Ruy Duarte de Carvalho’s Nelisita: Shifting the Boundaries of Art and Science in Angolan Revolutionary Cinema

Abstract

Nelisita (1982) was directed by the Angolan filmmaker, writer and anthropologist Ruy Duarte de Carvalho (1941–2010) in collaboration with the Mumuhuila of Huila, an ethnolinguistic group belonging to the Nyaneka-Humbe of south-west Angola, in the historical context of the Civil War (1975–2002). One of the most important films of the Angolan revolutionary cinema’s corpus, Nelisita shifts the boundaries of art and science, articulating aesthetic inventiveness with an anthropological dimension. Combining cultural critique, aesthetic analysis and a brief study of Carvalho’s theoretical writings, this paper aims to insert Nelisita, a prominent example of the intersections between avant-garde/experimental cinema and anthropology, in the history and main issues of Angolan ‘post-colonial’ national cultural-aesthetic project and revolutionary cinema, and to relate it to the tension between modernism and primitivism traversing the history of cinema. It examines, in particular, the way the film addresses the tension between the abstract universalism inherent to the construction of the ‘post-colonial’ nation-state and ethnicity. As it dissolves disciplinary boundaries, Nelisita questions the distinction between the aesthetic and the anthropological and interweaves the sequential time of history with the cyclical time of myth (Mumuhuila’s cosmology).