Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora 1405193042, 9781405193047

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Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora

Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora Anjali Prabhu

This edition first published 2014 © 2014 Anjali Prabhu (except for Chapter 2 © University of Nebraska Press and Chapter 4 section2 © University of Texas Press) Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Anjali Prabhu to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Prabhu, Anjali. Contemporary cinema of Africa and the diaspora / Anjali Prabhu. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-9304-7 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4051-9303-0 (paper) 1. Motion pictures–Africa–History and criticism. 2. Experimental films–Africa–History and criticism. 3. Motion picture industry–Africa. 4. African diaspora. I. Title. PN1993.5.A35P73 2014 791.43096–dc23 2014004405 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover image: Karmen Gei, directed by Joseph Ga¨ı Ramaka, produced by Richard Sadler and Canal+, 2001 Cover design by Simon Levy Design Associates Set in 10.5/13pt and MinionPro by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India 1

2014

For Kairav/Toby

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1 Africa Watch: Parameters and Contexts

1

Part I

Space

33

2 The Postcolonial City: Education of the Spectator in Harrikrisna Anenden’s The Cathedral

35

3 Framing the City: Africanizing Viewer and Viewed through Angle, Distance, Genre, and Movement

55

Part II

77

Character

4 Models of African Femininity

79

5 African Masculinity: “We Don’t Need Another Hero”

113

6 Revolutionary Personhood: Revolutionize the Spectator, or Stop, Thief!

133

Part III Narrative

155

7 Documentary Film: Situating a Style

157

8 African Narration: Narration of Africa

172

9 Jean-Marie Teno: Creating an African Repertoire

187

10 Conclusion: Inside/Outside or How to Make a Film about Africa Today

216

Filmography

234

References

238

Glossary

246

Index

251

Acknowledgments

Writing this book has involved the participation of so many others over half a decade that, apart from its weaknesses, I can hardly claim sole authorship for the ideas in it. My greatest debt is to several cohorts of Wellesley students whose enthusiasm, curiosity, and intellectual generosity enabled me to think through many aspects of “Africa,” “diaspora,” and “the contemporary,” and whose intelligence, debate, and energy have made me bold enough to present these ideas here. My special thanks to research assistants, including the smart and bubbly Nimmi Ariyaratne, enthusiastic and charming Maysa Mourad, elegantly intelligent Erin Doherty, quietly explosive Alma Heckman, and the mischievously insightful Cicia Lee. For bringing this project to completion I must credit, fully, Annie Wang’s tireless efforts. She took on the final task of organizing and reformatting the images, and compiled the filmography from an unruly set of motley references. I am grateful for her incredible capacity for solving problems and her unshakable calmness. Gaia Lettere is acknowledged for innumerable tasks, gracious thought, patient reading, and meticulous queries. The final glossary of cinematic terms adapted for this book was also consolidated by her. Thanks to so many who have encouraged and supported me: you are too numerous to name but your conversations have made it into this book. Thanks to various filmmakers studied here who generously shared their work with me, provided duplicate copies of their films, responded to queries, participated in formal and informal discussions, and gave of their time. Thanks also to members of my family, friends, and colleagues who have responded to my work (and my predicaments due to it) with patience and generosity. I am grateful to the many anonymous reviewers of my work in different contexts: you have improved my work and each of you has made your mark on my thought as it is expressed here. I also thank all those who attended my presentations at the MLA, ASA, and ALA conferences and at other invited talks. I am grateful for your time and engagement. Specifically I wish to acknowledge others who inspire through friendship and their own work: Elisabeth Boyi, Françoise Lionnet, Adeleke Adeeko, Susan Andrade, Priya Kurian, Sander Gilman, Walter D. Mignolo, Jim Petterson, Ananda Devi, H. Adlai, Murdoch, Kwaku Korang, and Tejumola Olaniyan. To Ato Quayson, it is easier to express admiration than to put across my gratitude for becoming, over more than a decade,

x

Acknowledgments

my primary interlocutor, sharpest critic, and indefatigable supporter in every intellectual endeavor. To Sheela Nambiar, I extend thanks for providing unquestioned sustenance and friendship from as far back as I can remember needing it and being a source of unending intelligence, delightful engagement, and superb comradeship. I wish to thank Sensei Eiji Toryu for inspiration, friendship, tolerance, and understanding and for providing a stunning example of how to teach without teaching. I am still learning. Many others at the Japan Karate Association Dojo, Brookline, have given me warm friendship through small gestures, words, and encouragement that are unforgettable. Xin Zheng and Ajith Prasad offered me precious forms of support by befriending my sons and being an inspiration to us all. Great respect accompanies my gratitude to my smart, intelligent, and knowledgeable editor, Jayne Fargnoli, at Wiley Blackwell. It is no exaggeration to say that her nurturing guidance was formative on this project. I also extend sincere appreciation to her team: in particular, the superbly efficient Julia Kirk as well as Allison Kosta, Mark Graney, and many others who brought his book to completion. Special thanks to the incomparable Felicity Marsh for painstaking, knowledgeable copy-editing which tamed and made sense of many an unruly sentence while rescuing the draft from numerous inconsistencies. This book is written with many children in mind: Aanya Adusumilli, Sitara Adusumilli, Meera Gulvady, Madhav Gulvady, Sumaira Lamba, Kelvin Prabhu, Nelina Prabhu, Akane Wakai, Moe Wakai, Audrey Garon, Isabel Garon, Olivier Armand, Delphine Armand, Jijo Quayson, Abena Quayson, and Kamau Quayson; and for all present and future graduates of the Lycée Victor Schœlcher in Fort-de-France, Martinique, with vivid memory of its luminaries of the past. Ralf Schlosser remains the greatest inspiration in my life. I treasure his respect for work, dedication to craftsmanship in methodology, and constancy of effort, though I am far from being able to emulate them. Keshav Raphaël is a gentle, generous, gifted, and unpredictable intelligence, who has taught me how to learn differently. His humor and resistance have humanized me all through this process of writing that sometimes drives one to forget one’s own humanness. This book is for Kairav Tobias, who is sharper than I could claim to be in “getting” African cinema for having watched it all his life. There is no one I know in the world who is made up of such intense and pure energy of mind and body. Surely some of it wrote this book. It is completed for you and is dedicated to your inextinguishable joy for life and the incisive quality of your thought, not to mention an uncanny ability to find the one essay or book that I despaired was lost and your enthusiastic attempts at arranging my books and movies in different categories that made me see Space, Character, and Narrative in Africa Watch(ing). A previous version of Chapter 2 was published in French Forum. I thank the University of Nebraska Press for permission to use it here. Part of Chapter 3 appeared in Cinema Journal. I thank the University of Texas Press for permission to include it here.

1

Africa Watch Parameters and Contexts

This book is written from a belief that the idea of “Africa” is one that has relevance for contemporary society and that contemporary society, as a global, interconnected context, has a great stake in African reality, particularly with the shifting power relations among nations in the twenty-first century.1 In this book, we will discuss “African” cinema by studying the particular ways in which Africa and its diaspora are anticipated, imagined, and captured on the screen, while the notion of the “contemporary” stands in a specific relation to the past and the future. We shall explore these ideas further in this introductory chapter. The phrase “Africa Watch” indicates the complexity of spectatorship in African cinema and acknowledges, without necessarily endorsing, other projects that name themselves as such. “Africa Watch” in this book is about watching films through Africanized perspective from all locations and privileging critical methods that allow for the conception of “Africa” via such a perspective. Notwithstanding the many sound reasons for approaching the study of the region in terms of national boundaries2 or specific political histories (Frindéthié), the impulse of this work coheres with the central impulses of the films that constitute its core corpus (mostly films released after 2000).3 Those impulses are to address, and at times to appeal to, a wide, global audience, all the while privileging the space, people, and narratives of the local African contexts of the films. These contexts, however, are constructed in the cinematic medium as networks whose signification within the film reach well beyond the knowable places represented in it. They stretch African space out beyond any containable geographical limit and interrogate many issues discussed at the global level; I argue that these chosen films imagine, and indeed construct their spectator within their process rather consciously. The most obvious African diasporas are the ones that date to the mass movement of Africans during the slave trade across to the “new” worlds of the Americas. In this book I have privileged the sense of an intellectual and aesthetic conversation that I tease out by following the construction of spectatorship in the range of films studied rather than Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, First Edition. Anjali Prabhu. © 2014 Anjali Prabhu. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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by delineating what African and diaspora space means by adopting a simple geographical or nation-based understanding. For this reason, I place African-American film in a slightly different category, particularly because of the naturally dialectical relationship with Hollywood cinema that is part of its history, and I do not treat in it any detail here.4 The idea of “diaspora” is also activated by the themes evoked in the films, not simply because many of the “African” filmmakers move, literally, in the spaces of diaspora in their own lives and especially in their filming endeavors since they are often interested in liminality, but also because the dispersion of peoples within national boundaries has itself become pertinent to the questions studied under “diaspora” in economic, material, and identity-based terms. Gestures from the Creole islands of the Americas as well as of the Indian Ocean as diasporas become overt in the cinema, while the notion is also activated in the films made within the newer migrant spaces that have emerged in the metropolises of Europe. African and diaspora films that are artistic, connected to liberation, and that pay attention to form to a very high degree are often contrasted to the more recently inaugurated video productions that are for the most plot-driven and far more connected, it is said, to the local contexts and local audiences. We will address this dichotomy shortly. Simultaneously, the artistic films we are interested in studying further, use various strategies that privilege local audiences in their encounter with the film. Further, these films engage with quite specific historical events or outcomes and are identifiably African in cultural terms. These African “terms” will be highly relevant to the configuration of the analyses in this book. That is, the method of interrogation, of reasoning, of representation within the films is explored under the three rubrics that organize the book’s structure: space (Chapters 2–3), character (Chapters 4–6), and narrative (Chapters 7–10). These films interrogate the identity of African characters they invent or recreate; the complexity of spaces relevant to Africa, though not restricted to it geographically; and the forms of narration that their creators adopt and devise. Engagement with representational space also implicates the cinematic medium and the relationship of space to time. This general conception allows for a more dialogical, and even dialectical, relationship among the films within this book. Any of the films treated in this book could easily be studied in a different framing: that is, all these films go well beyond the ascription of the category African and/or diasporic African. Presenting them as an interconnected repertoire is, then, a particular enterprise that this book takes on, but it is one that is based in a particular material history that is connected to the development of cinema on the continent, on one hand, and, on the other, the collectives that are moving beyond their foundational rationales and taking on new meanings in the contemporary context. Building on the previous scholastic work on cinema related to Africa and its diasporas, this book addresses an exciting array of new films that are presented as the theoretical ruminations they are on African history and contemporary society well beyond the continent and its diasporas, all the while intervening in cinema as the diverse, globally recognizable phenomenon that it is. Focusing on the spectator as a real but constructed entity drawn into the cinematic experience, I present and study these films as an interconnected “discourse” whose pertinence to contemporary issues on

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3

Africa and its diaspora are articulated in terms that renew film theory, genre, and spectatorship in interesting ways.5 Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse is useful because what he attempted to do was to move away from the idea of “knowledge” as a set of ideas which are then propositions in language about a particular subject. In this sense, the discourse that these films create is not directed toward deductive reasoning which then gives an authoritative set of propositions on “Africa” or “diaspora life,” for example. These films create a particular sensibility toward Africa that then might inform spectators’ attitudes toward specific propositions encountered elsewhere. For example, while notions of patriarchy, unadapted Western education, modernization modeled on development as it is visible in many symbols of achievement, or forced migrations to the cities or to the West come under critique in many of these films, those contexts are used to do much more in the spectators’ engagement with the film in question. The spectator is asked to enter into the ethical questions the films take up, and through a variety of techniques is invited, as part of the cinematic experience, to think from a variety of positions and angles that equally challenge an instinctive (and culturally bound) reaction or an intellectual and (educated) response. This is particularly true when the experience is repeated and sustained through a repertoire of films that I present provisionally in this book. It goes without saying that spectators might have different reactions to the filmic experience and interact with it in diverse ways. It would be impossible to somehow “account for” every possible spectator. Yet it seems that it is not the most productive move to distinguish between a “Western” spectator, who should then be constructed as an “outsider,” and another, in opposition to this, who is the authentic viewer, the “insider,” who would then necessarily be an “African” or a “diasporic African” in identity. At the same time, it remains true that the content of the film itself defines as “native” (despite the now annoying connotations of this word) a particular audience, one whom we might take to resemble the characters and occupy the spaces portrayed in the film, speak the languages used, and embody the rhythms and inexplicable sensations it evokes. However, this would only tell a small part of the filmic story. A film is so much more than its content. Its experience overflows beyond what can be contained by iconicity or intellectual endeavor; it is sensory and cerebral, all the while emotional and yet also demands both an immediate ethical engagement on the part of the spectator who is interpellated and a more processual interrogation of his or her attitudes and ideologies. The term “interpellate,” which I will use several times in this chapter, might require some unpacking. Its original meaning is to interrupt or intervene in parliamentary proceedings to demand an explanation. Its second meaning is more philosophical: it refers to the way a whole thinking system or ideology constructs an individual or a category. The French philosopher Louis Althusser is most often associated with the term, although it has been taken up by a variety of fields, media studies being one of them, with discussion around it in Screen in the 1970s.6 Althusser was interested in how individuals relate to their real conditions of existence within the state and their imaginary relationship to it. Althusser’s notion of interpellation teased out the ways in which a subject apprehends itself already in the terms in which

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it is called out to by systems of power that he labelled “ideology.” To simplify his argument somewhat, he shows how individuals participate in the power structure that dominates them. The aspect that is most interesting in importing Althusser into a conversation about how we watch films is the way he shows how meaning is made and the subject comes into being in a particular way through a process that we can track in stages but which does not occur consecutively. It is only the analyses that can separate these different ongoing parts of the process: “ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects, which amounts to making it clear that individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects, which necessarily leads us to one last proposition: individuals are always-already subjects” (Althusser 176). So it is not that the spectator is “born” as something new only through the film experience. Nor is it that he or she was already what he or she was prior to the experience. Our interest in activating such a notion of interpellation is to follow how within the experience of the film various cultural instincts are called up (differentially) for the spectator, thus drawing on models of being whose configurations go well beyond the sensory experience of the film. Yet the “presentness” of the filmic experience also relies precisely on the unknown and unknowable, the unconstituted, just as the spectator who is called up in these multiple ways is also constantly in a state of becoming as much as she or he can also exist as a being. Vivian Sobchack’s work reminds us of the spectator as a sensory nexus of meanings and meaning-making that involve a consciousness of the sensory evocations on the screen as well as one’s own body as sensing in and of itself (72–79). These dynamisms, related to the unconscious, the willingly political, the unforeseeable associative processes that occur within the interaction of the spectator’s mind and senses in the filmic experience, are drawn together in the idea of interpellation as I use it here and throughout this book. However, I wish in addition to evoke Fanon’s use of the same idea when he writes that when he is on the street the manner in which he is interpellated as a guilty subject does not require an epithet such as “dirty negro.” Just the casually surprised remark “Look, a negro” sends the black subject surrounded by white colonial culture into a crushing objecthood (Fanon, Black Skin 109). This then brings about an interrogation and analysis in Fanon’s text of the way in which the black man of that specific historical moment is interpellated in colonial culture. Adjoining Fanon’s experience of interpellation to Althusser’s more “neutral” terms recalls the particular valence of the idea of the subject in the hierarchy of colonial culture. Here, it reminds us that such a process of interpellation and the dynamic concept of the spectator are not divested from the meanings generated within the experience of the film, which while wholly present also draws on intellectual, emotional, and sensory knowledge that transcends that experience in the case of each and every spectator. It is quite obvious that theories of the spectator – such as that proposed by Christian Metz, by which the cinematic experience is an enactment of the mirror stage, whereby the spectator identifies with the image on the screen in order to register his difference from his mother, whom he then understands as “castrated” – cannot fully account for the cinematic experience of any audience, even one conceived

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of as homogenous. According to those early theories deriving quite directly from psychoanalysis, the spectator’s desire is then to merge with the mother and to disavow his or her own fears of castration by maintaining a belief in the existence of a maternal penis. Laura Mulvey’s work intervened strongly in order to show how the spectator was traditionally constructed as male and that the female spectator underwent identification with both the passive female subjects on the screen and the male voyeuristic position that the camera enacted and invited. Following Mulvey’s intervention much attention has been focused on accounting for the female subjectivity of viewers and, beyond that, of female positioning alongside moveable identities and the positioning of spectators in general. Moreover, it is recognized that the spectator is not passive, and thus the notion of “interpellation” becomes more dynamic and the relationship between spectator-subject and screen-subject dialectical – and in this sense far less predictable But the spectator is not simply a theoretical entity about which one might pontificate and seek to form conclusive statements. Mulvey’s early intercession and her suggestion that the spectator’s gaze counterposed the voyeuristic and the fetishistic gaze already contain the argument that a slew of critics would subsequently pursue (among them Kaja Silverman, Ann Kaplan, and Teresa de Lauretis): that the spectator is not a fixed entity that we can pin down, that spectatorship is a dynamic activity, that interaction within the filmic experience draws in the subject in multiple and changeable ways. We might productively link Mulvey’s suggestion to a more explicitly postcolonial critical apparatus in bringing it together with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s term “strategic essentialism.” Although in Spivak’s use of the term the overt political self-awareness of the subjects engaging in these acts of identity is much greater, it can also be seen as a series of overlapping procedures entered into by the spectator-subject in the provisional and time-bound context of the filmic experience. But it is also useful to keep in mind, despite the many revisions to the concept of the film experience since Christian Metz, his sense of it resembling the mirror stage of identification. This reminds us of the drive to “master” one’s environment and oneself in it. While most self-reflexive films that draw attention to their form subvert this aspect of the spectator’s desire, it is interesting to bear that primary impulse in mind as a potential tendency in spectatorship as we suggest specific possible interactions of the spectator in the films studied. The nexus “between desire, desire for political change and the language available for its expression” (Mulvey “Changes” 16) forms an important space from which to think about this cinema because much of the film work here is about creating a cinematic language for new desires and new ideas about politics which is itself wrapped up within the hope of creating a new spectator. Spectatorship and its relationship to the female character constitute something that is substantially rethought in the art cinema I refer to in this book. It is interesting to follow the female character’s presence within the diegesis as it plays itself out in the larger question of the film’s relationship to its spectators. African cinema is a subaltern in its own diegesis in cinema history. Its films perform pedagogical moves and construct their spectators as possible agents for political change. In this endeavor, African cinema invents its own expression adequate to such a task.7

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In the context of this work it might not be gender that always provides the grounds for positioning and moving as we theorize the spectator’s experience. The term “spectator” itself somehow becomes alien because it suggests a certain distance or remove that then aligns better with the audience of First Cinema, or cinema as spectacle. However, the notion of interpellation being a dynamic process in which the subject is hailed from the screen but enters into engagement with the totality of the film is helpful. The spectator-subject is then both a provisional nothingness whose being is contingent upon the film because within it is created the subject-spectator of the specific film experience and also a provisional totality that provides a responsive but supple “space” from which the subject enters into a dialectical relationship with the images that wash over it and transform that space into various shifting positions. We can liken these positions to provisional essentialisms if we can imagine them to be rapid, fluid, and often even contradictory. The filmmakers situate themselves just as Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary Martinican who literally became an Algerian and an African, envisaged the ideal intellectual: such an intellectual does the theoretical and practical work of negotiating between “the people” and the totality of the nation (often against the national bourgeoisie), while also connecting with the global stage.8 What emerges is that these films suggest that any local African character, space, or narrative has a legitimate place in the global reality well beyond the shores of Africa and its diasporic contexts.9 In this book, African films are considered instances for aesthetic and theoretical reflection and opportunities for developing critical acuity about the interconnected world. Those opportunities are of consequence for the selves that emerge from making and/or experiencing those films that both claim Africanness and redefine it. The African films that are of interest in this book all participate in the quite simple task that director Raoul Peck states explicitly: to work so that Africa can no longer remain a “backdrop” in movies. In a 2012 Cannes interview, he remarks that cinema should work to bring other realities, other viewpoints to global audiences by bringing to those audiences the problems as they are known to those living in African spaces that have long been marginalized, misunderstood, and simply neglected. He thus gives spectators the opportunity to stand outside themselves and exercise the humility necessary to take on the perspectives of another person. “Otherwise,” he says, “it remains a power trip” (Peck). Peck’s conviction, and his aesthetics following from it, are made out to be quite suspect, when such films as we consider here are dismissed as being disconnected from Africa in an explicit comparison with the more commercial films that are perhaps unfairly bunched together to be called “Nollywood” (from Nigeria) or “Gollywood” (from Ghana) films. These other types of film are proclaimed as giving an accurate picture of African reality because they manage to reach a wide audience.10 The argument is perhaps better posed in different terms. African cinema of the “artistic” conviction is no different from art cinema in, say, India or Latin America. These films do not manage to reach huge audiences anywhere – their biggest forums to date have been film festivals for launching, and their showings only sometimes make it to large cinema theaters (which are facing a more acute crisis in Africa than anywhere else in the world). So, to say that African art cinema is available

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less easily to Africans is only to restate what art cinema everywhere in the world already knows as a reality. Instead, filmmakers from the “art” group prefer to focus on aesthetics. However, one of their major considerations still concerns the practical and the material: the distribution and exhibition of their films and obtaining the technical means to complete them. The Niamey Congress emphasized the historic nature of these concerns for “art” filmmakers. Commercial filmmakers conduct this part of their business overtly (Diawara 43–45). African cinema is a recent phenomenon, with a proper repertory being established late in the second half of the last century, and it has emerged as a field of study from within African studies, sociology, or literary studies rather than from within film studies. As opposed to those approaches, in this book we will anchor discussion on the insights these films provide by following our experiences of them carefully as film. That is, I will share my own experience of the film (both of coming to know it as an individual and also of experiencing it in various viewings and discussions and through the shared understanding of groups of different sizes and natures, including students, colleagues, professional organizations, and friends), and I will use particular moments or themes to construct, analyze, and even imagine a range of reactions or forms of participation. It goes without saying that while these comments are not authoritative, their legitimacy comes from being grounded in the material of the film itself. The medium developed its aesthetics following the tradition of filmmaking in the colonies (from which it cannot be separated). This was linked to producing colonial documentaries and ethnographic films, often funded by colonial governments; these were the first “African” films, so to speak. While these early films were “objectively” African, often shot in Africa and even finished in some of the colonially established filmmaking facilities, they were evidently far from able to capture let alone articulate African “subjectivities.” In this way, within African Cinema, both as praxis and academic discipline, there is an awareness of historical continuity in the entry of Africans into the representational apparatus of cinema, beginning with colonial film. This has, in some ways, affected the critical apparatus that focuses on cinema’s truth-value precisely to combat the distortive ways in which Africans were depicted, particularly in colonial documentary or propaganda film and early European and Hollywood fiction. Although Africans, among others, continue to face issues of negative representation based on “difference” in mainstream media, and anything associated with the African continent might have to contend with the quick ascription of inherent poverty, backwardness, or political dysfunction, African filmmaking has come a long way in representing the fullness of African experience to audiences who care to heed it. African cinema today provides exciting films that exemplify and interrogate African realities, imagination, aspiration, and possibilities that invite audiences well beyond the continent and its diasporas to have a stake in them. Indeed, they take some trouble to show that we already do. Such are the films that have provided the reflections in this book. The African cinema that takes a long view of contemporary Africa and its diaspora has created its own history, has initiated a relationship with an audience, demands its own spectatorship, and challenges its spectators in ways that could make other contemporary cinema seem

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less sophisticated.11 African cinema, of what we might more recently need to qualify as the “artistic persuasion,” has always demanded its spectators cultivate a relationship with it by using as much critical and imaginative thought as it brings to them.12 This book takes on the challenge and invites its readers to do so as well. Early on, representation of Africans in the films made by Europeans was for the most part in ethnographic films, in which they were extensively (though most often, negatively) depicted. Early experimental film included characters in blackface while colonial documentary used Africans in propaganda for colonial ventures. Colonial films served a variety of purposes well beyond bringing back images of the colony to the metropolis. For example, in East Africa, under General Platt’s command, Sergeant Wernham was asked to film daily life, the work he produced is believed to have been shown to East African soldiers fighting in the British Army in Asia (Colour Film). In French Africa the Laval decree (1934) imposed explicit control on films made on the continent, while British colonial law banned Africans from watching any films at all of or relating to Europe or America, even those partially made in Africa; as a result, filmmaking in Africa by Africans could not become a reality until the late twentieth-century. The recognized power of the medium was also exploited as early as the 1930s by the British Film Institute’s support of the Bantu Educational Cinema Experiment, which educated Africans through cinema on matters such as hygiene and farming; slightly later, Catholic filmmaking facilities also trained Africans to work for them. Well before the Laval decree was lifted, Paulin Vieyra, who was born in Benin but lived mostly in Senegal, temporarily solved the problem for himself by going to France to make Afrique sur Seine (1955). While Pan Africanism was a movement that garnered African unity against European colonization to begin with, it is interesting to note how colonial film itself stressed African unity in paradoxical ways by framing Africa as a whole as entirely belonging to the different “empires.” The division of Africa between the various imperial powers of Europe following the Berlin Conference of 1884 was to tear Africa apart.13 Film became part of ethnographic recording as well. The French ethnographer Jean Rouch stands out in presenting African “difference” with a corpus of films, one of the very well known of which is The Mad Masters (1955). In this film Rouch records and fictionalizes the rituals of a quasi-religious movement known as the Hauka in which individuals from Niger are “possessed” by the spirits of their colonial administrators. Rouch’s presentation caused controversy on both sides of the colonial divide: colonials found it suspiciously anti-colonial and Africans felt that, ultimately, its portrayal of them was negative. Rouch made numerous films between fiction and documentary – several in collaboration with the sociologist Edgar Morin – on various rites and realities, such as particular dances, circumcision, or migration (Jaguar, 1967), and he experimented with the medium of cinema in its truth function. Several Africans who worked on these productions with Rouch went on to become independent filmmakers themselves; amongst them, was Safi Faye, from Senegal, one of the few female filmmakers to have a long film career. The actor Oumarou Ganda was the most well-known African with film training at the time Rouch was filming in Niger.

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He featured in several Rouch films, later walking away with a prize for his own film, but unfortunately he died quite young. There is no doubt that European filmmaking has had a lasting effect in this and other ways on African cinema, which continues to develop its own technological possibilities for filmmaking within the continent. Most filmmakers working on aesthetically focused films depend on European and American finishing for their films, although now India and Taiwan, among other countries, are offering new possibilities. At the same time, African filmmaking exerted its own influence, though it might not seem as evident. Cinéma vérité, for example, which became an important movement from Dziga Vertov in 1920s Moscow to the French films of the 1960s, was no doubt influenced by the filmmaking carried out in Africa and other colonies – Rouch being one of its highly praised creators and admired by many, including Jean-Luc Godard, despite his philosophical and sometimes contentious differences with Rouch. Interestingly, while African filmmaking has recently created a tradition of documentary filmmaking that is innovative and exciting, the “biopic” has also made a comeback in Europe and the United States.14 It is in this context that biographies of Africans or African diasporics such as Thomas Sankara, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Patrice Lumumba can be studied. We will take a close look at two versions of biographies of the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba made by the Haitian/Congolese filmmaker Raoul Peck in Chapters 7 and 8.15 These remarks serve to highlight the fact that the history of African cinema predates the appearance of the first African films we can identify and that the participation of African cinema in film history goes well beyond the benchmarks accorded to it in textbook accounts. At the height of the great decolonizing movements and in the struggle for representation, art and culture became spaces of increased contestation alongside more easily identifiable political arenas of government. Literature, written in (soon to be former) colonial languages, represented and imagined the militancy of African peoples as European colonizers left the continent from the diverse colonies. The writers and artists who produced these works were typically elites within the colonial system, a vast majority of their relatively small number having been trained in the West, not only in Europe – Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah’s American training stands out in this respect. Many of these intellectuals even went on to hold important posts in the new postcolonial nation: emblematically, Léopold Sédar Senghor, who became Senegal’s first president, or Aimé Césaire, who became the mayor of the capital of the French Overseas Department (DOM) of Martinique. One important aspect of early writing was that it addressed the colonizer in the latter’s own language, and thus exploded the passive identity that had been imposed on the colonized subject through colonialism. Thus, a novel such as the Ivoirian Bernard Dadié’s Un nègre à Paris (1959), which sends a black man to Paris so that Paris can be exoticized and Europe estranged through his eyes, constitutes a valuable moment in reclaiming the right to self-representation, which is the central feature of decolonizing beyond political handover. At the same time, in the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), the hero, Okonkwo, becomes the narrative device for a return to

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precolonial mores in his return, after exile, to his village of Umuofia. The novel allows the reader to note how the white man has brought his religion to Africa and how he gains a foothold by imposing it, while altering the terms of the specific African society and the interrelations of its people. Awareness of the incompatibility of two different spaces, of their differential power, and of a need to reinvent Africa beyond its colonial past and postcolonial imminence characterized these texts. In film, Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966), which was originally a novella, powerfully portrays an African girl in France, where she necessarily becomes “black.” Diouana arrives on a steamer in the French port of Marseille with the promise of freedom from the constraints of Dakar only to discover what it means to work as a housemaid for a white family in France. This pioneering film, often considered the first truly African film, lays the groundwork for many of those features that continue to appear throughout his filmmaking career and which characterized his fiction previously. Indeed, this film is a landmark that is drawn upon by African filmmakers in various direct and indirect ways. For this reason, we shall give to Black Girl in particular, and Sembène’s work more generally, a special place as we understand the framework of contemporary African cinema.16 This book follows certain forms of continuity in the films emerging from and about Africa, while ruptures are understood to be constitutive of redefining the medium and its cohesiveness. The ruptures and their diverse pathways also indicate that the films studied here speak to clusters outside the framing of “African”: these films are interesting to discuss from the point of view of, for example only, documentary, biopic, film noir, or other genre categories. Or they intervene in a more general sense of representation of Africans and other formerly colonized peoples in art and beyond. Many of these films contest globalization and question linking the development of newly constituted nations to European modernity as the sole way of proceeding.17 A large number of them also raise political and ethical questions regarding the unevenness of the distribution of resources, not only between African populations and their Euro-American counterparts but also within African contexts, as a feature of contemporary society, most strikingly visible in urban areas, but deriving from and having consequences well beyond the colonially conceived city spaces. At the same time, it is important to note again that certain streams of filmmaking completely break with the economics, aesthetics, and politics of this type of African filmmaking and are not the focus of this study. Here, I am referring to more explicitly commercial forms of filmmaking that attempt to rival the huge industries of Hollywood and India’s Bollywood in terms of their reach for numbers of spectators, primarily emerging from a new cinema scene that defined the video boom in Nigeria and in Ghana.18 Film, however, posed several challenges for early African self-representation, first because the number of trained filmmakers who could operate in the medium was very limited. And this was related to the technical aspects that cinema required for the making of films to be a realistic option for African elites. However, African filmmakers also had to contend with the impossible competition from European, American, and Indian films in their market, the scarcity of funding for filmmaking

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in Africa by Africans, and numerous forms of censorship by African governments.19 It is in this climate that one name emerges as the cliché: “Father” of African Cinema – that of Sembène. Yet, Sembène’s position within colonial culture as someone who is not part of the elite, the colorful trajectory that started with dropping out of school and encompassed working as a docker in Marseille, serving in the French army, and training at Moscow’s Gorki Studios, fashion his corpus of film work in very particular ways, which in their turn have marked forever the notion of an African cinema.20 Sembène’s career as an intellectual, a writer, and particularly, here, as a filmmaker through the colonial period and well after independence, in and of itself accomplishes many ground-clearing gestures for filmmakers who inevitably referred to his work as a stalwart landmark from which to proceed – even in opposition. At the same time, it is important to remember the fact that there were films coming out of the Egyptian Misr Studios even before the 1940s, and the first films of Egyptian director Mohammed Karim’s were made close to the First World War. From films with mass appeal and Hollywood-type plots to many comedies, Egyptian film has its own history with which to contend. If Youssef Chahine’s name stands out to film lovers the world over it is because he is, as Roy Armes points out, a “Third World filmmaker [who manages] to deal with social and political issues intelligently within the formal narrative structures of a cinema directed toward a mass audience and to combine this commercial concern with a totally personal one” (Third World 254). In this he achieved the same thing that can be seen in a generation of Bollywood hits from the 1970s and 1980s in particular. Moreover, Egyptian cinema’s implication in questions pertaining to the continent and to its own national context within global economics and politics has come to the fore in films produced more recently. Contemporary films such as Mohammed Moustafa’s Awqat faragh (“Free Times”; 2006) focus on the urban problems that make of Egypt a part of the former third world and show it to have a stake in the types of reflection within African cinema more than ever. Therefore, although Egyptian film history might align it more easily with Hollywood and Bollywood in terms of style, reach, and theme, we find in Egyptian contemporary cinema an awareness of and solidarity with African cinema of the more classic kind that we are treating here. In any case, its affinity with the newer video films is yet to be established, and it does not appear to be competing for the audiences of those films in any significant way.21 In privileging the type of films considered in this book, it is impossible to speak of contemporary cinema in the African context without proper acknowledgement of Ousmane Sembène’s place in its history. Sembène’s importance, though, goes well beyond his arrival on the scene of world cinema along with the wave of decolonization. His work remains the cornerstone for innovative filmmaking that is African cinema today because of the way it stands in and of itself as a corpus, offering a variety of themes, characters, techniques, approaches, and issues that concern the whole continent in the new and very diverse history of nationhood that colonialism left as its most positive-looking legacy. A perhaps less obvious reason for giving Sembène such a central position in framing African cinema is, paradoxically, not because of his cinematic content, method, or even style. Rather, Sembène early on

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recognized that the positioning of the spectator was one aspect over which he, as a director, had much greater control than he had over the distribution or the actual spectatorship in terms of numbers or demographics that he might have liked. Capitalizing on that power without apology, Sembène’s films are brilliant for the way they anticipated an audience that was not merely African, or even global, but rather “Africanized,” thus literally creating a new type of engagement with African cinema, and so with Africa. It is perhaps for this reason that Sembène’s films stand out as an unambiguous example of what Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino signaled as a Third Cinema. And it is also what distinguishes filmmaking in this tradition of Third Cinema as distinct from not just First Cinema, but also Second Cinema. Frank Ukadike underlines early on that the new commercial video films produced in West Africa tapped into and sustained an essentially First Cinema audience that was already loyal to “Kung Fu, Hollywood, and Indian imports” (“Video Booms” 140). While Second Cinema seems oppositional to First Cinema, whose relationship to the spectator is one that is closer to an exhibitory mode (i.e., cinema as spectacle), its experimentation with form and the demand placed on the spectator do not really extend to a process of real liberation as Solanas and Getino’s manifesto suggested Third Cinema does.22 The African and diaspora films examined in this book exploit many techniques and forms one might find in Second Cinema, but they ultimately require of the spectator an interactivity and emotive and intellectual engagement that transports and transposes questions of Africa into his or her very own subjectivity as just such an interactive agent in the viewing experience. At various points in this book, we will return to Sembène both explicitly and implicitly in acknowledging contemporary African filmmakers’ heightened consciousness of, on the one hand, the reality of distribution and circulation of less commercially geared films and, on the other, the cinematic possibilities of exploiting, creatively, the interpellation of a newly created spectator. This takes the coherence of an African cinema well beyond, and yet faithful to, Pan Africanism and gestures overtly to social liberation. It is not insignificant that Solanas and Getino’s manifesto opens with a quotation from Frantz Fanon. The mere gesture of acknowledging Sembène in this book as such a central figure is one that institutes the idea of “African” cinema in a particular way with nationalist and Pan Africanist beginnings alongside a particular skepticism toward globalization even as these films resolutely frame their audience as “global.” To do so is also to take a position on films connecting spectators to the notion of liberation in a variety of ways. Brigit Meyer states, with regard to the booming new film industries in Nigeria and Ghana, that many of the criticisms of the films “remain grounded in a paternalistic, if not colonial, idea of cinema as a medium for education and enlightenment” and that the “vantage point from which criticisms have been raised so far is inadequate because they fail to take into account the conditions under which film production and consumption now take place in Ghana and Nigeria” (“Popular Ghanaian Cinema”57). Most African filmmakers who continue to have some link with the ideals of the Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) might find, rather, that the directions given to education and what enlightenment meant were surely to be questioned, but that education

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and enlightenment remain – not paternalistically nor in the colonial tradition, but in a renewed manner, comically, lightly, magically, daringly, emotionally, or in many other ways – central to their project. Third Cinema might have been a particular historical movement, as the cinema critics Bordwell and Thompson acknowledge it in their book (544), but it is a practice that lives on in African cinema as well as other cinemas of the world. Beyond the orientation of critics, the pedagogical impulse of a thoughtful film does not relegate the spectator to the position of a naive or inferior entity to be educated into the tradition of Europe, as Meyer seems to suggest, nor does it need to lapse into a simplistic and reductive form that overpowers any aesthetic autonomy of the work. What has changed radically through African filmmaking is precisely that cinema is no longer in the service of paternalistic, colonial discourse which was so difficult to separate from the medium itself, given the ways it entered Africa. Rather, African filmmakers of diverse origin and intent, committed in a multiplicity of ways, explicitly or implicitly and consciously or less consciously, to what we can call the ideals of Third Cinema, have effectively and collectively wrested control of the medium of cinema by each dedicating themselves to making films that speak in their own voices, see with their own eyes, and think within the complexity of their collective minds and through their experiences. They thus inaugurate, from all of these factors and through their creativity, a style that allows for the notion of African cinema. Indeed, every “African” film treated here either overtly or implicitly brings into existence a spectator who goes through some kind of education, even enlightenment. It is from having being reborn provisionally but repeatedly in and through these African and/or diaspora films that the author of this book has undertaken to share those experiences of spectatorship and to contemplate them with any reader, who it is hoped will also become, if they are not already, a spectator of African and diaspora cinema. These filmmakers, over the several decades they have been making such films, have provided us (anyone who enters into sustained spectatorship of these films) with a repertoire that takes us through their struggle to create a superb African film culture in which it invites us to participate. This book responds to the call which that standing repertoire of films sends out to an audience within and well beyond Africa: to listen and learn, in our own process of becoming citizens of a world that all seem to agree is becoming more and more interconnected. The ever-growing repertoire is mature, and now sufficiently robust that it allows for multiple points of entry and more bold forms of juxtaposition. It has built up a dialogue with longer-existing cinematic traditions without being subsumed by them. Contemporary African cinema that joins up in aesthetic, thematic, material, and political ways with cinema of the diaspora (Akudinobi 388),23 invites us, as spectators, to enter into the cinematic medium and ruminate on the histories and possibilities of this shared world, and of cinema in it. Ousmane Sembène initiated this bold and unapologetic venture of painstakingly visualizing and creating not just characters but also spectators, whom he interpellated with humor, intelligence, and compassion. It is important to note, as does Dudley Andrew in his assessment of the work of the semioticians on cinema theory, that cinema is not a language as is French or Wolof. That is, it is not

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as “system of signification” but rather “a place where various codes come together to create meaning” (Andrew 68; emphasis in the original). Sembène initiated our introduction into that place called African cinema. Like many of his generation, Sembène was highly conscious of the notion of the “intellectual” as someone with a responsibility (in Sartre’s terms) to “the people” in a both a Pan African and a third-world sense. If these terms seem somehow old-fashioned, there is nothing old-fashioned about the challenge each new African film has thrown out to its spectators.24 As we shall see, that they adhere to some long-standing principles or beliefs does not imply Africans are making anything but thoroughly contemporary films. Through an innovatively Africa-oriented perspective that these films demand, rather than provide, they bring us to experience Africa as reality and possibility in dynamic, thoughtful, and cinematically sophisticated ways. They call up the spectator to take a stand on issues that are fundamentally significant to the apprehension of Africa in contemporary society, no matter from where such a view is being formed. Such an idea of local African realities as a consequential space from which to think of questions well beyond it also requires the paradoxical notion of the cosmopolitanism of the intellectual creating it and the one viewing it. This does not mean that the spectator must be a “cosmopolitan,” as in someone who has travelled the world or who is knowledgeable about “high” culture in specific ways. Rather, the spectator is drawn up in conjunction with the film experience to see the world from specific African spaces and perspectives and through rhythms and movements such that the local realities and struggles are imaginatively transformed into vehicles to connect that experience with the spectator’s existence beyond the film as a member of a global community in which Africa has too long been negatively framed or simply neglected. The responsibility that the film demands is one that the spectator must accord intellectually to become a creator of this African cinema for us all. It is in this sense that I present what I believe constitutes a corpus of work that we can term “African,” and that we can certainly critique (in the best sense) not simply for any category ascribed to it, but for the superb films that comprise it. The corpus, represented selectively here by privileging recent films (most of which were released after 2000), has emerged over decades of daring experimentation, inter-referentiality, play with form and narrative through irony and imitation without fear of becoming mere mimicry, and most of all, bringing delectable cinematic “experiences” to real spectators. In other words, the achievements of any single film or filmmaker would be unthinkable without the now rich history of African cinema prior to the contemporary period. Although the focus will be on the contemporary, as I have outlined, references to earlier films, and in particular to Sembène’s repertoire, situate the selected films within African film history. In this way, the ambitions of this particular type of African cinema are always larger than the space of the continent. They are not removed from the realities of Africa simply because they do not enjoy the wide viewership that Hollywood and Bollywood and now the newer so-called Nollywood and Gollywood productions do, but rather because they are devotedly committed to them. As we have observed, they

