent excerpt, the filmmaker's voice-over reflects: "Some of those present here have lived in Lunda for most of their adult lives. Others left as teenagers. What memories unite these people? What do they remember about Dundo and their time in Diamang?" (Andringa, 2009, 8m58s-9m11s). The editing matches the narrative voice with images of the luncheon and the black and white photographs on display there. In them, we see a carnival ball, a picnic, a tennis match, with one of the players identified as Physician Santos David, and an event in an arena where, in the center, we see a man on a white horse and, around him, about ten people taking part in the event. In fact, in all the photos shown in this scene, whites are the protagonists, and in the last image, in the background, in the stands, the audience is made up entirely of blacks, in the role of mere spectators, denoting the racial segregation imposed by Diamang.
In this way, that gathering, at the beginning of the 21st century, where no black people were present, emulates, consciously or not, the reproduction of an environment like that of the colonial past, revealing the same racist system in which whites and blacks did not mix. In the excerpt above, before the four photographs mentioned are shown, some of the participants in the event can be seen in an open shot. On the right, you can see several enlarged photographs printed on sheets of paper affixed to trees, and some of the participants are talking to each other facing them [F6], which creates an environment conducive to stimulating memories of the Diamang era, generating an atmosphere in which collective memory is maintained.
F6. Photogram of Dundo, colonial memory
The recovery and exhibition of those old photographs at the 26th Diamang Encounter show that they were originally taken in Dundo within a colonial context and are, in the present of the documentary, reused to celebrate and reminisce about that shared past, acquiring a different function from the one they originally had when the photos were taken. On this subject, Cunha and Campacci (2023, p. 98), when analyzing films that use photographs from the colonial period, clarify that "in addition to their dimension as historical records, the photographs are incorporated into the filmic diegesis in a displacement that offers some 'details' evidenced by the mechanisms of cinematographic language, surpassing the photographer's initial intention". In other words, "this transfer from photographic to cinematographic language promote (sic) a process of resignification of images" (Ibid.), which, in the case of Dundo, is to show how those people, decades later, still evoke that common past.
The documentary maker adopts a different point of view from the people she spoke to at the Diamang luncheon, as can be seen from her account: "Some of the things I hear here seem unreal to me. A lot of what they describe doesn't match my memory. I must go back to Dundo. To find out if what they remember is true" (Andringa, 2009, 11m04s-11m17s). In saying these words, the narrator distances herself from the idyllic vision shared by most of the participants and establishes a narrative thread that justifies her return to her homeland.
This distancing comes about because Andringa demonstrates that she developed an awareness of the struggle against fascism and racism a long time ago since she reveals that "It was my childhood that led me to defend Angola's independence and to be arrested [by the Estado Novo political police]. It was about life in Diamang that I spoke about in court when I was on trial" (Andringa, 2009, 4m18s- 4m26s).
4. The father's portrait
In this session, we will deal with two passages from Dundo in which Diana Andringa interacts with former Angolan Diamang employees about the memory of her father. The first is based on a photograph supposedly showing the engineer Paz Andringa [F7]. The filmmaker and the pensioner Mateus Tico-Tico have differing opinions about the identification of a person, so she meets him in order to clear up the misunderstanding, as he believes the man in question to be Engineer Paz Andringa. The narrator's voice-over explains: "On this return to Dundo, my memory is constantly challenged" (Andringa, 2009, 38m46s- 38m50s) as if in a duel, having to defend her father's image so that he would not be mistaken for someone else.
The fact that the photo was taken around seventy years ago, over-existing those adults, refers to Barthes (1984) when he says that photography "mechanically repeats what can never be repeated existentially". The photographed individual, as a Spectrum, has their image preserved, generating a rather terrible effect, called by the semiologist "the return of the dead" (Barthes, 1984, p. 20). This effect is linked to a presence-absence inherent to the condition of photography, since "what I place is not only the absence of the object; it is also, in the same movement, on the same level, that this object really existed and that it was where I see it" (Barthes, 1984, p. 169). To summarize,
Imaginarily, Photography [...] represents that very subtle moment when to tell the truth, I am neither a subject nor an object, but rather a subject who feels himself becoming an object: I then live a micro-experience of death [...]: I truly become a specter (Barthes, 1984, p. 27).
