VIOLENCE AND INVISIBILITY DURING SALAZARISM THE POLITICS OF VISIBILITY THROUGH THE FILMS 48 AND O ALAR DA REDE SOFIA LOPES BORGES MPHIL 2017 SUPERVISORS: DR. JULIA NG AND DR. ROS GRAY CENTRE FOR CULTURAL STUDIES GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON SUPPORTED BY: FCT — PORTUGUESE FOUNDATION FOR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY DECLARATION OF AUTHORSHIP 2 I, Sofia Lopes Borges, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Date: November 9, 2017 Signed: 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3 I am grateful to Dr. Julia Ng, who walked me through this project particularly during the initial stages, and then to Dr. Ros Gray who also guided me to completion with insight. I am most indebted to my loVe, Stéphane Blumer for his patience and graciousness in assisting and encouraging me throughout the course of this research. 3 ABSTRACT 4 This inVestigation analyses the relations uniting the long endurance of the Salazarist dictatorship in Portugal and the political processes of its cryptic Violence. Departing from the differentiation between different types of Violence, this thesis shows that structural Violence was used intentionally by the regime within the limits of a spectrum of Visibility, in an effort to create its own normalisation. This research examines the mechanism and manifestation of both direct and structural Violence through a study of different filmic data. Film serVed as key propaganda medium for the regime, holding together the concealment of direct Violence and generating structural Violence. Undermining this authoritarian gesture, this enquiry further explores the deVice of Visibility, intrinsic to filmic material, which challenges the Portuguese regime's politics of self-censorship. By articulating recent political theories and image philosophy with two films O Alar da Rede by Michel Giacometti, (1962) and 48 by Susana de Sousa Dias, (2012), this thesis reflects on the moment when a process of rendering Visible exposes a form of resistance to Violent hidden policies. With elaborated methods, both films manage to reinsert in the present, a Violence from the past. The filmic paradigm described in this paper exposes original tools to fight a Violence that was preViously concealed within normatiVe conundrums. Keywords: Structural Violence, Visibility, InVisibility, Film, Cinema, Estado NoVo, Portugal, Salazarism 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS 5 DECLARATION 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3 ABSTRACT 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS 5 INTRODUCTION 6 1. THE FILMIC AND THE VIOLENT DISCOURSE FOR INVISIBILITY IN SALAZARISM 15 1.1. INVISIBILITY AND VIOLENCE DURING SALAZARISM 17 1.2. THE FILMIC PROPAGANDA AS A MEANS FOR VIOLENCE 34 1.3. FORMS OF VIOLENCE: THE SPACE FOR VISIBILITY 40 1.4. CONCLUSION: POLITICS IN THE ACT OF FILMING 49 2. O ALAR DA REDE: THE IMMERSION OF THE VIOLENT EXPERIENCE 51 2.1. O ALAR DA REDE — THE FILM 54 2.2. NATIONAL IDENTITY GROUNDED IN THE RURAL 59 2.3. GIACOMETTI AND THE WILL FOR VISIBILITY THROUGH THE FILMIC 76 2.4. CONCLUSION: THE VISIBLE SPACE FOR A VIOLENT EXPERIENCE 84 3. 48 AND THE VISIBLE SPACE TO TESTIFY AGAINST STATE VIOLENCE 85 3.1. 48 — THE FILM 88 3.2. STATE IMAGE: THE STATIC AND THE SUBTRACTION OF VISIBILITY 92 3.3. THE VISIBLE AS A PLACE OF TESTIMONY OF THE EXPERIENCE OF VIOLENCE 100 3.4. CONCLUSION: THE VISIBILITY OF TESTIMONY 109 CONCLUSION 112 BIBLIOGRAPHY 117 ANNEXES 126 5 INTRODUCTION 6 Estado NoVo has based much of its ideology on the idea there that was a Portuguese ethno-cultural heritage common that ought to be implemented on the Portuguese society with an unquestionable acceptance. From Salazar’s ideology we can subtract Very strongly the idea of moderation. Despite the fact that the policies then enforced were Violent, the Salazarist regime is described, eVen so, as a moderate one if considered against the background of the remaining European dictatorships of the 20th century. The Portuguese dictatorship was, howeVer, the longest in Europe, existing between the years 1926 and 1974, and that is not without releVance. If one defines dictatorship as a political structure not subject to democratic elections and deploying Violent means, Salazarism was no different. It resorted to direct violence (a term used by Galtung, subjective violence in Zizek’s terms) in order to sustain itself. It is not, howeVer, here that we find the secret to the regime’s longeVity. The key to the durability of Salazarism seems to be linked, precisely, to the apparent moderation with which the regime imposed its Violence, and such appearance seems to endure until the present. This modus operandi of the regime confounded to a great extent the Violence (which was also a lack of attention and care with culture and society in general) with the deVelopment of things. Such