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are not completely anomalous in that many noncommercial films (and other “products”) the world over share the same fate in local and global markets when other “competitive” products are more readily and cheaply available because they are more easily consumable (here intellectually, too). These films are made from a vision that sees Africa, or particular parts or aspects of it, as having value to the world at large. They conceive of Africa as an actor on the world stage, as consequential for the destiny of mankind, a notion that has been largely ignored or hampered by European and American economic and political interests throughout and well after colonialism. They are brilliantly accomplished, especially because their experience involves the creation of a particular type of spectator, one who is invited to be positioned in particular ways toward Africa’s realities (riddled as it is with problems) through the creation of African spaces, characters, and narratives in the cinematic medium. Needless to say the FEPACI (Fédération panafricaine de cinéastes /Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers), formed at the time the FESPACO was inaugurated, has had an influence on the inception and conception of what African cinema is and can be.25 In 1975, at the FEPACI in Algiers, African filmmakers further defined their role in relation to, and solidarity with, progressive film from the third world. FESPACO, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, alternates with the Carthage film festival hosted by Tunisia (which also alternates with the Syrian Damascus Film Festival specifically dedicated to Arab film). The fact that Maghrebi filmmakers have played a crucial role in this co-operative African movement and in forging the kind of cinema envisaged by these initiatives allows us to view contemporary African cinema as stemming from but going beyond these collective initiatives. Férid Boughedir, the Moroccan filmmaker, for example, has enjoyed a very visible presence at FESPACO, both as a contestant with his films and serving notably as chair of the jury in 2001 (Boughedir, “Férid Boughedir: ‘le Fespaco’”).26 This is not surprising at all. African films have crossed borders in their conception and production. Souleymane Cissé’s Waati (1995), for example, takes up the story of a young girl born in apartheid South Africa who moves away and then returns. Despite a controversial response from Nadine Gordimer on the film’s authenticity or accurateness, Cissé felt fully comfortable as an artist to speak on any topic outside his own “national” context of Mali. Cissé was, by the way, also trained in Moscow after Sembène. In any case, film has always been “transnational” since its very invention, with innovation happening across Europe and in the United States. Early film theaters in the United States showed numerous European productions, while development of technologies and innovation in film also occurred transnationally. Ghana’s early filmmaking and television were set up with training occurring in collaboration with the BFI (British Film Institute), while South Africa’s first 3-D lab at Durban University uses technology developed with Taiwan. Spectatorship has also been transnational alongside the aspirations of film producers, not simply for greater distribution to sustain their filmmaking but also in the ambition of directors (who might also be producers) to speak to a universal audience. African cinema as an art form has surely shared this aspiration, and the Portugese film of Mia Couto’s novel by Teresa Prata on Mozambique, entitled Sleepwalking Land (2007), is testimony to

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this sort of global view in production, aesthetics, ambition, and reach. Interestingly, the film has had appreciative audiences not only at Cannes and New York but also Brazil and India. However, it is in the actual interpellation of the spectator that we can locate a renewed and revolutionized commitment to the transformed ideals that marked and oriented the beginnings of African cinema. Spectatorship for African films is a highly charged question, first, because of the politics of cinema theaters in much of Africa, which has made the showing of African films a far less frequent event than that of those from Hollywood and also from India’s booming film industry, Bollywood. Popular Egyptian films have also traditionally been contenders for theater showings. Second, since filmmakers have been dependent upon Western (European and American, and often previously colonial) sources for making these films, distribution has not been in the hands of the filmmaker. Therefore, with spectatorship being limited more generally speaking with regard to the cinema, as opposed to commercial distribution of film from the sustained industries in the world and the newer commercial production within the continent, the status of the spectator as an entity in the aesthetic and theoretical aspect of the film’s totality also becomes implicated. Walter Ong’s position that the “writer’s audience is always a fiction” (9) applies with renewed vigor to the director’s audience, particularly for the African cinema we are considering. These films are not made with a more immediately predictable audience of local or globally located consumers in mind, as we might say is the case of the staggering numbers of films produced by Nigeria and now Ghana’s respective and even collaborative video industries. It goes without saying that these video productions also reach unknown audiences in unpredictable ways, but the filmmaking process itself is not too concerned with this aspect in its form or content, being assured of the basic viewership that it has so brilliantly cultivated both at home and abroad. Although these commercial films also make connections with realities that go beyond the local, in my viewing experience of them, such connections are for the most part predictable in that they implicate economic success linked to having connections “abroad” and often include comic insult at the bumbling “hero’s” expense while the idea of return is filled with the notion of success (or false success). This in turn provokes admiration and envy (often the source of comedy, especially when the success was false) in the local sphere of “home.” Restrictive roles for women, who are either seductive and evil sirens or submissive “good girls” also abound, with lurking evil in the form of the lure of non-Christian values in the city-girl films. Many action films are inspired by the kung-fu tradition movies popular throughout the world. Sometimes we find vocabulary and imagery that appeal to, and indeed can only be fully appreciated by, local audiences and/or the new academic specialists located in the West. Alongside these somewhat reductive remarks, it is important to note that there is innovation, excitement, and complexity in many of these films. It is possible, though, to make some generalization about the trends spectators can identify, as it is in speaking of both Hollywood (with its feel-good impetus to please the widest global audience) and Bollywood (with its inherent nationalism and its commitment to bourgeois values and bourgeoisification, its preponderance of happy endings, and the prevalence of

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good over evil that can be seen in Hollywood hits). I have also done so to delineate the films constituting contemporary African cinema in building the corpus for this book. At this time, it is appropriate to say that this presentation of African cinema and of the idea of African cinema comes first and foremost from the profound admiration, thoughtfulness, and enjoyment that particular films within a now wide repertoire have incited in this author and particularly in her students – many of whom were Africans or African diasporics – over about five years as this project has evolved. If the late twentieth-century in much of the Third World, as it was then discernible, was characterized by the surge of privatization, the opening up of national markets, and, for cinema (and many of the arts), the loss of state funding, the availability of new technologies and privatization simultaneously opened up art production to new groups (and classes). For the new African video production scene, it goes without saying that many of the early video productions were accomplished by directors, producers, and actors who had little or no formal training; many producers even rose out of the milieu of illegal film pirating. The current status of Nigerian and Ghanaian video production and the competition between them is an interesting phenomenon that shall not detain us too long here. However, the close ties which these industries have had to their respective developing national economies is of importance and noted by scholars studying, more fully, the phenomenon and the films produced (Haynes, “Literature Review”; Okome and Haynes; Meyer “Popular Ghanaian Cinema”; Larkin; Adejunmobi). It is apparent that this book distinguishes between what we might call “art” film and “commercial” film in treating contemporary African cinema. However, while this is seen as a legitimate means of establishing a coherent corpus from which to choose films for close study and commentary, the move is also acknowledged as provisional though adequate to the moment. More and more, the gap between “commercial” and “art” film will be closed, as serious filmmaking becomes a shared concern and possibility for African filmmakers of all persuasions and ambitions and as the spectatorship for art film grows through newer channels, relieving them of their dependency upon cinema theaters, special screenings, film festivals, expensive distributors, and academic audiences. The increasingly high quality of commercial films (technologically and aesthetically), as is already evident, will allow for subtler and more variegated possibilities in the viewing experiences they provide. And yet for the current study, at the risk of being impolitic, it seems that the distinction between these differentially intended cinemas will continue to exist, though not necessarily in the rather stark current terms presented above: that is, the distinction might continue to operate but without the current gap that is visible, not simply through the types of issues tackled, the way they are tacked, the ideology, so to speak, but also through the greater repertoire in the methods of interrogation and reflection, intellectually and aesthetically speaking, for which currently “art” film in Africa as it is considered here is leaps and bounds ahead of “commercial” film. Therefore, fewer crossovers are evident to spectators seeking those riches equally. The demise of many cinema theaters across Africa (and the rest of the world, for that matter) binds the fate of “art” film more intimately to the newer and more aggressively distributed video

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productions while spectatorship of the two categories gradually becomes more overlapped. Crossover films, which can speak to a wide audience, facilitate the closing of these gaps, although it will probably always be true (if we judge from Hollywood and Bollywood) that the vast majority of commercial films continue to enjoy the widest audience, at least in terms of numbers. The American-based Ghanaian Leila Djansi, for example, after winning at FESPACO for her screenplay in the documentary, The Prostitute (2002), turned to fiction. She has recently produced Sinking Sands (2010), an issues-based film that appeals to local markets but also reaches out to a larger international audience beyond African and diasporic viewers. Though her production company is based in Los Angeles, she continues to shoot in Ghana. Bagging the prize for best actress (Ama K. Abrebrese) at the Nigerian-hosted AMAA (Africa Movie Academy Awards), the film is widening its reach. Newer filmmakers are entering the arena from outside of the Nollywood/Gollywood video productions. Congolese director Djo Tunda Wa Munga’s debut gangster film, Viva Riva (2010), for example, despite its almost vulgar graphic quality, has received international attention after being awarded best film at the AMAA. For the most part, however, films produced in the Nollywood/Gollywood context are made specifically with local African audiences in mind, or more recent diasporics who share the day-to-day local cultures of Africa and whose ties to them continue to be close, making it likely that they will make trips back to their home. However, while the idea of wide spectatorship, beyond the continent and its disaporic viewers, is shared by most of the filmmakers considered in this book, the position advanced by the young documentarist Ariane Astrid Adtoji, from Cameroon, is not the norm: “Honestly, the idea of showing [my] film in theaters in Cameroon never occurred to me” (Petsoko). In fact, her compatriot Jean-Marie Teno’s Sacred Places (2009) is itself explicitly about spectatorship of noncommercial films in Africa and the hopes of the type of African cinema to which that filmmaker has held fast and which he has helped to create. We will take a closer look at this filmmaker in Chapter 9. At the same time, the spread of Internet usage is a boon for the video industry, given that commercial videos have multiple sites from which they can be purchased. This has opened up distribution into the hands of filmmakers themselves. Independent filmmakers such as the US-based Ethiopian filmmaker Salem Mekuria and the Mauritian Harrikrisna Anenden are also exploring possibilities for wider distribution in DVD format, and thus they are directing more of the profits toward their future films rather than relying on distributors such as California Newsreel or Artmattan, which distribute noncommercial African films in the United States and are paid huge commissions by filmmakers. Jean-Marie Teno also distributes his films in DVD format through his independent website. South Africa’s M-Net initiative, African Film Library, allows viewers around the world to access footage that is hard to purchase or borrow and even harder to find in theaters. The Internet, more generally, also offers a wealth of information for cinephiles. The South African blog by (Akin Amotoso and Andy Kasrils) “The Admiral and Akin Go to the Movies,” for example, provides previews, clips, interviews, and reviews and discussions of what they unabashedly call “serious” films by Africans, and particularly South Africans.

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They also have a Facebook page, as do various festivals and distributors.27 Although the collective and quite particular experience of the cinema theater is one that seems to be disappearing, spectatorship itself is only growing, and cinephiles have endless sources to be connoisseurs of the cinema(s) of their choice.

Cinematic Beginnings of Contemporary African Cinema The colonial governments set up film units in Africa to make films that promoted colonial interests and established colonial mastery of Africa and Africans. Cinema as a technology displayed itself and its own power as being one with its colonial sources. The mobile cinemas that ran all over Africa to educate “natives,” such as the ones promoted by the Bantu Educational Cinema Experiment (1935–1937), showed films that were simplistic and paternalistic towards the envisaged audiences. The British Colonial Film Unit set up an instructional outlet on the Gold Coast in Accra in 1948 as they also did in Nigeria and Zimbabwe. The French began setting up film units in Tunisia and Morocco in the 1940s as well, while the Belgians began producing films specifically for the Congolese after lifting the law banning Africans from entering a cinema theater in the colony. Authored by Pierre Laval, minister of the colonies, the Laval decree (which was only lifted in 1960), supposedly censored all films made in in the French colonies in Africa. It effectively prevented Africans from making films and did indeed censor some films made by French directors for showing uprisings, for example. Many colonial filmmakers found value in collaborating with and employing Africans, fully understanding the meaninglessness of thinking in “foreign” rather than “local” terms. The logic of the local therefore provided films that ultimately had to record African perspectives, sometimes sympathetically and sometimes against the intent of those early filmmakers. We will not have the opportunity to expand on the very interesting and vast array of colonial documentary films here.28 Suffice it to say that early films produced by Africans within this framework could have developed further, but such a process was interrupted by decisions taken by colonial governments to curtail funds for their film units, particularly once decolonization started to look like a threatening reality. Thereafter, funding problems continued because of what the leaders of the new states saw as the impossibility of funding cultural development when other concerns were seen as more pressing. For this reason, we do not have a steady stream of films being produced by Africans, let alone on the African continent, once the shift to new nationhood for these countries meant, quite openly, economic dependency on the former colonial power and later on American and European aid more generally. Still, the rupture also served to give a keen sense of militancy to the new and truly “African” films (Barlet 221–231). Since Sembène’s early films, which arose from and transcended these circumstances, filmmaking from Africa as a concept was boldly born and imagined outside of and alongside imperial dramas like Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Sembène’s classic black-and-white feature Black Girl (1966) will give us the opportunity to consider some of the questions that came together as part of African filmmaking

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for the period that began with him and which opened up the contemporary period with which we are concerned. This will put in perspective many issues which are discussed in the chapters that follow and which are organized in the three conceptual groups of “space,” “character,” and “narrative.” Primarily, Sembène will function here to alert us to the creation of the spectator of an African cinema that at the time had not yet become a reality. The first “African” film might be considered to be Afrique sur Seine, which was completed in 1955 by Paulin Vieyra, from Benin and Senegal, and recounts the stories of African immigrants in Paris. Vieyra was one of the founding members of the FEPACI. Other early films from Cameroon, by Jean-Pierre Dikonguè-Pipa, Daniel Kamwa, or Alphonse Beni, for instance, tend to be highly influenced by the fact that they were state sponsored and avoided “political” questions, thus being “escapist” (Doho 22). Sembène’s Black Girl is an important and memorable film from that early period, following his own Borom sarret (1969). Our interest in Black Girl lies in the fact that it is cinematographically one of the most extensively theoretical films in terms of marking space, character, and narrative that exerted a profound influence on the films that were to follow. The Italian Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) is another film that is interesting from the same perspective, with added elements from the collaboration between the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) militants in their desire to tell their story while being entangled with the Italian filmmaker’s to record it. These films are an integral part of the imaginary drawn upon for what is being studied here as “African cinema,” and they initiated a pedagogical function among filmmakers that has only become more refined, extensive, and ambitious. It goes without saying that such an idea of African cinema cannot claim unfailing authenticity or objective existence as a category. Considering, for example, very briefly, South Africa’s recent film history, although the country was isolated by its national political situation for decades, it burst onto the international film scene with a string of big budget films that managed to frame its history in ways that have been in dialogue with locally situated South African filmmakers. South Africa has a thriving television and film industry, film schools,29 and enviable developing facilities on the continent. Simultaneously, films such as Cry the Beloved Country (1951) or Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom (1987), on the life of Steve Biko, attracted international attention to the history and reality of the people of South Africa. More recently, the US-produced District 9 (2009) is cast almost exclusively with South Africans. However, the film made in 2005 of South African author Athol Fugard’s novel Tsotsi by his compatriot Gavin Hood, who had had substantial experience in Hollywood, is poignantly African in the sense we have been discussing. Moreover, it can be discussed alongside the other films mentioned and smaller films being produced in South Africa, such as Simon Wood’s very recent Forerunners (2011), which is about members of the first generation of blacks to become middle class, or Simon Freidman’s Material (2012), which is set in the Indian Muslim community of Johannesburg. In this way, the African films considered in this book all allow for a notion of African cinema by bringing to the fore spaces, characters, and narratives that are inspired by the richness of African reality and the variously configured entry

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of Africa and its diasporic spaces and peoples into the postcolonial era. The films all exert pressure on the spectator to Africanize thought processes such that the notion of “inside” and “outside,” though not absolute, does not become a form of exclusion for deep engagement with the cinematic experience. Simultaneously, films from the diaspora, notably “banlieu” films, which are filmed in the poor suburbs of the (European) city often populated by immigrants, such as the iconic Banlieue 13 from France; films set or made in diasporic and essentially Creole communities such as the Caribbean or the Indian Ocean; and black British films by filmmakers such as Ngozi Onwurah, connect with, and even question, notions of Africa and Africanness in their form and content and provide insights into what African film might be. Some of these films also feature in this book. A valid question might be whether the notion of “Africanization” necessarily sets up African cinema as speaking to non-Africans. On the contrary, as Frantz Fanon showed early on, when he went to the cinema he saw himself. “I wait for me. In the interval, just before the film starts, I wait for me. The people in the theater are watching me, examining me, waiting for me” (Fanon, Black Skin 140). Seeing the black groom in the film accentuated his sense of alienation and exclusion from the images of himself that his poetics embodied. These images were ripped apart and the integrity of his selfhood as it was known in his body was exploded, not so much by the white gaze or the interpellation as a negro but rather by his own knowledge of his body through that interiorized white gaze. In fact he looks at himself, waits for himself, in a way that is not unlike that in which the other (white) people in the audience wait for him. The experience of that otherness is one that catches at his emotion: “A Negro groom is going to appear. My heart makes my head swim” (Fanon, Black Skin 140). It is the feeling he gets that makes his head swim; in other terms, it is not the idea of his otherness, but its experience. While we are not at the same moment when Fanon articulated these thoughts, in speaking of cinema history more specifically, the notion of the white gaze upon African bodies and realities disallows the cinematically educated viewing experience of “Africans” to be completely discontinuous between Africans and non-Africans. While it is clear that Fanon’s narrator’s alienation fills him with anguish as he waits to catch sight of himself (the negro-type), it is equally true that cinema along with other media’s powerful pedagogies have historically educated the viewing eye with images of Africans that Africans and non-Africans experience and internalize. While the effect on the contiguous selves of those subjects with their selves-as-spectators is no doubt differential, there is reason to believe that Africans as well as non-Africans as spectator-subjects have a great deal of room for the reeducation of their instincts in perceiving African subjects on screen as black subjects in a medium even physically and technologically first developed to show white subjects. It is all the more fruitful to consider how the films we have assembled here, which emerge from a history of African film criticism (to be read criticism on African films), continue to revolutionize the cinematic space, time, and image that form a totality with the spectator’s dynamic movements and shifts in a process of what I am calling “Africanization.” Such an idea follows from Fanon’s viscerally known insight. If cinema itself has grown and evolved in all its avatars worldwide, what that diverse history allows

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in African cinema as it stands as a repertoire is a form of collective and sustained interpellation that rectifies Fanon’s experience of his alienation, which arose from his engagement with the screen as well as the world of material reality that surrounded him in proximity. In other words, African cinema can provide a series of interpellations that together call up a particular type of strategic essentialisms through the spectatorial processes of identification, dis-identification, even alienation and contentiousness. Those interpellations bring a sensitivity to African contexts and realities, subjectivities and agency, as they are brought into cinematic reality. The traces of such sensitivity are taken into the world by the real spectators who experienced them as (at least) momentary “Africans” and sometimes “doubly” African – depending on their (claimed or acknowledged) identity. It is this aspect of African cinema that thus addresses and seeks to soothe the whole of Fanon’s anguish that was first and foremost experiential rather than intellectual, in his view of the black man on screen as well as his consciousness of being identical to it in the hall. And, beyond the many issues of inequality, hierarchy, and injustice that African films might tackle, it is particularly in this sense of liberating the experience of the spectator that these films join up with the liberationist impulses of Third Cinema.

Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl: Prototype of a Spectator of African Cinema Let us take a look at the opening sequence of Sembène’s Black Girl while acknowledging its importance to the idea of African cinema and its spectatorship today. Black Girl was a novella that the author-turned-director made into what is often considered the first African feature film. From its appearance in1969, it continues to speak to the concerns and aspirations of filmmakers and their art in the African context. The narrative is set during the colonial period and recounts the fate of Diouana, an aspiring young Senegalese woman who decides to leave Dakar for the south of France when her colonialist employers move back to their country from Africa. Diouana’s arrival in France is marked by her blackness, and, as a colonial subject, she is isolated without access to French culture, language, or anything beyond the closed walls of the high-rise apartment in Antibes, where her employers live. The technology of cinema allowed Sembène to break out of French-language discourse and afforded him ways of bringing indignation to the spectator on behalf of a humble girl from anywhere in Africa (in the original French, the title is La noire de … , meaning “the black girl from/of … ”; the lack of specificity in the preposition allows for the implication of possession by someone else and suggests slavery and domination). Diouana’s tragic fate (suicide), albeit painful, is poignantly allegorical of the fate of the “subaltern” whose speech is in doubt – not because of her own failing but because she is not heard owing to the structure surrounding her – an idea that has been superbly developed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her elaboration on the notion from the Subaltern Studies group (271–313). A film that speaks of and for Africa and the colonized world, Black Girl shares the fiery positions of Fanon for decolonization

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and liberation while it subtly posits and theorizes the notions of space, character, and narrative in cinema away from nationalist discourses to the highly personal, while paradoxically disallowing simple identification with the heroine. Ingenious positioning of the spectator characterizes this film as it initiated a compelling dialogue within Sembène’s marvelous intellectual and experiential framework in which we participate decades later. The opening sequence in Black Girl is an experience of movement that the film will set up between Dakar and the south of France, between Diouana’s home and her site of alienation, between her hope and reality. The reach of the film and its ambition are only indicative of what, following in its tradition, would become African cinema and incarnate the very struggle of the making of this film by an African filmmaker who wished to speak to and for his people and beyond them. The opening is a signature moment for the future of African cinema at the time it was shot. It is quite simply about reclaiming the camera, the power of perspective, the will to represent, and a reveling in the medium: sound, movement, light, and word. The first thing we see on screen is a white steamer occupying the center frame and shown via a still camera. Next we hear the loud horn of the ship before we see the movement of the boat toward the right of the frame. Before the prow of the ship reaches the extreme right of frame and begins to disappear, as we might expect after having followed its slow movement across the screen, there is a sudden cut and the movement is this time that of the camera which pans to the left, capturing the misty morning landscape of a harbor while we hear, for continuity, the sound of the ship’s horn. The front tip of the ship reappears about where it would have been left off but now it is on the left of the frame, moving, as ever, to the right. Our gaze, then, has been transported to the other side of the panorama and returned with the camera in its panning motion to the left across the landscape and back to the ship. Where will it dock? Where has it arrived? It is now an African who will tell us what to see, how to look, and what will follow. It represents a dramatic moment in African cinema and constitutes a beautiful statement of cinematic form. A dark screen announces in French that “Filmi Domirev” presents Black Girl, with the filmmaker, the original collection of works from which this novella was adapted, and so forth appearing on the dark background. The next movement is from the right to left of frame: a dock worker moves swiftly from right to left of frame with the heavy ropes that he loops around the post. Immediately one is reminded of Sembène’s autobiographical Black Docker, his first novel, while today it might recall the documentary on Sembène’s life (Le docker noir, Sembene Ousmane 2009), by the Algerian director, Fatma Zohra Zamoum. The scene is highly evocative in a number of senses. Another worker joins him moving from left to right, and therefore bringing, for a moment, movement in two directions on the screen. But quickly he moves in to help the first man and they both proceed in the same direction (right to left). This is once again followed by movement from left to right with the gangplank that will connect the port and the ship. Next, movement is from right to left, with the heroine smartly dressed in a Western outfit and scarf moving with her bags from right to left of the frame continuously onto the very ramp

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(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

Figure 1.1 (a) steamer center; (b) object movement right; (c) cut to landscape; (d) camera pans left; (e) figure appears left of frame; (f) still camera movement by object. Black Girl, directed by Ousmane Sembène, produced by André Zwoboda and Filmi Domirev, Les Actualités françaises, 1966.

we saw moving in from the other direction moments before. The camera recedes into a long shot, thus capturing the ship on the right of frame, the main character on the ramp in the center moving left to the port of debarkation. Another swift cut to a close-up of the woman’s face with her exaggerated movement of the head literally “panning” in imitation of the camera’s recent movement, leads across the screen as she looks to right of frame then sweeps her gaze across to left of frame: “Est-ce que quelqu’un est venu m’attendre” (“Has anyone come to meet me?”) and then back again to right of frame. These movements, all in the span of the first two and one-half minutes are extraordinary in setting up the parameters physically rather than conceptually. The experience of space that has been rendered is about possibility, about direction, its configuration through time and its holding anticipation, it is about movement in opposite directions, the energy of unison, and it is about interruption. Our experience of all this is intimately structured by the expectancy of the one whose voice we have heard.

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Given the actress Thérèse M’Bissine Diop’s experiences in African society after the film’s release, and Sembène’s indefatigable devotion to women’s issues in his films, it is indeed fitting that the documentary on Sembène was to be made by an Algerian woman filmmaker. Diop recently revealed in interviews that she was even shunned by her own mother: the idea of exposing herself on the screen as a woman was taken to be highly negative, Westernized, and even irreligious. Many African women aspiring to be filmmakers have understood that making films continues to be a daunting task for women on the continent. Although it might not necessarily be more difficult for female filmmakers than their male counterparts to sustain themselves by their filmmaking, it is certainly obvious that fewer women make the choice to pursue as their sole means of support a career which involves a ferocious hunt for funding of projects that are not likely to be blockbusters. In returning to the notion of spectatorship, it is interesting to note how the famed, popular American critic Roger Ebert reacted to Black Girl, which played at the Three Penny Cinema in Chicago in 1969. Ebert preferred the “poetry” of Borom Sarret, which was also screened at the same time, and found the former film to be less impressive: The weakness of “Black Girl” is in its slow, journeyman style; one feels that Sembene learned filmmaking by making this film. It also suffers from a kind of primitive naturalism, as if the script were by James T. Farrell out of Theodore Dreiser. Every motive is spelled out in unnecessary detail, and little attempt is made to get into the minds of the characters. The maid’s white employers, in particular, are drawn as such broad caricatures that we never believe in them as flesh and blood. People are stupid and casually cruel, yes, but rarely in such a direct and even melodramatic way as these two. (Ebert)

The first point that stands out is Ebert’s lack of belief in the mind that is so obviously brought to him through this film. Next, his plain disbelief regarding how “stupid” and “cruel” people can be is naive. Nobody who experienced colonialism or observed or studied it for that matter would ever disagree with Sembène’s portrayal nor have any problem believing in people’s cruel stupidity as the “we” imagined by Ebert are assumed to do. The idea of “primitive naturalism” along with the condescension inherent in the assessment that it felt as though Sembène had “learned filmmaking by making this film” suggests that this viewer’s bias gets in the way of what he surely must have been well-schooled in doing: which is precisely suspending disbelief. Clearly, the interest of the film to the notion of African cinema lies elsewhere for us. As we have seen, the film posits movement as its central way of knowing space. Movement is also intimately related to the psyche of Diouana, whom we are privileged to know because of the filmmaker’s willingness to give us her voice (in French, though we would imagine she would speak to herself in Wolof). This authoritative critic’s reaction only serves to highlight the need for the specificity of African cinema, of recognizing the demand it places on its spectators, from its very inception, to listen with greater care than is required simply to be able to hear the emblematic and loud horn of the steamer. Black Girl is about reclaiming cinema’s very core, the paradox of stasis and movement that is the most basic and most “primitive” truth

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of the medium itself, but it is about reclaiming it in the name of Africa, its peoples, its history, its imaginary – and its offerings to each of us. As Siegfried Kracauer perspicaciously stated, “movement is the alpha and omega of the medium” (158). These impulses of a commitment to Africa in cinema are about liberating the image of Africans from caricature and blackface and about believing in Africans not only as flesh and blood humans but also as transcendent imaginative souls. Ebert’s fixation misses the central point. Creating African cinema is about rediscovering direction, and it requires no particular color of skin for the director, or political persuasion of a character, or even geographical location of the spectator. Instead it requires entering fully into the phenomenological experience of cinema because of how it is an experience of the world in which (here) African perspective of not just Africa but the world is privileged in its multifaceted existence to be discovered again by its own people and the world through all kinds of positions, perspectives, and cinematic techniques. This move by the spectator invited by African cinema is consequential, coming after the distortions of colonialism and simultaneously with the growing reach of global capitalism, whose effects often gave continuity to the worst residues of colonialism in the spaces it had penetrated long after its demise. The need for a commitment to recognize the Africanized spectator whom African cinema was bringing into being, and which the eminently qualified Ebert failed to incarnate so soon after its inception, frames this book. What Sembène did was not to give us Diouana’s thoughts, all the “inside” of the “other” that was formerly unknown, unknowable, or just unimportant in film as in the world. Despite hearing what we take to be her voice, in many instances the spectator is frustrated that Diouana does not reveal (to us) more than she does in her terse monologue. Even in the contentious scene in which she takes back the mask she had once given her mistress we hear rather the conversation between the white couple, where the man says that after all it is hers so she should have it back. Similarly, before her suicide, she only chooses to say, as she packs up her things, that “jamais plus [never again]” would she be mistreated. An unsuspecting (first-time) spectator would surely think she were going back to Senegal. Sembène’s film form underscores the fact that although we cannot know the character’s experience we can have some sensations and imagine some scenarios. His techniques privilege spatial experience so that as a spectator we might feel we are beside the character more literally than psychologically, and being to think and feel from outside of ourselves and thus approach the other with greater, if inarticulate, empathy.

Spectatorship and African Cinema In considering African and African diasporic film in this book, spectatorship becomes instantly intercultural and transnational. This is not because the films in question are constructed for a non-African audience as many critics claim and thus dismiss them as “authentically” African. Rather, it is because the films themselves do not present Africa to a pre-existing spectator. Much of the film “work” in the

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cinema we are studying, is directed toward theorizing and interpellating a spectator, who comes into existence in the cinematic experience crafted by the creators of each film. This spectator, who is of course embodied in the many people who watch the films over time and in different settings, is put in touch with an experience that is both sensory and phenomenologically describable (and variable from individual to individual through personal history, memory, association, culture). Such an experience at some point in the film calls attention to the limits of the cinematic medium itself, no matter who the spectator is, and allows for a particular form of intellectualization that becomes the politics of the film through, but beyond, its experience. Carefully, over the span of its identifiable existence, African cinema has been building up an experiential history of spectatorship that contemporary films exploit and develop. It is in this sense that I present a study on the cinema of Africa and the diaspora. In the analyses of the films, I will pay considerable attention to the specific positions and possibilities of spectatorship that have significance for the sensory and intellectual awakening of real spectators and that connect up to some central impulses, preoccupations, and aesthetic and sensory proclivities that allow for a provisional unity of a repertoire of films. African cinema as framed here shares much with Emmanuel Levinas’s project: I have tried to find the temporal transcendence of the present toward the mystery of the future. This is not a participation in a third term, whether this term be a person, a truth, a work, or a profession. It is a collectivity that is not a communion. It is the face-to-face without intermediary, and is furnished for us in the eros where, in the other’s proximity, distance is integrally maintained and whose pathos is made of both this proximity and this duality. (Levinas, Time 93–94)

African cinema, in the version presented in this book, is always future-oriented in this manner, cognizant of and therefore hopeful because of the temporal transcendence of the present. These films imagine with their spectator that another future is possible beyond the one ordained by the long history of colonialism, the disillusionment of its aftermath, and the terrific inequalities of the current moment. The collectivity envisioned and indeed created by these films is not simply the national or even pan-African community against the world. Rather, it challenges its most unlikely spectators in Africa, Europe, America, or Asia to imagine and enter into a collectivity through thought and action. Such is the ambition of these filmmakers. Though the actual creation of each film involves so many intermediaries, the experience of the film is one in which the full play of desire is invited, the feeling of proximity cultivated, while the distance and essential cognizance of the self as different from the other, both within the film and in the filmic experience between the film and its desiring spectator, all constitute the pathos that binds that spectator to the textures, feelings, sensations, and emotions in which the film willingly envelops her or him in an act of what we might daringly call love. Because, above all, it is love of the cinema as it is known through the experience of these films that would bring a spectator back for more, and make of him or her a cinephile. However, giving in to the film’s multiple sensory and intellectual experiences in our desiring interlocution

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with it also consists in feeling what Levinas calls the caress, because what the caress seeks “is not situated in a perspective and in the light of the graspable” (Totality 258). While the sensory experience of the film cannot be captured in an analytical “interpretation” mediated by the written word, which configures absence in such a distant manner, I have worked by way of numerous stills to bring back the image into our thought about the films. It is not just the action or the objects and characters captured in a moment or particular point of the plot that I have tried to convey through them. Rather, I have sought to excavate the “special sense of the frame” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 200) and follow the set of relations that the still allows one to establish and interrogate as a spectator. This involves attention not just to what is in the frame, the action, the relations among what is captured, but also how that frozen moment can be seen in relation to other parts of the film in its totality. For this reason, I dwell at some length on most frames used in the book as images. This book is above all an attempt to share a sustained viewing experience with the reader. Therefore, in a mood of enthusiasm and optimism for an imminent viewing or a recollection (if the film is already known by the reader), I somewhat unselfconsciously, and sometimes conjecturally, refer to “our” collective and possible reactions. These comments should not be seen as proscriptive, but rather as suggestive. Because of the many, many presentations, both formal and informal I have made in sharing these magnificent films and some of my ideas on them – in contexts as varied as a computer screen at an airport, a formal 35 mm capable theater, a classroom, a makeshift large screen outdoors in my friend’s backyard, in our living room, to students, scholars, colleagues, neighbors, friends, relatives, and hapless strangers who happen to show curiosity – I already anticipate them as real and possible readers to form a provisional “we” that I address. Despite justified scholarly skepticism toward notions of an easy collectivity, I hope this book participates in interpellating the reader as a potential spectator in ways these films permit: I hope this book makes or remakes of the reader a spectator of some or all of the films studied and many more. In all cases, I have tried to proceed directly to the film matter and therefore prevent the text from being laden with theoretical references. Even when some references are made to film theory, cultural theory, and concepts from postcolonial studies, feminism or African studies, I have attempted to ground them in the particular films in question. This book is first and foremost about the African/diasporic films and how we might experience them as diverse spectators: it is written from the love inspired in one such spectator. I am reminded of Hamid Naficy’s endearing biographical essay in which he recalls himself as a young man forging a relationship with cinema in Iran and later in England, identifying the young immigré with various protagonists from films he had strongly liked. Following his lead, I theorize spectatorship by not effacing my own implication in what is essentially an experience of encounter and its dynamics (Naficy, “Theorizing”; Wexman). But further, I focus on spectatorship at specific, concrete moments in the African films I have chosen to study closely in this book. Such an effort seeks to ground the notion of spectatorship in the film work itself and at the same time to open up the processes shared to the critique and assessment of the varied readers I imagine and anticipate. A serious study on the spectatorship, in terms of statistics but also of the cinematic experience remains to be done: study

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of the spectatorship of specific films and film traditions; exploration of comparative experiences of spectatorship; investigation of the impact of the changing contexts of viewing cinema of all kinds in Africa and in African diasporas and of viewing African films in European, North American, and Australian contexts; and interrogation of the subject across the vast viewership in Latin America, the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and Asia. The terms in which such a study could be attempted for any of these regions are constantly evolving even before we may imagine the findings. This book does not provide such a study. In Chapter 2 we shall study an instance of the pedagogy of the spectator through a recent Mauritian film entitled The Cathedral (2006). The choice of a film shot in Mauritius by a Mauritian Indian is particularly significant for our conviction regarding African cinema as we present it here that it is an aesthetic category first and foremost, one in which Africans from different perspectives and historical trajectories participate, and one which reflects Africa’s multiethnic contemporary reality. Chapter 2 also carefully examines how space is configured in the cinematic medium. Along with this chapter, Chapter 3 presents the city, a crucial element that has been formative on the aesthetics of film more generally, and no less so in this cinema. Both these chapters explore space as a category of the filmic experience for the spectator. Chapters 4, 5, and 6, explore character: chapter 4 focuses on the representation and reception of the heroine in three very different films and examines female subjectivity within the film experience, while Chapter 5 teases out the image of masculinity. Chapter 6 singles out revolutionary characters and their cinematic evolution. Chapters 7 through 10 focus on narrative. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the category of documentary in particular, and how African and diasporic filmmakers have engaged with and transformed this genre. Chapter 9 focuses on the Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno, who provides an array of documentaries that construct a unique method and style. The concluding chapter takes up the polemic from the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina’s ironic exhortations on “How to Write About Africa” and playfully but seriously examines a blockbuster film on Africa alongside a quintessentially African film to revisit questions of inside/outside that can become highly contentious in any narration on the continent. The processes of Africanization that these films operate in mobilizing a particular valence and direction for interpellating their spectators allows us to conceive of a dynamic “discourse” (which is not to be understood as a set of propositions) that I assemble from a particular corpus of films under a conception of the contemporary cinema of Africa and the diaspora. A glossary of cinematic terms is provided as a reference for basic film analysis terminology.30

Notes 1

While V.Y. Mudimbé’s works expose and contemplate the construction of “Africa” through epistemological and sociological processes in the longue durée of its history, and particularly its history of colonialism, African cinema stands in relation to the past in a particularly futuristic way, imbuing many of the films with a latent utopianism. See Mudimbé.

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2 Nation- or region-specific studies are provided by a range of scholars. A classic one is Claire Andrade-Watkins’ beautifully researched and argued essay which explicates the role of Mozambique’s National Institute of Cinema in forging a cinema that worked with the liberating movements in the formation of the new nation. See her often reprinted essay, “Portuguese African Cinema.” Also, for a discussion of Guinée-Bisseau’s Flora Gomes, the national, and a complex view of tradition and modernity, see the more recent Adesokan, most specifically pages 31–53. 3 For a wonderful canvas of films from “Black Africa” in the 1980s see Armes, “Black African Cinema”. See also Boughedir’s “Brief History.” More generally on Arab Cinema see Shafik, Arab Cinema. See as well, regarding the long-term effects of dependency, Andrade-Watkins’ “France’s Bureau.” Jacqueline Maingard’s critical article on Tsotsi (2006) includes an insightful reflection on South African film history. 4 See Reid for questions of inside/outside in African-American cinema, Alexander for an informative view of contemporary black American directors, and Everett for a study of the fuller context of African-American cinema history. 5 See Tcheuyap for a view of African cinema in terms of a “postnationalist” look at a repertoire he proposes in terms of genres. 6 See also Gauntlett. 7 See Plate 1 and Plate 2 for images of female characters (Alia and Mélé) who depend on moments of spectatorship to understand and seize their deepest emotional desires for change in their identity. These characters are further discussed in Chapters 4 and 10 respectively. 8 On the one hand, being able to share the “people’s” reality affectively, the intellectual must also, on the other, “be able to see the people as part of a greater totality.” See Prabhu, Anjali “To Dream of Fanon” p. 63. 9 The issues of who is an African director, who is a diasporic African director, and who is an outsider took an interesting turn, as Andrade-Watkins describes the scene at the 1991 Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou ; FESPACO). See “A Mirage in the Desert?” (149). 10 Even The Economist was compelled to take note of this industry in Nigeria. See “Lights, camera, Africa.” 11 This is not merely a theoretical argument about film aesthetics, though it is that too. Spectators of African films are real and South Africa’s “Encounters” film festival for documentary films, for example, continues to offer an audience-voted prize for serious films, includes many interviews and panels attended by the audience. The festival promotes South African documentaries but includes international entries, particularly from the continent. 12 It would not be too bold to say that the divide between “art” film and “commercial” film is temporary and fluid. As the more recent video industry that took off in Nigeria, with Ghana following close on its heels, gains historical perspective, it will become increasingly hard to continue to pigeonhole directors in one or the other groove. At the same time “art” film will also be able to tap into the networks of distribution available to commercial film, although to do so it will need to appeal to a different temperament of the same audiences, at least to start with. Commercial film has penetrated quite well into the networks that were more strictly reserved for art films, making its way into film festivals

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13 14

15

16

17

18

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gradually and now even showing up in the category of “African” cinema on distributor’s websites. See “Thunderbolt.” See, for example the clip and description of the film “War Came to Kenya,” where white women are exhorted to contribute to colonial efforts. Perhaps tabloid culture has opened up the market for biopics of celebrities; one recalls the recent films on the writer Françoise Sagan (Sagan, 2008) and on Edith Piaf (La vie en rose, 2007) and the recently announced project of the German-based Banana Films (managed by Jean-Luc Van Damme) for a $13 million 3-D film on Dali. Martin Scorsese’s Living in a Material World: George Harrison (2011) is yet another such celebrity biopic. Interestingly, a new documentary on Sankara has been announced by the ambitious Gambian, Prince Bubacarr Aminata Sankanu, a newcomer to film who aligns himself to the tradition of Sembene, although his journalism is, at the very least, dubious. See, for information on his first film, his announcement of the Sankara film: “From the Film Set of ‘Backfire.’” For a lively critique of Sankanu, see: “Bubacar Sankanu has no Shame!!” Unlike Kenneth Harrow, I do not find that Sembène’s films necessarily limit our understanding of the contemporary at all (see Harrow 1) because scholarship has not paid his films any sustained attention to their cinematography in the first place. That work is still to be done, although we will touch upon it to the extent it informs our understanding of contemporary films. Indeed, the “price paid” (ibid. 8) for taking inspiration from many sources including Sembène but going well beyond him is what we find in the form of contemporary films such as Karmen Geï or Bamako, which are examined in this book. On the other hand, for a biographical understanding of Sembène’s career see Sembène. The term “modernity” is first and foremost related to Europe’s modernity, which coincided, and indeed depended on, colonialism, in the form it took from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries in particular. In Europe it was indicated through increased specialization of labor and therefore the division of society relative to the demands of labor and capital. African filmmakers inherit the notion of modernity as quite simply one in which Africa, which enabled European modernity via colonization, lags behind it in every way. Modernization has meant the transformation of “rural” agrarian societies into industrial societies modeled after European changes. It has been doubly registered in the creation of African cities and their relationship to what surrounds them as well as Africans’ and diasporic Africans’ fraught relationship with their own cities and with European cities as “immigrants.” It goes without saying that modernism in European art was marked by a reaction against consumerism, a questioning of Enlightenment rationality and particular forms of coherence and harmony in art that also reinforced the authority of older institutions. But early postcolonial cultural and political forms showed that European modernism (in forms such as surrealism, for example, that négritude would transform) had to be thoroughly reconstituted and rethought if it were to be of relevance to Africans. The awareness of the meanings of modernism and modernity as always already fractious for Africans of the continent and the diaspora frames the aesthetics of the filmmakers studied here and is ingrained in the usage of these terms that are related in this particular way in this book. The collection of essays in Saul and Austen attempts to bring together these usually disparate groups of films while focusing on viewer experience, screenings, audiences, and the tensions between them as well as how Western blockbuster films enter into the mix.

