Path to the Stars
Marissa J. Moorman

Path to the Stars follows a river. The river Kwanza. The film itself is river-like, drawing from many sources but cutting a path all its own. Combining, in equal parts, film’s cinematic and theatrical aspects, Path to the Stars plots a story of Angola’s liberation struggle on the river and in the words spoken by Carlota, a guerrilla fighter, a woman, never named but embodied by actor Renata Torres.

A photo
Carlota lived and died at Angola’s independence. We know her from Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński’s account of Angolan independence in Another Day of Life. The single photo that exists of her comes from Kapuściński’s book. Shortly after he met and took the photo of her, Carlota died in an ambush. We don’t know her last name or really anything about her. Sources are fragmentary, incomplete; they leave a trace, but offer little concrete to deepen our understanding. Like the bubbles children blow from bottles, de Miranda breathes life into the photo to create a possible story, a story that floats along a river, on a path to the stars—to somewheres, otherwises, and futures.

Paths
Mónica de Miranda and Yara Monteira wrote the film’s script, drawing lines and spirit from Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira and Portuguese poet Cláudia R. Sampaio. Inspired in part by Vieira’s O Livro dos Rios (2006), de Miranda’s film is an act of historically grounded poetic license, a riff, perhaps, on what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation.” Like the river plants with tenuous roots that bob around Carlota, floating Ophelia like in the river, these are growths of imagination that elaborate the experiences of those marginalized in official historical accounts. They drop roots in shifting sands, under moving water, and reach toward the light. De Miranda gives Carlota new life.

Vieira opens the book with a dedication, a tribute, and an epigraph. These are textual acts that, like pouring libation, recall ancestors and nod to interlocutors. He dedicates the book to those with whom he shared space in the prison of Tarrafal in Cape Verde for anti-colonial activities, in tribute (or as he says “a retribute”) to Langston Hughes, and with an inscription of the words of Njinga Mbandi (Queen Njinga) of Ndongo and Matamba, as related by the Portuguese conqueror and historian António Oliveira Cadornega. De Miranda’s film draws upon these historical layers.

Like a river’s tributary, Vieira moves through the first lines of Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”: “I‘ve known rivers:/ I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.” Vieira begins: “I’ve known rivers. I’ve known rivers ancient as the world, full of inhuman blood.” Carlota speaks these words in the film’s opening. Hughes speaks of rivers that nurtured civilizations: Euphrates, Nile, Congo. And of a river that symbolized the entanglement of dehumanization and industry: the Mississippi. It is a river that was also a great conduit of African American culture.

For Vieira and de Miranda, the river is the Kwanza. Born in Angola’s eastern Bié province, the river travels north and then west where it empties into the Atlantic. If the myth of Portuguese nationhood is wrapped up in the story of navigating oceans, made heroic in Luís de Camões’s poetic cycle Os Lusíadas, Vieira draws us to rivers, the pathways to and from Angola’s interior, to reframe Angolan national identity to the places where wars for sovereignty and against foreign control were fought, where culture swirls, while never forgetting the connections to other lands, rivers, and civilizations and the violent history that Hughes, Vieira, and de Miranda demand that we conjugate together. 

Citing Njinga Mbandi, Vieira reminds us that Hartman’s “critical fabulation” has ancient antecedents.

<<In dubio chronichae, pro fabula…>>

Dizem que disse —assim mesmo, em latim— Njinga Mbandi, rainha, a António de Oliveira de Cadornega, historiador, na comprovada presença de Frei Giovanni Antonio di Montecúccolo, o Kavazi.

Na nossa cidade de Santa Maria de Matamba, aos dezessete dias do mês de Dezembro de 1663, dia de Santa Olímpia Viúva.

These few lines capture the trouble of history. The citation in Latin, spoke by Njinga Mbandi, inflected by Vieira’s contemporary Angolan diction “assim mesmo, em latim,” and written down by Cadornega as witnessed by the Italian priest, Cavazzi/Kavazi (again, an Angolan reinscription of his name) enacts the transition from the oral to the textual as an act of chronicle. The writer intervenes to retrieve this from the past and put it to present use to imagine, to story, the memories of those who did not write the official history books. In this case, the guerrilla combatants.

De Miranda deploys filmic invocations. The opening shot on the river is a gesture both to Vieira and to Sarah Maldoror, the first filmmaker of the Angolan liberation struggle (Martinican by birth), who interpreted Vieira’s A Vida Verdadeira de Domingos Xavier into the film Sambizanga, centering Maria, Domingos’ wife and not Domingos, as the protagonist. Sambizanga opens on a river, though this one at a cataract, full of the rush and tumble of water’s energy. De Miranda’s title echoes visual artist António Ole’s film, On a Path to the Stars (1980), a poetic homage to Agostinho Neto, first Angolan president, himself a poet. Both Ole and de Miranda borrow their titles from one of Neto’s poems.

