Memory’s ransom: silences, postmemory, cinema

Paulo de Medeiros

doi:10.22409/abriluff.v13i27.51241

Authors

Paulo de Medeiros University of Warwick

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22409/abriluff.v13i27.51241

Keywords:

Postmemory, Film, Silence, Revolution, Colonial War

Abstract

Close to half a century after their end, the colonial wars Portugal waged in a desperate and doomed attempt to hold on to its African colonies in 1974 remain still largely unprocessed. This article examines the multiple silences surrounding the colonial wars and the 25th April Revolution in Portugal drawing from the concept of postmemory and the notion of a traumatic past whose wounds have never healed. It argues that silence in the end does nothing more than allow those open wounds to go on festering. The combined silence over the dictatorship and the colonial wars was never more than a mild palliative, yet another self-delusion the nation allowed itself as it attempted to put on its new European costume. The article focuses on two films, Inês de Medeiros’ Cartas a uma Ditadura (2006) and Ivo M. Ferreira’s Cartas da Guerra (2016), their differences and their similarities, singling out the work of postmemory evident in the scenes with Belmira Monteiro and her granddaughter in the former.

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Original in English.

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Author Biography

Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick

Paulo de Medeiros is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick. He has taught at several universities in Portugal, Brazil, Spain, the Netherlands and USA. He is a honorary member of the Institute for Research in Modern Languages at the School of Advanced Studies of the University of London and he was the president of the American Portuguese Studies Association. His research interests are: post-colonialism, memory, literary theory, Portuguese-language literature and cinema. Among his books stand out: Pessoa’s Geometry of the Abyss: Modernity and the Book of Disquiet, (Legenda, 2013), O Silêncio das sereias - Ensaio sobre o Livro do Desassossego, (Tinta da China, 2015) and Contemporary Lusophone African Film: Transnational Communities and Alternative Modernities, with Lívia Apa, (London and New York: Routledge, 2021). This essay was prepared partially for project MEMOIRS – Children of Empires and European Postmemories, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 648624).

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