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19 The amusing anecdote Oliver Barlet tells of the lion in Souleymane Cissé’s Waati underscores the ironies of African filmmaking. The lion that terrorized the local ivoirian characters had to be flown in from Marne-la-Vallée zoo in France. See Barlet, p. 227. 20 On Ousmane Sembène, Med Hondo, and Souleymane Cissé, see Woll, pp. 223–240. 21 See, for an in-depth discussion of Egyptian Cinema, Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema. 22 Their manifesto, “Toward a Third Cinema,” has been reproduced in many places and can be easily accessed on the Internet at several sites. 23 Some films explicitly reach from Africa to the diaspora, such as Mweze Ngangura’s Pièces d’identité, which is dedicated to the African diaspora. In an interview Ngangura explicitly states that he made the film in thinking of the diaspora experience of Africans (see Akudinobi). 24 Although some filmmakers, notably Jean-Pierre Bekolo, are polemic in their wish to break from FESPACO and its ideals, their reasoning seems legitimate – and in some ways true to FESPACO. Their rationale is that they want to be filmmakers rather than “African” filmmakers. Are they filmmakers first and Africans second? It matters little, in the sense that their daily struggles are characterized by their search for funding; the questions of shooting; the difficulties of developing and finishing their products, often of getting permission or access; and then the issues of film festivals, distributions, and so forth. African filmmakers rightly apprehend the need to be recognized as filmmakers in their own right, no matter how they align themselves toward their collective struggle, and this book is a direct response to that desire. 25 FEPACI recognized that for African cinema to thrive it had to be not simply intellectually committed in particular ways but that a whole system of legal, economic, and political factors had to be navigated on its behalf. See Diawara, pp. 44–48. 26 Boughedir’s insistence upon the unity of African cinema, of the shared solidarity among filmmakers and their common aspirations for their films, as well as the common roots of the two festivals (FESPACO and Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage) remain a landmark to respect in the idea of “African” cinema. Boughedir also continues to gesture explicitly to his African identity (“We, Africans”). See Boughedir, “Férid Boughedir: ‘le Fespaco.’” 27 For example, African Film Library, African Film Festival Inc, Africa in Motion Film Festival. 28 There is much work to be done in this field. See Peter Bloom. 29 The South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance in Johannesburg and Cape Town; the Durban Institute of Technology’s Television section; the South Africa Film Academy, also in Durban; as well as media studies departments in various universities, all provide a depth and breadth to cinema and other media in South African culture. 30 Many wonderful sites abound on the Internet, with more detailed terminology. For example, the one by the Internet Movie Database (see “Glossary”), the one by AMC (see “Film Terms”), or the one by Kodak (see “Glossary of Film/Video Terms”), which gives more technical detail. The glossary in this book includes, alongside terms one might find in such glossaries, vocabulary generated through years of compiling terminology in French and English. Colleagues have also generously shared the lists they use. A selection of useful and pertinent terms has been provided for this book.

Part I

Space

2

The Postcolonial City Education of the Spectator in Harrikrisna Anenden’s The Cathedral

The Cathedral 1 was released in 2006, though its creation dates back to 1975. It was written by a then unknown teenage girl. Refusal to conform and the will to push the limits of narrative possibilities at the level of genre, sentence, word, and image were already evident in the young author, Ananda Devi. The film version presents the capital of the island nation of Mauritius, Port-Louis. The Cathedral was filmed and produced by Devi’s husband, Harrikrisna Anenden. It is a sensitive documentary of Port-Louis city life as much as, or even more than, it is the story of its protagonist, Lina. We will pursue further the notion of documentary in Chapters 7 and 8, while here we note how the capital city is presented as a “social space [which] contains a great diversity of objects, both natural and social, including the networks and pathways which facilitate the exchange of material things and information. Such ‘objects’ are thus not only things but also relations. As objects, they possess discernible peculiarities, contour and form” (Lefebvre 77). Lina serves as a figure to trace such relations, and her movements give them a particular form that is quite literally tangible in the cinematic medium, which in turn becomes part of the spectator’s education. This pedagogy of the spectator is followed closely to link it to the type of “film work” identified in the Chapter 1. Despite such connection to the reality of the city, there remains an implicit quest for an untouched space that might change the course of history. Port-Louis was an important colonial port on the “inner route” for ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope and bound for India or the Indonesian islands. While the spice route had already made this port a halt, it was British and French interest in India and the subcontinent that gave the island its strategic importance in naval history. Port-Louis had a safer harbor than the neighboring island of Réunion offered, and thus it changed hands as a valuable halt for ships on this route. First “discovered” by the Portuguese and officially taken over by the Dutch, Mauritius was French and then claimed by Britain in 1810. This date definitively marked British supremacy on the Indian Ocean and, subsequently, in India. However, the long presence of Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, First Edition. Anjali Prabhu. © 2014 Anjali Prabhu. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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French administration continued to be felt, with Britain preferring to leave most French systems intact in the ensuing years for the various populations that made up its colony: French, African, Indian, and Chinese. It is no coincidence that Anenden has made numerous documentaries himself during his long employment with the World Health Organization (WHO). The story is of the young adolescent high-school dropout Lina, who roams the streets of Port-Louis to escape her unhappy home situation with a hypochondriac mother and a father who is engrossed in his work as a cobbler and seems to pay attention to nothing else. At the level of story, then, the film is rather idealistic. Lina is not materialistic, seems dreamy and unrealistic about her future, despises the busy people who forget to “live,” and dances on the steps of the cathedral while living off the generosity of her acquaintances – more specifically, the dhal puri seller, who gives her some food she does not pay for, and the ice-lolly man from whom she freely takes refreshing ice and with whom she enjoys intimate conversation that is lacking with her parents. Even her act of charity derives from the charity of another: we learn that it is her daily practice to hand over the coin that her friend the ice-lolly man, Ram, gives her to a mendicant woman who has watched her grow up. The conversation with the old woman throws the film into a mood of nostalgia, with the idea that things have changed in Port-Louis. The woman philosophically opines amidst wise words about living in the moment and appreciating the present. In considering solely the plot, the film is almost disappointing, offering a pivotal moment that seems easily anticipated: Lina decides not to go out with a French photographer, who is very taken with this carefree “native” girl he encounters.2 Set in 1970s’ Port-Louis, the film gives few signs of being shot more recently. Some new buildings do distract, particularly in the first panoramic shot. Of course it would have been quite possible to refrain from showing these if the intent were to recreate “exactly” the fictional setting. Clearly, the idea of truth becomes that of the film as a totality (the reality of filming, the impossibility of any kind of “return,” and a sense of history as a living thing), rather than this or that fact being accurately captured mimetically. This filmic truth encompasses, amongst other things, Anenden’s life as a diasporic Mauritian “returning” to film his native city; his recreation of the version of the fictional truth of the same city created by another Mauritian, Ananda Devi; and his aspirations as a filmmaker within the fraught context of independent filmmaking today. Thus framed, the film tracks an exciting journey and provides a beautiful testimonial for a close-to-impossible dream that is presented in a form that we might say could most “honestly” express both the dream and the thick historical reality from which it stems. The Cathedral, as we shall see, is an instantiation of what “art” looks like from a very particular place and how it speaks to audiences well beyond that place. That spectator of such a wide audience is carefully interpellated in ways that are worth following. It goes without saying that the film would have particularly strong resonances for a Mauritian who walks the streets of Port Louis and can traverse its recognizable corners along with Lina. A graduate of the London Film School, and trained in film criticism at the University of London, Harrikrisna Anenden has worked as, among other things,

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a photographer and lab technician, in various settings including the University of Mauritius. His numerous films cover a wide range of topics and most often have a pedagogical function, which continued with his employment by the WHO (for example, Blood [1999] and The Gift of Life: Facing up to AIDS [2000]). These experiences feed quite directly into this film. The presentation of place, time, geography, and the main characters – basic information for the viewer – are provided up front and clearly. Given that the spectator shares the camera’s view, the cinematic creation of this postcolonial context is treated here with sensitivity for the latter’s past in order to release the possibility for collective dreams from within nationhood. True close-up shots are rare, as the director seems to prefer the wide angle in general or the two-shot for conversations, while the zoom is highly restricted – all tactics that line up very well with the idea of distance, objectivity, and wide context provided to the spectator with minimal “judgment” or ideology. Knowing all the while that these are tricky generalizations, that they crumble and dissolve with technique, editing, spectatorship, and context, Anenden nevertheless goes for unexpected timing, superb editing, and effective use of sound, and he capitalizes on other elements of the composition rather than pure camerawork to bring the movements of the city to life. It is illuminating to learn that Anenden filmed Lina in the house in which he grew up in Port-Louis, much as Bamako (2006), examined in Chapter 10, was shot in the courtyard where its filmmaker, Abderrahmane Sissako, grew up. For Gaston Bachelard, “the house, even more than the landscape, is a ‘psychic state,’ and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy” (72). Several scenes include Lina’s home from both the inside and the outside. It is a modest, outdated apartment, parts of it quite dilapidated, and with only the bare minimum in terms of furniture. The very first image of Lina occurs in the establishing shot that her home in context: the shot invites us to be someone walking down the street in her neighborhood. The camera focuses on the closed grey wooden window (Figure 2.1a) that is opened from the inside to the sound of birds chirping. The doors swing outward toward us with a squeak to reveal a young woman in a crisp, white nightgown as she revels in the morning sunlight of a day that will constitute the entire time span of the film (Figure 2.1b). The inimitable Mauritian Creole singer T-Frère croons quietly over the radio, bringing back the 1960s, while the young woman prepares tea in a saucepan: water, tea leaves, milk, and then sugar all added meticulously until she strains some into a cup to take to her father, passing through a doorway that does not fail to recall the window as, this time, she moves away from the camera and into the distant room, to where her father is already at work. The entire film takes place between dawn and dusk of one day in the life of Lina. Lina herself might be an allegory for the type of filming in which she appears, necessarily in situ and therefore inextricably bound to her context. This aspect of the filmmaking itself, which occurs without the luxury of the studio as is the case of all the films discussed here, guarantees its inventiveness. The Cathedral is a utopian film in theme but also in form as it places itself outside the commercially viable films now produced well within the African continent. There is a long history in Egypt, that has been rivaled and overtaken by

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(a)

(b)

Figure 2.1 (a) Closed window viewed from the street; (b) Lina opens window. The Cathedral, directed by Harrikrisna Anenden, produced by Ciné Qua Non, 2006.

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Nigerian and, more recently, Ghanaian video productions, whose satisfactions are worldly, whose dreams are tangible, and whose audiences are growing. This film does not (yet) tap into such a given market to seek out its spectators. Speaking of the city and film inevitably places emphasis on the notion of “space.” In most studies, this connection connotes the city centers of filmmaking such as Los Angeles, but also Paris and London, and their counterparts in the third world, the most emblematic being Mumbai’s Bollywood. The aim is to understand the sociology of filmmaking and the city alongside the textual aspect of the film. Evidently, questions of production, distribution, and so forth become important. Here, it would be less pertinent to speak of Port-Louis in these precise terms because much of the filmmaking that showcases it occurs somewhere else. Although much production and finishing might occur elsewhere in various African contexts as well, particularly in the case of “art” films, the very distant setting of Port-Louis from any filmmaking context is striking. Anenden, a filmmaker from Mauritius, lives in Switzerland, and the view he provides of Port-Louis shows acute awareness of the changes marking this former colonial city as it is drawn into an increasingly “globalized” world. By the same token, his film is marked, much like other small productions from the “third world,” by its doubly configured audience. In other terms, while Hollywood films – even when tackling topics as American as apple-pie, so to speak – can presume a certain cultivated (now global) audience, these films address an audience that is not yet cultivated. While these points have been part of the understanding of European national cinemas, it remains true that this film, like many independent films, simultaneously develops a new cinematic language whose pedagogy is contained within its totality, which by its very orientation it shares with other films that have similar pedagogical impulses. As an independent film, this is something it shares particularly with the independent films of “different” cultures or subcultures, such as the African and diaspora films considered in this book. Thus we may speak of a repertoire. In addition, these films call out to particular spectators in order to develop a public that necessarily goes well beyond the context in which they are firmly anchored. Put simply, the film must teach how it is to be read even while continuing to exhibit itself; at the same time it must seduce its audience, however indirectly, in order to hold its interest and induce it to come back for “more.” Anenden himself has just completed a second adaptation of a novel by Ananda Devi.3 It goes without saying that coming “back” is a hazy concept since the group of films to which viewers might be returning is not so easily classifiable, nor even available. These films, as we noted in Chapter 1, are most often seen at film festivals or at other such screenings, before they become available through distributors or, more recently, through the directors’ own websites. Therefore, this virtual audience is also a “dream” that the film projects. In moving from novella to film, we will briefly consider The Cathedral as providing the pedagogical key for its own reading. While the process is incremental and ongoing throughout the film, it is possible to isolate quite early on the way the spectator is interpellated, or how one is called upon to watch it. As we shall see, the most pivotal scene of the film also turns out to be dramatic in this conversation with the spectator.

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From Novella to Film The film captures the imperfect tense of the novella which describes Lina’s daily schedule and gives a sense of the girl in the city: “[ … ] elle venait s’asseoir [ … ] elle distribuait son sourire [ … ] et savait se faire pardonner [ … ] elle partageait les repas des jeunes garçons [ … ]” (Devi 28). While the novella brings to life the cathedral gradually, with the personification culminating in the last few pages, in the film the cathedral opens the setting dramatically, its nature determined in the opening voice-over, which claims personhood for the entire city. The film version thus announces quite unambiguously the city as protagonist and privileges space in ways that allow us to move, quite logically, from seeing “story” to perceiving documentation. The next sentence from the narrating voice-over is: “Over the years I’ve seen it spread out and grow,” thus announcing both a narrating protagonist and a reference to a well-grounded reality that is unfolding in the pan toward the left, scanning the city from above. Furthermore, the pronunciation Port (English) and Louis (French), rather than using one language for both words, immediately encapsulates its bi-colonial history for those who know of it, and otherwise estranges anyone more used to either French or English. Although the various “ethnic” divisions in Mauritius are necessarily “named” in the novella, the film provides insight into many of these divisions through space. The most significant difference between the novella and the film in terms of plot comes from the identity of the male “outsider.” In the novella, although Lina is tempted to spend a night with the sailor who shows interest in her, she unambiguously rejects that path, despite the stark lack of hope that her home surroundings inscribe. There, the cathedral is cast as her savior, who gives the nod of approval and who comforts the sobbing girl within its nave, in its shadow, and with the coolness of its stone. On the other hand, in the film, it is a white, French photographer, rather than the sailor of the novella, who shows interest in the girl. The novella presents a closed ending with Lina’s dramatic rejection of the sailor who, she says, “would have betrayed” her. Prior to this Lina shouts out to him that she will not go with him, “There’s no point … I don’t want to … go away.” 4 As we shall see in greater detail later in this chapter, the film references its own form by calling attention to its images and drawing a strong connection between the media of photograph and film as bearing witness to phenomena without itself being burdened by the wish or demand for objectivity. In these ways the film seems to make an overt statement about fiction and documentary, in effect demonstrating that fiction is born of documentary but that the latter does not need loud proclamations of its autonomy. These questions of documentary and the city, though taken up later in this book, frame what follows in this chapter. The film opens with a beautiful aerial shot of the city, with the harbor visible in the distance beyond the high-rise buildings. The first sound is the familiar horn of a ship, followed by various city sounds and a chanting of prayers that are visually accompanied by a slow pan to the left. At this time, while we discern that the buildings are not as high, nor as modern, as we might have assumed, the sound of a church bell chimes in. The camera then becomes motionless as a series of superimpositions,

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fading in, trace the advancing morning hour. The first words of the female voice-over form an introduction: “Port-Louis is not a city,” she begins, as we see the roof of the cathedral not looking particularly impressive among other slanting roofs, “it’s a living thing.” The narrator then takes on an “I” that keeps the visual searching for its embodiment, so to speak. For the spectator, the anticipation is likely to be the image on the cover of the DVD: in the foreground, the young woman wearing an orange printed dress flared out in the motion of her dancing while the city of Port-Louis stretches out to one of the peaks of the emblematic hills of the “trois mamelles” in the distance. But a dramatic cut to a low-angle or extreme tilt shot of a stone tower rising up toward the clouds above it (Figure 2.2) interrupts the almost mesmerizing flow established by the tone of the narrator’s soft voice, the gentle sounds, and the slow camera movement panning to the left before the fade-ins, and the cathedral is established as the narrator. Following this, a quite dramatic series of shots of people’s feet, recognizably either those of men or women, introduces the crowds of Port-Louis as observed by the cathedral, who witnesses chance and fate. The story we are going to witness, the narrator tells us, is that of one decisive day in the life of a young girl who has grown up before the cathedral. This opening sets the story in a fascinating combination of fantasy (the narrating cathedral) and reality (people, as they are seen through their feet). What could be more real than the grime and sweat of feet that anchor people to the earth? And how to reconcile this with a talking building, albeit a church? This very worldly aspect is brought out in the conversation between Lina and her father when she serves him his morning tea. The old cobbler shows her a variety of

Figure 2.2 Low-angle shot of the cathedral tower. The Cathedral, directed by Harrikrisna Anenden, produced by Ciné Qua Non, 2006.

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shoes that have been brought to him for repair. Examining the specific qualities or defects, the father tells her about the owner of the pair in question, reconfiguring the shots of the feet seen at the beginning of the film. The theme is repeated a little later when we hear the clicking of a camera and a dramatic series of stills that melt into motion or movement that freezes into a still: of feet that then match up to a stray person crossing the street, another getting out of a vehicle, and so forth. The unmistakable thematic linking through the images of feet in the narrative of the two voices heard off screen creates a tension between inside and outside. An ordinary-looking man walks away from the camera in a crowd crossing the street, then moves over to the unpaved side (left of frame) to turn around and kneel down, revealing to the spectator the camera he is carrying, before he proceeds to take pictures of the crowd. The film camera dollies toward him before there is an abrupt cut to a pair of manicured feet in open black sandals. In quick succession a series of stills shows us six different pairs of feet, among them, a pair of cracked feet in open slippers and a pair in polished men’s dress shoes. Then the camera lets us observe the movement of a pair of silver women’s clogs. However, several moving body parts in the crowd pass in front of the camera and obscure our view of the feet in question until there is a thinning of the crowd. This allows recapturing of the clogs. This is then transformed into a freeze frame, thus calling attention to the entire problematic of shooting on-site in the city of Port-Louis. In these ways, the transformed novella is thoroughly cinematized while a spectator is born.

A Protagonist for a Collective Spectator At the level of “story,” Lina’s particularity is firstly linked to the everyday in Port-Louis city life and secondly to her quite crafted insertion as a specific character within the anonymity of the city. In other words, if the novella presented Lina as quite exceptional in a Port-Louis driven by the new-found channels for success for its middle class, the film subverts Lina’s potential to be the protagonist in quite the same way. In the film, Lina is linked through image, sound, light, and theme to the movement of the city between dawn and dusk, thus making her an integral part of it in a way we do not experience through the novella. Although reference is made to her “inner light” by various characters in the film, including the narrative voice of the cathedral, it is transformed into filmic reality in a very contrived manner. In the film, Lina is unable to escape “commerce,” which is the pulse of the city, rendered to the spectator with the sound of various popular Creole songs, as we roam the streets, following her through her peregrinations. But the idea of “commerce” comes to the forefront with the bills that change hands when her father is paid for his services by the owner of a pair of shoes he has restored; when her mother asks for money to pay a witch doctor she is convinced will cure her; when Lina observes the dhal puri vendor’s successful business; or when we follow her schoolboy admirer, Sanjay, as he purchases the earrings for her from the shopkeeper in the thriving market, claiming they are “for his mother”; and when she makes her daily visit to Ram, the

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ice-lolly seller whose philosophical exchanges with her in front of the cathedral are punctuated by his sales – but also when, using the money he gives her, Lina offers charity to the old woman on the street (something which, as observed above, she does on a daily basis). In the novella, Lina is not implicated in the commerce of the city in quite this way, and stands out, rather, as being quite ethereal. For these reasons, as viewers we resist the presentation of Lina as utterly free from all links from the idea of “commerce” and worldliness. Lina consistently scorns the “successful” of Port-Louis: for example, a man who has a brand new car but who is tearful since his wife has left him or all the people rushing around without a purpose in life except getting rich and being successful. While the disarming nature of Lina that the novella gives us in poetic language is recreated, the film adds a touch of irony to the fantasy with the stark juxtaposition, or rather the strong intermingling, of this fantasy with the multi-media reality that cinema allows. By the end of the film, we might wonder if the fantasy aspect of Lina – or Lina as created in the narrative of the cathedral and by the French photographer – might not indeed stem from nostalgic yearning on the part of the embodied city (and the collectivity that peoples it) for a space and time of a differently written history. Such a space is suggested as being confined to the steps of the cathedral where Lina daydreams and dances: a space that escapes the very definition of the city as a center of commerce, trade, exchange, power, and plenitude but also decrepitude, poverty, and illicitness, something of which we see less in this portrayal. We do see peeling walls, plastic bags and trash moved around by the wind, and other signs of decrepitude, poverty, and neglect, but these are understated. Although links are suggested, The Cathedral thus avoids the more common association, when the city is central in a film, of cinema and crime (Shiel 3). Similarly, point of view is highly complex in this film. When Lina leaves her house, the camera often follows her wandering from behind, or sometimes she moves toward the camera placed off at a slight angle. She is always framed, indeed surrounded, by signs of the city, drains, walls, graffiti, traffic, beggars, shops … . In one sequence, early in the film, we follow Lina through the city until, seamlessly, we are seeing it through the eyes of the French photographer. His voice takes over the narrative, which we learn is part of his journal, with the camera focusing on his handwriting as his words form his voice-over. We see the photographer sitting on a bench with a luscious banyan tree behind him. The banyan is, of course, highly symbolic in Hindu culture, evoking mythical spirits but also infinity and enlightenment. Vishnu (the preserver in Hindu mythology) is often encountered at the foot of a banyan tree. Although the Frenchman is fascinated by Lina and captivated by her spirit, the film gently makes of him, as an ex-colonial, a slightly clumsy presence in Mauritius, predictably seeking refuge in a five-star hotel setting. The cathedral, on the other hand, is indigenous; while the photographer is an “outsider,” it belongs to the city. Yet we cannot forget that the photographer also comes from the culture under which the church flourished in Ile de France, as Mauritius was then known. However, he seems genuinely interested in getting past such a limiting position by capturing, and being captured by, the expanse of the city and its people. While the

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narrative voice of the cathedral opens and closes the film, it is significant that no voice-over is ever used for Lina’s thoughts. In this way, although the spectator senses the struggle for narrative (or for Lina) between the persona of the cathedral, who wants to keep her innocence, and the photographer, who is fascinated by her free spirit, what dominates the entire film is the elusiveness of Lina’s own thought process. Seen otherwise, Lina’s thoughts as she relays them to Ram or Sanjay seem thin, almost frivolous. Despite many specific deviations, the film remains very close to the spirit of the novella in its effort to provide a nuanced entry into the narrative written by a very young author. Given that Ananda Devi herself wrote the screenplay, it is possible to recognize, despite the different medium and the entire remaking by a new artist, the hand of that “original” author as one has come to know her own very adventurous narrative wanderings since Solstices. Retrospection gives us the luxury to state that this story anticipates her most recent Eve de ses décombres, which revisits adolescence in Port-Louis with a very pointed pen. Quite naturally, the film captures the different languages of Mauritius. Most of the conversations take place in Mauritian Creole (or Morisyen to use the nationalist term), the classroom setting uses English, while the French photographer speaks to the different characters (an employee at his upmarket hotel and Lina) in French. His voice-over narrative, which we understand to be his written journal, is also in French, while the cathedral’s voice is entirely in English. We do hear some snippets of Bhojpuri and Sanskrit in the old woman’s lines and recital. One almost feels the thick description of ethnographic difference when we place this within the picturesque streets, market, scenic harbor, colorful clothing, beautifully chosen Creole music, and images of food, fruits, and wares. One can discern Anenden’s experience and knowledge of his country, and particularly its capital, not simply from the inside and the outside as a diasporic Mauritian but also as the maker of a documentary on the tourism industry of Mauritius.5

Interpellating the Spectator through Genre and Style While Trinh T. Minh-ha’s clearly stated discussion on documentary (as being impossible in its idealized closeness to “Truth”) provides an early theoretical framing, particularly for a host of films from the end of the last century onward that were made in former colonial contexts, the surge of documentary filmmakers who continue to make a mark on African cinema is remarkable. One of the reasons for this is surely the independence that documentary provides to filmmakers who lack the resources of a huge budget but who have a story to tell. The documentary can bypass the need for actors, studio settings, and lighting while putting to use less expensive alternatives: sometimes even handheld cameras, on-site settings, and real people within them filling in instead. Notable filmmakers who have used the documentary genre to tell African stories in a variety of innovative ways, and not only for these reasons, are Euzhan Palcy, Jean-Marie Teno, Safi Faye, and Salem Mekuria. It goes without saying that these conditions call up a different set of variables that filmmakers who choose or resort to this type of filming then encounter.

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Here, effective usage of both long takes that the spectator might associate with documentary or cinema vérité and dramatic cuts associated with action or drama respectively give the impression of belief in the truth as equivalent to reality and, at other times, quicken the pace of the film unexpectedly. One finds in The Cathedral very few true shot reverse shots, with most conversations foregrounding the two shot, thus capturing both actors in the exchange (Figure 2.3). While the shot is sometimes reversed in conversation, its timing most often does not correspond to the change in speaker. Such is the case of the few close-ups of Lina’s face when the photographer is speaking to her. Conversations are rather explorations of space and light, sound and physical presence. One of the rare shot-reverse-shot instances occurs between Lina and the statue of the Virgin Mary, with the camera alternating in absolute silence between Lina’s awed expression and Mary’s calm gaze straight ahead of her. Lina’s outburst against her own mother (in which she accuses her of having never cared for her, of having taken her childhood and transformed her into a care-giver, and, indirectly, of being a self-centered hypochondriac) occurs in the darkened room from which her mother rarely emerges. Lina at first seems to go along with the mother, as usual, when she is told to close the window she has just opened. Doing as she is instructed, she returns the room to the shadows, but having done so, she unleashes her anger, citing as here reason, cleaning and cooking and washing clothes for a woman who has no discernible illness other than spending her father’s hard-earned money. This relationship plays out in the darkness of the dank room whose doorknob, when Lina approaches it at the beginning of this scene, becomes the focus of the visual as the opening toward an ominous presence in Lina’s path. It is the only door or window in the film that is captured, with the focus being on the means of opening and closing it rather than its shape and movement. The sound of the creaking window opening onto the outdoors, when we first encountered Lina opening the window to the morning and the city, is cruelly transformed into the ominous creaking of the door leading to the dark space of the mother. Her mother will subsequently pay a visit to a woman who lets on to the spectator that she is a charlatan by cursing the mother once she has left the scene. Although she is tempted to cast her daughter as the cause of her illness for having placed a spell on her, Lina’s mother decides not to use the powder this witch doctor has given her to place under her daughter’s bed. The film thus does not pursue a simplistic opposition between the Church and (fake) witchcraft. Instead, this moment of decision on the part of Lina’s mother is used along with others to develop the family dynamics by exploring space through the placement of the actors within the shadows and light of the apartment and through the motion of characters and the camera itself via various thresholds. Lina’s images within the frames of the different doors and windows suggest, in perhaps quite an obvious manner, her position on the brink of adulthood and the precariousness of her future as well as the tautness of the household communication itself. However, the clever framing of Lina in these liminal spaces (in the window frame and very often at, passing through, or visible beyond the doorways of the small home) surreptitiously does more: it moves her effortlessly from the doorways and window frames of her home to the doorway of the church. A superb long

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(a)

(b)

Figure 2.3 (a) Lina/Photographer two shot; (b) Lina/Ram two shot, (c) Lina/Sanjay two shot. The Cathedral, directed by Harrikrisna Anenden, produced by Ciné Qua Non, 2006.

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(c)

Figure 2.3

(continued)

shot allowing a view of the three doors of the cathedral frames Lina at the middle one (Figure 2.4). Lina is dwarfed by the huge structure rising up behind her. Surprisingly, she has never entered the church before. As she stands there, with her back to the church looking outward to the city, waiting at the appointed hour to meet the photographer, the door appears to open magically on its own, startling the girl and seeming to beckon her in. It is in this sequence, that I want to suggest that the spectator is interpellated in a way that suggests his or her position is aligned with a greater collectivity. From that constructed perspective, the suggestion seems to be that the postcolonial context the film has been capturing might somehow have been different through the agency of such a collective, or that it still could be. Lina pauses to look up at the statue of Mary on the inner wall of the cathedral as she makes her way towards the altar, following which shot reverse shots between Lina and the statue create what might indeed be the most dynamic camera movement between two “characters” in the film. Then the camera allows us to follow Lina, who walks down the length of the central aisle (Figure 2.5). It is, of course, an exciting visual moment that showcases the beautiful space of the cathedral within which she is protected. There is something predictable, bordering on the melodramatic, in the overt substitution of the serene and pure Mary for her hapless mother in a long and dramatic pause of the camera in a point-of-view shot as Lina looks up at the statue. However, the drama of this scene, indeed the climactic moment of the film itself, occurs when Lina turns around to reveal she is moved to tears, and then walks away from the altar. The difference in the second shot (when Lina turns around to face

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Figure 2.4 Long shot of Lina at the church door. The Cathedral, directed by Harrikrisna Anenden, produced by Ciné Qua Non, 2006.

the camera) is that fresh flames have miraculously lit up about the altar. For her return from the altar, we have a still camera while Lina walks toward us and into focus in a medium shot while the blazing altar is also captured with depth of field (Figure 2.5c). As Lina draws closer to us, the altar begins to lose focus in the depth of the shot (Figure 2.5d), after which Lina literally walks into the camera until the close-up of her face is lost and her neck and chest occupy the entire frame; a slight change in the direction of her path then moves her swiftly out of the frame while we see the flames at the altar, still with the blurry focus (Figure 2.5e). While on the one hand this is very much in keeping with the theme of light that is associated with the inner beauty of Lina throughout the film, on the other, the empty pews become a loud signal to the spectator. But we cannot occupy all those seats! As spectators we could each be one of the people who witnesses Lina’s miracle, but the call is to join ourselves to others. This suggested collectivity is called upon to bear witness to Lina’s journey and illuminate the light of possibility that can spring from a collective will to dream and to accept fantasy. Lina’s earlier naïve ideas about being independent because she does not enter the rat race of material success that characterizes middle-class Mauritius or other such new nations are suddenly afforded more respect. Although at this point Lina predictably finds the strength to refuse the photographer’s advances, she accepts the package of photographs that he has taken of her. Yet, this package is literally juxtaposed with the stack of pencil sketches she has collected on her usual route and

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(a)

(b)

Figure 2.5 (a) Long shot of Lina walking toward altar; (b) Long shot continued while Lina is a speck in the distance; (c) Shot with depth of field of Lina walking away from lighted altar; (d) Lina walks into close-up while shot loses depth of field; (e) Lina walks into extreme close-up, almost colliding with camera. The Cathedral, directed by Harrikrisna Anenden, produced by Ciné Qua Non, 2006.

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(c)

(d)

Figure 2.5 (continued)

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51

(e)

Figure 2.5

(continued)

that were placed under little rocks along her path by, as we understand, her admirer, Sanjay, specifically for her to pick up. The pull between the outside and inside is given dramatic proportions in Lina’s struggle, while her decision to remain “inside” takes on an ephemeral flavor with the cathedral’s voice confirming that the time will come when she will have to give up the little girl. However, the simple choice as it was extended to the girl in this instance is also extended beyond the protagonist as suggested in the church scene. The consequences of her own power of choice, it turns out, have greater complexity than the character, Lina, is capable of understanding or willing to know at this time. The blazing altar is thus not seen by Lina and yet is dramatically visible to the spectator and the would-be audience that could occupy the empty pews. That knowledge, which belongs to the omniscient cathedral, is bestowed on the spectator as a gift and a responsibility, while the collectivity suggested opens up well beyond the scope of the film. If we were alerted by the opening panning shot of the city that the intent was not to deliver Port-Louis exactly as it was, and with documentary precision, the film prepares the realm of fantasy with enough irony to keep it interesting. We are drawn into the scene of Lina’s dancing to the gentle singing of Ram as he taps on his tin box in full view of the young and hopeful schoolboy Sanjay, who sketches Lina compulsively and has just presented her with earrings. We are prepared to believe the French photographer has been as captivated by the moment as we. Perhaps, then, his invitation to dinner could as well be innocent and hopeful as it could be simply arrogant

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and exploitative. In The Cathedral, postcolonial Mauritius “thinks,” through spectatorship in another logic that Lina provides. While at the level of the somewhat naïve protagonist within her tangible reality such logic hardly seems credible, as a dream it takes on new possibilities. The protagonist’s dream is reconstructed in the spectator’s thought against the only logic of “development” and becomes a project that binds together a collective, a new spectatorship – a postcolonial un-Hollywood one. One that, perhaps with Nigeria’s booming video industry, Nollywood, we might have too hastily written off as dead. The idea of phantasm, then, is less about the different unreal elements depicted in the film than it is about the desire of the film itself (as a desiring entity itself if we can accept it as such), which is expressed through the pedagogical moves it makes toward its would-be spectators. The many corners of the dwelling place through which the film takes us purposefully lead to the coolness of the Port-Louis cathedral. Here, the phantasm that is Lina creates and demands a collective view of the illumination of a postcolonial possibility whose contours are yet intangible, somewhat innocent, at times even laughable and immature. Yet Lina’s rejection of the French photographer – precisely because it is set on the steps of the Catholic church, which symbolically reminds us of the massive conversion of African slaves by the French colonial-era missionaries – is also a rejection of the most obvious continuation of dependency. While the Port-Louis cathedral is a reconstruction that dates back only to the 1930s, it marks the site of the first church built there in the eighteenth century. But as we saw, those contours of freedom are not seen by Lina herself. She does not turn back to the altar: might the spell be broken and might the church go dark like her mother’s room? Is she Orpheus or Cinderella, risking, in her case, a return to the enslavement and indenture of her ancestors? In other words, might the light be precisely “magic,” created by the spectator’s engagement with this presentation of Mauritian reality through fiction? It would be too risky, it seems, for Lina to turn her head back to glimpse the altar, now ablaze. Instead, the spectator has already been drawn in to the waiting pews in a classic cinematic moment of “identification,” by means of a shot that allows for the wide perspective around Lina. In essence, the invitation to see the light still unseen by the protagonist is an invitation to construct through willful dreaming the future post-Independence (Independence dates back to 1968), which is already the past. While the same time period for some new postcolonial and African nations has been used to forge a purposeful striding into the first world, perhaps the suggestion is that Mauritius could still walk otherwise and aspire differently by diverging from the expected. This idea of a different modernity runs like an unbroken thread through the films of Salem Mekuria, Jean-Marie Teno, Ousmane Sembène, Abderrahmane Sissako, and many other filmmakers examined in the pages that follow. If the idea is filled with innocence or a naïveté that Lina incarnates, the spectator’s situation, for having seen the transformed altar that she did not see, almost demands an alternate dream from that spectator. The non-hermetic form is often associated with Third Cinema, where the spectator is encouraged to “‘author’ his own collective

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narrative” (Shohat and Stam 262). The open-endedness of the future is one that this cinema embraces in form and content: Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact that we shall not have the time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts – serious, sad thoughts – and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality. (Bachelard 61)

It goes without saying that the cinema of Africa and that of the diaspora that joins up with it is as full of dreams as it is of reality. Neither the brutalities of colonialism nor the many disappointments of the modernity and post-independence have ever seemed final for those who live in their aftermath. Any one of the films we will discuss states and restates this in the form and content of their cinematic hopes. The Cathedral engages the spectator to witness a day in the life of a Mauritian girl. The story maneuvers between reality and fantasy and makes constant reference to liminal spaces, which are in many ways thresholds for different levels of solidarity. Our close look at the pedagogy of the spectator alerts us to the finesse of the techniques used in building the film’s spectatorship. Every chapter that follows in this book studies these techniques in order to establish forms of spectatorship that the cinema of Africa and the diaspora constructs in favor of subaltern spaces, thus, as we have seen in Chapter 1, allying its orientation with that of what is widely known as Third Cinema. The ethics of the character’s predicament are often transposed into an ethics of the spectator’s position, intellectual or emotional, in immediate relation to the film itself. Lina’s dilemma is the choice between a vague suggestion of escape (the white journalist and the five-star hotel culture) or engagement (as suggested by her connection with the streets, the vendors, and, through Sanjay, the school and to the space where the church literally meets the street through Ram). Lina’s simple decision is framed in such a way that the spectator (and not the character) witnesses the miracle with which divinity ratifies her simple strength, which is her creolized selfhood as it has emerged in postcolonial Africa. This self is emblematic for us as more than the notion of a continent and its diaspora, both meanings being activated by the relationship of Mauritius to Africa. It is suggestive of the cinema that joins the many disparate cultural, economic, linguistic, intellectual, imaginative, and political spaces that come together in synchronized and disharmonized togetherness as we hold together through this reading the repertoire presented here. The dramatic setting of the inside of the cathedral and the suggestiveness of the empty pews in The Cathedral have been well prepared by the camerawork to position the spectator as a witness whose action is already constructed as a possible participation. While the particular form that activity might take is, of course, left open, the most immediate space granted is as a witness to Lina’s miracle. We might take this character as an allegory for the postcolonial nation or simply as an idealistic young woman whose beliefs are conditioned by her experiences – which were shared with the spectator – of small joys linked to the warmth of sunshine, her language, the sounds, foods, and sights

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familiar and dear to her, all of which emerge at a particular historical moment in her country’s destiny, which is also carefully suggested and reinforced. In either sense, the spectator is enticed into the magical world Lina inhabits but alerted to its subaltern spaces; in either case, the spectator is finally positioned as a witness to possibilities that the character herself cannot know, and thus, as the viewer, is the one who can act from the power of that knowledge. Although Mauritius occupies a liminal space in its geographical and historical relationship to the African continent, evoking its early period of post-independence ties its destiny to African spaces most overtly, particularly because of the role this nation played in the Organization of African Unity as we have already noted. Evoking the way this film constructs spectatorship as a means to present the repertoire of films from the contemporary cinema of Africa and its diaspora in this book lights up the notion of margins (spatial, economic, linguistic, cultural, gender, regional, intellectual, for example) in both their rigidity and fluidity in multiple ways that we shall pursue in the rest of the book.

Notes A previous version of this essay was published as “Narrating the City: Documentary or Fiction in Harrikrisna Anenden’s La Cathédrale.” French Forum 35.2 (2010): 115–134. 1 Not to be confused with the animation Katedra (2002) by Tomek Baginski. 2 In Haile Gerima’s Sankofa (1993), the white photographer is also abandoned by the protagonist, Mona, an African American model who, while on a photo shoot in Ghana, returns to the past in the form of a slave girl. In The Cathedral, the photographer is less obviously and harshly linked to commodifying capitalistic society than the one in Sankofa, though the same kind of opposition is set up between Lina’s carefree connection to her creolized city and the outsider who is drawn to the possibilities she represents as an exotic other, who belongs, historically, to an exploited colonized society. The link with Third Cinema is strongly articulated in the African films in this repertoire through a sustained connection, by means of each film, with subaltern or less privileged characters, spaces, or narratives. 3 See Plate 3 The Children of Troumaron (2013); compare this with the images of the noir style camerawork in Casanegra discussed in Chapter 3. 4 Devi “Cathédrale” (28). 5 Rêve et Réalité (1981) Dir. Harrikrsna Anenden.

