Screenings from the archive: Nelisita (1982), an African vernacular-language fiction set in rural southern Angola and its illuminating cinematic chain

Received: 26 November 2022 | Accepted: 12 July 2023 DOI: 10.1111/var.12323 RESEARCH ARTICLE Screenings from the archive: Nelisita (1982), an African vernacular-language fiction set in rural southern Angola and its illuminating cinematic chain Inês Ponte Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal Correspondence Inês Ponte, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, Av. Professor Aníbal de Bettencourt 9, 1600-189 Lisbon, Portugal. Email: inesponte@ics.ulisboa.pt Funding information Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Grant/Award Number: 2020.01762. CEECIND, SFRH/BPD/115706/2016, UIDP/50013/2020, UIDB/50013/2020 and LA/P/0051/202; H2020 Marie Skłodowska- Curie Actions, Grant/Award Number: 747508 Abstract Nelisita (Carvalho, 1982, Nelisita: narrativas nianeka), a pioneering African vernacularlanguage fiction film from the early phase of Angolan cinema, inspired me to conduct a series of interconnected exercises in visual anthropology. I produced an experimental archive-based remake (Ponte, 2016, 127 stills or 34 scenes from Nelisita) and screened it in both transnational urban contexts and an Angolan rural context reminiscent of the film's setting. This article discusses the multi-sited chain of production and reception of this short archival remake and various localized contemporary responses to it. The article examines an evolving concern with the materiality of the archive and how both foreign urban and familiar rural audiences received the film's narrative and change of genre. KEYWORDS Angola, audiences, fiction and experimental film, film and anthropology, filmmaking and film screening I NTRO D U C TI O N This article discusses a serendipitous yet illuminating cinematic chain that played with genre and narrative of a singular film through archival film production and distribution. The film Nelisita (Carvalho, 1982), produced in a recently independent country, was one of the first Angolan feature-length fiction films and was pioneering in its use of vernacular language. Although Angola had established Portuguese as its official language, Nelisita was produced in Olunyaneka, a minority African Bantu vernacular language from the Southern region. Depicting African rural folk storytelling in a vernacular language and a fictional style, Nelisita embodies an unusual filmic genre in the history of cinema produced in the countryside. Three decades after its release, I found the film a stimulating point of departure for rethinking visual anthropology practice. In this paper, I trace my gradual repurposing of material derived from the original production and found in the personal files of its filmmaker Ruy Duarte de Carvalho. This culminated in producing a new version of the film that would enable audiences to engage with this thought-provoking cinematic work that, at the time, was not easily accessible. In this short archival remake, initially produced for a screening workshop in Lisbon, Portugal, where I am based, I sought to communicate many of the ways Nelisita engaged with the African vernacular. Reducing a 64-min feature film to a 14-min short entitled 127 stills or 34 scenes from 104 | © 2024 American Anthropological Association. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/var Vis Anthropol Rev. 2024;40:104–114. “Nelisita” (Ponte, 2016), this experimental remake elicited responses to an archival revival of a narrative about a distant African rural context from a fresh urban audience. Two years later I was fortunate enough to be able to arrange mobile cinema screenings close to the film's original location, thereby benefitting from the feedback of Olunyanekaspeaking villagers living in this specific region of southern Angola and who were familiar with the cultural context and language depicted in both the original film and its archival remake. Zooming in from a national to a local level within Angola, allowed me to get input from Olunyaneka-speakers who shared a sociocultural familiarity with the content depicted in both versions of the film. It also constituted a precious place from which I could reflect upon this particular cinematic genre and the distribution of this film project among illiterate rural people whose daily lives rarely included cinema viewing. Villagers' feedback also offered insightful closure to the cinematic chain configured by the production of the short archivebased remake of Nelisita. The remade film began as a situated experiment in narrative and genre. It then provided space to prompt field responses from audiences who had vastly different relationships to its content: an urban audience in Europe with little to no relationship with the film's context and an Olunyaneka-speaking, rural audience intimately familiar with that same context. The range of responses and readings of Nelisita's experimental archival remake received from foreign urban and familiar rural audiences also