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Paper short abstract:

I will reflect here on my footage made with the Makonde in Mozambique, a response to Margot Dias 1950's ethnographic footage. In this elicitation, sounds and images provoked a sensorial response, as an embodied cinema invested, by the actual process of seeing, by ideas of belonging.

Paper long abstract:

Visual archives carry the indelible stamp of the original encounter and the decisions made at the time of shooting. Margot Dias, ethnologist Jorge Dias wife, filmed between 1958 and 1961 among the Makonde people in North Mozambique. I have been working with her 16mm visual material, and also a huge amount of sounds. She recorded hundreds of songs and musical instruments. In 1995, I videotaped, in her house, a long conversation about her past and her African experience. From this material, from photographs, sounds, her books and the reports sent to the government I started a film that could unveil stories and encounters. In 2018 I went to Maputo to find the young Makonde artists and musicians in order to understand how film archives restitution and elicitation provokes narratives behind the scenes, taking us to specific places and situations. Margot's archival images helped, then, to look at a contemporary country with rooted traditions. I will relate this experience with the ideas of dislocation as method. Cameras impose special ways of engaging with the world and these often force filmmakers to step outside themselves and adopt intermediate positions, not knowing the outcome. These changes in behavior produce changes in perception, and sometimes new kinds of knowledge. (MacDougall, 2019) There are two searches in my project: the invisible, the out of frame, and on the other hand the inadvertently in the field, the periphery of the image. The camera is both an instrument and an instigator of dislocation: it changed both Margot's and my visual and social perspective.