3

Framing the City Africanizing Viewer and Viewed through Angle, Distance, Genre, and Movement

The African city has historically been a space offering high visibility for colonial presence. Many African cities as we know them today were colonial creations: Dakar, Accra, or Johannesburg, for example. European cities are also “African” cities in a variety of ways, and, as we shall see, not merely because of the presence of African immigrants in them today. In this chapter we will study how, through careful camerawork African and diasporic films merge their characters into the city’s material structures as they maneuver its more intangible networks. Cities are Africanized not merely through the presence of Africans but through the cinematic reclaiming of perspective for African and diasporic exigencies as these play out in the specificity of the characters, spaces, and narratives of the films. Space is a theoretical and conceptual expression of human existence, in the sense that, as part of the human imagination, it bears the marks of human actions that “real” places hold, materially. When we consider current demographics, the city is a massive expression of modernity, holding the cosmopolitan aspirations and the, often deadly, fate of the majority of living humans. The United Nations Population Fund estimated in 2007 that for the first time, more than half the world’s population (3.3 billion people) would be living in cities and towns the following year (“State of the World” 1). Many cities are living testimony to the opening up of their colonially conceived forms to the development and spread of capitalism, and are rightly associated with both new economic success and entrepreneurial opportunities for aspiring individuals and stark misery and inequities for the greater number of them. African experiences of cities provide an exciting space for filming as well as for recasting genre in contemporary cinema. African and diasporic filmmakers explore this in captivating ways, drawing upon a potential spectator’s experiences of cities and playing on the forms of alienation that the city holds for its poor, for women, for the struggling as much as they recognize and even celebrate its many possibilities. In particular they are rethinking and remaking film noir from the postcolonial underbelly and bringing to the powerful images of noir streets a new twist while imbuing the Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, First Edition. Anjali Prabhu. © 2014 Anjali Prabhu. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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youth who populate it with a new cinematic idiom. While commercial cinema, as it is evoked in Chapter 1, is more intent on bringing stories of success (or occasional failure) modeled after Hollywood gangster or mob films or the classic Bollywood comic village bumpkin film in which the comic hero strikes it big, for example, artistically inclined films provoke the spectator into thinking beyond the success of the “hero.” Cinema is uniquely placed to bring us to reflect on and through the city not simply by showing us what has been created but by allowing us to rediscover city space through perspective, angle, movement, and juxtaposition and by activating the relationship cinematic space establishes with other elements of experience, particularly time but also movement – and thus our sense of ourselves as beings in time and space. What is more, cinema was born with the modern city, and in fact the earliest films were quite simply presentations of the wonders of the modern world to be found in cities which simultaneously pondered at the wonder of their own medium. We have seen in Chapter 1, how Sembène’s early Black Girl rediscovers space from the perspective of Diouana, the young Senegalese girl who embarks on a tragic trip to the South of France to work as a nanny for the family that employed her in Senegal. In addition, it reinserts this character into a newly perspectivized space. Upon her arrival at the port of Marseille, Diouana’s entry into French urban space is configured through effective movements of objects and persons and the character’s own visual perception, which is recorded by the camera. The apartment where Diouana will spend most of her time becomes a prison. The visual experience for the spectator is guided by the editing and, among other aspects, focalization: in particular third-person, “witness” style observation alternating with the character’s perspective. As Diouana gets out of the car the camera gives us a close-up of her face, which is lifted up as she considers the high-rise building where she will live with the family she has come to serve (Figure 3.1a). Next the camera pans slightly to the right, perhaps her companion is observing her (Figure 3.1b), after which there is a shift to give us a point-of-view shot, so we see what would be her perspective of the building (Figure 3.1c). The next cut is to the door of the apartment, when as spectators we fully expect to “enter” the apartment from the outside with the character whose perspective of the building we have shared (Figure 3.1d). However, the door opens toward the camera, and we realize our position has been imperceptibly changed: we are inside the apartment and the view of the door was thus from the inside (Figure 3.1e).1 This dramatic moment, with the abrupt and unexpected “movement” of the spectator’s position, is significant not merely because it disrupts the expected flow. Beyond this, it makes a statement about the role of the spectator in a pedagogical move that could function as a key for how the film experience is going to proceed. In essence, the unexpected and radically changed positioning of the spectator, who arrived at the entrance of the apartment in the hallway alongside Diouana, to the inside of the apartment and therefore to the other side of the door to stand beside her white mistress, snatches the character’s perspective from our purview and installs the spectator as a witness to Diouana’s fate, sometimes even aligning us with her white masters. The viewer is thus alienated in a deliberate denial of identification with the protagonist: we are already somehow converted into silent observers beside Diouana’s white

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(a)

(b)

Figure 3.1 (a) Diouana looks up at her future dwelling; (b) Camera pans to the right; (c) Point-of-view shot; (d) Shot of the door, expected to be Diouana’s perspective; (e) Door opens inward, unexpectedly changed perspective. Black Girl; directed by Ousmane Sembène, produced by André Zwoboda and Filmi Domirev, Les Actualités françaises, 1966.

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(c)

(d)

(e)

Figure 3.1 (continued)

employers rather than being allowed to keep the natural sympathetic identification invited subsequently in flashback scenes. It is significant that the husband, who is the more positive character in a relatively sympathetic relationship with Diouana – at least at moments – is with her on the outside while on the inside is the wife, who gets into an overtly unpleasant engagement with the girl. Indeed, as the film progresses, we are thwarted in facile attempts to lament with and for Diouana by camera positioning that resists identification, by dissonance between image and sound, or by sudden cuts that interrupt our following the sustained perspective of her narrative. Rather, we are sometimes cleverly placed with her white employers and often have to actively resist the how the camera positioning frames our view, thus engaging our minds in an extra and contrary activity bringing awareness and distance rather than

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a full immersion in the sensory and emotional experience that identification with the sympathetic character might have allowed. Sembène’s montage thus carefully prepares reception of Diouana’s internal monologue, which we hear throughout the film, although we never witness her actually speak to anyone once in France. However, in the flashback scenes, we hear her voice responding “Yes,” when called, and although we know she is a nanny in the European quarter in Dakar, in the flashback scenes because of the way she is positioned in the frame she looks tall and at home on the well-paved streets of her own city. In the same time frame we see her alongside the boyfriend she left in Senegal. The multiplication of the dialogue’s substance alongside her white employers’ various conversations transforms the spectator into a witness whose guilt for Diouana’s death resides in the fact that she or he has been privy to the girl’s anguish and has been given ample evidence of its cause: Madame’s idea that the mask Diouana gave her when she first came to work for the family in Dakar is not hers to take back because it was a “gift”; the rude comments made about her by guests; the total lack of respect for her needs and desires in the everyday; crass objectification of her on the part of the whites. In this atmosphere, views of the city, of the seaside, and of the neighboring cities from her arrival in the city apartment are usually through the window. In comparison to this circumscribed life, in flashback mode we see Diouana’s obvious freedom in space in her own city of Dakar. In the scene in which she tells her boyfriend that she will be leaving for France, she moves freely about the monuments, runs up to a high wall above the street, comes down again, sits on a park bench, looks up to the sky, and in other ways is at liberty to move through her own space; her freedom in her own world becomes expressive of her boyfriend’s idealism for his country and for postcolonial Africa. This scene is typically instructive in classic Sembène style: the city space is explored by the activity of the female character, dressed in non-Western clothing, which is suggestive of freedom and possibility, while the narrative of such possibility is bifurcated. It is the young man’s aspirations that are tied to the spaces we discover through Diouana’s movements. At the same time, Diouana herself is less implicated in the city she unveils: she has already left in her mind. Her dreams are exposed within the closed space of the boyfriend’s student room, where she speaks about her own dream, which is to go to France and work for a French family. The city space of Dakar becomes gendered through Diouana’s dreams for freedom and independence, which lie in escaping it. The stark contrast of the lightness and hope of the city scene of Dakar with Diouana’s actual situation in the present of the narrative, in which she virtually turns into a prisoner in a high-rise building in the south of France, enjoins the two city spaces in particular ways. The views that Diouana sees of beaches dotted with white sunbathers from the windows and balcony of the high-rise building in France suggest that freedom might have been better sought through staying and dealing with the many inequities for women in her own country. Sembène’s exploration of space is highly complex in this film and complements his visionary idea of reclaiming the world as (an) African. Although it was not yet articulated at the time he made

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the film, Black Girl falls in perfectly with the ideal of the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) for African films that they should be made from an African perspective and anticipates the way African cinema would reclaim space through a revolutionary process of Africanizing the perspective of the potential spectator. We have already discussed how cinema in and from an African perspective became alienating or incomprehensible even for cosmopolitan global viewers well accustomed to “foreign” films.2 To acknowledge Africanized space in the cinema is not to simply see more images of Africans and focus on “real” African spaces. The fact that the referent is recognizably “African” is of course significant, but it is only part of its importance. Rather, re-creating cinematic space in African films has been about reimagining how to relate this space with the real places and spaces that are of concern to African reality and its imaginary. The city in Africanized cinematic space as we shall examine it here, then, is created in relation to the experiences of real cities that peoples who identify with and are connected to Africa and its diaspora have.3 An early “African” film with which most readers will be familiar is The Battle of Algiers (1966). Documenting the activities of the revolutionary Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in the city of Algiers, the Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo’s film gives a marvelous account of the space of the city, the ways in which the colonialists imagined and executed control by dividing the space of the city between the natives and the colonialists and restricted access to the European center.4 The film superbly traces how insurgency took over space, quite literally, through violent means.5 The Martinican filmmaker who has had much international acclaim since her early film Sugar Cane Alley (1983), Euzhan Palcy, also traces city space in this magnificent film set in colonial Martinique. Despite Sylvie Kandé’s critical study of the text-to-film adaptation, where she shows how Joseph Zobel’s novel (upon which the film is based) is not done justice by the film, Palcy’s characters and the ensemble of her mise-en-scène do speak to the Césairian and Fanonian ideals that Kandé suggests are impossible to find in the film. Kandé praises the novel and finds the film falls short – the medium of film itself –because it cannot recapture the tragic heritage of the novel, which traces José’s movement from orality to writing. Kandé’s attention to the detail of Zobel’s text is an astute study of the particular victories of language, which she traces through intertextuality and other means to establish the legacy of Fanon and Césaire alongside the more neglected Zobel. However, when African cinema is framed as an authentic and independent medium in which to claim those legacies, films like Sugar Cane Alley do play a key role in filling the gap in language that Glissant identified between the language inherited through the colonial process and the language needed to express and embody the creativity of colonized peoples. These films, when seen as a repertoire, harmonize a different visual authority in film history by initiating and developing a complex subjectivized presence for African characters in cinematic medium. For this, the film is effective when placed within a repertoire of films that work together to reinforce, complete, and refashion themes, motifs, and concepts that together form a discourse in the sense evoked in Chapter 1. That is the project of a conception of what might be a cinema of Africa and the diaspora as we pursue it here. In such an assembling,

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Jean-Marie Teno’s Afrique, je te plumerai (“Africa I will Fleece You”; 1992) bolsters Kandé’s notion of a language that can be meaningful through its intertextuality as it delves deep into the question of the devaluation of oral cultures and all forms of indigenous cultural heritage within the process of establishing colonial administration in Africa, something that numerous films in this repertoire will highlight and bring to life through the spaces, characters, and narratives they create. Telling the story of the young and aspiring José, whose indefatigable grandmother we come to love by the time of her death in the narrative, Palcy makes of Joseph Zobel’s novel an intricate tracing of the spaces of the colonial city, its “modernity” seen in the docks, the cinema, the shops, the gadgets in the bungalows of the whites, alongside the spaces of the servants, the poor huts or cases of the black slaves who worked the cane, and the colonial creation of the world of cane fields. Athough José’s beloved Médouze, the character who makes the explicit link for diasporic blacks with Africa, does not go to the city, he dies peacefully in the belief that his soul is headed back across the seas to its African home. In these and other distinctively African films, the colonial city becomes a space of alienation, or foreignness, and simultaneously of desire and ambition. Films depicting the period prior to independence present the city as a space controlled by the colonial power, and much of the cinematic effect works to capture negotiation of the city spaces by African-identified protagonists, while the ultimate goal of such negotiations is, unambiguously, for the colonized to occupy those spaces.6 Revolutionary Algerians, for example, risked their lives to penetrate the colonial city, to break out of the casbah, to defy strict policing, and ultimately to intimidate the colonial settlers and their military forces into recognizing that the time for independence was past. Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers provides what remains an inimitable scene that has the audience gasping in fear and astonishment as the disguised Arab women enter the white city space to plant their bombs, going past the French soldiers and cheerfully passing the checkpoint manned by armed Frenchmen. The women’s identities are masked by their Western dress and dyed hair, and as we hold our breath we watch them pass freely on while many of their countrymen are detained or refused permission to pass beyond the control point. The city that has to be taken over is truly invaded by these women, while the entire cinematic apparatus works to place them and their agency at the center of the scene, in particular by the stunning sense of time and space that the scene brings to our experience. The women are literally acting in the ticking time of the bombs they place at various locations and have to traverse the alienated city space that has been taken over through its conversion to the French colonial city. Music, sound effects, and crosscutting have the spectators anticipating every element that could go wrong for them, yet dreading the detonation that will kill innocent French citizens as much as we do the women being discovered as they negotiate their way through colonial Algiers. The repeated percussion motif reminds the spectator of the ticking of time leading up to the explosions. In the initial café scene this music is accompanied by the panning motion of the camera from left to right across the café into which the first woman, disguised in Western attire in order to pass as a French national, has entered. Next the

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cut is to a close-up of the woman, after the end of the panning motion, which artfully settles on a very young child licking an ice cream cone before the cut. The woman’s eyes betray a flicker of some kind of moral pang while her movement remains calm as she glances at the clock and then pushes the handbag containing the bomb under the bar stool with her foot. The film is set quite explicitly during the period just preceding 1960. Given that the film is based on the account given by one FLN member, Saadi Yacef, of those events, it is of course significant that Yacef plays himself in the film, instructing the women and handing the “handbags” over to them. There is no doubt that the film plays on the documentary genre, being shot entirely in black and white, although no real documentary footage is used. The city is transformed into a space of contentiousness and outright warfare, while the characters’ movements put pressure on the weaknesses of the colonial power structure. Knowing the city through this film in avatars that are both vulnerable and virulently powerful at the same time marks the African city as a space of contradiction and confrontation as it takes form under colonialism. Sugar Cane Alley, set in colonial Fort-de-France (Martinique), traces the journey of a young boy, José, to the city, across the water from the land of the cane fields, where the old African slave, Médouze, repeatedly teaches him the lessons of his ancestors and gives him a sense of his Africanness, while transmitting a classic diasporic longing for return. José’s survival in this colonial city is only possible because of his indefatigable grandmother, and his resilience is linked to a sense of his strength, personified by Médouze’s Africanness. Once in Fort-de-France to pursue his studies, José negotiates its spaces against all odds in order to take up the scholarship he has been awarded by the French government, which turns out to provide only partial support. His grandmother’s unbeatable spirit and relentless efforts to conquer city space, offering laundry services, trudging along narrow roads lined by square buildings with white-washed walls to reach the headmaster’s office, open its doors to José’s future. These emblematic early films that document the space of the colonial city through the perspective of colonized subjects anticipate the reality of the boom in postcolonial cities that we are experiencing today. The postcolonial city has itself been an explosive space whose contours have changed in decisive ways and distinguished them from those established during colonialism. Once the city has been “taken over” by the new nationalist elites, among the first changes made to mark the end of colonialism has been the toppling of statues of colonialists and their replacement with those of freedom fighters or leaders of the new nation. Heroes become local, street names are changed to reflect new power. Indeed Sembène’s films are known for their ironic view of the new elites as they misuse their power and shamelessly continue to bleed the new nation exactly as the colonialists did. Typically, in the postcolonial era, government spaces (Parliament, library, roads, banks, railway offices, for example) inherited from colonialism are renamed, refurbished, or demolished, in order to be rebuilt. Newer developments are supermarkets, brand new all-inclusive neighborhoods, gated communities, or individual homes with sophisticated security, “suburbs,” and “malls,” in the American sense. Cities also

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lure people from the countryside motivated by pure need or the desire for economic success or simply an appetite for adventure. Cities need these immigrants to function. Foreigners come to the city. Things “happen” in the city. The city, in this way, has been from its very creation a space where the collective ambitions of the nation, both spoken and unspoken, potentially coincide with personal ambition that lures many from spaces distant from it. Cinema has captured these multiple desires and struggles, and, in its avatars everywhere, it has made of the city its own material – for which the pioneering moment of the Lumière brothers’ “arrival of a train” is forever an emblem. But the city has also been the site for viewing films in theaters, and it continues, in the newer cinemas in particular, to dominate themes of filmmaking in which the city-dreams of luxurious mansions, swanky cars, nightclubs, gangsters, or bad girls take form.7 Nollywood/Gollywood and indeed Bollywood cinema all play up the city which is portrayed as the space of possibility, wealth, success, and above all, despite its dangers and difficulties, as possible freedom. The European city of Brussels and its postcolonial framing in the Identity Pieces (1998), by Mwezé Ngangura, are renewed in highly theoretical terms in Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (1990). In the first film, Brussels, and Belgium as its extension, is seen as a space that is intricately related to the fate of the Congo. The film recounts the amusing story of one of the last kings, Mani Kongo, whose meanderings through the streets of Brussels we follow. Mani Kongo goes to Brussels in search of his daughter who has left her country to study medicine there. His voyage turns tragic from the very point of his arrival in the African city of Kinshasa, beyond the reaches of his dwindled kingdom. He becomes a misfit, mocked by the city’s modernized youth. Mani Kongo’s quest, however, plays out in various seedy locations in the European city, where he finds himself, not without misadventure, no sooner than he has passed through customs. There, he loses everything he has on him, despite protests that they are symbols of his identity. Mani Kongo is framed in the Brussels bar inhabited by the former colonial general, the street spaces outside the Christian mission house that takes in a lot of Africans, the red-light district where he encounters prostitutes, and all over the city that he wanders in search of his little girl. In his fictional story of Mani Kongo, Ngangura’s bold use of documentary footage of the African king’s meeting with the Belgian king includes a moment when we glimpse Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Kasavubu. That moment is transformed, developed, and imagined further by Peck, but it is important to note that in Ngangura’s light film a person from the African crowd who came out to grab King Baudoin’s sword is shown as a madman making a crazy interruption of the procession. This incident is also seen in Prophet, and through it Lumumba’s courageous Independence Day speech before the king is positioned as an act on behalf of the common man and recalls the man who had otherwise been forgotten or taken for a fool (Akudinobi 375). In Peck’s 1990 film, signs of European modernity and development (smooth trains, neatly paved streets, fine architecture, museums) are all in clever ways linked cinematographically to Belgium’s colonial adventures in the Congo. However, the argument is extended when contemporary events and simple everyday people as well as members of important government circles are linked to Belgium’s bloody history

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in Africa. As we will see later in this book (in Chapter 5, which discusses documentary, and in Chapter 6, which focuses specifically on the two versions of Peck’s biographical work on Congo’s first elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba), Peck is quite forceful in his positioning of the spectator; his manner in this is reminiscent of Sembène’s in Black Girl. In a process I have called Africanization, both filmmakers structure perspective through gestures accomplished by the plot, narration, and camera movement to call up a particular relationship that interpellates the spectator to the African subject of their films. Peck’s spectator is quite immediately implicated in the past events of the Congo, which concerned the death of Patrice Lumumba, much as Sembène’s spectator in Black Girl becomes a (hapless but still somewhat guilty) witness to Diouana’s death, hearing the internal monologue that is not available to her white masters in the film’s narrative. These unforgettable instances of recasting cinematic space and the latter’s possibilities for Africans occur in more recent films, even as cities in Africa are rapidly transformed by various developments, including changes to cinema itself. The city has always been a place of commerce and exchange, of excitement (even “badness”), of possibility, and of poverty. Cinema is a privileged medium with which to explore these aspects of city space. Commercial films revel greatly in these valences of the city and explore its relentless transformations as they are linked to the ambitions of the young (and mostly beautiful) protagonists, who either triumph over the city’s many entrapments as they search for a better life or perish within its darker enclosures. While commercial African films in general tend to be “about” these heroes, or even about the city, artistic films tend to expend considerable technique to use the character’s framing within the city to question its particular development. From a different context, we could consider Slumdog Millionaire (2008), for example, which is an unabashedly commercial film. Although it might take up issues related to the city, in its development and dénouement it prefers to allow the hero to become a crorepati (“millionaire”) and dance with the girl at the end. The hero’s victory does not leave us with a sense of alienation. On the other hand, although in Palcy’s film José is ultimately successful in conquering the city, his grandmother’s death, the loss of his friends from the plantation, and his separation from his mulatto friend, Leopold, when the latter exposes his white father’s false ledgers that exploit the plantation workers are all artfully connected to his city life and weigh down his success for the spectator, who is left, along with the protagonist, to carry a sense of the price of his triumph; the idea of the partial scholarship given by the French government remains a sign of the mitigation that tinges the entire canvas of the colonial city and the promise it holds, leaving both the character and the spectator skeptical about a “happy” ending. More recently, the South-African born Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi (2005) does a remarkable job of creating for the spectator a spatial sense of the separation of the Soweto slum from the lights of the developed city. Over and over, the tragic young hero, Tsotsi, negotiates the broad strip of open land that lies between the subway station at the edge of the developed city and the entry point that leads into labyrinths of the slum. We find him, with or without his gang, trudging through the open spaces past

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the huge gaping abandoned drain pipes that house the orphan children (Tsotsi himself had been one of them, we learn, when he points out which drain pipe had been his). The repeated framing of the lights of the city that are either receding into the background or stretching out before him, places Tsotsi and his brothers in crime outside of the city and sketches the distance between them and its promises as virtually impassable. The vastness of the space and the dangers inherent simply in journeying through it to reach the city make that goal an unattainable desire for Tsotsi. We will become further acquainted with this film in Chapter 7. We will now discuss in particular the opening scenes of two contemporary films that are eloquent explorations of city space. Nour Eddine Lakhmari’s Casanegra (2008) showcases Casablanca’s seamier side, with the two young anti-heroes Karim (Anas Elbaz) and Adil (Omar Lotfi) exploring the possibilities it offers for a better lifestyle. The conception of the two boys is inseparable from their insertion into city space. The opening scene sets up this theme, and the entire narrative is about Adil’s dream of extricating himself from the clutches of the city and making a fortune abroad; Karim’s dream is to conquer it from within through financial success. Banlieue 13 (2004), by Pierre Morel, is set in the deprived Parisian suburbs – the banlieues – in 2010. It pairs up Leïto (David Belle), a young second-generation North African immigrant, with a white policeman, Damien (Cyril Raffaelli). The two must cooperate to achieve their separate ends – the former to rescue his sister (Dany Verissimo), the latter to de-activate a bomb that will detonate in 24 hours. Both missions put them against the crime lord, Taha (Bibi Naceri), who is aided by the enormous, if not always perspicacious, K2 (Tony d’Amario). One of the most remarkable aspects of the way space is configured in this film is that it can be invaded at any time. On the street, gangs can storm in and take over the very space any of the locals occupies at any given moment, be it indoors or outdoors. Even the police have to pull out. Doors can be blasted open, staircases become slides, the gaps between buildings are leapt across. The opening chase sets the pace. The opening shot of Casanegra is dramatic in a quite different way. We are mesmerized by the images of the city that the camera explores, slowly accompanied by haunting music with jazz elements by Richard Horowitz. Sudden cuts take us to angular streets flanked by high-rise buildings, windows of stylish clothing stores, a dog eating garbage before the two handsome heroes flash onto the dark screen with their dark hair and dark clothing. A Moroccan film noir, stylishly rendered in almost black-and-white tones, its only color comes in shots of Nabila, an antique dealer impossibly beyond the social reach of the besotted Karim.8 A short digression into the spatial and conceptual developments in Sembène’s 2002 film, Faat Kiné gives a quite startling insight into the limits of the kinds of dramatic reversals that made his cinema so powerful and delightful at the same time and of that magnificent intellectual’s recognition of those restrictions. Sembène frames his heroine in different parts of the city, often driving in her car and maneuvering through the traffic. Much of Kiné’s character is brought to us by framing her in the city, and even as part of it. We see her being respectful of other women as she waits in her car while a long line of them cross the street carrying loads on their head;

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at another time, however, amid parked cars, feisty and aggressive, she leaps out of her own car to pepper spray Madame Wade, a woman who has insulted her for having an affair with her husband; alone and desolate she walks out of the bank that refuses her a loan, and then has to accost her ex-husband who had abandoned her when she became pregnant in school (where he was her teacher). The city embraces the colorful Kiné when she is dressed in traditional clothing and meets her friends for a confessional talk at a café, and it provides her livelihood as the cars come in and out of the gas station she manages. Her authority at the gas station, her superiority over other women (such as the one who arrives with a “French” husband to pay off her bill), and her own success incarnated in her imposing suburban mansion, are all attached to the booming postcolonial city, wherein lie her hopes and the possibilities for her and her children. Chapter 4 treats this film in depth and has various images of Kiné in the city. The narrative privileges Kiné, who emerges as the future of Africa, her independence revered as such, when her son Djib gives a rather cheesy speech at the end of the film following a party at her house. Djib chastises the two fathers of Kiné’s children and holds up his mother as the ultimate example for the future of the nation. Indeed, Faat Kiné fulfils Jameson’s idea of the third world allegory, a notion for which he analyzed, unsurprisingly, a Sembène 1975 film, Xala (see “Third-World Literature”). However, the critique of capitalism that Jameson wished to highlight in the allegory that was not only distinguishable from but also contrary to Western forms of nationalism is not quite what we find in Sembène’s penultimate film. Fatou Kiné as a national allegory, or an allegory for the triumphant Africa, propelled by women’s courage and inventiveness, emerges through Kiné’s entrepreneurship in a masculine world that is tied to urbanization and capitalism, despite the critique of the banking system that refuses her a loan. On the whole, the spectator cheers Kiné on as she triumphs in the urban maze of Dakar, negotiating her way through the city with courage, style, and panache. And notwithstanding Djib’s criticism of the fathers and the general patriarchal structure that is critiqued as colluding with capitalism in most Sembène films, the heroine’s triumphs in this later film occur along with and within the capitalistic structures that the new city embodies. Although there are various factors that mitigate Kiné’s triumph, ultimately this film embraces the entrepreneurial possibilities that the new capitalist-oriented society offers to the heroine to “make it” and break out of the shackles that the patriarchal structure imposed on her all her life: a structure that Sembène has painstakingly examined, ironized, and denounced throughout his long career in filmmaking, particularly in its collusion with both colonialism and capitalism. In many ways Faat Kiné paradoxically becomes the antithesis of Sembène’s take on capitalist society while it is a successful culmination of his take on women’s issues. Kiné effectively participates in the structures that exist around her by triumphing over many obstacles, but she does not, for instance, propose an alternative such as we find in Sembène’s 1993 film Guelwaar, in which the youth overturn the vehicles holding grain sent by Western Food Aid because they believe that the solution to African problems has to be African productivity, or a reversal of fortune, as in Xala, where we find El Hadji’s corruption and greed, his lack of ethics, and complete egotism result in a series of

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humiliations which culminate in the beggars disrobing him and spitting on him in his own home after bursting in upon this “personal” space and ravaging its sanctity. Casanegra, for its part, is a feast of images woven together with the violence and poverty of the modernizing African city.9 Imagine a dark screen and quietly beginning music, with definitively jazz undertones. The first image is rendered by a still camera focused in a slightly tilted upward shot of three buildings rising up from the street, with the length of the two streets on either side – one giving depth of field while the gaining sound of the saxophone seems to swirl in the glow of the lights. The images that appear to come out of postcards are almost black and white. A cut to the left-hand building in a low shot captures a golden hue, while announcing “Sigma” (the name of the film company) at the top of the building while the word présente (“presents”) travels down the length of its neighbor (Figure 3.2a). What follows is a series of cuts timed perfectly to the music as our view is moved through the deserted streets of Casablanca while the initial credits are cleverly placed across buildings, merging into the city itself (Figure 3.2b). The facades are impressive, though there is a desolate look to the streets they line. One cut moves to come upon a scavenging dog, and the camera draws back to a long shot as the animal crosses the street. Another takes our view to the glass front of a store; white plaster mannequins glow, ghost-like, behind the display window. The title of the film “Casanegra” appears in illuminated letters, artfully superimposed on the glass to become the name of the store and yet reminiscent of the glitzy announcement we might still be lucky enough to encounter with excitement at the entrance of a cinema theater (where, in a time of declining audiences, they are still frequented). (Figure 3.2c). The old-fashioned air of the opening sequences evoke the cinema theater and would transport us from our own surroundings (if we were watching it, as is likely the case, on a TV or other screen that isolates us in our viewing experience). The opening thus potentially makes of us spectators who are nostalgic for the collective experience of the theater, something that, as today’s spectators of cinema, many of us might no longer realize is missing. Next a swift cut moves directly to the protagonists, emerging as it were out of the dark screen, one of them in a white shirt and tie. The beat of the music becomes urgent; percussion is added. The boys are talking to one another in Arabic and running away as they are pursued by police (Figure 3.3a); they head straight toward us and the audience we might have imagined in our nostalgia for the cinema theater, inspired by the mood of the film’s opening. A freeze frame on Adil (Figure 3.3b), whose face is contorted by pain, fear, and fatigue from running, announces his name and age and tells us that he is un chômeur (“unemployed”). This procedure is repeated for Karim (Figure 3.3c) before we realize we have just watched the end of the diegesis. The film continues in flashback mode: “Three days ago … ” The dramatic beginning, the gorgeous music, and the stunning images all embody the city, its streets, and its buildings, but more than anything else they reinforce the construction of the two characters as completely fused with them. The two heroes dazzle on the screen, and their youth and physical beauty are captured in unabashed love, as the city is discovered through their perspective.

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(a)

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Figure 3.2 (a) Low shot of building; (b) Long shot of curving street; (c) “Casanegra” on a store window, like the name of a cinema theater. Casanegra, directed by Nour Eddine Lakhmari, produced by Pierfrancesco Fiorenza, Omar Jawal, Ali Kettani, Aziz Nadifi, Mohcine Nadifi, Dino Sebti and Global Media, Sigma Technologies, Soread-2M, 2008.

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Figure 3.3 (a) Adil freeze frame; (b) Karim freeze frame. Casanegra, directed by Nour Eddine Lakhmari, produced by Pierfrancesco Fiorenza, Omar Jawal, Ali Kettani, Aziz Nadifi, Mohcine Nadifi, Dino Sebti and Global Media, Sigma Technologies, Soread-2M, 2008.

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Both young men are looking for quicker ways outward and upward than the ideals of hard work and steady rise can offer. Karim cannot abide the horrific smell in the factory where he has been given a job gutting fish. Petty thievery seems a better option to both of them. Adil dreams of going to Sweden and becoming a successful immigrant. The quintessential mafia-like thug (Mohamed Benbrahim) emerges like the city’s god – or, as it were, devil – entrapping the youth between the right and wrong sides of the law. The city is thus a space to be conquered and survived, even as it is the means of the young men’s escape. The youths emerge from boyhood with fathers who fail to provide examples of how to negotiate the city: Karim’s father is an invalid while Adil’s is a violent drunk who beats both him and his mother. Casanegra is, then, a rather grim reflection on the future of the modern African city, with the still-alluring dream of Europe planted quite firmly in the minds of its youth. At the same time, it is the European quarter of the city that provides the setting for the genre of banlieue films, which form a necessary dialogue with the images of African cities in cinema.10 These films of the not-city, or what is configured as non-city, the outskirts, the out-of-bounds, take up the dialogue, indeed showing what “success” might look like for youths like Adil. When Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine (“Hatred”) (1995) had great success at the box office, it demanded attention as a banlieue film, going on to win the Best Director Award at Cannes. Kassovitz’s black-and-white film also became emblematic because it emerged at a time when the French suburbs erupted and became recognized as a hotbed of violence, most often associated with “immigrant” others. The antiheroes Vinz, who is Jewish, Saïd who is an Arab, and Hubert who is black live in low income housing (HLM) and must negotiate their daily life through skirmishes involving drugs and theft while fending off the police. Disrupting the image of Paris that French films offered in dialogue with Hollywood romanticism, the chases and excitement (for example, Luc Besson’s 1985 film Subway) took on a different flavor, with the dispossessed and racially marked “others” claiming city space and making the plot of French films that were celebratory of the form and surface of the city (cinéma du look, [“films of the look”] as they were called) seem banal and thin. Others in the banlieue repertoire of the time were Karim Dridri’s Bye-Bye (1995) and Thomas Gilou’s Raï (1995). In Banlieue 13 Leïto bursts out of an impossibly small window, zooms down the side of his building, skids through corridors, dangles on a rope and re-enters the building, and runs the length of one building’s roof before leaping across to its neighbor, all the while showing off his highly developed musculature (Figure 3.4a–d). It is interesting to note the sharp contrast this presents with the way in which Adil and Karim of Casanegra traverse the concrete space, gingerly making their way from ledge to ledge (Figure 3.4e). Thrilling chases abound in captivating cinematography, all accompanied by the minimalist but exciting sounds of modern hip-hop music. In this film, the cooperation, followed by the suggestion of friendship and trust, between the banlieusard and the cop is not a simple solution to neutralizing gangs in the highly volatile suburbs. Damien is sold out by his superiors, who do not want to give him the huge amount of money Taha demands in exchange for access to the bomb. In the end, each man can only depend on his own prowess and cooperation

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(e)

Figure 3.4 (a) Leïto leaps out of window; (b) Leito scales wall of HLM building; (c) Leïto suspended above the city; (d) Leïto leaps between buildings. Banlieue 13 (District 13), directed by Pierre Morel, produced by Luc Besson and EuropaCorp, TF1 Films Production, Canal+ (participation), 2004; (e) Casanegra contrastive movement from building to building. Casanegra, directed by Nour Eddine Lakhmari, produced by Pierfrancesco Fiorenza, Omar Jawal, Ali Kettani, Aziz Nadifi, Mohcine Nadifi, Dino Sebti and Global Media, Sigma Technologies, Soread-2M, 2008.

from his “other” in order to escape. The fate of each is explicitly linked to the other’s knowledge of the structures of the city and his relation to them: the material structures and the power structures alike. Films like Banlieue 13 pick up the narrative of many of the African films whose protagonists (configured as both real and fictional) – such as the eponymous Lumumba, Adil from Casanegra, or even Jean-Marie Teno’s Sobgul (Paulin Fodouop) from his early feature Clando (1996), who manages to get himself to Cologne, and Diouana from Black Girl – directly implicate themselves as actors in “non-African” contexts as Europe’s “others.” At the same time, new African directors like Lakhmari and more recently the Congolese Djo Tunda Wa Munga, with his Viva Riva! (2010), show how city space is now becoming a global phenomenon with interrelated problems that connect urban dwellers across the world not simply to each other but to those who live outside the city limits.11 City space, as it emerges from an Africanized perspective, also seizes upon the architecture and revels in the form of its streets as film has

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always done. Yet its repertoire calls up the margins of the city, the underbelly, as it explores its contours with desire and hunger that the protagonists embody as they move through its spaces in diverse ways. If there are recognizably African cities, there are also Western global cities that are Africanized. Urban space is one that African cinema, of the persuasion in which we are interested, presents as highly productive, for study by its spectator from an Africanized perspective both politically and intellectually. It is also presented as a space whose areas of rapid development and change need to be assessed from beyond its boundaries. Questions of the distribution of resources, development of neighborhoods, education, integration of immigrants, are all illuminated through engagement with the experience of real and imagined city space in films conceived by artists with strong connections to the second-largest continent on the planet. In Tsotsi, the Soweto slum is presented as a prison for the young thugs whose hope reaches only as far at the end of the no-man’s land that marks off the space between their poverty and the luxury of the modern city (Figure 3.5a). The space is literally one of darkness that the camera establishes in an evening shot early on in the film. Natural light is put to use superbly to show the stark difference between Tsotsi’s dwelling and that of the little baby he will steal. The most striking aspect of the presentation of the two spaces is how much they each resemble a gated jail while being such starkly contrastive spaces; the first is barricaded with the barbed wire, the second with the barred gates. (Figures 3.5b and c). When we see the car that Tsotsi will hijack, it is arriving at a large home just inside the city. The gates and approach would be familiar to a Nollywood afficianado, although here we will become more deeply entangled with the story of someone who lives on its outside rather than its inside. This film is discussed in detail in Chapter 6, so without dwelling too long on the entire narrative, we can say here that, as in other African films, the city is highly charged as a space of desire and ambition, but also one of deep alienation and marginalization. Further, in pursuing this repertoire of African and diasporic cinema, it is strikingly evident that the city within art films (which hold out hope for advancing a form of ethics beyond or despite ambition) separates itself from the city of commercial films. The wide framing and long shots, as well as other means of giving perspective to the cityscape from beyond, below, and above, where subalternity breeds, is starkly different from commercial African cinema’s framing of the city. Long shots (for example, in the 2010 Gollywood film by Frank Rajah Arase, Who Loves Me) are constructed to give unity and coherence to affluence and justify the violence or other means by which it is seized rather than to capture contradiction (Figure 3.6). The striking views of the cityscape found in Banlieue 13 through aerial shots and wide panoramic views, like the vastness of Tsotsi, do not hold together the totality of the commercial film and so they are not often used. Ambition does not give Tsotsi legitimate entry into the city any more than it does Leïto; he does not have the goods that opened it up to José in Sugar Cane Alley. However, his space is far worse than the HLM buildings where Leïto grew up; and the sugar cane fields, though filled with blatant exploitation, also provided José with the camaraderie of drunkenness, Médouze’s wisdom, and his grandmother’s spotless hut. Tsotsi’s existence and the

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(a)

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Figure 3.5 (a) Wide-angle shot showing the huge gap between the slum and the affluent city; (b) Long shot of Tsotsi’s dwelling rimmed with barbed wire; (c) Long shot of Baby’s affluent dwelling with barred gates. Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood, produced by Peter Fudakowski and The UK Film & TV Production PLC, Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa, The National Film and Video Foundation of SA, 2005.

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Figure 3.6 Long shot showing unity of mansion, cars, garage, lawns and pruned bushes. Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood, produced by Peter Fudakowski and The UK Film & TV Production PLC, Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa, The National Film and Video Foundation of SA, 2005.

outcaste city space we traverse with him are far more wretched, and they hit one with the urgency of the present that the end of the film hammers home. The sight of the drainpipes which house orphaned children become all the more dismaying to us when the narrative reveals that the children are likely to share his fate: he had been one of them (Figure 3.7). The light at the end of the tunnel illuminates nothing

Figure 3.7 Drainpipe dwellings of orphans. Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood, produced by Peter Fudakowski and The UK Film & TV Production PLC, Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa, The National Film and Video Foundation of SA, 2005.

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but the barrenness of the no-man’s land. In keeping with Jean-Marie Teno’s sustained critique of the way the modernization of African cities depends on leaving behind the majority of its inhabitants, experiencing Tsotsi awakens the spectator’s indignation with the dissonances of the city as they are lived by the dispossessed who are excluded from its promises. If the Africanization of cinematic space first took the form of providing African perspective and reimagining space as Sembène did in such a revolutionary way in Black Girl, the contemporary cinema of Africa and the diaspora continues to engage in new ways of conceptualizing city space, in particular by staying true to the impulse to think through and beyond how space restricts and constrains subalterns. Such a task necessarily frames the city in ways that allow for a proper accounting of subaltern spaces in their contradiction to those of power, affluence, and cultural and economic capital. These films track the way the city subalternizes Africans and African diasporics in their historical specificity and contemporary circumstance by inventing ways of narrativizing the characters cinematographically through techniques that link them to the city beyond being its simple inhabitants. In Casanegra, the genre of film noir is explicitly evoked in dramatic street shots with breathtaking cinematography which seduce us through the aesthetics of color, light, sound, and movement while the narrative steadily develops the vortex for the Adil and Karim by breaking through the aesthetic seduction. In Banlieue 13, it is Leïto’s parkour movements rather than the mise-en-scène that aestheticize the narrowness of the ghetto’s shabby streets and the confines of its dismal buildings. The explicit link between parkour and Africa comes from the actor David Belle’s own description of his father Raymond Belle’s story of parkour or military obstacle training. He was influenced strongly by Georges Hébert, who gained his skills and agility when serving in the French army in Africa.12 David Belle’s own career as a traceur (a practitioner of parkour) began long before he landed the role offered to him by Luc Besson. Hébert’s idea of parkour and strength was linked to being useful. Through these means parkour is a physical and mental discipline cultivated without any specific aim of self-defense or aggression but for the purpose of being useful to the practitioner in the everyday environment. To soften the harsh corners of the HLM building, Leïto provides curvature through his big jumps and arcs and loops of movement. If Sembène had come to some kind of impasse after the huge strides he had made in thinking against the smooth or at least rapid adoption of capitalism as a logic by African cities, Casanegra and Banlieue 13 recast his irony, grand gestures of reversal, and opposition to subjugation by rethinking genre and establishing new ways of Africanizing cinematic city space. While these moves represent exciting developments for thinking about space beyond the cinema through fresh perspectives and conceiving of the contradictions in the city through the alternative ways of “looking” and thinking that these films suggest, they all remain couched in highly masculinized terms that only a handful of films in the repertoire proposed in this book manage to destabilize to any great degree. In Chapter 4 we will pursue some female characters in an attempt to tease out to what extent Africanization has allowed for feminization of character beyond the casting of female protagonists in key roles.