provides the basis for this article's discussion of the challenges that arise when visual anthropologists conduct transnational research with and through film and when they work across multiple languages, cultures, backgrounds, livelihoods, and national contexts in the current postcolonial era. TA I LO R I N G A RC H I VA L PR AC TI C E S FO R S PEC I FI C S C R E E N I N G S E V E NT S Nelisita's director, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho (b. 1941, Portugal; d. 2010, Namibia), described himself as Portuguese by birth and Angolan by declaration.1 Carvalho is better known today as a writer of historical fiction who, while focusing on Angola, explored many transnational connections in the Atlantic Portuguese-speaking world. Since the early 1970s, his work featured poetry and by the mid-1970s, he had begun exploring filmmaking. Ethnography came shortly after yet by the 2000s he was writing historical fiction. He is often described as a poet, anthropologist, and writer from the Portuguese-speaking world. Since his films from the early independence period quickly became hard to access after their release, they entered a long period of semi-obscurity. 2 The remake of Nelisita originated from my work on Carvalho's personal estate a few years after he passed away in 2010. His heirs hired me to catalog his personal files, which they had reunited in Lisbon after his itinerant life had them geographically dispersed. As a younger anthropologist with regional expertise in Southern Angola, familiar with Carvalho's work and with the film's rural context, it was a thrilling opportunity. Thinking about how I could meaningfully animate Carvalho's archival material at a different time and for a broader audience led me to become an archivist-anthropologist (Zeitlyn, 2012). This resulted in the development of an evolving ethnographic practice that emerged from the archival materials themselves and through which I explored the role of anthropologist-curator (Sansi, 2019) to produce visual media related to this research. The cataloguing of Carvalho's remaining files was intended to provide material for a temporary exhibition entitled “A Delicate Zone of Commitment” at Quadrum Gallery, in Lisbon (Oliveira et al., 2015). The exhibition's title was borrowed from an expression that Carvalho used to define his work as a filmmaker (Carvalho, 1984, 14), but is also apt to describe his intellectual trajectory and what, by the end of his life, had become a multifaceted career, whose extent deserved to be better known. The exhibition was planned to be a retrospective of Carvalho's work in dialog with contemporary artistic practices. During a curators' meeting in which we were discussing how to invoke Nelisita, I proposed creating a short video piece | 105 15487458, 2024, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/var.12323 by Cochrane Portugal, Wiley Online Library on [08/07/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License PONTE | SCREENINGS FROM THE ARCHIVE F I G U R E 1 A draft for Nelisita's poster juxtaposed with the film's original poster in the early 1980s, both in Carvalho's personal archive. Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, c. (1982). using 127 test prints of 34 photographs made during the film's production that I had recently digitized. Based on a suggestive arrangement of sets depicting 34 scenes from the original film, the 3-min photo sequence aimed to make visible the creative processes integral to the cinematic work, rather than the narrative it produced. To make this more tangible, this photo sequence was complemented by the public display of process-related materials such as a typewritten script and a draft for a poster (Figure 1). By the end of the exhibition, the fact that so few visitors remembered the film's actual content raised the delicate matter of how Carvalho's work could be celebrated by invoking the filmmaking process behind a work that, for most, was either unfamiliar or forgotten. Importantly, it also highlighted the limit to which our curatorship could make accessible the worldview the film so cleverly depicted. Only by attending the exhibition's parallel screening program could one discover Nelisita's enchanting narrative. It was the chance of a fresh audience a year later, again in Lisbon, that gave me a new role as an archivist-filmmaker and raised the possibility of producing a remake that could retrieve a forgotten gem of participatory African film from the recent past and activate it in the present. G R A PPLI N G W ITH E TH N O - FI C TI O N A S A S H A R E D G E N R E FO R N ELI S ITA A N D IT S R EC E NT A RC H I VA L R E M A K E The feature-length Nelisita was Carvalho's last filmmaking experience of this period and his debut in fiction after a period when the director had made films in both urban and rural contexts. The feature fiction film emerged as a project after Carvalho directed a 10-episode documentary series on southern peasants (1976–1979) for Angolan State Television. Living in a multi-ethnic region, the rural