Malini Guha — The Ciné-Kinship: luta ca caba inda as Decolonial Praxis
A still from Spell Reel (Filipa César, 2017)
In this paper, I will position the model of ‘the ciné-kinship’ practiced by the group luta ca caba inda (‘the struggle is not yet over’) as a method of solidarity work that revives the memories of a decolonial cinematic praxis while offering a continuation of this praxis for the present and the future. Luta ca caba inda is a collaborative project involving filmmakers including Filipa César and Flora Gomes, artists and critics from around the globe who have undertaken the urgent task of digitizing and disseminating moving image fragments that constitute the remaining traces of a nearly lost history of a militant cinema practice in Guinea-Bissau that flourished between 1963 and 1974. This practice was forged during the height of the revolutionary struggle against Portuguese rule led by the Amilcar Cabral and his party, Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné Cabo Verde. Some of these unrestored fragments have been screened across Guinea-Bissau while some of these images have also found a home in films directed and assembled by César, including Conakry (2013) and Spell Reel (2017).
The kinship model, according to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, does not name a precise structure, but rather “a practice, a praxis, a method and even a strategy” (Anti-Oepidus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). Seemingly informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of kinship as well as assemblage, the ciné-kinshipdenotes a method of working as well as an aesthetic that foregrounds performance and assembly, as demonstrated in Conakry and Spell Reel, among other works. As such, I will argue that luta ca caba inda is demonstrative of the potential that a solidarity- based practice holds for the revival of lost histories that add to our contemporary understandings of militant cinema as a category while also offering ways to consider elements of film style and assembly as themselves gestures of kinship.
BIO
Malini Guha (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University. Her essays have been published in Feminist Media Histories, the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, NECSUS, Screening the Past and the Journal of British Cinema and Television. Her first monograph, From Empire to the World: Migrant London and Paris in Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) is a study of cinematic London and Paris from the perspective of migration, globalization and the end of empire in a British and French context. As a contributing editor for the online journal Mediapolis, she writes a regular column, ‘Screening Canada’, where she explores an aspect of Canada’s mediated place-making in relation to recent issues concerning its global role and domestic negotiation of racial and ethnic difference.