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Notes 1 In fact, the door latch has been visible throughout, reinforcing the fact that the camera view is from the inside of the apartment; however, the common experience of spectators, influenced by the consistent adoption of the point-of-view camera throughout the preceding drive and in the very dramatic pull back to a long shot just before when she looks up at the building, is one of surprise at being inside the apartment with the white mistress. 2 Note the reaction of the renowned American critic Ebert that concludes Chapter 1. 3 Tracing the presence of colonial architecture and power in African cities, Françoise Pfaff outlines how filmmakers developed the relationship of the vertical, high-rise buildings, government offices, and monuments, vestiges of colonial rule, and new capitalism with the horizontal, with street life and poverty as well as unofficial culture. See Pfaff, Focus 89–106.” 4 For the politics of screenings and on the making and reception of this film, see Harries 203–222. 5 For a reading of the two sides, Algerian and French through the characters of Mathieu and Ben M’Hidi, see Haspel; for the enduring place of this film in French film culture, see Caillé; and for very instructive information and thoughtful reflection on the sources and historical contexts of the film and its history in film, see Forgacs. 6 Eid and Khaled activate such an understanding of colonial space, and their essay identifies Fanonian thought as a theme in African cinema. 7 Plate 14 illustrates the lavish setting chosen in many commercial films. The swimming pool and imported car, the wide porch and the space afforded for the car to enter and park, the tiled yard and the exclusion of any evidence of the life of the city beyond the walls are immediate indications of wealth. 8 See Plate 4 and Plate 5 for more images of the European facades captured in shadowy film noir style in Casanegra and The Yacoubian Building (2006), which traces Cairo’s recent history and the development of a slum in the upper storage areas of a decaying luxury apartment block. 9 More recently, Leïla Kilani’s Sur la planche (2011) gives an impressive look at Tangiers through the stories of four young women, all of whom have big dreams. 10 It is not surprising that Melissa Thackway, who authoritatively framed African cinema in her book Africa Shoots Back, now makes documentary films that capture the city through the banlieue sensibility. See Plate 6. 11 Classic films that engage the landscape outside the city include Abderrahmane Sissako’s Life on Earth (1998) from Mali, Raymond Rajaonarivelo’s When the Stars Meet the Sea (1996) from Madagascar, Teresa Prata’s Sleepwalking Land (2007) from Mozambique, and Mohamed Asli’s Al malaika la tuhaliq fi al-dar albayda (2004) from Morocco, tend to place non-urban space somehow in relation to urban space. Jean-Marie Teno’s A Trip to the Country (2000) is studied in Chapter 9. 12 “What is Parkour?”

Part II

Character

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Models of African Femininity

This chapter on representations of women in films by African filmmakers is concerned with a concept of women-centered spectatorship (i.e., with privileging the voice, desires, actions of women in the films to follow how these films provide ways of thinking about and understanding them). Such a project puts pressure on the spectator both to follow very carefully the way the woman is positioned within the film as a character but also to think boldly about the meaning of such positioning for female and male spectators beyond the totality of the film.1 These two approaches will form the basis of our reading. The first involves close attention to cinematic form; the second requires willingness to think beyond it. We will follow three films in this project: Ousmane Sembène’s Faat Kiné (2000), Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen Geï (2001), and Moufida Tlatli’s The Silences of the Palace (1994).

Faat Kiné and Female Agency in Postcolonial Dakar Faat Kiné, the film named for its heroine, resolutely places her as a shining example of resilience and hope against a backdrop of a corrupt and male-dominated postcolonial urban society in chaos. Sembène is at pains to give us a multifaceted woman, at once impatient, calm, seething with rage against injustice, able to enjoy the little pleasures she has earned, mischievous with her friends, tender with a lover, and kind to the less fortunate. We first encounter the heroine (Venus Seye) on a drive through the city of Dakar early one morning when she is dropping off her children who are to take the baccalaureate examination. The first scene provides a fascinating presentation of the heroine. We observe her from the back seat of the car, where the camera is positioned, while she talks about the impending exam with her daughter, who is riding in front with her mother. Then we hear a male voice, which is startling, until the camera turns 90 degrees to give us the speaker’s profile in the back as he talks to the girl in front (Mariama Balde), who is his sister. He reassures her that Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, First Edition. Anjali Prabhu. © 2014 Anjali Prabhu. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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they have prepared well for the exam, and then they both get out of the car. We then realize that we have been accompanying Kiné in the car alongside her son Djib (Ndiagne Dia), and somehow sharing his view of his mother, as she navigates the Dakar traffic. Little do we know how crucial this view will become until the culminating scene of the film. For now, once the teenagers leave the car, we are made to wait patiently as the camera captures Kiné’s blue car from behind, placing us in the city traffic. From there, perhaps as a driver of another car, we are able to watch events ahead of Kiné’s car, where we see a line of women crossing the road. They have pots balanced deftly on their heads and keep the strict formation of their straight line as they carry their loads across her path. This makes us wonder if it is water they are taking home or if they work for someone – someone like Kiné herself, as we cannot but help being struck by the stark difference between the glamorously made-up woman in the car with whom, thanks to the camera position, we were just seated and the bare-footed women, each balancing her load on her head, as the day begins in the city. Next, we see Kiné speed off, driving her car deftly through the traffic to her place of work at a Total gas station. Kiné is the manager, having worked her way up, we understand. Flashbacks allow us to witness the difficulties she has experienced: in school she becomes pregnant from a relationship with one of her teachers who does not recognize the child and, in fact, has her expelled. This child is her daughter, Aby, whom we have just met in the car. We also see how Kiné’s father blamed her mother (Mame Ndoumbé) for their daughter’s predicament and how, in a violent scene, he threatens the young girl by brandishing a flaming log. In the scuffle he burns Kiné’s mother’s back as she intercedes to protect her daughter, Faat Kiné. These scenes from the past are edited in to interrupt Kiné’s ostentatiously successful life in bourgeois Dakarois society. Chiaroscuro is put to good use in the flashback to the scene of her father’s disapproval. This effectively and quickly highlights the dark shadow of Kiné’s past; the dingy surroundings and the looming domination of the father are juxtaposed with Kiné’s present, in which she has overcome these obstacles and we see her in the comfort of her own spacious, bright home where she is, literally, mistress of all. Incidentally, the film opens with an aerial shot of a street with the same women walking across it who will pass in front of her car (Figure 4.1); they move further and further away before there is a cut in to the point when they pass between the pillars of a large building complex we had seen in the distance in the previous shot. In fact, a whole minute before we encounter Faat Kiné in her car is dedicated to just following these women. The camera angle changes from the high angle to have them pass in front of the camera one by one as they make their way across the place (central square) to the next street where they will pass Kiné’s car. All this is set to music featuring the voice of the unmistakable Senegalese singer Yandé Codou Sène, who will figure in Karmen Geï as well. The women’s measured step, disciplined line, and graceful gait are all respected instinctively by Kiné, who waits patiently as they pass in front of her car; in contrast a harsh taxi, who must have seen the approaching line, accelerates to avoid the long wait he will have anticipated it meaning for him: two reactions that become sharply distinguished on screen.

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Figure 4.1 Aerial shot of women with pots crossing road. Faat Kiné, directed by Ousmane Sembène, produced by Wongue Mbengue and Filmi Domireew, 2001.

The directional opposition between the slow movement of the walking women seen first from above and then, after the cut, from about their waist level, following on to their perpendicular intersection with the path of Kiné’s car, is a good example of what the Soviet school called “intellectual montage,” and it offers a quick contrast between Kiné and the vast majority of her female Dakarois counterparts. In other terms, the edited juxtaposition potentially sparks in the spectator a particular line of thought regarding the difference in circumstances of Kiné and these women. Our encounter with the exceptional Kiné is carefully crafted from the beginning. We are presented from the first with this female protagonist’s multifaceted personality. The first fifteen minutes provide kaleidoscopic images of Kiné, whom we have just seen dropping off her children and driving to her place of work (Figure 4.2): she is at once kind yet admonishing to her disabled friend, Pathé, for the carelessness that caused him to lose the wheelchair bought for him by a collection she had organized; she is smiling in her acknowledgment of the woman whom she supports by frequently buying flowers from her; she is flirty and looks desirable and desiring when her single friend, Jean, stops by (we also learn that she has some reservations in considering his “proposal” because his widow was her best friend); she is regal in expelling the no-good father of her daughter; and she is cheerful but authoritative as she approves the quality of petrol delivered to her station. We also learn by an artful flashback hinged on the expression “Dehors!” [“Get out!”] her story with the man expelled from her office. Kiné tells her former schoolmaster, the father of her daughter, Aby, to get out of her office while she is on the phone receiving the news from Aby that she and Djib have passed their exam. But this commanding view of her is softened by the revelation that she can laugh at herself, as we see her do when her co-worker shouts out to her that she has, yet again, prepared to leave without putting on her shoes.

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(a)

(b)

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Figure 4.2 (a)–(f) Faat Kiné opens with a kaleidoscope of images of the heroine. Faat Kiné, directed by Ousmane Sembène, produced by Wongue Mbengue and Filmi Domireew, 2001.

Sembène’s attention to movement in different directions in his shots and his use of contrastive lighting work with didactic purpose. His deep awareness of montage theory associated with the Soviet school is unmistakable. The women who cross Kiné’s path intersect her trajectory perpendicularly in a striking angle that the initial bird’s-eye view of the walking women clearly establishes. Likewise, Kiné’s past in the dark hues are set in direct contrast with the white expansive interior of her present, the flashback being purposefully inserted in the montage to allow the consecutive light–dark–light to be established. Sembène’s method for presenting this heroine is didactic without being simplistic, while also being purposeful and direct. She rises like a beacon from the ashes of her past; she is a shining light in word, deed, dress, and manner, striking in the righteousness of her purpose. She is a nationalist, one who scorns the wealth and power of what a white man could bring a black

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woman, even proving it to be illusory. This is demonstrated in a scene at her gas station when she impounds the car of an impertinent woman who places great emphasis on the fact that she is leaving for France with her French husband and wants to pay in Euros. Kiné’s manner is regal and sometimes sardonic as she remains unmoved by these gestures to impress and insists on being paid in cash for her business’s services. Kiné’s story is about her individualism and personal triumph as these are yoked to her nation’s history, for whose future she allegorically shows the “right” path through her example. In the culminating scene of the film, Kiné’s son, Djib, makes a speech about the future of his country. This becomes a direct eulogy to his mother within a nationalist framework and a humiliation of the fathers of her children, thus reinstating the view of her as moral leader which was prepared so well by the initial car scene. In that scene, the spectator was “seated” by Djib’s side in the passenger seat behind Kiné. Kiné’s various triumphs are validated by the spectator in that scene through Djib’s praise. Repudiation of men’s lack of courage and dedication is a theme Sembène had developed in many of his preceding films. In Xala (1975), the African men come off looking no better than did the Europeans of his early Black Girl (1966). We will come back to this idea in greater detail in Chapter 5. Kiné defies conventions in bourgeois Senegalese society: she takes lovers, insults and even accosts their wives, needs no man to obtain material success, provides for her children, performs acts of charity, sees to discipline, and supports her friends – all in forging her own version of “family” and “individual.” If the French she speaks comes across as somewhat stilted, her ease in combining French and Wolof only serves to heighten awareness of the place that French occupies in postcolonial Senegal: it is the language of success, of business, of government – of the domain of men, one that Kiné can negotiate quite well on her own. Wolof is not only the most widely spoken language across Senegal, it is surely the lingua franca of Dakar in its own urban version. It is also, along with Fula, one of the few non-tonal languages of the region (a tonal language being one where the tones distinguish meanings). Kiné’s (Venus Seye’s) over-careful use of French almost makes it sound tonal. But Kiné does not shy away from Wolof, nor from reveling in what her culture affords her; thus, her speaking French and dealing with the domain of business in it only enhances her own sense of self. Kiné exemplifies, with grace and panache, a very local avatar of the notion of style termed dirriankhé in Wolof. As we will see, this aspect of womanhood is completely lacking in the radical character of Karmen. This concept evokes the “corpulent body” of a woman, the quantity of cloth in her dress, its density and the ornamentation, as well as the two-meter headscarf (Mustafa 25). The subtle interactions of women in ratifying dirriankhé presuppose value and attention to women’s collectivity as a forum for engagement, something to which Sembène pays special attention. Kiné gets together with her friends at a local café in an overt display of dirriankhé (Figure 4.3). We will have more to say on the nationalist framing of roles for men and women in the complementary chapter on men that follows.

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(a)

(b)

Figure 4.3 (a) and (b) Female sociability or dirriankhé. Faat Kiné, directed by Ousmane Sembène, produced by Wongue Mbengue and Filmi Domirev, 2001.

Karmen Geï: The Monumental Heroine in Global Cinema Context2 If Sembène provided us with the exceptional Kiné, the chosen mode of his younger compatriot, Joseph Gaï Ramaka, for representing his heroine in Karmen Geï (2001), his reworking of the Prosper Mérimée novella Carmen, is the “monumental.” We will first follow the way the entire mise-en-scène makes of the heroine a monument, which resists our desire for interpretation that follows particular paths of criticism.

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This invites further evaluation of the film’s political meanings that are much touted by critics. Statements on the film by critics and the filmmaker himself tend to cohere regarding the political valence of the film, primarily because of its unconventional, revolutionary heroine, and particularly when it is identified as an “African” film. We will see here that because the film proposes what I am calling a monumental (and therefore an impossible) version of female identity, it also eschews many moments of plausible feminine agency. On the other hand we will probe more substantively other possible venues for teasing out political meanings than those identified by critics, and the filmmaker himself, of the African specificity from within the film. Joseph Gaï Ramaka is no doubt a politically sensitive thinker, and his other films are a solid indication of the predilections of his thought processes. His So Be It (1997), which is an adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s play Strong Breed, tackles the conflict between the proverbial Western medical doctor and traditional beliefs in a rural Senegalese setting. More recently, he launched a direct critique of President Abdoulaye Wade, who defeated Abdou Diouf in the 2000 elections, with the film Et si Latif avait raison (“And if Latif Were Right”; 2006). Yet, while political intent might certainly be behind his creation of Karmen, it is interesting to probe further the limits of the particular mode chosen for representing the female protagonist in this film. Karmen is carefully crafted by Ramaka as an all-powerful heroine who escapes from prison, where she leaves her lover (the female prison guard, Angélique) to languish without her. Angélique, as a consequence, commits suicide. Karmen then takes a male lover, Lamine, who is presented as exceedingly weak in his maleness, which depends on his position as a police officer and thus vaguely calls up the national structure. Lamine is forced to take Karmen prisoner when she disrupts his wedding to the commissioner’s daughter by accusing Lamine and the establishment of corruption and inattentiveness to the people. Lamine later becomes her accomplice, and his fatal attraction to her prompts him to abandon everything in pursuit of her love. Karmen’s refusal to submit to him or to any acknowledged relationship between them finally causes Lamine to kill her. California Newsreel, the giant distributor of African films which focuses on academia in the United States, quite easily suggests that “since this is an African Carmen, freedom necessarily has a political dimension” (“Karmen Gei”). For Saya Woolfalk, reviewing the film for a New York film festival, Karmen uses “her sexual power to obtain not only personal pleasure, but to stimulate cultural subversion and incite political dissent.” A slightly less perspicacious statement offering a contrary viewing is that Karmen “never frees herself from the male gaze of the camera” (Garritano 159). This is to ignore the quite ingenious creation of Karmen by Ramaka, who does indeed avoid the standard moves that result in fetishizing the female body from intense masculinization of the camera’s gaze, which is often accomplished through use of close-ups. Ramaka also avoids the classic voyeuristic camera whereby the woman’s agency is thwarted by objectification. In fact, as we shall see, surveillance is explicitly defied and denied by his heroine’s agency both diegetically and cinematographically. Ramaka resorts to something different by privileging a particular aesthetic. I have referred to it as the monumental mode of representation

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for Karmen. The monumental mode, prosaically stated, “monumentalizes” the heroine, that is, it makes of her a magnificent, impenetrable entity, which, beyond disallowing recuperation by the cinematographic male gaze, simultaneously resists access to itself through discourses given coherence by feminist criticism, political engagement, or other such particular forms of rationality. So while this does relieve the heroine from the more limiting “male gaze” of the camera, we find her cinematic possibility actually remains constricted in other ways that become interesting. Even when a sequence develops Karmen’s irresistible sexuality as a form of power for the character, its meaningfulness as agency beyond the specific sequence within the montage remains brittle at best. Karmen’s character only seems to permit phenomenological description of a particular kind: description that restricts itself to the synchronic, that is, the moment of its occurrence. Whenever an attempt is made to link sequences through any type of logic, the linkage is thwarted in favor of an emerging image of monumental status, which disallows any other logic but itself. Thus, in the critic Lindiwe Dovey’s otherwise sensitive and persuasive reading of Karmen, when she tries to link together coherently, two dance sequences of Karmen’s – the first being the opening sequence with the female warden and the second with her lover Lamine’s wife at their wedding celebration – the distinction Dovey establishes (the first a dance “with” while the second a dance “against”) does not prove terribly meaningful when pressed further and placed within the totality of the film. In taking into account the story, the seduction of the uniformed Angélique is directed to a specific diegetic end: to overpower her authority in order to escape from prison. Similarly, the animosity Karmen displays towards Lamine’s wife proves completely gratuitous as far as any motivation, such as jealousy, is concerned. Her purpose is to insult Lamine and place him in a position of submission, so that he will assist her gang in their thievery. The two sequences are thus not as far apart in intent or with regard to plot and even cinematography as it might appear: the submission of the bride, Majiguène, is achieved and demonstrated in throwing her to the ground, while the submission of Angélique, the prison warden, is achieved by seducing her into leaving her chair and her role of guard to join the dance. In each case, the result is Karmen’s “victory” in the moment. More than anything else, this monumentalizes Karmen’s image in the moment. What I mean is that neither win leads to any development that one might term radical in any political sense within the wider diegesis: Angélique commits suicide and is herself unwilling to follow Karmen, so that dance sequence leads to nothing further in the relationship. In the second case, Karmen remains indifferent to Lamine and lacks any true interest in his wife, Majiguène herself; thus even the animosity developed in the second sequence just fizzles out. Nor is there any aesthetically understandable victory beyond defying the male gaze. In both dance sequences, cuts from Karmen to the other female character are privileged to establish the dialectic, which builds to the culminating two-shot. In each case the latter occurs close to victory, while both sequences work for Karmen to come off as the uncontested winner of the moment. We shall now pursue in greater detail the specifics of development of the monumental mode. In the early “competitive” dance scene mentioned above, between

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Figure 4.4 Karmen in the foreground. Karmen Geï, directed by Joseph Gaï Ramaka, produced by Richard Sadler and Canal+, 2001.

Karmen and the wife of her obsessed lover, Lamine, camerawork effectively presents Karmen in the form of an irresistibly powerful woman. Karmen bursts in on the nuptial celebrations dressed in a stunning bluish-white boubou that stands out against the darkness of the evening outdoor scene as well as her own skin. The still in Figure 4.4 is exemplary of the type of framing accorded to Karmen throughout the film. She is almost always in the foreground, sometimes with the background losing focus or as seen here with considerable depth of field. At this point, she insults Lamine for being weak, calling him powerless, to which his bride responds in a dance “against” Karmen, as Dovey has noted. In the ensuing “battle,” Karmen overpowers Lamine’s wife in a terrific scene of drumming and traditional sabar dancing. She ends up being arrested by Lamine. What is interesting about the frame shown in Figure 4.5 is the way in which camerawork mitigates the heroine’s helpless position. Karmen is bound in ropes and is being dragged along the street by Lamine; yet Lamine’s head is severed from the image, making him a foil in the foreground, the equivalent of an empty signifier. In the still he simply functions to hold the coil of rope in the foreground suggesting, as does much of the diegesis, that Karmen is a willing prisoner to herself rather than to anyone else. In fact, although Karmen is at Lamine’s feet, she commands the space, occupying the center of the frame and looming up against the length of the alley, which stretches out behind her, as if it were the train of her gown. Camera angle also reinforces the centering effect, contributing to the building of the monumental heroine. Karmen has to look up to speak to Lamine at the moment of the next still; however, the position of her neck and head suggests she is speaking to someone who is also sitting or kneeling, while the camera contributes to this illusion (Figure 4.6). It is also interesting to note the unusually acute upward angle of her gaze, which is essential if she is to look Lamine in the face – an effort that a slight upward

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Figure 4.5 Karmen center frame. Karmen Geï, directed by Joseph Gaï Ramaka, produced by Richard Sadler and Canal+, 2001.

Figure 4.6 Camera angle conceals physical positioning of actors. Karmen Geï, directed by Joseph Gaï Ramaka, produced by Richard Sadler and Canal+, 2001.

tilt of the chin by the actress would have rendered unnecessary. Instead, what is eliminated is the bodily acknowledgement of Lamine’s higher spatial position. At this moment, she Karmen is kneeling down in the street and speaking to Lamine, who is standing before her. Nothing in the body positioning or angle of the head of the heroine suggests he dominates her from above, while the adjusted height of the camera’s preferred angle does not adopt Lamine’s perspective to result in a downward-tilt shot but rather naturalizes Karmen’s physical position by matching itself to her eye-level. This produces what we might call a phenomenological lie that goes to the heart of the monumental image created by the film. It is only the lifted eyes that give away the perspectival angle between her and Lamine above. The shallow focus prepares for the

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(a)

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Figure 4.7 (a)–(d) Karmen/Lamine shot-reverse-shots. Karmen Geï, directed by Joseph Gaï Ramaka, produced by Richard Sadler and Canal+, 2001.

series of shot-reverse-shots between the two characters in which Karmen will once again come off as the cinematic “winner.” In the series of consecutive stills in Figure 4.7, the use of shot-reverse-shots (which occur soon after the wedding scene) privileges the powerful figure of Karmen. She is now Lamine’s prisoner and is being led away in ropes to be jailed. Although these shots oscillate between Lamine and Karmen, according each, ostensibly, the same space and position in the series, when the camera is focused on Karmen, what we see of Lamine is the side of his face. When Lamine speaks, the shot is reversed to capture him, while we supposedly see Karmen at a similar angle. However, it seems as if Karmen’s bare shoulder almost jumps out of the screen as it appears in the angle, providing not simply a view of her skin but a form of subtle continuity between the shot and its reverse. In fact, the line between the camera and her shoulder acts like a lever with the shoulder being the pivot point thus skewing the image in favor of the heroine while simultaneously displacing the image of Lamine in such a way that, although his white clothing stands out against the dark background as well as in contrast to the actor’s hair, skin, and dark tie, he is virtually pushed off-screen in the shots that privilege Karmen. A close look at the first shot in this series and the previous shot of Karmen (Figure 4.6), when she is on her knees in the street, will reveal that the camera height, and therefore angle, remains almost exactly the same relative to the actress regardless of her physical positioning vis-à-vis the actor (kneeling in the former or standing head-to-head with him as in these shot-reverse-shots). In the shot-reverse-shots, included in the frame is Karmen’s body from slightly below shoulder level to the top

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of her hairdo. Even when the shot moves to its reverse to frame Lamine, Karmen’s shoulder, glistening with sweat, occupies the foreground to the front left of the frame, providing an eroticized distraction from the figure of Lamine. These tactics allow the heroine to emerge through the mise-en-scène (rather than somehow be captured by it) in the form of what I have referred to as the monumental heroine. The most striking cinematic effect of monumental form for Karmen is that she rarely shares the frame with any other character. Privileging medium shots, when the mise-en-scène depicts Karmen with others, Ramaka uses constant camera movement, particularly shot-reverse-shots and cuts to eschew two-shots for the most part. This is in stark contrast to the two shots noticed in Anenden’s The Cathedral, where Lina is repeatedly framed in two shots (Figure 2.3) and the shot-reverse-shot is avoided except for in the dramatic church scene. In the rare moments that the frame includes Karmen along with another character, Karmen’s domination of the image is unmistakable. We have already noted the two-shots that occur at the victorious ending of each of the dance scenes. Immediately preceding the climactic lighthouse scene, when Karmen warns Lamine to be careful around her, the bright red knotted blouse assures Karmen central attention, while Lamine is not only captured from behind but is also wearing black. The one scene for a potentially meaningful alliance between the two women occurs later in the diegesis and attempts to equalize the power play between these two female characters after the dramatic dance-duel. In this surreal scene with Majiguène, the two women have a conversation in which Karmen is generous to her rival, telling her she is a “good” person and that she should embrace Lamine. They both wear striking colors, the wife a royal blue and Karmen, once again, red. This is an elongated moment when the frame is, in fact, shared. However, in this scene an unexplained stream of sand falls ceaselessly between the two female characters and contributes to its dreamlike quality.

Figure 4.8 Karmen/Massiguène screen split by falling sand. Karmen Geï, directed by Joseph Gaï Ramaka, produced by Richard Sadler and Canal+, 2001.

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This scene will initiate Karmen’s overt rejection of Lamine. The falling sand visually splits the frame in two, separating the two women and suggesting an impossible alliance. Although the scene seems to mitigate female competition, since it could be seen as an attempt at reconciliation after the competitive dance, the film does not manage to go beyond this to gesture to any female alliances, and the split frame is a faithful emblem of their uncompromising separation. In the brief scene where Massigui, Karmen’s musician friend, embraces her after the success of her gang’s smuggling enterprise, Karmen is framed by the vast ocean behind her while Massigui’s back is toward the camera. The shot includes a moment of spectacular beauty with Karmen flanked by the ocean and looking at her lover with charm and affection (Plate 7). In the following scene with Samba, her ex-lover and father-figure, shots and their reverse are preferred to the two-shot for the nostalgic exchange between the two, who relive their past in a conversation, thus framing them separately even in this intimate moment. This is followed immediately by a cut to Karmen entering her mother’s bedroom carrying a coffee. She wakes her mother by singing to her. Apart from two fleeting moments, the first when Karmen straddles her mother to sing and wake her and the one where Massigui is announced and the two women sit side by side and laugh, it is remarkable that they don’t share the frame in any significant way. This type of filmic separation complements building the monumental image of Karmen and reinstates the impossibility of any social and emotional ties for the character through mise-en-scène. In fact, Karmen stands as a direct response to the statement regarding African films of the past, in which, “often women in particular appear ineffectual, and incapable of standing on their own” (my emphasis; Ukadike, “Reclaiming Images” 127). For the same reason, the “feminist argument” that “nationalization” of women’s bodies occurs through sabar dance, which is advanced by Dovey, is even less convincing when probed further, as we shall see in studying more specifically the side of sabar that Ramaka chooses to privilege through Karmen’s dance. In any case, the idea of an actual female society beyond the enclosed and forced contiguity of their bodies within the prison is not raised in this film. There is no gesture to indicate any meaningful female society in terms of reality or myth. Karmen leaves the prison and does not organize her sisters, whom she stirred up through dance, nor does her energy carry the collectivity through to action within the diegesis. Therefore, a link between that group of wanton dancers and the mutual aid societies in Senegal, or mbootaay, that is offered in Dovey’s attempt at a feminist interpretation is hardly plausible with and through the diegesis (244–245). It is not surprising that Dovey in fact undoes her argument regarding what she calls the “nationalization” of the female body and its relevance to a feminist interpretation of the heroine by ending her essay with a claim that actually contradicts her previous position: that the film “renders the very idea of indigenization irrelevant” (251). Indeed, indigenization through the name “Karmen Geï,” which both Powrie and Dovey suggest, seems almost superficial in the end. However, Dovey’s conclusion is quite insightful because, in fact, the monumental mode of representing the heroine disallows any form of particularity, such as the national, that would yoke her to an established form of reality, being imposed

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upon Karmen. What this type of scrutiny reveals is how Karmen as character articulates “a visual style (as well as a visible content) of being that has not been allowed to fully become, that has to contest and overcome its delimitation” (Sobchack, Address 162). Thus we will see increasingly that Karmen emerges really as an alternative style rather than as a character in the sense in which she can be grasped in psychological, realist, political, or other terms. Karmen’s death becomes dramatic only in the knowledge the spectators of the film and the filmmaker share of her fate and in their anticipation of that myth and their participation in sustaining it – at the extra-diegetic level. At the level of story, Karmen virtually disappears: neither her death nor her burial is observed by anyone but Lamine, who commits the murder, and Samba, who buries her. Her death does not create even a ripple in the vague society evoked in the film. Samba’s care for her burial can be seen as some sort of redemption offered by the film and is suggestive of a return to the safety (and authority?) of paternal love for the transgressive woman. It is worth noting that the isolated burial is also true to the original story by Prosper Merimée, in which Don José buries Carmen after killing her. Carmen, in U-Carmen E-Khayelitsha (2005), a Xhosa filmic adaptation of Bizet’s opera by Mark Dornford-May, more readily fulfils the role of the “bad” woman who causes the man to act in particular ways, and the character plays on European ideas of deviant femininity, which were certainly part of Mérimée’s tale. Although it is well known that in various properly colonial contexts colonized males were often feminized to offset the colonizer’s virility, colonized females were also highly eroticized in the locus of power inscription by the male colonizer. Karmen Geï provides what is close to caricature if the characters are thought of in strict relation to reality in postcolonial Senegal, with Karmen embodying the female “other” in relation to the European (ex)colonizer, who, although not depicted in the film, lurks in the ideas of power and a hazy image of the inherited state. Yet, the film is not able to sustain such an interpretation because the direction it takes is one that is more universalizing of the actual notion of absolute liberty or individualism. The filmmaker remarks in an interview, “The integrity of freedom has been questioned more than once. In Bosnia, in Rwanda, in Tchechnya, everywhere on the planet. For basically political reasons, we have been willing to make compromises on the liberty of peoples, the liberty to live, to think. Karmen is anything but a woman of compromise” (Real 47). Although Ramaka uses the term “woman,” the film itself positions Karmen as a woman only in terms of an obvious physical iconicity, not in terms that can be understood through sustained reference to any networks of signification. In fact, Karmen’s sabar performances tend to include many acrobatic moves associated with the more recent influence of street performances of sabar by men. The opening scene of the film activates the idea of visual pleasure that Laura Mulvey reads as scopophilic (“Visual Pleasure” 8): here the male spectator is posited as the viewer through a long take of a seated Karmen in a sexually charged pose, keeping time to the drumbeat by the slapping movement of her thighs coming together and apart. This is disrupted as the shot is cut to capture the actual viewer within the diegesis: the light-skinned, uniformed prison guard Angélique. This

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subversion, or view from “elsewhere,” might complicate the stability of the expected male spectator in ways that have long been productively questioned by Teresa de Lauretis (Alice), and thus suggest at least a double desiring position for a potential spectator. Phil Powrie argues that “the spectator is thus ‘lesbianized’ by the opening sequence, and no amount of ‘late-night TV’ erotics can undo that lesbianization” (287). For Lindiwe Dovey, this “prevents” a reading dominant in Mulvey-style criticism, where the “male look” of the spectator and camera dominates. According to Dovey this sequence successfully “cut[s] the viewer out of the equation” (240) thus weakening (his) power. Powrie takes note of what he calls the film’s “subtlety,” the “purpose [of which] is to underscore the fissures in the patriarchal structures” (287). The scope Powrie wants to accord to Karmen’s politics is questioned by sustained attention to the cinematic form, as we shall continue to see. The viewer’s supposed diminished power in that particular sequence is reinstated at the level of the unity of the film, whereby the viewer’s expectation of the film’s ending is iterated as the acknowledged authority for the narrative. Powrie’s optimism cannot ratify the patriarchal punishment in store for Karmen. We should not be too quick to jump to the “lesbian” relationship at this point in the diegesis, even though subsequent scenes will reiterate such an interpretation. Moreover, the lesbian relationship, known to be an attractive element in the heterosexual male imaginary, does nothing to undo, and in fact reinstates, the spectator’s position as, in Laura Mulvey’s terms, having a voyeuristic relation to the female, eroticized, image (“Visual Pleasure” 6–18). In particular because this relationship does not truly develop further in the diegesis, even though Karmen confesses to her mother and Samba that Angélique is the one she could have loved, its gratuitousness at the beginning of the film actually serves to suggest male-centered scopophilia. We may note, in addition, that sabar dancing is, for the most part, a female activity in Senegal (Heath 92). The playfulness between women, who sometimes mimic the male–female relationship and often perform risqué moves that are pushed further when the group is entirely composed of women, is central to sabar aesthetics. In fact, in being true to the sequence of scenes, there is no immediate cause to unambiguously lesbianize the gaze until the point when Karmen and Angélique are seen in bed together. Still, allowing multiple configurations of the spectator, as we shall see, does not go far towards endowing the female heroine with a very wide range of possible motivations and channels for her character’s wide range of action. The quick excision (through suicide) of the woman who opens these possibilities is typical of the way this film eschews interpretation of female agency. Even if we provisionally accept the subversion of the masculine gaze early on in the film by means of the cut to Angélique’s perspective, the ultimate revenge of social order (through Angélique’s suicide and then Karmen’s murder) “insures a masculinisation of the spectatorial position” (Doane 85). Powrie rightly remarks that Ramaka studiously avoids the close-up in the case of Karmen but this does little in terms of the direction of realist representation or of placing Karmen in any kind of wider field of reference. The singular principle followed in mise-en-scène is monumentalization. The supposed decentering of heterosexual dominance that is present in the

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Western Carmen myth does not really go far in terms of developing the plot. Even though Karmen evokes Angélique well after the latter’s death, none of her actions in the story credibly rely on Angélique as a motivating factor. The choice of actors for Karmen’s two male lovers – one, the hugely successful singer, El Hadji N’diaye as Massigui, the other, Thierno N’diaye Dos as Samba, who formerly played a quintessential Sembène hero in Guelwaar (1992) and is known for his opposition to food aid from the Western world – is also compelling in building the monumental heroine. Karmen plays on – and outdoes by means of the plot, dialogue, and camera work – the significant presence that these male figures represent for a West African and, arguably, a more widespread audience that is in some degree familiar with the identity of the actors. It is very difficult to separate what Teresa de Lauretis clearly and succinctly posits as the “movement back and forth between the representation of gender (in its male-centered frame of reference) and what that representation leaves out, or, more pointedly, makes unrepresentable … ” (Technologies 26). A male filmmaker here succeeds in intervening in the myth of Carmen precisely by seeking out what the male-centered myth has left out, or rather made unrepresentable. In Karmen’s case, it would first be accomplishing her own desire rather than being a pawn to male desire. Yet it remains useful to recall de Lauretis’ point that “these two kinds of spaces are neither in opposition to one another nor strung along a chain of signification, but they co-exist concurrently and in contradiction” (Technologies 26). This elaboration is brilliant for its endurance beyond what de Lauretis was specifically writing about. It remains important to be alert to the possible contradiction between what is represented and what is rendered impossible in the actualization of particular representations, but yet to understand them to exist concurrently. In the case of Karmen, we have what we might expect to be unrepresentable – female desire, ambition, sexual liberation, and freedom from many of the constraints of society upon the defined roles of women. At the same time, the choices made for this representation fail to present her character as a political statement beyond an absolute, and thus impossible, fantasy. While the camera’s celebration of the film’s heroine continues uninterrupted, the story constructs an admonishment to the heroine for her ruthless individualism. In fact, Karmen must die at the hands of her lover as per the original story. Dressed in the sleek, red, European-looking evening gown, Karmen goes, of her own accord, it is true, to her heroic death (Plate 8). Like Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, she must die. Everything, then, is driven toward this end: from the character’s death wish to the spectator’s anticipation of it. This is heightened in the brilliant penultimate scene: a scene within a scene. We follow the subtle slow pan to the right in a long shot that captures the watching audience from the back of the auditorium through to the blind female singer (Yandé Coudou Sène) on the stage. A magnificent shot follows, which capitalizes on the shadows of the darkened auditorium to execute a jump cut to the moving white screen that then reveals Lamine’s presence as a shadow upon it. Cross-cutting between Karmen dressed in red in the wings and the singer on the stage is followed by a cut to Lamine’s shadow. Incredibly swift cuts ensue

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between these three while the drumming onstage becomes ever more powerful until the dramatic moment when Lamine and Karmen come face-to-face above the stage. At that moment, the music from below is silenced; no applause is heard. Karmen’s final scene is played out of view of the depicted audience. We hear her poetic song (in this case, transposed from the Bizet opera into Wolof in faithful and thus quite recognizable subtitles) as the actress is captured in a medium shot inviting Lamine to kill her, until he pierces her with his dagger. Camera angle is tilted downwards to focus on Lamine’s knife approaching Karmen. His agency in the act is bypassed by focus on the weapon and then by rapid camera movement upwards at the moment that it plunges into her body. The camera freezes at a point above Lamine’s shoulder to capture Karmen looking defiantly into his eyes; once again the central position is denied him, he is not granted it in any way, not even that of perspective, since the camera focuses on Karmen from an angle rather than from his vantage point. At this moment the music is heard from below once again, along with the wailing voice of the singer, as Karmen’s body drops to the wooden floor; the camera pauses on her body revealing, all around her, vertical lines of light coming up through the cracks from the stage below, thus reinforcing her distance from the stage and the society which never emerges in the story. Then come the ghost-like figures already seen in the marketplace scene; they fade in to be superimposed over the still body, which then fades out. One moving shot continues and traces the length of the alleyway, which is bathed in bright sunshine but punctuated by the shadows of the buildings on either side, capturing the “ghosts” with painted faces lining it on both sides. Karmen becomes one with the spectator’s gaze and seems to move invisibly as the spectator is transported by the swift pans that accompany the forward momentum of the shot producing a simultaneously forward and left-to-right movement along the length of the alley, from face to ancestral face, the “bounce” effect suggesting the moving spirit. We then fade into a long shot to establish the final context: we see crucifixes in the graveyard, the sea in the distance, and a black figure that we will soon recognize as Samba wheeling the shrouded body uphill to lay it to rest. Fittingly, Samba lifts up the body and walks uphill with his weight, finally disappearing out of the top left of the frame before there is a fade to a black screen, which will show the credits. The seamlessness of the music and the theatrical stillness at the moment of the heroine’s death heighten the operatic style of the ending (the well-matched music suggesting a dramatic and awaited ending) in the dénouement. These elements only serve to remind us that her death has been the driving force of all the action of the diegesis. What this does, consequently, is to disallow a plausible place for Karmen’s own agency despite all the more obvious transgressions of her character and the subversion of the original plot. This last and lengthy shot, which begins with Lamine plunging a knife into her, brings together the elements of composition in a dramatic moment of unity. The combined effect of the music before she drops to the ground and the affected stillness of her gaze, which match her own abrupt motionlessness, address the spectator directly in a language that is unmistakable for the reward of universal recognition it offers after any discomfort or alienation during the viewing experience. The singer’s sustained note and the dramatic arresting of movement to

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privilege stasis that together suggest a cosmic moment constitute the denouement of the myth of Carmen that the spectator shares with the creators of the film. The knowing that binds the spectator with the creators undermines the subversive possibilities of the character while paradoxically liberating the viewing experience. It is a moment when common knowledge unifies the spectator with the creator across cultural and linguistic divides by reverting to the original and well-known myth after various threats to its sanctity. The explicit interpellation of such an audience for “African” cinema is highly subversive of the expectation, which has framed African cinema since its inception, and the FEPACI (Fédération panafricaine de cinéastes) statements on it, that African cinema should be created at least ostensibly for African audiences (Ukadike, Black African Cinema 254). Moving away from the role of the storyteller or griot that Sembène reclaimed and which has, in some ways, trapped his films in a particular form of criticism,3 this film is daring in the way it rejects such a discursive position. In fact, the use of quite faithful translation of Bizet’s opera, in terms of the rhythm and the feeling of the music, the catchiness of the tune in the local Wolof music scene (subtitled in English), the adaptation of sabar dance, and the specific Senegalese and African context put the onus on non-African and to some extent non-Senegalese spectators to occupy a lesser-knowing position than real or imagined “insider” spectators. Knowledge of the myth invites wide participation and appreciation while various other elements simultaneously contest rather than simply establish the “local” or the “national.” If the local is to reside in the character of Karmen, her appropriation of sabar, her impossible alliances, her monumentality are all a space for a utopian conception of a new local that would come from disjuncture with what exists rather than simple continuity or correspondence with it. Blackness in this film becomes an issue at the extra-diegetic level, in placing the film within a global context because within the film blackness is natural and universal despite what critics note as the significance of Angélique’s lighter skin. Formulaically, she is black and desires Karmen, who is black. The actress, Stephanie Biddel, is, of course, Canadian, and once again, therefore, this might become significant at the extra-diegetic level in conceiving the globalized context of filmmaking and, particularly, reception. In these ways, what Ramaka does is to implicate the “globalized” spectator from home or abroad intellectually into the local precisely because it is ingeniously conjured up, but with a degree of deviance or inaccuracy that cannot “cohere” in terms of allegory or metaphor. This is one level of “politics” that criticism on the film has not touched upon. There is no extended female community whose support Karmen draws upon. In U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, Carmen is always in the company of her little entourage, and the strong bonds between them allow for the mourning of Carmen first by the women and then also by the men of the outlaw-gang who join them in horror. But in Karmen Gëi, neither Karmen’s short and barely perceivable closeness with her mother nor her scenes with Massigui and Samba provide convincing cinematic development of Karmen as a social being. However, the scene serves to enliven the link between the reality of the female characters, which is something the film itself

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does not really pursue: the vagabond subversive Karmen; the lover who chooses death over continued adherence to the rules of her uniform that signify her duty to the state; and the mother who provides great latitude to her daughter’s comings and goings. These moments might be seen as bringing to the fore failed attempts at (or, depending on one’s point of view, rejection of) female collectivity. Envisaging a female-centered spectator who links sequences out of order so as to acknowledge if not female sociability at least some possibilities for an imagined social fabric where differently positioned women might be connected makes certain demands on this cinematic reality that is the film. Even Karmen’s relationship with Majiguène, Lamine’s wife, would be imagined against the resolute separation that the screen image allows. These remarks are meant to be suggestive rather than conclusive. What I have suggested is that while the film presents a monumental heroine, it is by acknowledging and perhaps enabling the space of the spectator (whose globalized identity includes the African) that we might locate a potential politics that critics have been touting for this film. African cinema thus in this instance reclaims an African audience which, in its turn, retains its right to the global as much as it does to the local. We might go further to say that the film Africanizes a global audience that it implicates precisely by its resistance to easy correspondence with African reality even for the most recognizably “African” aspects. Yet, it is clear that the politics of the film are strongly anchored in a resistive mise-en-scène, one that resists our instincts as critics. Thus feminism or Afrocentrism or third-worldism or postcolonialism scarcely function as points of entry that the film in its dynamic but totalized form allows. It thus continues to be clear that female-centered spectatorship has to be born in opposition to male-centered filmmaking and spectatorial positioning, where the tactics misleadingly might include monumental framing of feminine heroines only to result in the joke being on women. Inserting female presence as interrogation disallows the male position from having the last laugh, so to speak, but in this case, it necessarily has to go beyond the image alone if it is to stop the image from functioning as an object of the male gaze. Put another way, the image itself, within the totality of the film, impedes a developed narrative of any kind. Pushing beyond the limits and the authority of the image, as we have done here, allows for pathways of resistance and interpretation that could become meaningful for African cinema in a globalized context within which it is created and disseminated. Taking this idea further, we may note that in Senegal the idea of female sociability has been evoked in the context of dirriankhé, in its reference to the seductive gait of Senegambian women, or at least their aspiration to that emblematic image of female attractiveness through presentation and attire. As we have mentioned, this concept evokes the “corpulent body” of a woman, the quantity of cloth, its density and ornamentation, as well as the two-meter headscarf, worn strikingly by Kiné, particularly in the company of her female friends. Karmen, on the contrary, has a very sleek body, and her dress is often minimal and simple. She never wears the traditional headscarf. In fact, the subtle interactions of women in conceptualizing dirriankhé presuppose

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value and attention to women’s collectivity as a forum for engagement, and one which U-Carmen E-Khayelitsha explores more explicitly. This type of engagement is something that is explicitly rejected in Karmen Geï. Relying as it does heavily on the sabar subtext, the film also bypasses the possibilities for representing and exploring feminine agency by overshadowing the taasu, or poem part of the dance tradition, in favor of the more dramatic sabar steps. Karmen’s politics are all about casting out accepted hierarchies and societal interactions, and not merely those pertaining to women, but in the bargain the social fabric of interrelationship is stripped back to the point that it is impossible for the politics to signify meaningfully. Laura Mulvey’s now classsic essay on the death drive also gains significance here. Mulvey argues, following some moves made by Peter Brooks in his appropriation of Freud in analyzing stasis in the cinema, that the different classical (and some avant-garde) endings – marriage, dying together, the final kiss … re-enact the stasis upon which movement in cinema depends as well as the ultimate desire to move toward death that Freud describes as the death wish (Death 71). In viewing Karmen Geï, the spectator already knows and anticipates Karmen’s death with her. That final moment of stasis that is her death is indeed a wish (and knowledge) shared between spectator and character. What I am arguing here is that the entire grand movement of the heroine from start to finish and her various transgressive, revolutionary acts all depend upon this known desire for death: without that redemptive death, it seems unlikely that Karmen’s monumentality could have been conceived. While on the one hand one might see Karmen’s death as inevitable because of the dependence on the myth of Carmen, on the other, we might see adherence to this part of the myth as neutralizing what could have been her most revolutionary moments. Similarly Karmen’s monumental screen presence is momentarily subversive in its enormity, perhaps, but it is unable to provide reflection on revolutionary possibilities for African women. This reaction, based to some extent in “realist” expectations, is best taken further through Fredric Jameson’s insight into the nature of utopian texts. Utopian texts, for Jameson, do not “tell a story at all,” because of a consciousness that the good society envisioned and desired cannot be known in its particularity since it is still in the future. To attempt to know it would inevitably lead to a form of repetition. Like such a utopian text, then, Karmen Geï, “involves the imagination in a contradictory project. [because, like those texts, it] aims[s] at illustrating and exercizing that much-abused concept of freedom that, virtually by definition and in its very structure, cannot be defined in advance, let alone exemplified [ … ]” (Jameson, Seeds of Time 56). For a feminist or female-centered interpretation of Karmen, the film brilliantly creates an Africa-oriented spectator, who is actually seduced into questioning the authority of the European myth against the film’s definitive adherence to it. In Kiné’s case, we might have the same sense of distance, yet the heroine provides an image that is anchored in a reality that requires less “work” in our engagement with the film. The same spectator becomes a utopianist in intellectualizing what is and is not recognizably African in this character, or quite simply in interrupting the monumental style that is Karmen to recast her subjectively as a desiring subject.

