Artists feel that the power they have to affect social thinking can no longer be seen as a privilege but a social responsibility. Martin Mhando
From its very title (The Cinema of Difficult Dialogues), the special programme brought to the 16th Videobrasil by Tanzanian filmmaker and professor Martin Mhando set out to provoke thought on how not only African filmmakers struggle with the continent’s social ills—war, AIDS, slavery—, but also with narrative frameworks rooted in the community psyche, and the “formal signs conditioned by structures of social organization.” Centered around the work of young filmmakers from the southern region of Africa, the programme brings together works produced between 1999 and 2006, screened in the Auditorium.
artists
Works
Curator's text Martin Mhando, 2007
Question
Where, or how, do you situate the confluence of art and cinema today?
The citizenship and its representation is key to artistic expression. Artists have continued to be categorised within specific identities while what they describe has always gone beyond those ascribed identities. Their narratives have entered the realm of the symbolic. What we find in this confluence of art and identity is that there are always hegemonic perspectives from which artists and filmmakers in particular present their voices. These artists therefore soon find ways to interrogate their own positions as they recognise constrained liberties that violate their creativity and innovativeness. The result is a constant critical journeying between right and responsibility. Artists feel that the power they have to affect social thinking can no longer be seen as a privilege but a social responsibility. And yet any ascribed identity invariably locates them within a bounded voice spectrum, be it in the media network, national identity, or commercial concerns. This complex reality has always been there but it is becoming more and more defined even as we embrace or are forced to embrace globalisation. What are those forces that contend against the power of globalisation? How do artists reveal the capacity to unchain themselves from hegemonic influences? It is this realisation that cinema and artistic creativity find confluence that needs to be used to allow more innovation, creativity, and social responsibility.
Statement
The term ‘Cinema of Difficult Dialogues’ proposes to reflect on films and filmmakers who deal with significant issues of social concern that acknowledge the process of signification that is inherent in communication. The common use of the term ‘difficult dialogues’ only aims at promoting pluralism and academic freedom on campuses, but I use it to foreground the confrontational nature of the subject especially as Africans reflect upon it. Many of the films around issues of wars, HIV/AIDS, gender oppression, slavery, and trauma in Africa project not only confrontations of individual filmmakers with the subjects but also of communally inscribed narrative structures. The programme will look at the relations between the filmmakers, their community, and society, and how African cinemas reveal formal signs conditioned by structures of social organisation, of cultural affinity, and conditions of interaction. Foregrounding the work of young film directors from the Southern African region, the programme shows the clear social concern that the filmmakers are enjoined but they all recognise the creative facilitation that the documentary mode allows to communicate through. They recognise how the medium is itself the message they are passing— creatively communicating important social messages.
ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "16º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica SESC_Videobrasil": de 30 de setembro a 25 de outubro de 2007, p.16-17, Edições SESC SP, São Paulo-SP, 2007, p. 161 a p. 163.