Elements
De Miranda builds Path to the Stars from this diverse source base. Like Maldoror before her, she offers a riposte to Maria Calafate Ribeiro’s question: “And now, José Luandino Vieira? Where are the women, the creators of new generations?” (2012) Precisely fifty years after Maldoror’s film, de Miranda’s perspective differs but this is an equally Black feminist intervention. She does not explain the anticolonial struggle, it is assumed. But she reimagines it. Unlike Maldoror, this is not narrative filmmaking. Instead, it is a reflection in moving images, sound, and words from a highly regarded Angolan-Portuguese visual artist.

De Miranda’s visual work puts her still photographic technique in motion to great effect. Depth of field is balanced. Actors pause. The work is unhurried but never slow. At a table Carlota and her Shadow (played by Sunny Dilage) are seated side-by-side, the former in a white gown, the latter in a high-necked black dress, Victorian and stiff. They face the river and without expression eat roasted hearts. The English expression ‘eat your heart out’ expresses delight. This scene enacts something else. Swallow your heart. Put fear behind you, emotion aside, and look ahead.

In this scene, Carlota is twinned: young and old, black and white, night and day. De Miranda’s use of twins, doubles, and now triples asks viewers to question time, difference, and similitude. An older woman guides a young girl, who naps on her lap. Three young women dance around a fire and stand still, returning the camera’s gaze, their long braids linked one to another, like chains of flowers. And three women: an astronaut, the older woman, and Carlota embody different generations as their dialogue entangles the past and the future. 

Theatrical elements are anti-naturalistic. Instead of realism that absorbs viewers in story, de Miranda’s slowly moving stills draw our eyes to the relationship between the human and the natural world. Actors deliver lines that approximate poetic recitation more than conversation. We wonder: how do humans act under conditions of war? How do women act to realize different futures?

Color and costume are elemental: black, white, blue, and camouflage. We never see a flag and the colors so tightly associated with the MPLA—red, black, and yellow—do not appear. We might locate traces of the flag in form, if not in color, in the horizon, that “narrow line that divides,” and in the star or stars of the title and the ambitions of the astronaut and the astrology maps of two male soldiers.

Sound work, done by artist Xullagi, is critical to the film’s force. It is layered and distorted, bending time and transporting us through space. Non-diegetic elements predominate, again offering an anti-naturalism that tugs at our conscience. We hear radio broadcasts, a speech by an African American preacher, and the transmissions of a space shuttle launch. Sounds bring the outside world in and place this story in that larger arc of late 20th century history—of the US civil rights movement, of space exploration, of decolonization, and the distinct language of a liberation movement that speaks in local languages to elude Portuguese military. 

Two main characters, Carlota and the Kwanza, propel the film. Except when we see Carlota submerged, they often operate at different speeds. Carlota moves slowly, her features at ease, her gaze often distant. The river buzzes with life in and along its banks, is dense with vegetation. People and their stories are temporary here, but the river endures. We see Carlota and her Shadow in a small boat, still before a briskly moving background.

River and water evoke ancient temporalities that cycle and spiral, challenging the triumphant teleologies of political discourse. They demand we be present with them, or they will overtake us. The river is a teacher, never a student.

Stars
Stars are light, in a different time. They register hope, signal distance, and other worlds. Path to the Stars speaks of Angola’s liberation struggle but its relationship to chronological time is ambivalent. We course with the river and Carlota through the three acts of one day and into the next. Two radios, a plastic encased mirror, an astronaut, and soldier’s camouflage are the only indicators of a particular historical moment. Other temporalities coexist—the past, present, and future at once, astrological time, and stars in the sky and stars below Carlota’s feet.

What was once here is no longer. Landscape erases as much as it sets the scene. A building in ruins is an explicit visual reminder of change and decay. Overgrowth is stealthier. If the river marks the land like a scar and as a tattoo, vegetation hides the signs of war. The present can overwrite the past. But in the present: “when we remember, it is not with memory, but with its future.” Memory is one form of the past’s futures. Still, Carlota cautions, “when you visit the past, wipe your feet.” Because we must imagine other presents and futures too.

Stars scintillate with a future even as they deliver to us a light that left that star long ago. Stars are at the nexus of science and magic and at the center of cosmological time, the time of the universe. The female astronaut embodies this future-directed vision and desire in Path to the Stars, reminding us of Afrofuturism’s African as well as diasporic sparks. Two soldiers study the astrological chart of the Chinese nation (a nation with a star flecked flag). Military precision should measure the distance between “consciousness and the darkness” and of “hate.” The soldiers parse the chart as if it were a map of pasts and futures, spiritual and mundane. One says to the other “we’ll transport ourselves from here to there, beyond. These centuries have been an intermediary phase.”

Photography scholar and historian Patricia Hayes describes liberation movement photos from Zimbabwe as crafted in the “future tense.” De Miranda’s film troubles those certainties. As Carlota says, “There’s no way to get the time right.”



This text was taken from the book No longer with the memory but with its future, Lisboa, Hangar Editions, 2022, pp 40-55.

[1] Angola’s anticolonial war began in 1961 and continued until April 25, 1974 when Portuguese military brass (fighting wars in Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau) overthrew the state. The Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola declared independence on November 11, 1975. The country soon fell into civil war. Rival sides signed peace accords at Luena in April 2002.