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The Silences of the Palace: Burdens of the Past for Women in Postcolonial Tunisia The Silences of the Palace is the most overt allegory of the three films considered here. Alia (Ghalia Lacroix), a beautiful young singer, returns to her past in a palace in Tunisia where she was raised as the daughter of a servant (young Alia: Hend Sabri). Since leaving, she has become the partner of Lotfi (Sami Bouajila), the radical nationalist whom she came to know when he was hired as a teacher in the palace and who is now the father of her unborn child. Unsure of herself, she is compared to her country, which, on the verge of independence, is at a crossroads in its destiny much as she is in the story. Alia has heard of the death of the bey (prince) Sid’ Ali (Kamel Fazaa) in the palace where she grew up, and she goes back to pay her respects. Like her mother before her, Alia has grown up as a servant, but her special relationship with the bey and his daughter grants her entry into spaces, knowledge, and experiences otherwise forbidden for the servants. Yet her ambiguous position between servant and family comes out in a poignant moment when she is with her beloved friend Sarra (Khedija Ben Othman), daughter of the bey, and a family picture is to be taken. She is banished from the frame, quite literally by the aristocratic women. This moment is significant in many ways. The filmmaker, Moufida Tlatli, links the women’s gaze in this film to their silence. Because Alia cannot legitimately protest, her silence gives her view of the same photograph a different meaning. The filmmaker has noted that the inspiration for the film came from her own mother, and the film is dedicated to her. Tlatli realized that she did not know much of her mother’s life, and became aware that this was the fate of most women. The silences around the women characterize their existence. A film shot with extremely long takes, it recreates an experience of time faithful to the rhythm of the largely unpunctuated days of the palace servant women, their endless tasks, and their lifetime of servitude. Yet the emotional tempo of the women’s experiences (particularly that of Alia and her mother) brings great momentum to the film. All of Alia’s childhood is presented in a flashback sequence with few returns to the present between the beginning and ending of the film, at both of which points we see Alia, beautifully dressed and captured in stunning frames, navigating life in newly independent Tunisia. However, in the shadow of that beauty is her past, her fraught relationship to motherhood, and the difficulty she has in forging a new relationship with Lotfi. Explicit links between the crumbling power of the French in Tunisia (which we hear about in reports on the women’s radio and via the introduction of the young revolutionary Lotfi, who is hidden by one of his female relatives in the safety of the palace) and Alia’s escape from the confines of the palace invite us to see these events in relation to each other. Unlike most of the other films we have so far considered, in which the major part of the diegesis involves the liberated period and includes triumphal aspects of the heroine’s life, Tlatli chooses to begin with an image of the liberated woman that quickly disintegrates. The first image is an extreme close-up of Alia’s face, with the

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frame capturing her from just above her chin to just below her brow. As she prepares to sing, we have a long take with an absolutely still camera. All movement comes from the actress’s face – for a whole forty seconds before the singing begins her painted lips part, her outlined eyes dart about as she looks around the room and blink below brows that if thick are dark and shapely; she moves her head fractionally this way and that. Then we are plunged fully into Alia’s past to the point at which we almost forget the image of the successful singer, until we are brutally returned to her present dilemma: will she keep the baby? The past and present are often strikingly and abruptly juxtaposed to bring the spectator up to speed with the storyline, with the scene moving by means of a swift almost invisible cut from the sunlit courtyard where Alia walks to visit her old quarters to the darker interior of the palace. However, to establish Alia’s own subjective position, the means by which she is inserted back into her past takes on a seamless quality, reinforcing the idea of its relevance for her present. We see in a high shot a close-up of Alia’s face reflected in a cracked looking glass she picks up in her old quarters (Figure 4.9a), after which she dusts off the mirror with her hand, confusing the spectator as to which is her hand and which is its reflection (Figure 4.9b), and then a sudden cut replaces the image with that of the young Alia (Figure 4.9c). In these ways the spectator is given a close vantage point from which to view Alia’s own psychological journey and her meanderings between past and present. Tunisia is often considered to have the most liberated female population of the Muslim world, with laws engineered and supported early on by Habib Bourguiba, who, after years in jail, returned to his country to take over the transfer of power from the French as President of the National Constituent Assembly and in 1957 became president of the new republic. His code du statut personnel outlawed polygamy and contained other pro-woman articles such as the right to divorce and the requirement for mutual consent to marriage in order to support women’s equality in the new nation. Tlatli, though well aware of this, shows how it takes generations for women to liberate themselves and imagine themselves differently so that the battles won can come to fruition in the practice of their everyday lives, how the class and gender oppression of the colonial era does not transform overnight with the liberation of the republic. Tlatli’s sensitive probing of the links and distance between three generations of women (and perhaps a fourth in the unborn child) allows us to think more deeply of what it means to be liberated at the individual level within the constraints of real-world culture, and how the past cannot be obliterated as easily as one might wish. The most stunning moment of silence in this film, cinematographically speaking, is the one that occurs when one of the princes rapes Alia’s mother, Khedija, in her quarters. Khedija comes from the kitchen to find him bending over her daughter, whom we have seen carried indoors after she had fainted or fallen asleep in the grass outdoors. Alia wakes up to hear the sound of her mother being raped; she presses her hands to her temples, and then there is a dramatic cut that shows her running toward the palace gates that seem to be swinging to by themselves or being closed by some automatic mechanism. In any event we see nobody but Alia, while the camera

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is placed on the outside of the palace, just beyond the gates, so that the spectator is somehow culpable, standing and watching the gates shut her inside as she reaches them, doing nothing, as it were, as they imprison her. While Murphy and Williams link this to the general silencing of women in the palace (177), the silent slamming of the gates, and the unheard scream that the visual captures so distinctively are experienced by the spectator as his or her own passive powerlessness as the shot brings us “face to face” with the character of Alia. We watch from outside the limits of the

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Figure 4.9 Seamless integration of past and present (a) High shot close-up of Alia’s face reflected in cracked mirror; (b) Continuous shot: she dusts off the mirror; (c) Cut replaces mirror image with that of young Alia. The Silences of the Palace, directed by Moufida Tlatli, produced by Ahmed Baha Attia, Richard Magnien, and Cinétéléfilms, Mat Films, 1994.

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(c)

Figure 4.9 (continued)

gates as they slam together, our necessary silence in the viewing experience feeding the horror of the moment. This moment is laden with significance because Khedija has told her own story earlier: she was brought to the palace at the age of ten, and her parents told her that they would return on Friday. Every Friday the young girl would run to the palace gates to see if they were there, and she would ask the gatekeeper who would only laugh. The positioning of the spectator so as to almost turn him or her into the invisible gatekeeper from the past adds a different dimension to the melodrama of the pathos that her story evokes. Alia sticks her head through the grate’s green grille, her mouth open to a scream which we do not hear, while the camera places us right outside them (Figure 4.10a). Next there is a zoom-in to her face that continues until all we see is her open mouth, still there is total silence (Figure 4.10b), and then there is a cut to the bright daylight of the courtyard where some of the servant women are sweeping the floor outside Khedija’s door. This rapid transition also releases the spectator from the tense engagement with Alia’s gaze and his or her positioning as a silent observer from a space of freedom outside the site of her captivity. Might it have been just a dream of Alia’s? This relief will be short-lived as, in flashback, Alia recalls the death of her mother, and her own pregnancy, in the ‘here-and-now’ of the film is viewed in the light of her memory of that time. Our silence before Alia’s terrified scream is somehow emblematic as we watch the film. Her silent scream is made disturbingly piercing for us because we are aware that it echoes her mother’s: we know her mother would run to the gates, just as Alia has, every Friday and would experience the same desolation when no one let her out and the gatekeeper mocked her. The fact that “we” did not witness the mother’s childhood terror and yet knew that Alia’s was an iteration of it, makes us somehow doubly guilty in our, albeit helpless, position as spectators. The subsequent

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Figure 4.10 (a) Medium shot of Alia at gates, screaming; (b) Zoom into close-up of Alia’s face, silent scream. The Silences of the Palace, directed by Moufida Tlatli, produced by Ahmed Baha Attia, Richard Magnien, and Cinétéléfilms, Mat Films, 1994.

relief of the everyday action in the brightly lit courtyard is then snatched away with the bloody scene of Khedija’s death in labor. Because of our understanding of the many forms of iteration the film exploits, Alia’s pregnancy is thus rendered precarious, delicate, and we feel it to be inexplicably fatal. To highlight Alia’s relationship with her mother, the film abounds with two-shots (a technique which captures two people in the frame) in which, typically, Khedija

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dominates the space. She is often positioned standing behind Alia or to her side, for example when she is bathing her, pouring water over her head, and admonishing her that she must stay away from the party upstairs. In this scene, when the mother tries to explain to her that she must stay away from the men, they are seen at the same level (Figure 4.11a). However, when Khedija senses the spark of rebellion in Alia, she immediately straightens up her body to take the knots out of Alia’s hair, and her position in the frame becomes higher than Alia’s (Figure 4.11b). Finally, she

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Figure 4.11 (a) Two-shot, Khedija and Alia neutral position; (b) Khedija dominates frame by height; (c) Two-shot, Khedija dominates by assuming standing position. The Silences of the Palace, directed by Moufida Tlatli, produced by Ahmed Baha Attia, Richard Magnien, and Cinétéléfilms, Mat Films, 1994.

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(c)

Figure 4.11 (continued)

takes control of the situation as she pours water over Alia’s hair and rises up to stand behind her as she does so (Figure 4.11c ). The film’s first image of Alia, the singer, in close-up, singing alone on the stage, is called to mind and retroactively given greater amplitude by this sequence of two-shots with her mother. A question comes up in this scene which is a recurring theme in their conversation throughout the film – who is Alia’s absent father? Alia repeatedly asks who her father is and Khedija avoids an answer. In one such scene, Alia becomes more insistent, criticizing her mother for not standing up for herself. as In Figure 4.12, a still taken from the scene, Alia’s image stands out, she is more brightly lit than her mother and wears a light-colored bodice that contrasts with the black that her mother is wearing. She gives the camera a perfect profile shot as she turns to look at her mother. Meanwhile, although she might be slightly higher in the frame, Khedija is positioned at a subtle angle so that she is not parallel to the camera but angled slightly away from it. She also has greater shadow upon her face and her black dress seems to move her further back, although both she and Alia are in the foreground. There is considerable depth of field in this shot, with the lamp at the far wall behind them, which serves to provide symmetry and balance, showing that the distance to lens for the two characters is about the same. As it is positioned at exactly the midpoint between the characters it also testifies to their equal occupation of the foreground space in the frame. Nevertheless, Alia’s clear domination prepares for the next shot where she will thrust her hand into the mirror in her frustration (“Who is my father?”) and shatter it. She will pick up a piece of the same mirror years later when she returns to the palace at the time of the bey’s death in the scene occurring earlier in the narrative that we have considered above. Within the timeframe of the flashback, Sarra’s wedding, at which she has asked Alia to sing, is also imminent. Alia’s beautiful voice replaces her

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Figure 4.12 Two-shot: Alia dominates through light and position. The Silences of the Palace, directed by Moufida Tlatli, produced by Ahmed Baha Attia, Richard Magnien, and Cinétéléfilms, Mat Films, 1994.

mother’s dancing body in its service to the beys. So we think. The wedding scene is dramatic because Alia will sing a song of independence utterly disturbing to the aristocrats, whose power had become highly dependent on that of the colonial rulers. For their part, the colonials depended on the beys, once rulers in their own right, to administer their colony. Notwithstanding the violence of the broken mirror and Alia’s bleeding hand and despite Alia’s sharp criticism of her mother for failing to resist the fate that made a servant of her, the scene ends with mother and daughter embracing. It will be their very last embrace. For their part, the colonials depended on the beys, once rulers in their own right, to administer their colony. Alia’s singing of the revolutionary song causes the guests to walk out of the wedding; and as she stands on the dais, the scene cuts to Khedija’s bloody death. Leaving the stage, Alia runs to her mother’s quarters to find her dead. A swift cut brings us back to the present with Alia in conversation with one of the servants who witnessed her mother’s death. While focusing on the particular relationship of Alia and Khedija, cinematography weaves together the dynamics that we anticipate and absorb beyond the spoken words and the images of these women. The movement between past and present in the film brings heightened awareness of time within the viewing experience. This is done, as we have seen, by repeating the feeling of dread, interspersing it with contrastive relief or relaxation. While this falls in quite well with melodrama, this film does not grant the spectator that genre’s formulaic resolution. There are not the happy tears of a melodrama’s conclusion, but rather, the spectator is left with an ambiguous, open-ended and anti-climactic final scene. Instead, what remains powerful are the feelings, repeated within the span of our viewing experience, of anxiety, helplessness,

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and doom. Thus, while in the plot Alia relives Khedija’s life, in the filmic experience, we live Alia as if reliving Khedija (though we do not see that life – we do not, for instance, witness her running to the gate), so there is a multiplication of signification; and we anticipate living Alia as we lived Khedija especially with regard to the conniving fatality within the plot added by the pregnancy. This anticipation of what has not happened and experiencing of something as if it has already been experienced sharply makes the point that temporality is the only means of conveying time within the cinematic apparatus. Because the answer to what Alia does with the unborn baby is left open at the end of the film, the fact that the film frustrates the very experience that it had been preparing us for as spectators, makes the ambiguity of the unresolved end particularly significant in connecting the experience of spectatorship with the experience of the same spectator’s self beyond it. For a Tunisian spectator, particularly one connected to contemporary Tunisia, going beyond the confines of spectatorship, this continuity would be a moment of empowerment which could break the circumstantial and cultural silence confining women. In The Silences of the Palace, the entire society of domestic servants in the palace is also beautifully captured through various sequences both in their space in the lower level of the palace and in the dangerous forays upstairs that the women must make in serving their masters. Alia’s friendship with Sarra and the favoritism that Sid’ Ali betrays for her (“Is he her father?” is the already answered question of the entire film), places her quite precariously between the servants and the aristocrats. In fact we never have an answer within the narrative of the film because it really does not matter. Whether Sid’ Ali was indeed her biological father or one who protected her within the palace walls, what there was between them was never sufficient to become a real relationship. Likewise, the film seems to say, the colonial government could never offer real leadership to Tunisia because its motivations could not coincide with the people’s aspirations. Independence sweeps the nation, and Alia escapes the life of the palace with the young revolutionary Lotfi. The film begins with an extreme close-up of Alia singing in a commercial venue after which we see her living with Lotfi. We learn that she is pregnant and that he wants her to terminate the pregnancy. Alia then receives the call from the palace which leads us through the whole story. The final scene returns us to her predicament. In a voice-over scene, Alia “thinks” about her baby and sees it as a reconnection with her mother, against Lotfi’s wishes. Alia’s own desire is that it will be a girl whom she can name Khedija. The two actresses, Ghalia Lacroix (as the grown Alia) and Hend Sabri (young Alia of the palace) bring to the film an exciting, dynamic play between the two periods in Alia’s life. In general, feminist criticism in film theory has focused on the techniques by which images and representation of women are manipulated in cinema – the angles used, the framing – all of which work to accord with socially recognizable roles of submission, and the way these procedures and techniques have traditionally reinforced a more passive role for women in the totality of the film story. Of course, the ultimate point of reference is the patriarchal reality of women beyond the screen with which these representations intersect, which they influence and defy, and

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from which they are drawn. Among the pioneers in this field, Laura Mulvey has shown that women in Hollywood films are fetishized and the spectator is often given a voyeuristic position – both of which features result in women appearing as objects rather than subjects of the action and representation. A fetish is an object to which great significance is given; it stands for something other than what it is and is often imbued with religious or mystic qualities. Fetishizing of the woman in cinema has often been accomplished through objectification by the camera’s focus on parts of her body, dissociating them from the totality of her “self,” thus disallowing her presentation as a conscious thinking subject capable of full agency. Voyeurism is also related to the same type of disempowerment in that the gaze (often coinciding with that of the male character but thus, in the coincidence of the spectator’s view of the woman with that of the camera, implicating a male spectator) is able to penetrate her spaces to capture her visually and observe her to the point that her acts are all preempted in some way by the presence of this “looker.” These concepts come to cinema theory via psychoanalysis and are linked to sexual difference and the underlying idea that the male child thinks of the mother as a castrated male, all in fear of the power that she actually wields. Related to this is the notion of “masquerade,” whereby the female participates in this feminizing process of submission, cinematically feminizing the character on screen, something that has been substantially theorized in relation to melodrama. Teresa de Lauretis has shown that the significance of feminist criticism for film studies lies in resistant readings against male-centered filmmaking, which would do more than simply give the female a part in the oedipal story. Mary Anne Doane is known for her thinking about masquerade as both a form of submission but also a means of wielding power in that the woman enacts the meek role of submission in order to conceal her desire for mastery, and therefore the femininity seen on the screen acquires a paradoxical twist. Laura Mulvey’s early work is, in some ways, constructed against the American feminist critics for whom the essential truth of women was covered by a patriarchal reduction that dichotomized women as whores or virgins. Claire Johnston suggested early on that the distinction between entertainment film and political film was not useful when constructing a feminist theory and practice in cinema. Likewise Mulvey made headway in focusing on the relations forged in the process of viewing between the screen and the spectator as the latter engaged in “scopophilia” or, literally, pleasure in looking.4 Women, these early feminists showed, were either marginal or dangerous, objectified or glorified, but in all instances disempowered across genres, thus making feminist praxis an urgent necessity in cinema. Drawing from both Mary Anne Doane and Teresa de Lauretis, it has been possible to understand the functioning of women within film beyond the reductionist possibilities that strict adherence to psychoanalysis imposed. Similarly, although Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking work relied quite heavily on psychoanalysis, her interest in the spectator, not as yoked to this or that identity but in terms of how the relationship between screen and viewer was constructed processually, opens up the notion of a feminist criticism to great possibilities today. Both Foucault’s theory of power as

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dynamic and Althusser’s notion of ideology as structured by social and institutional practices have influenced these and other early feminists writing on cinema. These central ideas continue to have great potential to explode the limits that the image appears to impose by explicitly placing it within the networks of signification and materiality that are, to use Foucauldian terms, which he derived most notably from Kant, its condition of possibility. That is, when we see the image of a woman on the screen accomplishing a particular type of signification within the story or narrative, a feminist project would require us to push the boundaries of the image to seek to understand how the viewer’s desire is called up in different directions by that image; to tease out in what specific ways the signification is attained by more traceable elements identifiable within the techniques that created it; and beyond that, to study how existing images, realities, and fantasies enter into the interaction between the image and differently situated potential viewers. It is more than evident that – given that Africans, both male and female, were objectified in cinematographic reality as it came into existence as a new medium – these types of investigations have been central to the cohort of filmmakers who created African cinema. The materiality of the film, the specificity of the story, the explicit or implicit pieces of identifiable reality, all of these can only be conceived in a relationship with a viewer. We will see, as these and other feminist critics knew very well, that although it is not so simple to resist hegemony or forms of domination that become naturalized, we can still make progress by exploding silences in order to expose hidden meanings that suddenly appear clear and evident. Many projects originating at the World Bank or the World Health Organization as well as the efforts of numerous NGOs and governments are focused on improving the quality of life for women; but the truth is that women’s desires within their everyday contexts have been neglected historically. What better place to understand women’s desires than in the cinematic medium where desire becomes central to creating meaning: from the desire of the characters to the unconscious and conscious desires of the viewer? The Silences of the Palace offers, in terms of narrative endings, a similar type of satisfaction as to that of Faat Kiné. These films provide resolutions in terms of political thought processes rather than finished plots for their respective heroines, who can be situated within a real-world framework. In the case of Kiné, it is suggested by a close-up of her feet after the celebrations. Her manicured toes wriggle with pleasure as she prepares to get together with Jean, who meets with her children’s approval. She chooses to enter into a relationship with him, while her son shames his father and the father of his half-sister Aby before eulogizing the noble struggle he recognizes in his mother. In Alia’s case, her escape from the palace at the time of her nation’s independence is accomplished in the company of the revolutionary Lotfi. However, Lotfi’s protection and love only go so far. Her decision to keep her child has to be her very own, and it does not implicate a happy ending but rather anticipates, in all likelihood, a lifetime of struggle, as the implicit suggestion is that her lover will not accept her decision. Karmen’s end, dying at Lamine’s hands, could be seen as the outcome

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of patriarchal power crushing female agency by returning to the terms of the myth. Yet its very gratuity ends up debating the myth, because the fact that Karmen does not struggle, indeed her agency in the physical gesture of volutantarily going into Lamine’s knife, opens up possibilities for escaping the patriarchal view that the end might seem to offer. Although the women in these films lend themselves to allegorical readings, entering into the spectator positions opened up by the films allows for a continuous intellectual and affective engagement with the nexus of meanings generated by these fictional women. Bringing Africa in specificity to the spectator through image, language, dress, demeanor, language, and cultural coding, these female characters open themselves up to the spectator’s imagination and appeal to his or her intellectual acuity. Each heroine in the totality of the film in which she figures is a thorough theorization of a form of being and self-representation as well as of contemplation of possibility. The “answers” to some of the questions raised are purposefully withheld because, in Levinas’ words, “the not-yet-being is not to be ranked in the same future in which everything I can realize already crowds, scintillating in the light, offering itself to my anticipations and soliciting my powers.” Each film places a notion of what African womanhood, as it has emerged through historical change, struggle, and creativity, offers the world, and women in particular, in thinking about what being “woman” in the world might mean. As Adorno writes of the iconic and beautiful woman’s irresistability, “the gesture of irresistibility remains when the reality has passed away; magic perishes the moment it ceases to stand for hope and settles in domesticity” (171). Faat Kiné brings the spectator to contemplate a female heroine in African postcolonial specificity as one who can work the system already in place. Surprisingly, Sembène seems to favor for women a revolutionary role in conquering and entering spaces from which they have been excluded rather than explosion of those spaces. Thus, this film, made toward the end of his career, departs from the revolutionary stance of reversal or revision that his earlier films privileged.5 In other words, the film accepts the terms of modernity and explores the opportunities for women in African contexts that still remain largely unexploited in the new roles it offers them. Silences presents the woman as an entrapment of her history, both her personal, biographical history and the larger historical framework from which she emerges into her present. Ultimately, African spaces in Tunisian specificity and the many aspects it shares with much of North African culture, are constrictive to women’s creativity in forging roles for a version of modernity, despite the dents made by women’s actions to transform it from within. Karmen is created in collaboration with spectatorship as a utopian notion of freedom that defies gender. As a female identity the character challenges “us” (whether the topography of the land, the spaces of Gorée and Dakar, Senegalese sabar dancing, or the feel of the market or of gatherings in the capital are familiar or not) to imaginatively configure a Karmen in all kinds of alternate versions because she is not entrapped into providing authentic representations of herself as reality in Senegalese specificity. By the same token, the film does

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not allow the spectator to legitimately take her as a proposition specifically regarding female emancipation in contemporary Dakar. Whether we think of these heroines through the more realistic and historically specific Alia or the realistic/utopian Kiné, or even the monumental fantasy of Karmen, who is ultimately tragic, the desires emanating from possible African “women” are complex in their entry into filmic spaces and the desires they call up in variously situated and dynamically configured spectators, far from simple. The web of references that enter into play in following these heroines allows us to track the movement of our own thought beyond the idiosyncratic and purely personal to a world of associations and deliberations intertwined with our experience of the film and the world.

Notes 1 Although Karmen Geï (2001) has scenes depicting sexual connection between two women, homosexuality as a theme in film or as a way of life is not explored. African cinema has had severe censure with regard to any hints of homosexuality as many African countries have stringent laws explicitly outlawing it. Considered one of the “success” stories by the West, even Ghana has until very recently taken an explicit position against homosexuality as an accepted practice. See “Ghana refuses,” President Atta Mill’s statement on the question when under pressure from the British prime minister David Cameron to recognize homosexual rights or risk restrictions on British aid to Ghana. See also the South African film The Man Who Drove With Mandela (1999) on Cecil Williams, whose chauffeur Nelson Mandela posed as in order to be able to move around and participate in ANC activities during apartheid; they were arrested together in 1962. The film explores William’s identity as a gay man. South African film history includes many more films depicting homosexuality than does that of the rest of the continent, which few include Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria … Why?(1979) and, more substantively, Mohamed Camara’s Dakan (Destiny; 1997). The lone Man of Ashes (1986) by the Tunisian filmmaker Nouri Bouzid covered substantive ground on the issue, but there is no continuity or dialogue because of the difficulty of the topic. Particularly from the late 1970s, after television broke into South Africa, more and more options for funding became available to South African filmmakers than the Afrikaans-dominated Suid-Afrikaanse Teaterbelange Beperk, which had had a virtual monopoly in the preceding decade. For an in-depth analysis of homosexuality in South African cinema, see Botha “Homosexuality.” 2 Much of the material from this section was first published as the article “The ‘Monumental’ Heroine: Female Agency in Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen Gei,” by Anjali Prabhu, in Cinema Journal 51.4 (2012): 66–86. Copyright © 1997 by the University of Texas Press. All Rights Reserved. 3 Sembène’s iconic presence as the African griot also weds his films to a particular orientation in criticism, whereby they seem closer to social realism as it appears in Hindi cinema of the 1940s and 50s rather than with the highly formalist films of the Soviet 1920s. See Wexman 392; Murphy 52–53; Pfaff, “Sembene”194–200; Sembène 16.

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Mulvey further linked the consumption of the image, particularly that of woman, in the cinema as spectacle to consumption in late capitalism (Mulvey “Some Thoughts”). Although in his last film, Moolaadé (2004), Collé is a revolutionary heroine, it is in the enlightened Ibrahima that Sembène decided to place the ultimate burden for change in the village: Ibrahima will be the one who finally stands up against the genital mutilation of girls and announces that he will marry Amasatou, Collé’s daughter who has been protected from the practice by her mother’s courageous refusal against pressure from the entire village.

5

African Masculinity “We Don’t Need Another Hero”1

If, as we have seen, the idea of allegory has had continuing relevance for the representation of women in African cinema, the same is true for that of manhood. Representations of African manhood in cinema tend to return to the material conditions within which such an identity must be forged anew. The moment of independence was naturally an important one in terms of what African manhood (particularly evaluated in terms of visible, economic success) could mean. Masculinity in former colonies has been historically, and inevitably, linked to taking over the new nation and, in many ways, replacing the models of visible manhood that colonialists represented primarily from administrative positions. This aspect is explicitly dealt with in Sembène’s Xala (1975), which is an acerbic criticism of early postcolonial African masculinity. The fact that a common pickpocket replaces the pathetic anti-hero El Hadji Abou Kader (Thierno Leye) when he is voted out of the chamber of commerce by his own comrades in thievery drives home Sembène’s point that there is a lack of indigenous leadership in the domain of men after colonialism. African manhood, according to this film, is in serious crisis both on the national stage and in the more intimate scene of the family. It is also worth noting that, in general, African manhood in the cinema is linked quite tightly to heterosexual possibility, while the possibilities within homosexual or bisexual relationships are few and far between. The highly visible example of Destiny (1997) really addresses the more simple issue of coming out and how fraught that remains in the African social setting. The many problems that its director, Mohamed Camara, had to face to complete the film once the content became known suggest an avenue that African cinema, in both its conceptual and its practical directions, as a living cultural form, has yet to negotiate. Nouri Bouzid’s Man of Ashes (1986) provides a thought provoking situation in order to contemplate the bonds that threaten heterosexual identity and sociability. Although Karmen Geï (2001), discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4, brought numerous tribulations for its indefatigable director, Joseph Gaï Ramaka, the film does not really allow us to pursue

Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, First Edition. Anjali Prabhu. © 2014 Anjali Prabhu. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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through its diegesis how homosexuality might be actualized socially and interrupt the societal machinations of patriarchy. Sembène’s reasons for viewing women as a more promising space for revolutionary thought seem to go beyond mere cinematic technique. Women emerge as natural leaders who take the experience of injustice arising from patriarchal power that prevails within the family and, completely naturally, become agents against it out in the world of public action as well. In Xala, Sembène does not provide us with an answer in the form of a heroine breaking out of the private sphere and into the public scene of corruption, which he carefully crafts within the boardroom and between the steps of the Chamber of Commerce and the public space of the square and the streets of Dakar. However, El Hadji’s daughter, Rama (Myriam Niamg), takes on a highly political position. She answers her father in Wolof and makes his pseudo-French ways seem out of touch with reality. When Rama visits her father at his workplace a dramatic shot frames her traditional boubou with a map of Africa that is perfectly matched in color, making her a spokesperson for a pan-African rejection of European sham that is incongruous in African reality. Sembène makes clear that his commitment, while it rises out of specific situations in Senegal, is directed to the new African states and their united future as they emerged differentially out of colonialism. If (possibly) powerful, intelligent women represent and call up African solidarity in African art films, the failure of African men makes of pan-Africanism an immense still mostly untapped possibility. First appearing as a novel by Ousmane Sembène in 1973, Xala took cinematic form and was released in 1975. In the film, Sembène very quickly sets the contexts with utmost clarity: the exchange of power between Europeans and the new African cadre. The film begins with a dramatic opening of African drumming and dance on the streets of Dakar with cuts to the boardroom of the Chamber of Commerce where symbols of European power (busts and photographs) are being removed and placed outside on the steps of the imposing building for the people to witness. Within, the new chairman places his own photograph on the mantle, while soon the African men around the table will receive briefcases full of banknotes handed over to them by the white French intermediary, whose servile nature masks real power – the power of money. Sembène efficiently communicates to us that the grand and dramatic exchange of power is only play. Quickly establishing the context as the neocolonial period, and linking that power first to France in this film, Sembène will be devoted, throughout his career, to a critique of African dependency on former colonial and neocolonial organizations, the most direct example being through the theme of “food aid” in Guelwaar (1992). The most emblematic and unforgettable image undoubtedly remains the freeze frame with which Sembène’s Xala ends. The dwarves who have entered El Hadji’s home surround him and spit saliva and bile on his body, which has been stripped of its clothing. The sound continues after the frame is frozen (Figure 5.1). The image is powerful, violent, and devastating because its power exceeds the simple idea of retribution and because in it the act of retribution seems to continue with the sound of the spitting even after the end of the film is signaled by the cessation of movement.

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Figure 5.1 Xala Freeze Frame. Xala, directed by Ousmane Sembène, produced by Paulin Vieyra and Films Domireew, Ste. Me. Production du Senegal, 1975.

The image demands, in some ways, to stand by itself by claiming the end of the film, while the effect of the stasis is to leave its imprint on the viewer well beyond the context of the film by extricating it from the flow of action although it is the most powerful action in the entire film. However, it is important to note that in Xala El Hadji’s impotence, his penury, and his failure are all linked to his inability and unwillingness to embrace a role that would take him beyond self-interest. This is evident in his relationship with his wives, his daughter, and his work as well his engagement with the economics of his country and the poor around him. Ultimately, Xala stands as a Fanonian admonition to the middle class, which appears out of nowhere at the time of the birth of the new nation, out of no entrepreneurship or creativity of its own. The table in the Chamber of Commerce becomes a focal point for demolishing the idea of such propped up virility and manhood. It is supposedly where the powerful men of the new nation make decisions that have an impact on the country, while it is clear that their pact is to protect the white man’s interest, all the while securing their own. They mysteriously receive briefcases filled with banknotes from the white intermediary, and the film is purposefully vague about the source. The point is that these men have taken over from the white man, and their ongoing collaboration is explicitly established as a continuing phenomenon, gainsaying the various rituals associated with the rupture that independence supposedly brings, as the opening of the film suggests. However, Sembène is less interested in the white man and in launching criticism against him than he is in the role of the new African elite and its failure to perform. The have-nots’ curse on El Hadji comes to fruition when he cannot “perform” on the night of his wedding to a third wife who is younger than his daughter. Therefore, there is an explicit link between El Hadji’s political and economic failure and his

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failed “manhood.” While he is ridiculed by his peers, the most terrific irony is evoked in various humiliating ways, when he performs laughable procedures, recommended by various charlatans, that are supposed to help him regain his virility. All the while, the spectator has a keen sense of his imminent and total financial ruin. Following his wedding night the girl is still deemed a virgin by the matrons who check the bed. When he leaves in abject shame, he walks past his parked white Mercedes, and the driver dutifully follows him for a while, driving behind him. Finally, the driver takes charge, speeds up past him and opens the door of the car in his path so that he has to step in. That scene, recording El Hadji’s despondency and his own inability to wield power equal to the position he has in the new economic order, signals to the spectator his total ruin and the yet-to-come stripping of the recognizable symbols of his virility that the film will subsequently trace. In any case, El Hadji’s humiliation in Sembène’s film is properly completed at the very same table where he participated in deal-making to the detriment of the common man. The same “friends” reject him from their tight circle of camaraderie, which is based on collective exploitation of power. Significantly, this is coupled with his sorrows at being shunned by society for his impotence in his most recent marriage. The marriage itself had been announced at the same table in a scene where each of the men was handed a briefcase full of banknotes, and where the filmmaker highlights their complicity in siphoning off funds that they had been charged with managing for the nation. The link made between faulty “manhood” and financial ruin in this most obvious, and crude, physical manifestation functions allegorically, shaming the nation as lacking the virility to protect its totality by portraying the failed responsibility of these new elites soon after colonialism. Sembène, a strong believer in the untapped potential of women in all fields, also highlights the failure of men by constantly linking women to effective African unity, African identity, and emotional and moral health at the individual and national level and beyond. In Xala, when El Hadji’s daughter, Rama, comes to speak to her father in defense of her mother and to admonish him for mistreating them because of his new love interest, she speaks Wolof, while her father responds to her in French. This is a very interesting scene visually. At one point, El Hadji and a bottle of Evian® water form a veritable two-shot (Figure 5.2a), while the conflict between the protagonist and his daughter is driven home by shot-reverse-shots that match the conversation and opposing points of view. Furthermore, at another key moment, Rama sits down to address her father and, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, she is framed by a map of Africa that matches perfectly with the colors of her African attire (Figure 5.2b). Through these and other comprehensive key points in the mise-en-scène, Sembène sets up the male African of the new elite class as an unmitigated failure, while the latter’s female counterpart holds much promise and hope for the young nation. More recent films have also put pressure on the notion of manhood, its meanings and possibilities, and pointed toward its failures most often in an allegorical critique of the new nation. Although “the nation” specifically, or “Africa,” can be symbolized by the modern African woman as a utopian symbol of possibility, as we have seen in

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Figure 5.2 (a) El Hadji Evian® Two-shot; (b) Rama’s clothing matches the map of Africa. Xala, directed by Ousmane Sembène, produced by Paulin Vieyra and Films Domireew, Ste. Me. Production du Senegal, 1975.

the representation of women in Chapter 4, depiction of men focuses on questioning reality in much more urgent terms in the sense that it is a critique of what already exists as reality. Sembène’s films perform this function systematically. For example, in Guelwaar, the hero’s words are interrupted by his wife’s lamentations that he neglects his role as a husband. More women take central roles in other Sembène films such as Faat Kiné (2000) and Moolaadé (2004). Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen Geï does

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more than pit Karmen’s strength against the pitiful weakness of her policeman-lover, Lamine. The other two male characters, Massigui and Samba, while portrayed sympathetically, prove ineffectual in their virility or strength not just at the level of image, as we have noted in following the relentless monumentalization of Karmen. In addition, at the level of plot, the male characters do not intervene to alter the destiny of the mythical Carmen upon whom the narrative is based. That is, while Karmen becomes a monumental heroine despite her foretold death, the male characters, precisely because they are crafted as appendices to her centrality, do not emerge as actors with any real agency in the world depicted in the film. This rather pessimistic view of African manhood shows up in different ways in more recent productions. I have chosen, here, to follow as a spectator, a thoughtful presentation of African manhood in The Hero (2004), whose title frames the protagonist in this role. The film gives a positive but tragic image of the African man, in the sense that the return of the hero, Vitório (Makena Diop), to Luanda from the Angolan civil war is structured by his loss of a limb. The fact that, though a veteran of the war, he must go through endless difficulty in order to procure a prosthetic leg, quickly sets the stage for his struggles as central to the narrative of the film. Reduced to living on the street, Vitório inevitably loses his prosthesis, which is stolen while he is asleep. In the ensuing story, we see the young orphan Manu (Milton “Santo” Coelho) choosing to stay in school rather than to drop out like many of his classmates, and we become avid followers of the entanglement of the schoolteacher Joána (Patrícia Bull) with Vitório. It is significant that Manu has lost his family to the war while Victório returns from the war to find his family is missing. That is presented as the norm: all aspects of life in Luanda are not simply affected, but structured, by the war. This film is drawn into dialogue with Sarah Maldoror’s films on Angola, which are well known to audiences.2 Setting the tone for issues-based films with her documentaries on Angolan independence, Maldoror’s presence on the cinema scene also alerts us to the fact that the Angolan film industry has not had the right circumstances to grow and develop a repertoire of films that could intersect and redefine African cinema as each director’s repertoire or national/regional/genre collection does. More recently, there has been a renewal in the Angolan cinema scene with films such as Orlando Fortunato de Oliveira’s Comboio da Canhoca (1989) and, in the same year as The Hero, Maria João Ganga’s Na Cidade Vazia (2004). Zézé Gamboa, the director of The Hero, worked in Angolan television for many years, and made several documentaries before turning to fiction. The civil war in Angola, which broke out soon after the declaration of independence in 1975, brewed through the end of decolonization. Once Portugal officially left Angola, the struggle between the two leading parties was waged as an open war fueled between the two superpowers locked in the cold war. With the Cabinda region fighting for secession, by the time the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) decisively “won” over UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) in 2002, ending the war, the country was devastated. The Hero captures the utterly desolate city, the state of military hospitals, and the plight of those dependent on care from them, while turning the

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camera’s focus on the damaged social fabric of the country. The young protagonist, Manu, reminds us of José from Euzhan Palcy’s Sugar Cane Alley (1983) in his struggle for education in the midst of a renewed attack against hope and youth for Africans, well after colonialism. Gamboa develops a subtle relationship between Vitório and the schoolteacher Joána, who is dedicated to keeping Manu in school. Manu’s grandmother also subtly calls to mind José’s grandmother and her epic struggle to keep José in school despite all odds stacked against an orphaned boy in colonial Martinique. Vitório’s relationship with Joána is quite deliberately developed with a level of tautness that highlights the class lines that are never quite crossed in this poignant relationship, while his engagement with Judíte (Maria Ceiça) plays on their shared poverty and desolation in the war-ravaged city. Judíte has resorted to prostitution and must face all kinds of violence to stay alive. Her encounter with Vitório occurs when he steps out onto the street after having been thrown out of a bar. Judíte is quite obviously soliciting customers as she paces back and forth on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette. Next comes the incident of his prosthesis being stolen by the gang that rivals Manu’s. Vitório returns to the bar to try to retrace his last movements on the previous night in order to recover his prosthetic leg: going to the bar is the last thing he remembers about the evening because he was quite inebriated. There, Judíte is preparing for the evening customers. She remembers meeting him on the sidewalk and, though she cannot help him find his prosthesis (she notes he had it on when they met), offers to make him a cup of coffee. The meeting with Joána, on the other hand, occurs on one of his innumerable visits to the hospital where he is constantly disappointed regarding his prosthesis. Joána’s interest in Vitório’s situation, her wish to help him, and what we come to accept as her typical, emotional do-good reaction puts in question her relationship with her boyfriend Pedro (Raúl Rosário). Pedro’s concerns seem too removed from the reality of the majority of the population. He comes from a wealthy family, drives a fancy car, has studied abroad, and is set to enter politics. His relationship with Joána dates back to their childhoods and is often presented as a default relationship that has only come about because of the reduced possibilities within the general population of meeting a large number of possible partners from the same milieu because of the war. Gamboa delivers, through Vitório, a character whose masculinity is sensitively explored in two very different heterosexual relationships, one with Judíte and the other with Joána. But the character is also presented as a father and a citizen encoded in quite traditional visions of masculinity. The first glimpse we have of Vitório comes soon after we encounter Manu, who gets into a scuffle with another boy in a basketball game and goes off the court in a huff. Manu leans against the railings of the street that overlooks the bay. Interesting camerawork gives us a view of the bay from behind the boy, looking out from about the level of his waist through the two parallel bars. Gradually the camera pans left as it moves above the boy’s head and “looks” beyond the bay out to the sea. An abrupt cut takes us to a hospital corridor where a one-legged man in camouflage uniform enters left of frame and is seen, waist-down, walking away from the camera (Figure 5.3a), until the camera recedes into a full

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shot. Vitório’s leg, irreparably injured by a land mine, has had be amputated, as we will learn. Continuity of the singer’s voice on the music track joins the two shots. A swift cut then gives a medium shot of the man with a parked ambulance in the background, confirming the hospital setting. When we get a glimpse of Vitório, we see an

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Figure 5.3 (a) Man walking away from camera on crutches; (b) Upward tilt shot: close-up of man angrily accosting doctors; (c) Medium shot: man reveals crutch to say he cannot dance. The Hero/“O Heroi” (original title), edited by Zézé Gamboa, produced by Fernando Vendrell and DAVID & GOLIAS, Les Films de l’Après-Midi, Gamboa & Gamboa.