people depicted in the series and the film were from an Ovanyaneka background, and both productions aimed to depict them as part of the recently founded Angolan nation-state. In doing so, the films were quite unique within the context of the convoluted early phase of Angolan cinema, that more often than not focused on documenting urban workers' struggles and culture (Abrantes, 2015 offers a recent update; Moorman, 2001). Nelisita's social history is fascinating, particularly when one digs deeper into the relationship between its on- and off-screen features, its play between literal and figurative dimensions, and its circulation across several cinematic fields (Ponte, 2021).3 Yet what attracted 15487458, 2024, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/var.12323 by Cochrane Portugal, Wiley Online Library on [08/07/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 106 me to conduct these archival exercises in tribute to Nelisita was the simple, innovative way in which the film depicted a social world linked to classic anthropological contexts. One of Nelisita's direct connections with anthropology appears in its closing credits where literate audiences are informed about the source of inspiration for the film's script: two Ovanyaneka tales told by different tellers and published in both Olunyaneka and Portuguese by a missionary ethnographer in the early 1970s. However, the fact that this acknowledgment appears in the closing titles suggests that its filmic narrative was intended to stand by itself. Nelisita opens with an old man's voice introducing a heroic tale about men who raise cattle overcoming social and ecological adversity in a semi-arid landscape. Alternating between a mythical past and an indeterminate present, rural non-professional actors play a double role in the film: they are both performers of the tale and, as it unfolds, its audience. Explicitly rooted in anthropological sources, this imaginative film used reflexivity to emulate the storytelling tradition intrinsic to oral cultures. Nelisita resulted from collaborative exchanges between the small filmmaking team based at the short-lived Angolan Cinema Institute (1979–1983) in the faraway capital of Luanda and the film's rural protagonists living in Chibia area and whose life experiences and cultural references served as inspiration for the film. Although the filmmaking process was adapted to the protagonists involved, Nelisita's production followed conventional cinematic methods for fiction, whereby Carvalho asked participants to play scripted scenes according to a production plan. This approach differed from the linear unscripted shooting associated with filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch's participatory approach (Henley, 2010, 352). In this sense, broader characterizations of the so-called ethno-fiction genre (Ferrarini, 2018) appear more suitable for defining a film such as Nelisita than discussions centered on the strong influence of Rouch's practice (Sjöberg, 2018). Although Nelisita may appeal to ethnographers today for its manifold engagement with the vernacular culture of a minority Indigenous group in southern Angola, at the time of its production its collaborative features were an attempt, as its director argued, to bring the film closer to an African cinema made with and about Indigenous people (De Groof, 2013) in an emergent nation.4 In a scholarly reflection written soon after Nelisita's release, Carvalho (2008 [1984]) described the cinematic work as an African film resulting from fertile engagements with anthropology, while locating it as an example of something existing “beyond ethnographic film.”5 Addressing other significant promising relationships for anthropology and cinema, he discussed Nelisita as an applied practice of national cinema, in the context of African independence and the rise of African cinema throughout the continent. His thinking was a direct response to the major assumptions underpinning ethnographic films that were being made about African subjects from a foreign viewpoint and for foreign audiences. In contrast, he defended Nelisita as the politically urgent work made by an Angolan, with Angolans, and for Angolan audiences. Importantly, for Carvalho, Angola was a country where he implicitly considered both Indigenous marginalized populations and himself, an African man of European descent, to belong. In Carvalho's view, anthropology promised a path for bridging the many cultural backgrounds enmeshed in this emerging nation.6 Appropriating digital material derived from black and white 16 mm film with synchronized sound, produced after centuries of Portuguese colonialism and under severe material constraints during the early years of the Angolan Civil War (1975–2002), my short remake of Nelisita came into being 13 years after peace was declared in Angola and 35 years after the original film was produced. The unbounded field of visual anthropology inspired me to recast Nelisita as an ethno-fiction. Finding it a useful referent for the original film's multiple