Birth (of the Image) of a Nation: Jean-Luc Godard in Mozambique
Birth (of the Image) of a Nation: Jean-Luc Godard in Mozambique

Summary/Abstract: While Jean-Luc Godard’s life and work has received a plethora of critical attention, a relatively uncharted episode occurred in 1977–1978, when, at the behest of the Samora Machel government, the filmmaker worked in Mozambique to assist in the establishment of the country’s first television station. Having newly acquired its independence from Portugal, the avowedly Marxist government of Machel embarked on a cultural policy emphasizing the country’s autonomy and intending to avoid simply replicating the media landscape of First World countries. Godard, meanwhile, had recently come out of an intense period of militant film practice in the post-1968 period, and was at the time ensconced in producing video and television works, many of which can be seen as models for what a revolutionary television in Mozambique could have looked like. Godard’s hiring by the Mozambican government resulted in an extraordinary situation: a radical filmmaker is given responsibility by an anti-colonial regime to construct what Godard had earlier dubbed, with Althusserian overtones, a “televisual state apparatus.” The mission also put him into contact and collaboration with Ruy Guerra, a Mozambique-born director who had worked in Brazil’s Cinema Novo tradition, and Jean Rouch, whose ethnographic films Godard had greatly admired when a critic, and who was continuing his work in Mozambique at the same time. The fact that he was working with a tabula rasa, in the sense that the vast majority of Mozambique’s population had never been exposed to film images before, catalyzed a process of frenetic theoretical exploration by Godard, continuing the work on the nature of the image he had done since the unfilmed Moi Je script of 1973. Ultimately, however, the project failed. Godard’s contract was terminated and he left the country dissatisfied with the images he had produced. No footage remains of Godard’s work in the country, but photographs of the country are utilized in a photo-montage essay included in Cahiers du cinéma’s issue #300 and recollections of the project can be found in the documentary Kuxa Kanema and interviews with scholar and video artist Manthia Diawara. The article utilizes these resources in conjunction with archival research to present an overview of this extraordinary yet rarely analyzed experience.

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