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(c)

Figure 5.3

(continued)

angry, belligerent man who accosts his doctor while he is engaged in conversation with a white man. When the doctor tries to reassure the white Frenchman that things are fine, that he’s “juste un pauvre soldat” ‘just a poor soldier,’ the soldier responds that he is not a poor soldier but a sergeant. He then accuses the doctor of being the one who cut off his leg and angrily says that he has been waiting for his prosthesis for two months. His aggressive behavior fills up the screen with movement and his expression is somewhat wild (Figure 5.3b). When he goes looking for work at a construction site he is told that he should find something less strenuous. At a bar, when a prostitute comes over to him, he gives her the money to buy them drinks and goes along with the attention. When she asks him to dance, he shakes his head and then picks up his crutch, which has been under the table (Figure 5.3c), to reveal he is crippled. Vitório is, thus, somewhat didactically presented as a lively, masculine-looking man whose performance of a particular form of emblematic masculinity is hampered in the situations we see him encounter, primarily because of his amputation. The story begins with deliberate cross-cutting between Manu’s story and Vitório’s, thus inviting the viewer to anticipate the connection between them that eventually forms, well into the film, when the rival gang chases Manu down. First we have a long shot of Vitório walking away from the camera, into the night. A small figure passes by in the opposite direction, coming toward the camera. Then comes the rival gang, shouting and running past Vitório in the depth of the shot toward Manu and the camera. When they pass the crippled man, he turns around to observe the scene, thus moving to face the camera. When the last boy has gone off frame the camera is turned around for a cut to Manu running, now away from the camera, and then a long shot has him running down some stairs onto a clearing, after which there is much scuffling in the darkness as the gang gains on him. Next, the gang leader has

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him captured by his boys and threatens him with a knife. From left of frame a wooden crutch appears, barely visible, and hits the bully, who then falls to the ground, as if by magic, before we can distinguish it as the replacement issued to Vitório and identify him synecdochically through it (Figure 5.4a). This metonymous presentation of the hero undoes his previous appearance as an appendage to his infirmity (Figure 5.3a). In this sequence, as well, the crutch appears before him, but when it does, it is a

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Figure 5.4 (a) Crutch appears left of frame to thrash bully; (b) Manu rushes to embrace Vitório. The Hero, edited by Zézé Gamboa, produced by Fernando Vendrell and DAVID & GOLIAS, Les Films de l’Après-Midi, Gamboa & Gamboa.

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powerful form of protection for Manu, and is followed by the assertion that he is his “father.” The savior says: “I’ll kill the first one who touches my son.” Vitório’s masculinity is called up not simply because he saves the boy but also because he does it in the name of fatherhood. The boy rushes to him, wishing to believe Vitório is indeed his father because he told the bullies he’d kill them if they touched “his son.” In these examples, the crutch itself becomes part of Vitório’s masculinity because it is embraced as his condition – indeed it is what makes him heroic to us. This development follows quite soon after the initial presentation of Vitório as an anonymous “cripple.” Manu explains that he has been having trouble with the gangster boy ever since the latter called his mother a whore. Vitório says he did the right thing to defend his mother. Later, Vitório catches sight of the gang leader at the bar where Judíte works; he loses control and rushes toward him. The boy is scared off, but the bouncer roughs Vitório up. He is on the ground with the bouncer standing menacingly over him when a bottle breaks on the man’s head from above the frame. The deus ex machina-like “saving” of Manu is thus repeated, but this time, rather than being the savior, it is Vitório who needs to be saved. Judíte loses her job as a consequence of her action. In one notable scene, Vitório comes back to Judíte’s place to find her beaten badly by one of her clients. He comforts her, in an almost fatherly fashion, and nurses her back to health. Judíte prepares dinner and as they eat she exclaims that she is enjoying playing the role of “wife,” after which they make love. These mutual and circular exchanges of being of real service to one another, saving one another from what could be a violent encounter, even death, occur among the have-nots. Vitório’s role as provider of kindness and support as well as recipient of love and affection and, particularly, of affirmation of his manhood, rightfully belongs with this group. He does not, the film repeatedly suggests, belong with the residues of the upper class, even if it is incarnated in the undeniably lovely and charming Joána, whose intelligence, purity of heart, and commitment to the cause of the total good of her country are, equally, presented as things of beauty that should not be regarded with cynicism. However, the filmmaker reserves one moment, toward the end of the film, where Joána must be somehow altered in the spectator’s vision of her purity, and we will examine that shortly. The film’s take on Vitório’s masculinity is also brought into sharp focus in the initial meeting between him and Joána, which occurs when Joána and Pedro are at the hospital because Pedro has hit a child while they are driving in his car. We learn there will be no doctor to see the child before the next morning. Joána will not leave him alone, while Pedro finds it ridiculous to mollycoddle a street kid for whom, it seems to him, they have already done more than necessary by bringing him to the hospital. The tension builds subtly in the exchanges between the two, and Joána agrees that he should leave, that there is no point in the two of them waiting there all night. In a very ungracious gesture, Pedro hands Joána some money and leaves, while Vitório observes the scene before he sits down beside Joána on the bench outside the hospital, while she moves slightly, making space for him. Vitório purposefully strikes up a conversation with her, starting off by asking if the child is better. Joána’s body language changes as she becomes intrigued by the story

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he recounts of having been caught at the age of fifteen, coming from the seminary, to be taken off to fight in the army. The almost romantic shot of Vitório and Joána, who are nevertheless still strangers, reminds us of a couple sitting on a park bench, though the crutch visible to the left of frame reminds us of the context and the preceding narrative in which we first encountered Vitório in the hospital. Vitório looks at the young woman with undisguised pleasure before telling his story. After a cut to Manu with the prosthesis that he has got after trading in the music system he and his friends stole from a car, we are brought back to the hospital in the early hours of the morning. Joána has been asleep with her head on Vitório’s shoulder, and when a loud ambulance arrives she awakes, slightly embarrassed as she realizes where she is, while Vitório’s obvious pleasure is quietly unstated. The moment is very special and lasts only about a minute: it is interesting that Joána does not pull away though her bare shoulder moves in acknowledgment of the impropriety of its position. She catches Vitório’s eye and smiles slightly, squirming, still without moving away. We already know Joána’s instincts well enough by now to be aware that she will be careful not to offend his masculinity as well as the fact that apart from such sensitivity, she is well aware of the fact that she has gone beyond what decorum dictates for a first meeting, something that becomes even more charged with the obvious class difference between them. Her refusal to move away from him suggests that, beyond having a highly sensitized nature and an instinctively virtuous response to others that leads her to accept and even love them simply for their humanity, she is not uncomfortable as a woman with being in such close proximity to Vitório. Indeed she seems to revel in it as a form of both solidarity and sexuality (Figure 5.5).

Figure 5.5 Joána wakes without moving away. The Hero, edited by Zézé Gamboa, produced by Fernando Vendrell and DAVID & GOLIAS, Les Films de l’Après-Midi, Gamboa & Gamboa.

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This meeting, and Joána’s discovery that Vitório’s prosthesis has been stolen, lead her to decide to help him. The moment when Vitório’s masculinity is brought to a crisis in this context is when he is at Joána’s apartment, invited to dinner. He is dressed in a white jacket, the camera giving us a classic two-shot of the couple at either side of the table that Joana has laid out attractively on the balcony, with the bay in the background. When he is anxious that the radio interview has been set up in two days, Joána teases him, saying it should be easy for a war hero. He responds by wagging his finger at her in a light moment, telling he she shouldn’t tease him. He even tells her she is beautiful, that he is enjoying the moment with her, and he takes her hand in both of his own. Joána responds naturally in delight at his compliments (Figure 5.6a). The shot-reverse-shots are given from our perspective in close-ups of the two actors. Spontaneously, he stands up (Figure 5.6b), wanting to move towards her, but he lurches forward losing balance, causing the cutlery to crash discordantly, upsetting the romantic moment. Joána is dismayed and tries to reach out to him. He stands up abruptly without reaching for his crutches, which are nowhere in the frame. The rude realization strikes him he cannot move with ease without reaching for his crutch since he has no prosthesis. There is a moment’s hesitation marking her initial bewilderment, which is followed by her tender reaction to his discomfiture, but he rejects her pity. It is a decisive moment in the diegesis for the spectator. The tantalizing

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Figure 5.6 (a) Joána enjoys Vitório’s compliments; (b) Vitório wants to move toward her; (c) Medium shot Joana reassures Pedro. (d) Joána drives off with Pedro; a paper bag flutters behind car. The Hero, edited by Zézé Gamboa, produced by Fernando Vendrell and DAVID & GOLIAS, Les Films de l’Après-Midi, Gamboa & Gamboa.

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notion of Vitório and Joána as couple cannot compass the figure of “the hero.” Furthermore, Joána’s position becomes clear after the radio interview has taken place: Pedro’s uncle makes it into a political rally and Joána is quite unhappy with the way Vitório’s situation is being used to other ends. Although she voices this displeasure when they are leaving the radio station, Pedro accuses her of being than a friend to Vitório. She laughs lovingly at him. Full of indulgence for him, she cries, “You’re jealous,” while her tone suggests incredulity at the mere idea that she might reciprocate Vitório’s feelings (Figure 5.6c). For the spectator, it is a moment that betrays Vitório, and indeed is somewhat untruthful given we have witnessed her basking in his adoration, particularly in the romantic dinner scene when he tells her she is beautiful and she reacts with undisguised pleasure and shyness. In the current scene, she follows up her laugh with a kiss on Pedro’s lips, disappointing us terrifically. When he proposes they go home to make love our feeling is not one of indulgence at all. In fact her laugh sounds somewhat harsh to the ear in its hypocrisy and ultimately in its disdain for the idea that she might reciprocate Vitório’s feelings – although it is clear this is done to reassure Pedro. But why? we might ask, why must she reassure him? He is, after all, everything she previously said: a rich boy whose future assured thanks to family ties, one who left the country on a scholarship, which, if not rigged was surely skewed to favor people like him. When the car drives off, Vitório emerges from the darkness. It is not clear to us whether or not he heard and witnessed the entire conversation. The paper bag that flutters around in spirals behind the car is perhaps too starkly emblematic of the end of the Vitório–Joána story, but it records, appropriately, the starkness of the gap between the aspirations each of them can have in the end. After this moment, Vitório’s realization is heightened that it is in Judíte, who prefers now to go by her christened name, María Barbara, that he is embraced with love and admiration: as a “man.” Judíte’s frequent references to wanting to be his wife, to stay together forever, her efforts to look pleasing and attractive when with him, all reassure him in his masculinity. When she is beaten, in the scene in which he comforts her, the framing he is given makes his crutches become irrelevant. The classic Hollywood-style framing of hero and heroine in close-up with her looking up at him beseechingly and in gratitude activates every emblematic man–woman relationship from the cinematic tradition, for any spectator. That is true love as we recognize it on the tinsel screen and it is reprised here in the culminating sequences of the film when Vitório and María Barbara go to dinner at Manu’s. The boy runs to be embraced by the couple and the grandmother invites them in. A long shot frames the home as the couple follows the older woman up the stairs. They enter the house together. Activating a tradition in cinematic language and symbolism, the story might well provide a “feel good” ending, but the reality of the aftermath of the Angolan civil war is strongly inscribed in the spectator’s mind, even as these images call up familiar resolutions in recognizable cinematic language. The natural ease with which Vitório here accepts his condition and yet feels secure in his masculinity is in stark contradistinction to the two moments of closeness with Joána (the first at the hospital

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(a)

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Figure 5.7 (a) Classic Hollywood framing Vitório/Judíte; (b) Long shot couple enter house together as a family. The Hero, edited by Zézé Gamboa, produced by Fernando Vendrell and DAVID & GOLIAS, Les Films de l’Après-Midi, Gamboa & Gamboa.

bench and the second on the balcony of her apartment). In the first instance, the appearance of the crutch, though propped against the wall to the left corner of the frame, does not develop into anything beyond that because they are seated together. His masculinity, in the pose (her head against his shoulder) is classic in the illusion it provides of an equality of experience and fortune in which Joána could be stereotypically posed as the appropriate partner of her man – smaller than him, petite, and

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dainty – particularly because they are both seated on the same bench, with his height giving him the advantage. In the second instance, his taking her hands across the table provides the same illusion, the water in the distance suggesting the image of a postcard and his white shirt reminding us that this is a performance, since we are used to seeing him either in the checked red shirt he bought at the market or in his army camouflages. As we saw, he involuntarily breaks the smoothness of the space established between them, bridged by the seeming evenness of the table, when the spontaneity of his move toward her is thwarted because, crippled without a prosthesis, he stumbles and causes the table to jerk. The jolt disrupts the picture postcard scene for us, at first purely physically, in the movement itself, but then in our interpretation of his feeling of incongruity. He is someone who, despite his starched white shirt, is completely removed from the context in which Joána was raised and socialized, and, more immediately, someone whose distance from her is all too evident once the postcard is ripped up. Joána’s, albeit momentary, response, quite different from the one we observed on the hospital bench, suggests some kind of fear beyond her reaction to the noise of the silverware. It immediately alerts him to the reality of the difference in their lives and expectations and the impossibility of taking the obvious flow of emotion between them any further. Gamboa carefully leads the narrative to the end by following up this scene with the radio interview that Joána has organized through Pedro’s connection with his uncle. Manu arrives at the radio station, forced all the way there by his grandmother who finds out that Manu is now in possession of the prosthesis that he has bought on the black market in exchange for a car radio he had stolen with his gang. The suggestion of redemption for them all is made by a classic framing of a father-and-son embrace between the two males before the grandmother steps into the picture from right of frame. Over the child’s head the adults exchange a look of understanding, compassion, and peace as the film begins its gentle form of closure and healing through the reconstructed family built around the male, Vitório, who now comfortably takes up its central position. In the end, despite Joána’s uneasiness with the advantages afforded to her by her class, she embraces Pedro and seems to go along with his advances. When their car drives away from the radio station, Vitório watches it recede into the distance, while the abandoned paper bag flutters behind it. Joána’s tantalizing desire to merge with her constituency is of no significance to Vitório’s reality as a man, though he was clearly attracted to her. Joána’s intellectual and emotional sympathy can only go so far for someone maimed by war and scarred by the experience of violence and poverty. Vitório’s harshness with Judíte, whom he had refused to take along with him to the radio interview, melts away as she embraces him wholeheartedly with nothing but joy and gratefulness. Their common experience places them as ideal partners in understanding and love. The last sequence begins with Vitório’s reunion with his prosthetic leg. Once again, Vitório comes across as fatherly, dutiful, desirable, and becomes the willing piece that completes Manu’s and Judíte’s life, as a man. The semblance of a family is suggested in the next scene when he arrives at Manu’s grandmother’s house with Judíte, whose obvious joy at meeting Manu comes from nostalgia for her

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own lost son, who would be about the same age as the boy. The last scene is one of small hopes for a man of Vitório’s life. Manu comes to see him at his work as a driver, where he is cleaning a shiny BMW.3 He takes Manu for a spin in the car along the marina. The two of them, like father and son, enjoy the music, singing along or keeping time with the nodding of their heads, sharing many affectionate glances as the car speeds down the road. The camera starts off inside the car with them and then draws back to an aerial panning shot of the city, its slums, make-shift roofs, and muddy streets and alleyways across the highway to the still upmarket buildings and well-kept concrete houses surrounded by trees and paved roads, to return to the shanty town on the other side – all exposed from above in the movement of the camera to the left – much as the film began, though movement then was to the right. Vitório’s manhood is restored in the ideally matched situation with Judíte and fully developed in his engagement with the young Manu and in the moments of contact with the boy’s grandmother. Judíte and he are construed as necessary elements by the time they walk hand in hand into Manu’s house, which could well be their sunset. We might briefly note in this context, Ian Gabriel’s Forgiveness (2004), which embraces the moment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. In search of absolution, the white former cop, Tertius Coetzee (Arnold Vosloo), returns to the scene of a shooting in which he killed someone (not the only person, we might imagine). Coetzee makes a pilgrimage to the village where Daniel Jacobus Grootboom (1971–1991) is buried, as we discern the name on the cross of the flimsy-looking grave he manages to find. The film is a philosophical inquiry into the idea of forgiveness and its possibility. It clearly raises the question of what it means to be a “man” in the aftermath of apartheid. Sannie (Quanita Adams), the sister of the boy Coetzee has killed, is the sharpest of all the characters in identifying, instinctively, Coetzee’s need for absolution that is impossible to quench. The innkeeper in the sleepy fishing town of Paternoster reacts to Coetzee as a man, flirting gently, and repeatedly, but he does not respond. Power is, of course, central to the idea of masculinity. Daniel’s death has created a huge hole in his family. The representation of the character of the younger brother is haunted and interrupted by that of the departed first son, who was sent to university and, according to the official story, died tragically in a “hijacking.” Coetzee’s arrival throws a different spin on the story when he reveals that Daniel was taken to be a “terrorist” by the police and that guns and maps found in his room revealed he was a dissident. Daniel was taken in and tortured. In an emotion-packed scene, Coetzee visits Daniel’s home to explain the circumstances of his death. His parents have always allowed the story to stand that it was a random accident. Coetzee’s visit drives the plot because Sannie has informed Llewellyn (Elton Landrew), Daniel’s friend, of his presence. Llewellyn and two other friends plan to come to kill Coetzee to avenge the death of their friend. Cuts between the three young men preparing for the long car ride to find Coetzee and happenings in the sleepy, coastal town of Paternoster, where Daniel’s family lives, set the stage for the dramatic tragedy. In this tragedy Coetzee’s body is often framed to privilege his height and broad shoulders, while his countenance is one of complete openness to receive the many emotions

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Figure 5.8 Coetzee center frame or filling up the frame in a suggestion of a large physical presence and calm demeanor in comparison with the young thugs’ frenzied violence. Forgiveness, directed Ian Gabriel, produced by Cindy Gabriel and Giant Films, Dv8, 2004.

from each of Daniel’s family members (Figure 5.8). There is a certain “flatness” to his character, as if to best absorb the eccentricities and individualities of the emotions and preoccupations of all the others. The manliness of Coetzee, a “good” white man in post-apartheid South Africa, comes uniquely from his acceptance of not just his own guilt and wrongdoing but also that of those like him. He is Christ-like (though the film clearly casts him as guilty), for he is to offer endless acceptance of others’ emotions in the path to cleansing the ravaged collective whole. Whether it is Sannie’s sarcastically expressed pain or the physical violence of her brother Ernest (Christo David) that draws Coetzee’s blood, his test is one of endurance and forbearance. This is developed in many ways until the point toward the end of the film at which the nature of his manhood is fully understood by the spectator when Sannie tells him to go away because he does not seem to want “forgiveness” but rather “to be punished.” Daniel’s parents provide different insight into the question. Hendrik Grootboom (Zane Meas) is a dignified contrast to Coetzee in his role of the dismayed father, one who above all wants success for his oldest son, a fisherman who desires something better for his offspring. It is a relationship that is universal and enduring, convincingly portrayed by Meas. The pressure on Daniel, who left for college, comes out in the tense conversations within the family once Coetzee comes to town and stirs up the emotions that they have kept buried. The film has all the signs of theatricality, and indeed of the theater itself. The camera position is often suggestive of it being placed in front of a proscenium stage, especially in the living-room scene when the pastor, Father Dalton (Jeremy Crutchley) accompanies Coetzee to meet with the family for tea. Although there are many moments of tension between various characters, the most well-developed

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dialectic is that between Sannie and Coetzee. It evolves such that Sannie, who was the most anxious to have retribution, ends up nursing Coetzee in the car when he has to be rushed to the hospital. Coetzee’s wound is inflicted on him by Ernest, who breaks a vase on his head when he reveals how Daniel was tortured by the white police and yet did not reveal the information they were seeking. Sannie’s viciousness is offset by Coetzee’s endless calm, which at times grates on our nerves, while we wonder how plausible it is. From the point of view of a skeptical spectator who, regardless of their location, is not quick to be convinced of “white” repentance in the South African context, Coetzee is viewed from the start with suspicion. However, in the complex emotional and intellectual processes within Daniel’s family, Coetzee is finally redeemed when he is shot dead at Daniel’s grave, which he has gone to cover with the seashells Sannie watched him collect earlier. What the character of Coetzee symbolizes in this dramatic film is the very process of relinquishing control to the rightful forces (youth, women, formerly disenfranchised people) in order for a more just society to come into being. Masculinity (in the dominant, white version) that was inextricably yoked to every form of power – economic, military, social, and political – as these films show, simply must be undone so that it may be reinvented in order to create renewed African realities where European modernity, as it played out through and beyond colonialism, is not the only possibility. I examine an array of films in this book which, together with a whole repertoire of African and diaspora films, evoke cultures where repressive masculinity can no doubt quite often be linked to indigenous practices. However, the particular brand of contemporary masculinity in any film has to contend with its complicity with a European colonial image of the powerful master, the governor, the policeman, the banker, the monarch, the educator, or ecclesiastic. Any of these might occasionally be enacted by a “female” character (in history itself), but they nevertheless wield the power emanating from that masculine impulse that was colonialism itself. As we have seen, Vitório’s evolution takes him away from the logical paths that could lead to his bourgeoisification in The Hero. Similarly, many other films in this repertoire attempt to dismantle the images of masculinity that are inextricably entangled with colonialism. But these films go much further in reimagining and questioning the highly evolved structures of their postcolonial societies, particularly visible in the gap between elites and the rest of the population – a gap which grew out of that history.

Notes 1 Playing on Tina Turner’s hit song of the same title, Clyde Taylor argues that a black film aesthetic escapes the very categories, such as that of the hero, of dominant Western cinema. His short essay is not meant to be a conclusive study but the fact is at least that there was, and is in African cinema, a desire to get beyond models based on Western ideas of the individual, of the meanings of success, and by consequence, of an idealized masculinity. See Tyler. 2 Maldoror worked as Gillo Pontecorvo’s assistant in The Battle of Algiers (1966) after having been to Moscow to study film. She is believed to have met Ousmane Sembène there.

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Her most well received film has been Sambizanga (1972) on the Angolan war. A point to note is that Maldoror’s husband, Mário de Andrade, was the leader of the MPLA Party (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) in Angola. The Togolese filmmaker Anne-Laure Folly, who has been greatly influenced by Maldoror, went on to make a film on Angola herself (Les Oubliées, 1996), as well as a documentary on Maldoror (Sarah Maldoror ou la nostalgie de l’utopie, 1998). This moment is prepared early in the film. Vitório attempts to hail a cab, but none stop. Finally, a black Mercedes pulls up; it belongs to the Minister of Public Works. The driver, we learn, makes money on the side by giving rides independently. Vitório’s expression suggests that is not the kind of thing he would like to do.

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Revolutionary Personhood Revolutionize the Spectator, or Stop, Thief!

The meaning of the enigmatic subtitle of this chapter will become evident incrementally, so I ask my reader for some indulgence in following along with patience. African and diasporic cinema, as we have been following it here, provides superb examples of revolutionary personhood in the form of both epic and everyday heroes. Sembène’s films provide a veritable repertoire of heroes from the eponymous hero of Guelwaar (1992), Kiné in Faat Kiné (2000), and the antihero, El Hadji, in Xala (1975). What kinds of heroes does this African cinema favor? Typically, Sembène chose to have more than one hero in each of his films. Even in the emblematic Guelwaar, Guelwaar’s daughter emerges as being as heroic in the decisions she makes as is her father, thus providing a counter to his masculine and controlling views of female independence and identity. Xala, of course, presents an antihero whose personal choices reflect the depraved postcolonial state that the filmmaker virulently attacks in this film, while Rama, El Hadji’s daughter, might be the real beacon. Thus, quite purposefully undoing, the idea of a single hero, Sembène naturally constructs characters in their multiple facets and particularly in their various social relationships. This then prevents them from embodying heroism without the contiguity of their alter egos or collective identities even in the span of a single film. In keeping with this, Guelwaar is shown to be woefully lacking in his role as a husband, though he is admired by the spectator for his courage, conviction, and ability to inspire others to protest the question of food aid to Africa and instill consciousness of the necessity for self-sufficiency without which self-governance is impossible. Such is that hero’s quest. Sembène’s cinematic hero is such only insofar as her or his cause is meaningful in a revolutionary and utopian conception that frames the particular artistic endeavor. While today the concept of the hero and its cinematic representation are diverse and evolving, African cinema has internalized a form of pedagogical engagement with the spectator through its versions of heroism. This notion of an African cinema is, by its nature, immediately separated from a commercially logical framing of the medium and the hero within it. Essentially, revolutionary status in the imaginary of Africa and, more Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, First Edition. Anjali Prabhu. © 2014 Anjali Prabhu. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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generally, the entire third world, has been linked (before the boom of the Internet and social-networking era) to action and enabling action on the stage of the nation, of transnational representation or “global” sites by those privileged to have access to these spaces on behalf of and in solidarity with those who do not. The hero is heroic through his or her ethical monumentality, in that she or he exemplifies the moment of decision in some way that is revolutionary for the multiple spaces and peoples engaged with her or him both within the diegesis and beyond it, extending to the spectator that the film calls up. In this, there is a Fanonian legacy to be recognized within this imaginary, through overt or more subtle, even unconscious, pathways of connection. Sembène often signaled that legacy with images of a “pan-African” conception of the continent, as in the Xala scene between El Hadji and his nationalist daughter, Rama, in which the colors used on a map of Africa are the same as those worn by Rama, while the father comes across as a complete Francophile elitist (Figure 5.2); or in the images of Che or Lumumba, as in the scene between Diouana and her boyfriend in his small quarters in Black Girl (1966); or even in Kiné’s home in Faat Kiné. Today, there is a reckoning with the newer subalterns and their struggles, which have to be thoroughly rethought within political agendas and aesthetic frameworks – a task into which African cinema has plunged. As we have seen, despite what can be construed as rejection by various African critics and even directors of Sembène, FESPACO, or the past of African cinema as somehow outmoded or irrelevant, both the extra-diegetical reality and the aesthetics of African cinema indicate that moments of renewal and innovation completely ratify this past, not as determinants but rather in claiming it as a tradition worth honoring. Contemporary cinema of Africa and the diaspora in the collection presented here is fully immersed in the task of reinventing and challenging the precepts and manifestations of that tradition. It is in this commitment to a sense of its own historicity that African cinema distances itself from commercial forms of cinema and aligns itself more visibly with art cinema from diverse parts of the globe. African cinema, of the variety in which we are interested, continues in its hopes for the continent beyond the aspirations of individual nations and in its struggle for political and economic liberation; in constructing the cinematic medium it manifests in form and content particularly intellectual freedom, cultural liberty, and aesthetic autonomy, all of which are tied to the economics of both production and distribution. The fact that much of this cinema is funded from sources outside Africa has paradoxically bound its creators to an even greater dedication to its perspective, its future, and the hopes for an African filmmaking that could bypass an imitation of the major industries modeled on the unquestioned rival of Europe’s various cinema traditions: Hollywood – which has since been rivaled itself by India’s Bollywood. This African cinema is recognizable as a cinema through its major dedication to a higher purpose than commercial success alone and its commitment to a pedagogy of the spectator. Heroes in African cinema emerge from this landscape. However, contemporary films seem to suggest that it is no longer invested in the type of monumental activity of the hero “for the people” at all times. Although that status was already, in the early African films, somehow mitigated by a collective or a counterpart, the hero

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was still most often heroic in his (heroes were mostly male) action for or on behalf of that collective. Those forms of collectivity might prove not to be the major and most pressing forms of groupings in which individuals are subalternized or exploited today. In fact much of the “globalization” efforts in Africa have only served to replicate the worst of Western modernization and development with deleterious effects that the “original” might not have known. There have been felicitous outcomes too, but, in any region of the world where it is possible to identify such social structures, it is hard to take an unequivocally positive position about Western modernization as it is viewed from anywhere below the middle class. And one of the major effects could be said to be the rupture of old forms of collectivity, whether as a result of migration, the erection of false borders, or sudden changes in economic bases that then ripped up existing social structures and radically altered the social and economic infrastructure. While all or some of these events are simply signs of a changing, evolving society, the terms, timing, and manner in which they have occurred in much of Africa and what we called more comfortably “the third world,” emerge from large-scale oppression by colonial and postcolonial forces merging with newer dynamics that draw economies and cultures into tight relationships. As a result, the wealth of the continent too often stays in very limited parts of the society from which it comes, and is further siphoned out, while the suffering and strife of the people on whose backs the wealth is exploited remain within or move across the globe (including within the continent) in pockets. In keeping with these realities, African cinema remains unambiguously in sympathy not with the old forms but rather with those who bear the brunt of the changes in question. African cinema thus most often constructs its heroes not by weak nostalgia so they become anachronistic but rather by presenting those now more individualistically articulated social characters as protagonists whose communities are revealed and explored as extending well beyond the more obvious. To do this filmmakers employ various cinematographic techniques, among which is the innovative interpellation of the spectator, who is drawn into the cinematic space in clever ways such that he or she becomes part of those communities. Emblematic heroes abound when one looks at the range of African cinema: from Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1973) about Angolan liberation; José (Garry Cadenat) from Euzhan Palcy’s Sugar Cane Alley (1983), who defies and breaks down the colonial barriers in place through hard work in his educational pursuits and a lot of help from his indomitable grandmother; or Mwezé Ngangura’s Mani Kongo in Identity Pieces (1998), who travels to Brussels to find his daughter and discovers even before he leaves for Europe, when he is in the Congolese capital, that he is a complete misfit outside his own kingdom. Maldoror had worked under Gillo Pontecorvo on The Battle of Algiers (1966) and was trained, like Sembène, in Moscow. In her film, although the hero and martyr is Domingos (Domingos de Oliveira), who is taken to the Sambizanga prison in Luanda, where he is eventually beaten to death, the story is really as much about the dedication, terror, anguish, and strength of his quiet wife Maria (Elisa Andrade), who travels on foot and bus to reach her husband and rages against officers to try to gain access to him. Palcy’s José wins our hearts with his innocence, the limpid purity of his gaze when he looks at his grandmother (Darling Légitimus),

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and our respect for his hard work. His connections to Médouze (Douta Seck), who carries the myths and realities of Africa in his psyche, to Carmen (Joël Palcy), who brings excitement but also the reality of what interactions with whites entail, and to his grandmother, without whom the dream of entering the pathways to success would be impossible, are all essential to his character’s heroism. Ngangura, for his part, exploits the fictional situation perfectly (working the Montesquieu trope of the outsider that has been well polished by Bernard Dadié’s Un nègre à Paris [1959], translated as An African in Paris) to expose not only the racism rampant in the European capital of Brussels but also the incongruence of old ways of thinking in an African world that has essentially changed in its social relations because of the type of modernization associated with colonially invented technologies and postcolonial capitalism. More recent films continue to present heroes whose situation in African reality challenges, questions, and ponders various issues of which the political, social, or economic scope goes well beyond the continent and implicates these new nations that form it as actors on the global stage in different collectivities that demand new forms of aesthetic representation. The particular relationship into which the spectator is enticed (and sometimes forced) becomes highly political in that a variety of techniques and processes bring the latter to initiate a questioning of these changes in the relevant social structure that the protagonist’s interpellation sparks. For Teshome Gabriel, Third Cinema focuses on contexts rather than on individual heroes (Gabriel 60). It is true that the protagonists who are explored in depth in the African and diaspora films examined resolutely draw in the context that either renders the character somehow symbolic or undoes his or her agency as individualistic. Films like Karmen Geï, which highlight individuality, do so in a highly stylized manner, as we have seen, and thus they also comment on social structures in interesting ways. While in his earlier films modernization and capitalism were instinctively and almost totally rejected in a severe, scathing critique, in his later film Faat Kiné, Sembène brings to his spectator an African heroine who, in his typical style, is realistic, as we have seen, in her particular brand of femininity and her insertion into the Dakar cityscape and social networks while also being utopian in her unpredictable deviation from convention and the thought processes her character initiates in the spectator. Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006), which is examined in detail in Chapter 9, involves a meaningful though fictional “trial” of the World Bank and the IMF by the “people” of Africa and reminds a spectator familiar with African films to reconsider the brilliant Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas (1992), where Linguère Ramatou returns to her native Colobane as rich as the “World Bank” to extract sweet revenge for the wrongs done to her. Her now magical power, in the form of nothing but wealth, exposes human frailty, cowardice, and greed: an African story on a universal theme that demands that these “global” realities be reconsidered in their African incarnations. This is not a plea for a victimized Africa, it is a demand that humans, and here Africans in particular, rise above the worst version of ourselves that many of the rapid changes in the world actually cultivate and encourage.1

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These films present heroes in such a way as to demand of the spectator a heroic form of thoughtfulness beyond liberalism, beyond naïveté and political correctness, and beyond theoretical obfuscation, through the experience they bring us of African history and what it means to be an individual in African contexts within and beyond Africa today. Such contexts are carefully chosen and crafted through a rediscovery of cinematic tropes and techniques. We have seen in Chapter 5 how, in Ian Gabriel’s Forgiveness (2004), manhood in post-apartheid South Africa is fragile in its process of breaking out of strictly defined and available roles for men that now demand to be reinvented in the everyday. From the white cop who returns in what seems to be a perverse form of self-torture to the aggrieved and grieving father of the dead black student killed by the same policeman and to the young survivors of the police raid that killed him, manhood is a delicate and unspoken ghost that haunts each male character. Revolutionary personhood is to be found, instead, in women: Sannie as well as her mother show greater potential for actual development in their personhood than any of the other characters who wield guns, drive cars, shoot others, pop pills, and swear out loud – all of them men. Gamboa’s The Hero (2004) – also examined in Chapter 5 – concerns a hero whose manhood is constantly alluded to and whose real revolution occurs in a poignant coming to terms with the loss of a leg, which dates back to an explosion in an active minefield. His most obvious community, which is class-defined in the film, desperately needs his manhood, while his manhood turns out to be his engaged social and emotional presence. We will now take a closer look at the protagonist of the South African production of Tsotsi (2005). Insofar as South Africa’s particular history has also affected filmmaking in that country, with greater resources being funneled into all aspects of the film industry, filmmaking capabilities are more developed and provide greater possibilities there in comparison with many other African nations. Yet we find that an organization like the SAHO (South African History Online) project, which claims to be a “non-partisan” people’s history project, recognizes that in both material structure and preoccupations South African filmmakers are very much at one with the filmmakers of the rest of the continent that we have been studying in this book (“South African Film”). While, for example, Gamboa’s troubles in finding funds delayed The Hero by about a decade, Tsotsi had a veritable crisis of casting as the director did not want to use a seasoned actor from the mainstream to tell this African story.2 There has been sufficient precedent for South African stories in the more mainstream cinema culture, notably with Denzel Washington playing Steve Biko in Cry Freedom (1987) or Donald Sutherland playing the fictional schoolteacher Ben du Toit, in Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season (1989). Notwithstanding these and other difficult variables that have functioned differently across the contemporary filming contexts in Africa, the director in each case puts pressure on the spectator to respond to the dilemma that is creatively placed before him or her in ethical terms. Because these ethical questions are not presented as restricted to particular cultural valences, even though they are anchored in quite elaborately represented cultural, national, or ethnic contexts, they really speak to the problematic of the post-independence

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period and well beyond it, evoking historical developments often common across many nations. For this reason, these films debate the notion of the revolutionary in African contexts in ways that are engaging and exciting for all kinds of spectators. That most African of non-Africans, Frantz Fanon, thus provides the process of Africanizing his thought and himself as a model for our thoughtfulness about the meaning of solidarity and caring for and truly engaging with “others.” As noted in Chapter 1, there is much within Fanon’s realization of the complexity of his engagement with the cinematic experience that is useful to this project of presenting a repertoire of African and diaspora cinema. It captured the dialectics of his personhood as, on the one hand, it confronted the screen as a culturally cohesive entity extending and forming spectatorship in that moment in the Parisian cinema house and, on the other hand, it radically severed it from that collective spectatorship because of the visceral reaction that the negro on-screen provoked by its sheer anticipation. Fanon’s insight into the filmic experience in the dramatic moment he describes has alerted us to the importance of anticipating, theorizing, and even imagining different types of dynamisms when thinking about the spectatorship of contemporary films from Africa and the diaspora. So how, in Forgiveness, for example, do we see the cop returning for “forgiveness”? Is it yet another story of “white guilt,” from a character who, in essence, wants to be let off the hook through some liberal move to recognize unequal power and yet preserve it by the very fact that such recognition is a form of power in and of itself? Coetzee’s complicated interaction with Sannie is what rescues his character from such an understanding and brings us something beyond white wrongfulness and black victimhood. That entanglement is as much visual, even sensual (recall him picking her up when she has fallen in front of his car; her attending to the cut on his forehead made by her brother’s blow and even wiping the blood from it; the two of them meeting out in the open spaces with the feel of the salty breeze that we taste via Sannie’s lips). As for Tsotsi, the revelation of this young thug’s complicated situation comes about through a dramatic series of events that places him in tautly represented situations where he makes decisions that, sometimes in the exigency of a constrained few seconds, can turn his fate one way or another. How do spectators and spectatorship provide understanding and expansion of the ethical questions raised for Africa and Africanness? Many viewers, African and non-African, might consider the South African context to be one that has already been well represented, or at least its cinematic representation would be more familiar than that of many other African nations. In any event, in cinema history, it is a theme that has had if not major hits at least big-budget films. Yet Tsotsi still manages to be gripping as a moral thriller as much as it is an exemplary African film. Presley Chweneyagae is convincing as the young thug Tsotsi, conveying both his brutality and his fragility delightfully throughout the film. Tsotsi’s relationship to the baby he unwittingly kidnaps and unwillingly keeps with him has us gasping in surprise, anguished in our frustration, and melting with tenderness or smiling through our tears in the revelation of his humanity. All these reactions connect us to the boy-man whose end cannot fail to strike us as tragic in its