sense of the vernacular, the opening title of the archival remake defines it as such for literate viewers. Cherishing Nelisita as a universal story about overcoming oppression and inequality, but also as a window to inspiring folk tales, storytelling culture, and a vernacular language, I thought others might also appreciate it for these qualities. In remaking the film, I carried out a formal exercise in cinematic narrative to retrieve its manifold links to the African vernacular while leaving to other mediums—such as writing or speech—many of the historical | 107 15487458, 2024, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/var.12323 by Cochrane Portugal, Wiley Online Library on [08/07/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License PONTE | SCREENINGS FROM THE ARCHIVE F I G U R E 2 127 Stills or 34 scenes from “Nelisita” (https://vimeo.com/159941120). Inês Ponte (2016). and contemporary complexities embedded in the archival materials that had recently been converted from analog to digital. In the case of 127 stills or 34 scenes from “Nelisita,” my concern with the film's African vernacular content led me to largely reuse Nelisita's original synopsis (Carvalho, 1984, 68; see Ponte, 2021, 600), merely adding that this new work was a remake of a magical-realist tale set during a time of famine. The short seeks to provide a sense of the original film and includes English (and Portuguese) subtitles. Given that the version of Nelisita (1982) currently available online is only subtitled in Portuguese, the online version of the remake made Nelisita's narrative more accessible (see Figure 2; Ponte, 2016). The vibrant subfield of visual anthropology, whose outputs exist in a diversity of formats and styles and across multiple modes of distribution (Basu, 2008), is a particularly apt context from which to explore the short cinematic chain of the Nelisita remake, its experimental filmic nature, and its informal screening trajectory. The production of this short included a series of contemporary practices linked to current debates in visual anthropology. This included archival practices and experiments linked to the collection of audience feedback and the production of specific video pieces for different contexts, which were then screened in distinct settings. FRO M TH E A N I M ATE D I M AG E TO TH E M OV I N G N A R R ATI V E : CO NTR A S TI N G E X PE R I M E NT S W ITH TH E A RC H I V E A call for submissions to a screening workshop organized by the Festival of Anthropology, Cinema, and Art (FACA) in Lisbon in 2016, made me speculate on ways to offer viewers access to the Ovanyaneka narratives depicted so richly in Nelisita. In light of feedback from exhibition visitors, I wanted to avoid the impression of having merely “animated” archival materials and sought to craft a remake that could reinvigorate the legacy of the original film as a work capable of conveying a sense of Ovanyaneka culture and way of life, albeit via a fictionalized narrative. This prompted me to approach the archive in a way that differed from how I had engaged with archival materials for the exhibition. I wondered if the 34 photographed scenes displayed as randomly captured moments in the exhibition could be used, instead, to frame Nelisita's narrative, including its participatory dimension, thus bringing this intriguing film to life more fully. Discussing the work in progress at the workshop helped me to understand whether attendees discerned what Nelisita's archival materials appeared to have the 15487458, 2024, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/var.12323 by Cochrane Portugal, Wiley Online Library on [08/07/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 108 potential to suggest. It was also a chance to see how people, unrelated to, or unfamiliar with Carvalho's work, the region or the country, would assess Nelisita's rather complicated yet fascinating narrative. Nelisita disregards cinematic conventions by which viewers understand that an unseen action has taken place (Carvalho, 1984, 80). My appropriation of and intervention into this film transformed its cinematographic grammar of long takes, emphasizing the protagonists' actions—what film critic André Bazin calls “a cinema of duration” (2005, 39). Focusing on narrative, I found photographs useful to condense this style. I was also driven to retain imperfections in the collective archival material that revealed their analog source. Similarly, I decided to use the title to accentuate the work's archival nature for literate audiences by invoking a linguistic device that would illustrate to what extent the original film's narrative had been condensed: 127 stills or 34 scenes from “Nelisita.” Seeking cinematic balance between film narrative, grammar, and production context, I also drafted other framings based on existing archival material. For the remake's opening, I worked with the Nelisita's film poster to highlight its connection to the original film, introducing sketches of the narrative's two heroes, which juxtaposes two Ovanyaneka