“Portuguese India”: omission and tensions in filmed luso-tropical “Fantasies”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/va.i1.200284Keywords:
propaganda cinema, "Portuguese India", colonial films, Estado Novo, konkani cinemaAbstract
The Portuguese filmography on the Portuguese Orient during the Estado Novo is scarce, appeared late, and it espoused a simplified Luso-tropicalist rhetoric, that sought to project the bygone mythical importance of a formerly vast empire. By the time of the dictatorship, however, the colonies in the East held a symbolic value. I propose that the scarcity of films stems from this symbolic value of an imagined community that is evoked more through its omission than through representation in imagery. Based on this assumption, I will characterize the case of the representation of "Portuguese India", where the cinematographic exhibition was vibrant but left no space for the concanim cinema to assert itself while the official Portuguese filmography affirmed the supposed local Lusitanism.
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