naturalization of Violence made it inVisible to the eyes of the folk. A personal example: my mother. Two small anecdotes will help me clarify my estrangement: on the 16th of March 1974, the forces that were to attempt the first state coup were ready to depart from my home city, Caldas da Rainha. My mother, who then worked in Lisbon as a policewoman, was on the bus for the weekend and saw the tanks leaving the military quarter in Caldas. She remembers well that situation and the difficulties the bus faced to head backwards. The mission was aborted later that day and the state coup did not happen. The second anecdote happened on the day of the reVolution, the 25th of April 1974: it was about lunchtime and a lot of people were out on the streets in Lisbon, shouting reVolutionary slogans. All the restaurants were closed and my mother could not find a place to eat and so decided, together with a friend, to travel for almost 2 hours to her home-town, where she found restaurants that opened, as usual. There is probably more than one explanation for this of behaviour but, eVen though I question 6 the lack of reVolutionary feelings in my mother back then, I also question the reasons for it. Why didn’t she care? I guess the question that strikes me the most is: why didn’t she see it? I start from this personal note in order to try and establish the connection between Violence and perception in the Portuguese regime’s modus operandi. In order to understand this connection it is necessary to depart from the idea that Violence is not something that happens only through acts external to oneself, where clearly an unwanted force is exerted upon others – direct or subjectiVe Violence. To acknowledge this Violence it is necessary to step back on different forms of non-explicit Violence (objective violence according to Zizek: 2009). This step back will allow the identification of a kind of Violence, which is structural, in which we are embedded and of which we are a part, enabling us, at the same time, to fight off those forms of normalized violence. This is the point of departure: direct Violence is merely the most Visible form of a more general kind of Violence. This more general kind deriVes from systemic (structural) political and economical relations that find in direct Violence a way of reVealing the most extreme confrontations. Seen in this way, direct Violence cannot be contrasted with the zero degree (Zizek: 2009) of Violence but, rather, it must be thought of as the visible side of a more latent kind of Violence. The Visibility of this latent / objectiVe / structural Violence is bound, necessarily, with the means that make it Visible, with its mediation. The question of Violence during Salazarism gains, under this View, a different dimension. The Portuguese regime was the longest in Europe and part of the secret for this longeVity lies in the feeling of peacefulness that was propagandised and in the absence of Visible forms of Violence. It is this latent kind of Violence that is important to demystify, and that is only possible if we understand the mechanisms of Visibility that helped, on the one hand, to perpetuate this form of structural Violence and, on the other hand, to hide more extreme forms of Violence. It is easier to respond and position oneself against a regime whose Violence is obVious. But it is difficult when this 7 Violence remains inVisible. We can thus conclude that the longeVity of the regime was due to the ways in which non-extreme Violence was used. This thesis proposes a study on the forms of Violence of the Portuguese regime through the language that makes them Visible. More concretely, and since it was one of the strategies of Salazarism, I will inVestigate the use of film as a way of showing and hiding different forms of Violence. I shall assume that the Portuguese dictatorship enforced and instilled, through propaganda and brute force, a set of policies and ideals highlighting the sense of honourable poVerty that ought to be made the foundation of Portuguese culture, operating as a form of Violence oVer society, one consequence of which was the deVelopment of a desire for self-inVisibility within the people. This is the ideological principle kept inVisible that we will seek to question, as well as the forms that gave it Visibility. From the Vantage point of a study of Salazar’s regime according to which the Portuguese dictatorship deliberately built a system of inVisibility within Portuguese society with emphasis on the Portuguese uniqueness, a system which was inherently Violent, this dissertation argues for the claim that particular films addressing the dictatorship bear the capacity to challenge the system of inVisibility created by the regime. The process through which the state’s politics of inVisibility is challenged will be clarified in three distinct moments in each of the three chapters.