tales. Two separate negative strips from the archive, both dating from around the time Nelisita was filmed, also intrigued me. One depicted an Ovamwila girl on a 16-mm film, and the other, Carvalho on a 35-mm photographic negative. Both portraits were linked to repeated frames and shared the seductive appeal of analog film. Attempting, in the remake, to somewhat mirror the reflexive dimension at work in the original film, I joined them together to create a closing image. Through this experiment with Nelisita's form and by changing its pace, the original became a 14-min remake. Knowing that international commentators would attend the workshop where the remake would be presented, I added English subtitles below the Portuguese ones that were already embedded in the original film. The workshop participants appeared to pick up the gist of the story and wondered whether the magical mood of what they had seen was already in the original film or if it was a result of my cut. The remake piqued their curiosity about Nelisita, with which they were unfamiliar. Their overall attitude encouraged me to continue shaping the experiment into a more finalized version, which I subsequently made available on the web as a work in progress. I then made an unrelated return to a field site in Southern Angola, specifically to a rural community of people living in an agro-pastoralist village and with whom I had built a certain familiarity. This was an ideal opportunity to test my concerns with the remake's narrative, this time in a context where there was less of an issue with the subtitling language and the archival framing that had been so central to my efforts to mediate the film's content for an urban audience. It was also a chance to evaluate whether this experiment in genre had interfered with the film's cultural references. This return to an area close to the film's original setting also enabled me to show other films that the villagers might relate to and to elicit and become familiar with their response to the film program I had, somewhat inadvertently, curated.7 I organized mobile cinema screenings, not where Nelisita was originally shot, but in another village where non-literate locals watched and responded to some of the films without needing subtitles. Now, my concerns shifted from the feedback I had received from audiences with no relationship to the film's content to the response of Olunyaneka-speaking villagers with no direct relationship to its actual production. Blurring the roles of archivistfilmmaker and anthropologist-projectionist resolved my initial concerns about Nelisita's narrative and genre. It also represented a major transformation in my relation to the work from the moment when I first dealt with the film for its exhibition in Lisbon. S H I F TI N G AU D I E N C E S : G E N R E A N D N A R R ATI V E I N RU R A L ANGOLA The workshop and the other public screenings held in urban contexts were far easier to coordinate in logistical terms than the screenings held in rural Angola. Besides creating the digital | 109 15487458, 2024, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/var.12323 by Cochrane Portugal, Wiley Online Library on [08/07/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License PONTE | SCREENINGS FROM THE ARCHIVE files for each context, for the rural one, which mostly took place on the farm that hosted me, I had to use solar-powered batteries, as I had done in my previous filmmaking experience in the village. However, I also had to learn about other specialized technology, to bring lightweighted compact and rechargeable equipment, namely, a portable projector and speakers. On the farm, we sporadically set up outdoor mobile cinema spaces equipped to accommodate intergenerational audiences consisting of the members from the household that hosted me, neighbors, temporary migrants, and occasional passers-by. On average, about 20 people would attend each session without much prior planning needed. Okuhungila (Olunyaneka), the daily practice of socializing after dinner was perfect for these night sessions, and comments that people at the road market—located 3 hours away—would happily pay to see the films revealed how little cinema was available in the area (Figure 3; see also Ponte, 2021, 608–9).8 I backtrack quickly. Carvalho's view of Nelisita as a wholly Angolan production for national audiences, first emerged the same year that the film was initially released with some success at film festivals in Europe and other African countries (see Ponte, 2020, 2021). It also coincided with patchy national screenings that undermined its utopic ambition as a popular cinema. The year following Nelisita's release was marked by the decline of the short-lived, post-independence, small-scale film industry that led to the film's almost non-existent national distribution. Yet, its poor distribution in Angola was not Carvalho's only source of frustration regarding the film's reach to popular audiences. At the time, Carvalho (1984, 78–9) commented on showing the film to its protagonists, and