F7. Photogram of Dundo, colonial memory
From this perspective, there is nothing worse than death than forgetfulness. Andringa, knowing in advance that the old man has mistaken her father for someone else, promotes that meeting – on camera – in order to correct him. When Mateus replies that the man she has pointed out is Paz Andringa, she replies assertively: "Oh, that's not right, it's not! This isn't Paz Andringa! Do you want to see that he has nothing to do with Paz Andringa? Look and see! Look at Paz Andringa and see how he's totally different!" (Andringa, 2009, 39m27s-39m38s), so that he has to admit that he has made a mistake.
The scene is interrupted when the documentary maker finds herself victorious in that "hard battle", proving that the man Mateus Tico-Tico thought was Paz Andringa was, in fact, someone else. Correcting that mistake is a way of defending her paternal memory, but by choosing to include this passage in the film, the documentary maker is moving closer to the colonial stance adopted by the Portuguese, whereby "they were always right because they were white. They were always right" (Andringa, 2009, 22m54s-22m58s), as soba Gilberto Munana, one of the interviewees in Dundo, recalls. Making use of photography as an instrument of irrefutability for her argument, Andringa seems to recompose the colonial scene, where the white woman's truth needs the humiliation of the black man in order to be established. Thus, the defense of her paternal memory weakens the critical stance against the Salazarist ideologies that mark the filmmaker's biography.
The pensioner's misunderstanding leads the documentary maker to hypothesize that many of those Angolans may pretend to remember her genitor in order to please her. In voice-over, she says: "Others recognize, at first glance, a photo I show them. But is it possible that, after so many years, their memory is accurate, or do they know who I am and are gently trying to please me?" (Andringa, 2009, 40m20s-40m32s). This is the second passage mentioned above when the filmmaker shows a portrait of her father to another elderly man, who then tells her that the man is Paz Andringa. While smiling, he stares at the picture for a few seconds but cannot say anything about it [F8]. Andringa asks him if he knows who the man in the portrait is, he answers affirmatively, tries to say something about that time, and as he is not able to, he ends up kissing the picture of the former Diamang general director with a subdued smile. We do not know what the elderly man might have thought of the image of the former engineer, but we do know that hierarchical and racial relations within the colonial system were not equitable. Perhaps that portrait had activated his memory of colonial times. Regarding colonialism, São Tomé and Príncipe writer Mário Domingues reflects:
Exterminate a people, weaken them and bestialize them with alcohol; force them to believe in an unlikely God; fornicate their wives and daughters; taint the pure environment of the backlands: this has been Europe's civilizing mission, this is its culture! (Domingues, 1919, p. 90).
F8. Photogram of Dundo, colonial memory
In addition, that man was in the presence of the filmmaker and her daughter, and he knew he was being filmed, which makes the scene, at least, problematic.
The eyes of the former Diamang employee are fixed on the eyes of Paz Andringa, immortalized in the photograph, evoking the colonial past. However, when a photograph makes up a film, we are talking about the gaze of the cinema spectator, who begins to see based on a selection predefined by the filmmaker and, more specifically, by the editing, as Sontag explains:
In the cinema [...] the camera looks [at things] for me – and forces me to look, leaving me with the only option of not looking. What is more, the film condenses into minutes something that takes hours to happen, leaving only interesting parts, presented interestingly, that is, with the intention of provoking or shocking. The dramatic is dramatized by the didactics of composition and editing (Sontag, 2004, p. 133).
In this way, the viewer's gaze is guided by these choices, which are intended to provoke the most diverse sensations, as the philosopher points out. In addition, there is the fact that the cinema screen expands the display of filmed faces. When we consider portraits of people, the spectator's gaze crosses with the photographed/filmed object. In this respect, Ismail Xavier ponders:
In the cinema, I can see everything up close and well-seen, magnified on the screen, so as to surprise details in the flow of events and gestures. The image on the screen lasts; it persists, it pulses, it reserves surprises [...]. When the image is of faces, there is the interaction of gazes that confront each other, a true orchestration: the eye that sees and the eye that is seen both have their own dynamics, and each of us has had the opportunity to evaluate, with greater or lesser awareness, the intensity of the effects extracted from this orchestration (Xavier, 2003, p. 36).
In the case in question, the confrontation of gazes takes place, in a way, in three instances: that of the elderly man, that of Paz Andringa, and that of the spectator. The pensioner gazes into the eyes of the engineer in the portrait, eyes that "look" back at the old man, affecting him. The camera directs the gaze of the spectator, who follows the scene as a witness, looking at both the uncertain and shy gaze of the pensioner and the serious gaze of Paz Andringa, who is wearing a suit and tie, as his position would demand. The camera pans back to the elderly man after he has kissed Paz Andringa's portrait, smiling embarrassedly.