realizing that, for them, it had failed to meet its intentions. He later remarked (2004) that he thought the protagonists had paid no attention to the film's narrative or their fictional roles in it; they only recognized themselves as themselves. On both occasions (1984 and 2004) Carvalho blamed these readings of the film on the screening of his documentary series, which had been produced in the same context only shortly before the film's completion. His frustration may have arisen because the documentary series contrasted with several of Nelisita's central aspects, which was a scripted fiction in which non-professional actors had provided input (1984, 80), been paid at the same rate as the filmmaking team (73), and played double roles. Knowing that the film's original circulation three decades earlier had sparked these reactions was one of the reasons that the chance of showing it to those I was connected to in the field was so exciting. Once I, playing the role of an anthropologist-projectionist, introduced the complete film program, people often asked for specific sessions to be set up to screen Nelisita's story. The plot, which addressed themes of food scarcity and various forms of oppression, resonated strongly with my contemporary rural audience. I believe the film can elicit similar responses F I G U R E 3 A screening session at my host farm in 2018. Photograph by Inês Ponte. 15487458, 2024, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/var.12323 by Cochrane Portugal, Wiley Online Library on [08/07/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 110 with anyone who dreams of harmonious resolutions such as those depicted in Nelisita. These audiences showed me how scenes that I had interpreted as having dragged on too long in narrative terms were in reality high points during these local screenings. The film's ponderous pace gave viewers time to collectively discuss the narrative meaning that the director had originally intended. For instance, when the film's hero is shown walking across the full length of the screen, the audience, interpreted this long walk with his having to travel a long way, an experience with which many were familiar. For an audience of men who raise cattle, the long scenes with the spirits' oxen passing by were a delight, giving them time to count and recognize the various cowhides. In the remake, pleasurable moments, such as the ones mentioned above, were simply cut or shortened, and their brevity compressed the vivid discussions of certain scenes that the original allowed when screened. Its faster pace transformed the experience of watching the original film to such an extent that villagers, on first seeing the remake, appeared to have trouble appreciating it. This meant that those who had previously seen the feature film took pleasure in filling in details for those who had not. Overall, the short appeared a little unusual for their taste. On some occasions, when audiences asked to screen Nelisita, dwindling batteries gave us two options: watch only part of the original or screen the complete short version encapsulated in the remake. The audience concluded that they preferred to watch the short yet complete version because, after all, who likes to see a film without an ending? On such occasions, villagers who had already seen the original film loudly anticipated certain scenes before complaining that they had been cut. The ways in which they continued to relate to moments of the story that they enjoyed, even when those were presented using different cinematic grammars, opens up a fresh avenue for exploring film reception in rural Africa. It makes it possible to consider a particular context in which viewers had unusual access not only to film screenings, but also to a rare film program that related to their own way of life. Historian James Burns (2000), in discussing British spectatorship theories developed in the late nineteenth century, noted how these theories still resonated with film producers in Africa in the late 1980s. This prompted him to assess a 40-year genealogy of observations regarding rural Africans watching films and to closely examine the case of Sellers, a director of 1920s educational films made for African audiences that had little exposure to cinema during the colonial period. Sellers argued in favor of slow-paced techniques and the continuity of shots since, in his view, rural Africans were unable to comprehend a more sophisticated cinematic grammar. In his work, Burns unpacks how these unfounded ideas were a comfortable ideology that reinforced the misconception that there was a cognitive difference between Europeans and Africans. Furthermore, he questions Sellers' assumption of these techniques in relation to rural Africans' awareness of moving images. Burns highlights how Sellers overlooked alternative interpretations of rural Africans' reactions to the films he showed them. He proposed humor as a plausible reading for such works. He notes, for example, when Sellers' audiences reacted to a close-up of a mosquito by remarking how big the insects were where the filmmaker lived and how lucky they were in comparison can rather be the audience's lighthearted appreciation about the incredible nature of certain images. In another example, Burns notes how Sellers' audiences focused on the unintended rapid movement of a chicken in the background, rather than attending to the protagonist who was acting in slow motion as directed. With added laughs, these reactions are testimony to the collective joy of watching films in a rural context and present an alternative understanding of rural audiences' audiovisual literacy. I come back to Nelisita's story and its success in a village that could culturally relate to it. Here, differing film grammars used to communicate the same plot played with sociocultural recognition, rather than with self-recognition or unfamiliar references. Introducing the unusual activity of cinema-going in the everyday village life made it possible to access and garner peasants' views on the original film and its short remake. This revealed how community members adjusted to different cinematic genres through the collective dialog that emerged | 111 15487458, 2024, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/var.12323 by Cochrane Portugal, Wiley Online Library on [08/07/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License PONTE | SCREENINGS FROM THE ARCHIVE during the screenings and how they manifested the pleasure provoked by the cinematic experience. The popularity of the story in the village revealed that the cinematic economy of the short remake disregarded local cultural sensibilities and suggested that villagers would enjoy another, potentially more thoughtful version. Even so, the remake produced the same effect as the original: people continued recalling memorable scenes afterward by playing them and their specific dialogs out with one other. Thus, when I had little battery to enable the full screening of the original 64-min film, the audience always opted for the remake. Even with its cut scenes and fast pace, the remake was a pleasurable alternative that made it possible for them to engage cinematically with the story of Nelisita. CO N C LU S I O N This article reflects on an experiment in cinematic genre shifting—that is, the transformation of a feature-length fiction film into a short experimental remake—all of which sought to recover a unique depiction of African vernacular storytelling by drawing on archival material. The text unpacks the production of this remake and the range of responses elicited by screening it in foreign urban contexts and local rural ones. In doing so, it explores aspects of film narrative and genre, which also involved a role-shifting practice. Examining a chain of film production and its reception by different niche participants and audiences, this experiment with film genre operated across and within a range of languages, livelihoods, and worldviews. I have discussed how I looked to the archive for materials that could offer audiences, with no prior relationship to the original film's context, the chance to meditate on the intercultural relationships embodied in this cinematic work while also break with those established through the colonial project and its legacies. However, exposing my archival gesture while also introducing the double subtitling of the spoken Olunyaneka may have over-complicated the cinematic experience for these viewers. It was an inclusive, yet ambitious, rationale intended to increase the remake's chances of working across various languages and translations, but one overly focused on broadening its potential reach to audiences who were unfamiliar with the context depicted. Such efforts to widen the remake's spectatorship were almost irrelevant to the work's other audience of Olunyaneka-speaking villagers. For them, the short was a way to socially engage with a story that delighted them, during and after the screenings. As such, they were open to adjusting to a more compact version of a story they enjoyed. Their response to both the original and the remake provided food for thought on the imbalance of local cultural sensibilities in my archival experiment which was more focused on reaching the broader audience previously described. It also situated the remake as a work in progress, subject to potential revisions or even reconsideration. Intertwining experiments with narrative, cinema, and anthropology, the archive-based remake of Nelisita 35 years after its original production and its recent transnational urban and national rural circulation, provided the basis for an exploratory discussion on film as a way of mediating cross-cultural relationships. As limited as these experiments with and through film might have been in the past, how they might appear today, or how they will be considered in the future, I hope they stimulate further experiments in both film production and distribution, by and for rural and urban Angolans or anyone else who finds them revealing and significant. AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S