For the documentary maker, the kiss that the black man gives to her father's portrait could mean that her father was well-liked by the local population, having been a good director. What she perhaps does not realize is that a black man who lived under the Portuguese colonial system, experiencing the hardships and cruelties imposed on him, kissing the portrait of a white man who was hierarchically above him within that regime, is a controversial image. The role of subservience demanded of those black men by the Portuguese seems to emerge in the man's attitude when he sees the European's photograph. As well as servile obedience, this attitude is also reminiscent of the worship/fear that exists in certain religions and sects, where unconditional love/fear of some divine entity is demanded.
We wonder why the documentary maker included these two scenes in her film since they seem questionable regarding the problems of colonialism, and the hypothesis that we have raised lies in the feeling of filial love she has for her father and her childhood memories of her homeland. Furthermore, her father died in 1971, a few days after Andringa left prison at the age of 24. Although Dundo is dedicated to the memory of her parents, the maternal figure barely appears but is mentioned when he shows photos of her childhood to Sofia, in contrast to the evocation of memories of her father, who was, in fact, the one who exercised class, race and gender power in that family/society.
5. Conclusions
According to Sontag (2004, p. 9), "Photos provide testimony. Something we have heard about but doubted seems to be proven when we are shown a photo". It is precisely this condition of proof inherent in photography that we see in Dundo when the filmmaker presents portraits of her childhood as unequivocal proof that attests to her origin, her identity, and her history. These are images of her as a child, with her parents, her sister, her grandparents, and at religious ceremonies, which show that she actually experienced what she narrates. However, it is the way in which these photos are used in the film narrative that indicates the bias adopted by the filmmaker, showing her historical perspective.
Furthermore, when she presents the K10 to her daughter, there is effectively a coincidence of temporal layers in the narrator's voice-over, in other words, colonial time and present time collide, as Stock (2018) analyses. The images that are lodged in the filmmaker's memory are enunciated by her voice-over and contrast with those captured by the camera. However, returning to that place after five decades allows the former resident to prove, on an individual level, that what she remembers was real and not a creation of her memory, as when she says that "you can still see the remains" of the division of the backyards, corroborating what she remembers.
Andringa could, in voice-over, present the photographs of her childhood directly to the viewer, but doing so with her own daughter has a more interesting effect on the transmission of family memory. Sofia did not live through that colonial past, so it is through her mother's accounts and the evidence that the photographs provide, from the perspective of the film, that she absorbs the history of her ancestors. This strategy also makes the documentary more interesting for the viewer.
The filmmaker's point of view is the one that prevails. She often corroborates what she is saying by showing photos, such as the fact that she had a wild pet, something not very common in a European city context – Sofia's. Thus, "The photo may distort; but there is always an assumption that something exists, or existed, and was similar to what is in the image" (Sontag). So, the documentary in question, through fragments of the filmmaker's memory and individual experiences in Dundo, at the same time places it within the category of "geography of return" (Stock, 2018), makes use of photographs as elements to corroborate a historical truth, as Sontag (2004) and Guzmán (2017) assert.
The memory of Paz Andringa is defended by his daughter when she presents former black employees of the company with photographs involving, or not, the image of the engineer. The daughter's love for her father is evident when she chooses to keep problematic passages that still suggest a certain racial and social hierarchy during her visit to Dundo, given that it is the daughter of the former general director who teaches and corrects the black pensioner, making a point of recording her mistake in the film, which can be seen as mimicking the colonial practice of the time when she belonged to the Diamang elite in Dundo and had privileges. Furthermore, the passage in which the other elderly man kisses Paz Andringa's photo seems a little questionable to us, because, despite taking a stand against Diamang's segregationist and racist policies, the filmmaker presents a scene that imposes the recognition of subservience on the part of the black man in the presence of the white man's photograph, which seems to emulate the colonial discourse of the hierarchy of races.
In short, photographs are used as testimonies to events, i.e. elements of proof that can incriminate or justify. However biased it may be, a picture carries the assumption that something actually happened, making the reproduced image acquire the status of evidence, from the perspective of those who use it as the basis for the narrative. Those from the filmmaker's childhood presented in the documentary corroborate her narrative about her past and those involving her father end up arousing ambiguous feelings on the part of those watching, as they offer a condescending reading of the engineer and seem to ignore problematic issues relating to colonialism.
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[1] This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001.