Mariana Liz and Maria José Lobo Antunes provided thoughtful discussions about this intricate cinematic chain. Earlier versions were presented at the 2019 RAI Film Festival Conference in Bristol, UK and the Portuguese Film Archive's (ANIM) Annual Meeting in Bucelas, Portugal that same year. I thank Angélica Cabezas Pino and Mattia Fumanti for their warm persistence 15487458, 2024, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/var.12323 by Cochrane Portugal, Wiley Online Library on [08/07/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 112 as editors and for the attentive feedback that much improved this essay. I am also grateful AU T H O R B I O G R A P H Y for the comments provided by anonymous reviewers and the editors of VAR, in particular Lee Douglas. Field research was supported by the European Commission under a Marie Inês Ponte is a research fellow at Skłodowska Curie Fellowship (747508); by the Foundation for Technology and Science (FCT) the Institute of Social Sciences, Portugal (Grant SFRH/BPD/115706/2016). National funds by FCT (UIDP/50013/2020, University of Lisbon (ICS-ULisboa). UIDB/50013/2020, and LA/P/0051/2020), and the fellowship 2020.01762.CEECIND Her research concerns material (10.54499/2020.01762.CEECIND/CP1615/CT0005) also supported the writing of this arti- and visual cultures in anthropol- cle. I also extend my thanks to the family of Ruy Duarte de Carvalho and to the rural and ogy. She has published in History urban audiences that have engaged with the evolving versions of the remake. & Anthropology (2021) and Kronos (2020); created the research-based website Mobilising Archives and six ORCID Inês Ponte https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8258-2646 short films. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media E N D N OT E S 1 Embracing Angolan citizenship after the country's Independence, Carvalho's birth certificate, in accordance with Portuguese Law no. 2098 (1956), dates his loss of Portuguese citizenship to 1976, the year when he voluntarily claimed nationality of another country. 2 As an author who valued vernacular African languages in all areas of creative expression, Carvalho's work has so far circulated in Lusophone-related contexts. Literary and cultural studies researcher Livia Apa (2012) offers an inclusive view of Carvalho's biography and multidisciplinary career. Film scholar Maria do Carmo Piçarra (2017) also offers an overview of his film works. Some of the director's films made between 1975 and 1989 under the name of Rui Duarte are currently available online (E. Carvalho et al., 2016). 3 Carvalho (1984) briefly mentions how the film's production collided with South African military invasions, one of many international interventions that intensified what became a long-lasting civil conflict (1975–2002). As this conflict progressed and as UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) emerged as the main opponent to the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), the film was soon interpreted as a reflection of this turbulent political situation (Carvalho, 2004). 4 Examples of coeval films depicting African rural contexts via vernacular languages include the Senegalese-shot films Emitai (Sembène, 1971), Kaddu Beykat (Faye, 1976, B&W) and Fad'jal (Faye, 1979) and the Burkinabe-shot Wend Kuuni (Kaboré, 1983), all of which were filmed in color, except when indicated. 5 This text, which also discusses the documentary series (1979), was based on his graduate dissertation in anthropology completed at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences or EHESS in Paris, France (1982). It was published in Portuguese (1984) and later republished (1997, 2008). 6 Addressing African and Western cinema from a nationalist standpoint, Carvalho leaves unresolved the implicit fissure with the then-socialist MPLA's ruling social imaginary, which defined national modernity as urban and black. This excluded the two other backgrounds this film production integrates from a definition of Angolan-ness. 7 Over two short periods in 2018, I organized 17 screening sessions of a film program that was about 8 h long. This film program included six episodes of Carvalho's (1979) documentary series, in which a Portuguese voice-over translates the Olunyaneka-speaking protagonists and three films spoken in the language spoken by my hosts: the two versions of Nelisita (1982, 2016) and the documentary I had shot during an 8-month stay in 2012 while learning to communicate in Olunyaneka. 8 These comments were redolent of the small commercial screenings that operated throughout Angola in late colonial times, rather than the equally understudied, mobile cinema initiatives promoted either by the Portuguese dictatorship, for the purposes of propaganda, or by the independent Angolan government, for the purposes of its emancipatory agenda. Missionaries first introduced cinema in Angola, for example via the magic lantern, in the early 20th century (cf. Hohlfeldt, 2017, 64). 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