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irony. This character becomes an African hero not because of this or that particular act but because of the way the filmmaker brings to the surface his inescapable humanness, making it impossible to extricate from the African historical context that the film raises. Tsotsi embraces his humanness in the simple decision not to abandon, or worse, kill the baby. The particularity of his story binds him as cinema can to a specific landscape, to the language of his environment, and thus to the history of Soweto, an emblematic African space into which every spectator is brought. The spectator beholds a beauty of spirit revealed as un-thought thought, formulated at the level of instinct, in the moment Tsotsi makes his decision not to abandon the baby in the car he has stolen. That spirit is celebrated in a quiet communion with the spectator when his life becomes a scramble to keep the baby from hunger or discomfort, and throughout the length of his emergence before our eyes as something other than the thug-by-default. Most strikingly it is extolled at the end, when he returns the baby to his parents for them to give him a better life than he himself could provide. Thus, the one consequential contact with something essentially human, what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called the face-to-face encounter, catapults Tsotsi into a series of choices that exert his humanity above all other qualities. Levinas presents this essentially simple moment of recognition by one human of the humanity of the other when confronted by the nakedness and uniqueness of the face of that other. This is literally an exhortation “do not kill me,” that is dramatized here. This consciousness of humanity is the basis for Levinas’ more complex ideas of responsibility and the fundamental relationship of the self to the “other.” In Tsotsi, this moment is dramatized to frame the entire engagement of our spectatorship. Tsotsi is based on Athol Fugard’s novel of the same title. Although the novel was set in the 1950s, Hood’s screenplay adapted it for a thoroughly contemporary context. It is a daring story of a young man known as Tsotsi whose brutality is systematically linked to his early life experience of growing up on the outskirts of the Soweto township. Tsotsi is the unquestioned leader of a miserable gang including Boston (Mothusi Magano), Butcher (Zenzo Ngquobe), and Die Aap (Kenneth Nkosi). We know nothing about Tsotsi, not even his real name – Tsotsi itself means “thug.” After a meaningless argument, Tsotsi beats up Boston until the latter’s face is completely destroyed and then rushes out, running across the township and into the city of Johannesburg. In the city, outside a gated house, he holds up a woman (Nambitha Mpumlwana) who is passing through the gates of her home in her fancy car; as he jerkily drives away (he does not know how to drive), he realizes there is an infant (Nonthuthu Sibisi) in the back seat. He loses control of the car, which he has to abandon. We watch him walk away, and then we witness the dramatic moment when he turns back to come and peek at the wailing child. The fatal humanity of the encounter between the seemingly mercenary thug and the infant is the spark that lights up the entire film thenceforth. Tsotsi’s endearing struggles to hide the child, deal with its excretions, hunger, and loneliness take him through the meandering alleyways of Soweto and lead him to highjack Miriam (Terry Pheto), into breast-feeding this baby along with her own. Tsotsi is a wanted man because the woman he shot survived and the sketch of his face is all over the news. He finally decides, with prompting

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from Miriam, to return the baby to its parents. In a somewhat melodramatic ending that insists on the gangster’s humanity much as the beginning did, Tsotsi hands over the child and then turns himself in. Two additional alternative endings are provided in the DVD version of the film, which includes a commentary by Gavin Hood, the director. In the first one, Tsotsi runs away across the open space between the city and slum despite having taken a shot in the shoulder. In the second, Tsotsi is fatally shot at the moment he hands over the baby when he reaches instinctively for the milk bottle under his shirt upon hearing the baby cry. Tsotsi won, among other forms of recognition, the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2005 and has made quite a name for its director. In some ways, then, it is a “commercial” film (its budget was close to US$3 million). Its portrayal of the African city well beyond colonialism and apartheid highlights the stark inequalities that massive urbanization has brought. Gavin Hood explains how South Africa, being a venue for many big international commercial films, offers to its own filmmakers the advantages of well-trained technical crews. Hood reveals his commitment to the kind of ideals and ambitions that position Tsotsi squarely as an “African” film in the sense we have referred to, and this does not today preclude wanting to have success (as in winning at festivals and actually making more money than it took to make the film). Apparently, there were some proposals by big-name actors who might have played the part of Tsotsi, but Hood explains that the decision to use tsotsitaal (gangster language spoken in the slums which is a mixture of various South African languages), rather than some type of accent a Hollywood actor could master, took the film and its casting in a particular direction. If such a preoccupation is purely about “realism,” it extends in the cinematic reality to the sensory experience of the film, its connection of any spectator to African “reality” in its own way. It is the latter that argues for its strong inclusion as an African film, which, as mentioned earlier, hardly precludes any film from being a lot of other things – and indeed places it more firmly within the repertoire chosen here. These films all participate in multiple registers, genres, conversations, and groupings because they are rich beyond being African, diasporic, or both. When thinking about the casting and if an international name would be beneficial, Hood said in an interview: And then you go, there’s something wrong with the commercial paradigm here. Actually, the commercially sensible thing is to stick to what is best for this film. Now if it’s best for this film because of its subject matter, that this lead being an international name can fit, as I keep saying, you must take them. It’s crazy not to. No young filmmaker should do otherwise. But when it’s not gonna work and it’s gonna feel tortured, then you’ve gotta commit to doing it in a way that those guys have inspired us. Those South American filmmakers have inspired us and that’s where I took my inspiration from, and that’s what we did with Tsotsi. And once you decide you’re gonna do it in Tsotsi-Taal, well that kind of limits the number of name actors you can go to because not too many big name actors speak Tsotsi-Taal. So then you go home and you start casting and auditioning and then you worry you might not find the right person. (“An Interview”)

The superb casting goes a long way towards keeping the film tight and the city feeling real. It seems impossible to imagine anyone but Presley Chweneyagae in

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this role, swaggering around the bars and running across the field between the slum and the city. Although the film was not shot in Soweto but in Pretoria, Hood’s effort with every detail, including the kwaito (local rap) music, was to convey something that “felt right,” to him and to South African sensibility attuned to and knowledgeable of the particular sensory details – thus meaningful in quite a particular way to spectators of that kind. The city, in this film, does not end with a “slum dog millionaire” – far from it. Its poignancy is sharp, its advocacy is vocal, and its message beyond clear. It is precisely because of its commitment to the detail of the real that in appealing to a wide variety of spectators Tsotsi does not offend any sophisticated aesthetic sensibilities by its overt (and therefore, one might feel, old-fashioned) gesture of defending the “humanity” of the have-nots. It shows the alleyways in the slum city, the print of the young mother’s clothing as she bathes the child at gunpoint, the open space with its drainpipes in which the orphaned children live, the shabby dark underpass where Tsotsi chases down the beggar, or the driveway of the stylish house that falls victim to Tsotsi’s gang. But they are real differently to different spectators. Indeed these details stay with us as we start to see the various decisive moments in plot, anchored in space as contingencies that always seem to play out to this young man’s disadvantage. As his life emerges in the form of a series of disadvantages that are not so much circumstantial or coincidental as systemic, the no man’s land between himself (and his world) and the city which is likely more familiar to most spectators starts to become an unbearable form of cruel separation from emancipation for which we might ourselves be responsible. If that is an extreme statement, at the very least, the spectator is prepared to become indignant at the gross unfairness of the end of the story and of the fate of the boy we have followed. Gavin Hood’s young Tsotsi rises out of the Soweto slum as a loud plea to the world to heed the entirely dispossessed whose violence is bathed in pathos, because it is carefully traced in the film through a series of specific moments of revelation to the spectator and personal revolution of the hero. Concurrently, there is a particular type of movement in the education of its spectator that prepares us for the end of the film. The moments of humanity, which primarily focus on Tsotsi’s relationship to the infant, are understated but bolstered by the detailed reality of the city. This reality, even if it alienates the “cosmopolitan” spectator in the sense that Fredric Jameson suggested third world texts do for first world readers, in this particular cinematic formation also calls in a variety of spectators through the experience of the Africanized city that today anyone who lives in or visits a city in any part of the world might find familiar from a color, a tune, smell, language, or face. Any “cosmopolitan” inhabitant or visitor of big cities must brush shoulders with its dispossessed, come into contact with some of its doubtable vendors, or move through some of its murkier streets, and negotiate potholes and rubble or excrement in the course of their movements. Cinema (and Tsotsi here in particular) is able to simulate and exploit much of that experience in the short time the spectator steps willingly into its reality. Thus, cinema might be considered to have more potential to play with and get beyond the type of alienation Jameson describes, which arises from the unfamiliarity of the context, culture, and everyday life encountered in “third world” novels. One strategy that many

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new African and diaspora films employ to interpellate a range of spectators is to draw on the commonality of urban experience precisely to highlight that “other” occupant of the city. In this, the spectator does not become an alienated one for whom the film is not made but rather one to whom is offered, with creativity and thoughtfulness, the opportunity to enter what might be an “other” experience alongside what is familiar and known. We will now follow the specific ways in which Tsotsi’s particular moments of decision function to elicit in the spectator a response to the character’s humanity and to revolutionize this character through our experience into a thoroughly ethical being, one who, in the final moments of the film, thus cannot fail to make us want to jump out of our seats (or off our couch or chair or seat on the floor) with the same emotion Fanon proclaimed necessary for a proper social accountability: “Stop, Thief!” But this, in our indignation for the thug, Tsotsi, and against the many traps the system lays for him. In the analyses, we shall comment on our diverse and possible “relationship[s] to the thing portrayed” (Eisenstein 153). Our first view of Tsotsi is accompanied by dramatic music while he looks menacingly at the rest of his gang lolling around playing dice. While rap music plays, Tsotsi struts through the dusty shantytown, followed by the gang, reacting with an indignant middle finger at bigger thugs who mock him. Then, at the railway station we witness the gang’s first murder. A middle-aged man, self-satisfied in appearance, has just purchased what looks like a gift for a woman – perhaps his wife, perhaps his lover, perhaps his daughter – he pays for it by taking out a thick envelope full of money. The thugs follow him onto a crowded train, surround him, and when he protests slightly as they reach into his pocket, stab him quietly; he is surrounded by them, and the crowd on the train is totally ignorant of what has happened. The movement of the knife is clearly shown as it exits his body. The wound is pressed, the body propped up until all other passengers exit the carriage, the boys are seemingly stunned at what they have done. Next comes a long shot of the empty carriage and the body slumped to the ground. We then learn that they had never gone this far before. Boston cuts himself with a broken bottle, challenging Tsotsi by asking if he has any feeling, any humanity left. He wants to know what his real name is and who he really is. When pressed about his father and mother, Tsotsi is provoked, and in a rage pounds the boy’s face, leaving it a bleeding mess. Next we segue into a dramatic shot of Tsotsi running away: he runs in the open no-man’s land between the shantytown and Soweto proper (Figure 6.1a) and we have frequent cuts to a little boy (Benny Moshe), running in his stead (Figure 6.1b). This purposeful crosscutting between the Tsotsi as we know him and the little boy, both running toward the camera (and thus the spectator) establishes the importance Tsotsi’s childhood will play in his fate. It is a direct and powerful appeal to see the youth as a product of his childhood. We are alerted that there is something in the thug’s childhood that will require our attention in order to fully process the violent scene we have just witnessed. Tsoti arrives in the city in the pouring rain, and as he waits under a tree on the side of the road, a woman (Nambitha Mpumlwana) pulls up in her Mercedes Benz. The remote that operates the gate to her home will not work, so she steps out into

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Figure 6.1 (a) Medium shot, Tsotsi runs after injuring Boston; (b) Jump cut to young Tsotsi. Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood, produced by Peter Fudakowski and The UK Film & TV Production PLC, Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa, The National Film and Video Foundation of SA, 2005.

the deluge to reach her husband (Rapulana Seiphemo) on the intercom to tell him to open it from inside. Tsotsi steps into her car while pulling a gun on her; as he is pulling away, struggling to get the automatic into “drive” mode, the woman makes the fatal mistake of opening the car door, at which point he shoots her at close range. There is a moment when the camera records Tsotsi’s own surprise (Figure 6.2a), which, however, does not linger. He has to get away. We see the woman rise up and then fall down as her husband, John, rushes out to her before she collapses. Tsotsi seems stunned as he drives away. We recall the expressions on the lads’ faces when they committed murder on the train: the same shocked, almost amazed expression. Again, there is a purposeful connection established between those moments, which communicates some form of resistance and awareness of the enormity of the violence, which the characters share with the spectator, although they themselves are the ones who have committed it. This reminder is a pedagogical strategy in the spectator’s education. The film gives us quite simple and quick narrative connections to make. You know that feeling, it seems to say, you know that expression on your own

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face, likely for something less horrific than a murder you committed. But what we do know is that muscular set of the jaw and the surprised widening of our own eyes in witnessing our folly in something: Oh God, did I just do that? These early images set up our reception of Tsotsi. While he, of course, had a loaded gun, we are not likely to conclude he would have chosen to shoot at her at all, because his surprised expression even suggests this is the first time he has used it. We are still sorting out the impulsive violence toward his friend Boston, and are still haunted by the image of the little boy crying, running out into nowhere. However, if these are vague thoughts, we do not have time to reflect because the immediate is more pressing. This is also a strategy in the unfolding of the film: the seeds for softening the spectator toward the character are planted, but before it can be intellectualized the thought process is interrupted by a pressing scene of action or suspense short-circuiting the thought process. Yet the spectator’s apprehension of the subsequent action is conditioned by that previous softening. Now, Tsotsi turns around as the car swerves and sees, to his horror, what we now recognize as the full narrative set up for what will follow: the baby in the back seat. He tries to abandon the baby in the car as he walks away, but its crying makes him turn around. When he walks back and opens the back door the baby’s cries immediately grow calmer. He finds groceries on the floor that he stuffs back into the brown bag from which they seem to have fallen, and then another decisive moment occurs when the baby’s eyes meet his. This moment provides a superb dramatization of Levinas’ notion of the face-to-face encounter mentioned earlier. Levinas uses the biblical story in which Abraham, prepared to carry out God’s will, is on the verge of sacrificing his son Isaac. Levinas dramatizes this moment as one where the father looks into his son’s eyes and experiences a feeling of being put in touch with pure humanity, where one human being encounters the humanness of another, beyond any other specific relationship. In his version, the moment of the encounter of each other’s gaze is constructed as one in which Abraham feels an ethical imperative not to kill his son. The power of recognizing that the other is different from the self, for Levinas, is one of pure and total ethical possibility for responsibility that, in his understanding, goes well beyond reciprocity (Totality and Infinity 199). Here Tsostsi grabs the blanket from the child’s seat, stuffs it with his jacket into the brown bag, and finally, to our relief, takes the now wailing child out of its car seat to put it into the paper bag. Tostsi’s walk, while he is armed with the bag containing the baby, to return to the shantytown across the no-man’s land is accompanied by dramatic but soft, expectant music that appropriately signals the beginning of his quiet revolution. This beginning invites the spectator to journey through that whole experience while having set up a sympathetic, even if ambiguous, view of the protagonist. Tsotsi’s struggles begin with dealing with a baby who needs a new diaper. We are horrified when he brandishes a threatening-looking knife to undo the velcro straps of the disposable diaper, but we heave a sigh of relief as he deftly cuts away from the body and the fastening comes undone. Through this and other acts, Tsotsi flirts with the spectator’s mind, teasing us into seeing that his potential violence can always be tempered by his generosity, signs of which we see in the small, instinctive, and

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Figure 6.2 (a) Tsotsi stunned after shooting woman; (b) Point-of-view shot: Tsotsi sees the baby in the back seat; (c) Tsotsi’s eyes meet the baby’s. Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood, produced by Peter Fudakowski and The UK Film & TV Production PLC, Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa, The National Film and Video Foundation of SA, 2005.

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un-thought acts within situations requiring immediate reactions. In this scene, he struggles as the baby protests, wrapping it up in newspaper and keeping everything together with a large towel. Next comes a lovely moment when the thug is transformed. He turns on the music and dances, trying to coax the baby into being quiet, then stuffs bread into the infant’s mouth, then attempts to feed him condensed milk that he attempts to pour from a pierced can directly into the baby’s mouth. The baby’s momentary delight brings Tsotsi relief and triumph and the spectator’s horror is willingly transformed to share Tsotsi’s reaction. Despite these attempts to win over the spectator, the latter’s sympathies might resist and be over-determined by the effect of the previous scene of the mother who has been shot. However, the contrast between the animated and desperate action in Tsotsi’s filthy and sparse environment and the manicured hands of the wounded woman in the hospital tinges that scene with a sense of the stark contradiction in the conditions between the two settings that is operative despite the tragic situation in the hospital. The tragedy for the shot woman is entirely in the current crisis, but it has already emerged that Tsotsi’s tragedy predates this. In Tsotsi’s case, the current crisis (i.e., how to feed the hungry baby) allows for capturing his entire world and suggesting his past. The crisis of his larger situation signals that of a whole generation of youth in a world far away from, yet adjacent to, the clean and comfortable hospital, although it is where the woman lies, gravely injured. While, on the one hand, the spectator is gently nudged in his “education,” in which the two scenes are interlocked not just for the contradiction but for the particular ways in which they are juxtaposed and thus joined structurally well beyond the cinematic technique of crosscutting. Tsotsi’s transformation from here on out is gradual and goes through stages such that we are not allowed to see it simplistically, by moving in a singular and unquestioned direction forwards toward his redemption. We are alerted to this in his brutal interaction with a beggar (Owen Sejake) and with Miriam, as we listen for our own sympathies, alliances, and ethical reactions through the sharpened awareness the film has already brought. In the first interaction that we see between him and the old man, Tsotsi seems to give vent to his anger against the world when he hurls the coin at the beggar because he believes he is shamming his disability. When he makes the old man soil his pants from fear, we witness what could be a moment of near regret. There is something simultaneously cruel and gentle when Tsotsi mentions the story of a dog whose back was broken and which he compares to the crippled man. The mention of a “dog” was what also unleashed his anger against Boston in the scene that occurred at the beginning, after the killing on the subway. Boston had provoked him then: “Maybe you had a woman and when she left you, it hurt. And you bled. Your father, your father, Tsotsi. Your father, where is he? Your father and mother. Where are they? Jesus, Tsotsi! A dog? What about a dog?” That unleashed an inexplicably violent burst of anger and now brings about the activation in our minds of the dog being somehow tied to his parents and his childhood as well as a source of the always immanent violence we sense in the young thug. Here, in the scene with the beggar, he kneels down to speak to the crippled old man, who is in a makeshift wheelchair. Instead of

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Figure 6.3 (a) Camera position allows for spectator presence as witness; (b) Focus on beggar, camera takes Tsotsi’s perspective. Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood, produced by Peter Fudakowski and The UK Film & TV Production PLC, Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa, The National Film and Video Foundation of SA, 2005.

the tilt shots used at the beginning of the encounter that made him tower above the beggar menacingly, as well as the close-ups of the terrified man who had to look up at the boy, the camera now follows Tsotsi, keeping his face in focus as he kneels before the mendicant. However, instead of a two-shot to capture them in the same frame, shot-reverse shots are preferred for this conversation. The camera is placed slightly off to one side beside the beggar so we are still allowed into the scene as witnesses rather than voyeurs when Tsotsi speaks, while, when the man speaks, we squarely take Tsotsi’s perspective (Figure 6.3). Thus, the film still maintains the spectator in a form of skepticism, obliquely watching Tsotsi from a point of view which is not quite the beggar’s and yet is close enough. From this perspective we are allowed entry into the scene as intimate observers, but tension is created by the thorough exploitation of the pathos of the beggar’s situation as it is exposed to Tsotsi, which extends rather than resolves the moment of possible judgment: Tsotsi’s reaction is likely not ours, and yet the beggar is framed from Tsotsi’s perspective, which we are allowed to share.

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And we shall see, in a minute, that the tension between our perspective and Tsotsi’s vis-à-vis the beggar is not collapsed. The film is thus very controlled in the way it wins the spectator over to Tsotsi for the denouement. Making our view of the beggar coincide with Tsotsi’s position brings a degree of discomfort to the spectator who is somewhat skeptical of this character, even if his or her sympathy has already started shifting. This ending for the scene is all at once an anticlimax, a moment of relief and release of tension for the spectator (No he’s not going to kill him after all!), and it consists of an opening up of the interpretive field. The fact that he did not kill the woman or abandon or shoot the baby does not mean he is not a nasty young person who disrespected other, less powerful, human beings. These and perhaps other ruminations are key to the pedagogy of the spectator, who is being prepared for that last moment of more visceral reaction beyond all intellectual processing: Stop thief! How do we apprehend Tsotsi in the interaction with the beggar? How do we read his attitude toward this helpless man? Is it a moment of disdain, despite the flicker of gentleness we thought we witnessed? Is it a form of respect (even if not as we might have wished it expressed) devoid of paternalism, because, in essence, Tsotsi treats him as someone who can pick up his money himself? We cannot say with too much certitude, no matter which way our sensibilities take us. However, when we recall this moment, as it is likely we will, when we come to what will be the last encounter between Tsotsi and the beggar, we would want to connect the possibility of respect to Tsotsi’s act: pick up your money as a beggar, your infirmity does not make you any less capable. If these ruminations appear too speculative, then we could simply state that, in hindsight, when we witness Tsotsi’s real generosity to the man, when he gives him a sizable sum in rolled up bills, perhaps we can say that in that moment something other than disrespect and cruelty lurked in the protagonist. The final scene is carefully worked toward and built up; the spectator is prepared. Tsotsi is nicely dressed and on his way to return the baby. He makes one last stop at the top of the stairs in the subway station where the beggar normally places himself. To the beggar’s surprise, he gives him a not insignificant number of bank notes and tells him to take it. We have been well prepared to appreciate the moment. The film’s pedagogy has taught us to examine our initial skepticism just as much as it has pricked our emotional sympathy before bringing us to a place of less ambiguous warmth for Tsotsi. We will discuss the ending after examining another interaction that allows our engagement with the protagonist to develop. The interaction with Miriam is similarly structured, requiring the spectator to exercise both sympathy and skepticism. At first Tsotsi is a threat and an impending danger, as we see it, to the beautiful young woman with the baby. The dramatic placement of the two actors – Tsotsi around the corner while Miriam is unlocking her door with her baby on her back – casts us as helpless observers of Tsotsi’s possible violence in the opening of this sequence. Indeed, that danger becomes real when he takes her by surprise. Miriam tries to retaliate with a knife, but he holds her at gunpoint before she finally gives in. His menacing attitude when he tells her to feed the child little anticipates the next moment. Once the child is suckling at her breast, the

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camera builds on the beautiful flow of emotion by moving from swift cuts between the two of them to gentle traveling shots (rather than zooms) that advance toward her from him and vice versa; meanwhile, the silence suggests the calm of the feeding child is transferred to the relief of its captor. He gradually puts down his gun, and the camera focuses on his almost childlike face. We now see a hint of tears in his eyes before he lowers them and then looks away. Cuts to Miriam capture her anger and indignation, which are tinged with anguish for him. Camera placement cleverly accentuates the distance between them as he wanders around her place, which is small but neat, full of beautiful objects, beautiful light, and good arrangements, in stark contrast with his own dingy quarters. The earthy colors highlighted with the oranges and yellows of the space and her clothing give a feeling of warmth, cleanliness, neatness, safety, and hope (Plate 9). Yet that distance serves to establish the spatial aspect of the scene, capturing Miriam’s humble dwelling as a place of warmth and a refuge for the child within the thug. Despite a cut to the hospital scene, where a sketch of him is being made following the mother’s description, the sanctity of Miriam’s home comes through as an oasis for Tsotsi. Subsequently she will volunteer to wash the baby, which he allows her to do, and we are witness to the cooing of both woman and child. From Miriam’s gentle comforting we cut abruptly to a dark scene lit by a candle, with greens and browns in the color scheme, setting it in stark contrast to the yellows and reds of Miriam’s space. This flashback to Tsotsi’s dying mother calling to him to hold her hand is almost eerie in the contrast it makes. When Tsotsi sets out from Miriam’s he is transformed yet again, and he seems to regain his threatening demeanor as he leaves this haven. However, on his return, there is no brandishing of a gun. He tells Miriam the baby’s name is David. It is his own name, and we know it because of another cut to the memory of his mother, who calls out to him: “David.” The whole story of his childhood, which has haunted the narrative and interrupted our judgment is revealed: from Tsotsi’s wild reaction to Boston’s questioning that included the words “parents” and “dog,” the little boy running interspersed with Tsotsi as we know him, to the mother calling out in the scene when Miriam is cooing to the baby. All this is exposed when he goes back to his pathetic quarters. Through an effective flashback we learn that the dog in question was kicked by Tsotsi’s father in his drunken rage, and that it had had its back broken. The mother was dying of some communicable disease, or at least thought communicable by the father. The father’s brutality to the mother and the boy are clearly related to the volatility in his personhood, and particularly in his manhood as it developed within the dispossessed surroundings to which he abandoned his son. In both these interactions with Miriam, what occurs is a particular type of preparation of the spectator that I am calling a veritable pedagogy. Rather than a seamless and incremental change from the thug to a gradually more and more sympathetic character, the film gives us contradictory moments, conflicting images, and, particularly, instances for adjusting sympathy and assessment. However, since these moments are often followed by important twists in the plot or scenes that grab our attention away from developing the thought that has been provoked, such

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pedagogy does not fall into the trap of preaching. The beginning of the end arrives when Tsotsi, Aap, and Butcher return to the baby’s home, since Tsotsi is now familiar with the terrain. They need some money, although with the way Tsotsi lingers in the baby’s room it is clear his emotions have interfered with his efficiency as a criminal. The boys enter the home, slipping in with the husband’s car. They bind John to a chair, and Tsotsi packs up many things from the child’s room, looking wondrously at the stuffed animals and other baby paraphernalia. He fills a bag with whatever he can stuff into it, including bottles and baby formula. Butcher is rummaging around while Aap is eating and sampling wine, chatting happily with the bound householder. John manages to set off an alarm from his keychain, and in the panic that ensues, Butcher is about to shoot him when a shot goes off and he falls to the ground in a pool of blood. Tsotsi has prevented the baby’s father from dying and has killed his mate. Aap is in shock. The boys make off. All this prepares the plot and the now educated spectator is ready for the final sequence and Tsotsi’s definitive rehabilitation. Miriam persuades Tsotsi to return the baby. Tsotsi takes responsibility for Boston, decides to care for him, and asks for his forgiveness. He chats with the kids living in the drainpipes and reveals which one was his (more disclosure for the spectator, more preparation for the finale). He takes the subway, passes the beggar, gives him the money, as we have already discussed, and makes his way to the house. He sets the baby down and is about to make off, but something holds him back: his attachment to the child and concern for his wellbeing. Tsotsi turns around and rings the buzzer on the intercom to let them know the baby is there to be taken in. When the baby cries he instinctively he picks him up. But the house is wired, everyone is prepared for a violent, brutal criminal, there is security all over, and soon Tsotsi is surrounded by the police, whose formation cordons him off so that he can go neither up nor down the street. The mansion is before him and behind him stretches out the no-man’s land beyond which lies his wretched life. John persuades the police to put their guns down, and the baby is handed over. By now, the spectator is rooting for Tsotsi: we surely want him released. We know what he risked to return the baby he could have simply abandoned at the edge of the no-man’s land. He could have just walked away from the gates without alerting anyone. His foolishness is, for us, his humanity: his humanity, and his nobility under conditions of sub-humanity. He has paid his dues all around, even returned the baby heroically, putting his emotional tie to him and his responsibility for him above his own safety. Tsotsi’s expression when he has to hand over the baby is filled with the pathos of having been deprived of his own childhood, the one we shared in through the hints and glimmers that were revealed as the circumstances of his current life catapulted forwards. His feeling of bereavement without the child is felt in the pit of our own stomach. Our act of love, to listen and wait and piece together the emotional fractures that fed his rage, which we ourselves might have condemned to start with, constituted the simple agreement of spectatorship. When the exchange is made, and the officer tells him to raise his hands above his head, Tsotsi turns toward the voice with a confused expression that seems to come from a vague consciousness of the situation that must be established above his grief. As he raises his arms, we want to

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rise up, not with all the ethical or other arguments we might make, and that we indeed have been prepared to make about the disenfranchised and the means available to them, but rather with the Fanonian visceral shout: Stop, thief! But the thieves become the officers, the situation, the injustice, the sheer incongruousness of Tsotsi being a criminal. We are struck by Tsotsi’s almost physical pain at the loss of the child and the look of utter betrayal in his eyes (Figure 6.4a). “What more do you want?” his eyes seem to ask in disbelief, while the pain expressed around his mouth mirrors the uselessness of the limp hands that have given up their raison d’être. The dramatic lighting upon him with the darkness all around makes it seem as though he has emerged from nowhere. We might carefully study the action to conclude that it was at the moment he was leaving the baby that his affection for it and his ability to rise above the hardships of his own existence push him to go back to ring the bell. That fatal action might have caused him to be caught in the end. However, the anguish on his face and his look of

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Figure 6.4 (a) Tsotsi devastated after handing over baby; (b) Tsotsi raises hands. Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood, produced by Peter Fudakowski and The UK Film & TV Production PLC, Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa, The National Film and Video Foundation of SA, 2005.

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slight incredulity that he is being held for his reaction to the child’s hunger is given full credence at the emotive level. This is so even though we have been expecting his incarceration as at least a possibility as soon as he became a firm suspect when the baby’s mother gave a description of him to the police and they made a sketch of him. The point is, our immediate desire to jump up in protection of an essentially good human requires that we take Tsotsi at face value, as it were, on the spot, as one human who reacts to another. This notion of redemption is very much a part of the thinking of South African history as it emerged out of apartheid, not simply for people who were somehow “right” historically but for a collectivity that has to engage in acts that release individuals from being bound by anything other than those “good” actions. Tsotsi, in this manner, is quite specifically South African, and though a larger budget film it joins up quite effortlessly with the ideals of the contemporary forms of cinema from Africa and the diaspora that we have been exploring. In many ways Tsotsi’s character becomes the new “man” Solanas and Getino refer to in their description of Third Cinema, while the processes the film incites in the spectator, and that we have followed in at least one sustained potential version above, act as a systematic familiarization of a truth that becomes dear to the spectator in the form of this character: “Freeing a forbidden truth means setting free the possibility of indignation and subversion. Our truth, that of the new man who builds himself by getting rid of all the defects that still weigh him down, is a bomb of inexhaustible power and, at the same time, the only real possibility of life” (285). This big budget film inserts itself into the repertoire of the cinema of Africa and the diaspora as delineated in this book, particularly in its engagement with the spectator. The process of bringing the spectator into ethical engagement with the protagonist and his historical circumstances is central to the film’s construction, as is the emotional education of the spectator to prepare for a concluding moment in which, paradoxically, it is not all the subtle arguments about the disenfranchised that come to the fore when we see Tsotsi apprehended by the police. Rather, we are prompted to have a visceral reaction against an injustice that in the moment requires an action to prevent it. The filmmaker himself seems to acknowledge the complexity of that ending, so much so that he was prompted to provide an alternative possibility for the fate of the protagonist. This revolutionary character evolves into being a hero by responding to various tense moments through an assertion of his humanity while he is mired in a situation that defies human needs. The film simultaneously awakens the spectator to a veritable revolution to consider South African history as urgent beyond apartheid and its resolution, something that cinema has so effectively brought to audiences around the world. The fact that the bourgeois family that Tsotsi brutalized is black moves the primary terms of conflict away from the purely racial ones in which South Africa tends to be visualized both within and without, while the primarily white police force does not dilute its racial history. The spectator’s implication in the cinematographic frame undergoes dynamic movements, and the process of acquiring intimacy and coincidence while simultaneously experiencing distance and divergence from the character of Tsotsi becomes a series of ethical moments that are actualized as seemingly spontaneous reactions although they are

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carefully crafted potentials for Africanizing the spectator. Such a form of Africanizing includes thinking of South Africa in its contemporaneous urgency, where the terms of conflict and the space of the subaltern have evolved beyond what might be standard ways of returning to the “problem.” The series of spectator engagements with Tsotsi culminates in the dramatic ending, where our solidarity moves beyond the logic of technique and focalization, though well prepared by it, and is experienced as a visceral reaction for that character.

Notes 1 See Burlin Barr “Dependency” for an insightful reading of Hyenas. 2 Tsotsi was produced with much financial support from institutions based in South Africa such as the National Film and Video Broadcasting Foundation of South Africa as well as the UK Film and TV Production Company, Inc.

Part III

Narrative

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Documentary Film Situating a Style

Documentary film in general gestures toward truth in overt ways. As Bill Nichols writes, “documentary has come to suggest incompleteness and uncertainty, recollection and impression, images of personal worlds and their subjective construction” (Blurred Boundaries 1). African filmmakers picked up the documentary form most naturally but also came into it at a moment when (i) they wished to move away from the colonial/ethnographic documentaries in which Africans were most frequently negatively represented and (ii) documentaries themselves were to undergo massive reinvention across the world. In addition, a very important point in the development of African documentary cinema regards funding. Documentary films lend themselves to being shot with a hand-held camera and do not require sets, actors, and much of the paraphernalia associated with large productions. African filmmakers have found that this could be a very effective way to tell urgent stories. Their adaptation of the genre shows that they were less constricted by some of the traditional expectations of documentary film.1 One of the most exciting “documentary” filmmakers from the continent is surely Jean-Marie Teno from Cameroon. His films Afrique, je te plumerai (“Africa I will Fleece You”; 1992), The Colonial Misunderstanding (2004), A Trip to the Country (2000), and most recently, Sacred Places (2009) amongst others “document” and question realities in Africa. The pedagogical function is not one Teno’s films shy away from, nor does he attempt to divert attention from his positions vis-à-vis the subjects he tackles. The Ethiopian filmmaker Salem Mekuria has developed a style of narration that is quite unique. In her films, right from As I remember It (1991), which is a portrait of Dorothy West (who is less well known today than her contemporary, Zora Neale Hurston), Mekuria uses imaginative means for accessing the past while interweaving it with her own position as the filmmaker. More recently Mekuria has taken to video installations that offer greater flexibility and reach for the same types of gestures. Joseph Gaï Ramaka, best known for his fictional Karmen Geï, examined in Chapter 3, is also a prolific documentary filmmaker with many short and longer films to his credit. His most Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, First Edition. Anjali Prabhu. © 2014 Anjali Prabhu. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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striking documentary, Et si latif avait raison (“And if Latif Were Right”; 2006), is a resounding critique of Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade. These filmmakers lack the advantage of the South Africans’ superb internal support system and infrastructure, for example the Documentary Filmmakers Association does a great deal, including providing a list of it members and links to their personal sites (Documentary Filmmaker). The great Russian filmmaker and theorist, Sergei Eisenstein, is associated with the notion of the synchronization of senses. At the same time, his ultimate interest in the “integration of image, sound, and music,” was always related to perception and meaning but also to emotion. The documentary films that we shall examine here masterfully engage this notion of synchronization while the spectator is interpellated in such a way as to elicit a response that is both emotional and intellectual, conditioned by the total sensory experience. African and diasporic filmmakers are well aware that their films are not necessarily being viewed by those most immediately concerned with the issues raised and that those viewing them might not be fully conversant with every image, sound, or word, no matter where such a spectator might be placed, both within and beyond the continent. But, as Jean-Marie Teno’s most recent film, Sacred Places, shows – by following a cinéclub in Ouagadougou, where audiences are thirsty to see films about themselves – it is perhaps too soon to write off certain films as highbrow or elitist all the while lamenting that African audiences don’t get to see these films and therefore, as a consequence, ask: How legitimately African are they? These questions run counter to the orientation of the filmmakers who participate varyingly in a renewed tradition of filmmaking that rejects precisely the notion of the authentic and the absolutely real, where they are held responsible for showing how things “are,” in “Africa,” something that colonial documentaries claim to do. Such objectives or claims are also those of ethnographic or traditional documentary films, which fixed Africans in particular roles and are limiting to those who see themselves as African. Indeed, those films completely erase the “subject-producer” and give central occupancy to the “subject-spectator” (Augst 51). African documentary filmmakers in particular are, first of all, invested in freedom: the freedom to invent and create, document and dream, report and critique. They are filmmakers above all else, while the topics, orientation, and approach in their films all constitute an act of freedom. It is in this sense that Joseph Gaï Ramaka insists he is a citizen filmmaker rather than a political one. What he explains is that interest in a particular topic and the orientation taken in the film he might be making about it is developed from his feeling of being a concerned citizen – naturally he feels very connected to happenings in his native Senegal.2 The aesthetic totality that the film becomes is invented from such a position. Africans, as they have been represented in film, have historically been negatively associated with the idea of the anti-modern or the not-yet-modern. But as Jacques Rancière puts it,

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the idea of modernity is a questionable notion that tries to make clear-cut distinctions in the complex configuration of the aesthetic regime of the arts. It tries to retain the forms of rupture, the iconoclastic gestures, etc., by separating them from the context that allows for their experience: history, interpretation, patrimony, the museum, the pervasiveness of reproduction . . . . The idea of modernity would like there to be only one meaning and direction in history, whereas the temporality specific to the aesthetic regime of the arts is a co-presence of heterogeneous temporalities. (Politics of Aesthetics 26)

In a similar vein, Fredric Jameson has suggested that modernity is not a concept but a narrative category. What these documentary filmmakers do is to precisely question modernity as an appropriate narrative category for the types of dilemmas which Africans face. In another sense what they question is the moving toward an identifiable European “modern,” that would then necessarily set African modernity as a latecomer. In terms of our view of the documentary films examined in this chapter, it is therefore important to retain the idea that innovation and iconoclastic features in these films are not served well by simply comparing them to the development of the documentary genre as it is recognizable from its changes in European and American forms in particular. Instead, it is more interesting to connect these filmic gestures to the temporality surrounding the events or realities that enter into these documentaries in imaginative and often highly personal ways for the filmmakers in question. Rancière suggests that the emergence of the aesthetic regime of the arts is what the term “modernity” refers to, although the idea of modernity focuses upon rupture in a simplistic fashion distinguishing the representative from the non-representative (or anti-representative). The distribution of the sensible, in Rancière’s terms, refers to the conditions of possibility for what we can see, hear, make, and do. However, the rejection of mimesis in the modern era does not mean abandoning all forms of figurative representation (i.e., where the figures are recognizably taken from the real world). In fact one of the emblems of European modernity is also called “realism.” What was happening in the realist novel, then, was an alteration in the structures within which resemblance was functioning. In the realist novel, we could say (still following Rancière) that the primacy of the narrative over the descriptive was toppled or reversed. For Rancière, the aesthetic regime of the arts is less concerned with establishing a rupture with the past than with thinking the future of art from its current separation from non-art – a venture in which the past is constantly re-staged. My interest in Rancière’s debunking of the authority of modernity as either a thing of plenitude or something to be attacked is based in wanting to speak about African films as being political without falling into the trap of calling them modern, although at various points in this book I have used the term “modernity” to signal the symbols in films that are meant to function as emblems of European-derived and American and other “global” forms of economic and cultural “now-ness.” For Rancière, however, the notion of modernity seems to have been deliberately invented to prevent a clear understanding of the transformations of art and its relationships with other spheres of collective experience, or at least it functions in such a way. However,

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politics is close to art in Rancière’s description of it: that is, when we consider them to be forms of knowledge which generate fictions in the sense of material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, what is done and can be done. When put in this way, the fiction of political films and nonpolitical films, or the distinction between fiction and documentary, is less pertinent. Still, it is possible to identify films that insert themselves, for a variety of reasons, into the documentary genre, although our interest in them for this book is less to understand or problematize genre than it is to understand how African and diaspora films bring about a particular discourse that aesthetically challenges the notion of modernity as much as the filmmakers critique the rapid changes that modernization has wreaked on the cultures whose stories they cinematize. The “documentary” genre in African and diaspora cinema participates in the same kind of Africanization of the spectator, and often takes liberties more easily and unselfconsciously in crossing into fiction or constructed reality, allowing for the taking of positions more readily because the autobiographical stance is not rejected as a premise that could be reclaimed. Rather, it is taken as part of the ongoing process of reclaiming cinema and reinventing its quite recent Africanization. Within a more strictly aesthetic realm, for Rancière, there are two politics: one which is “le devenir vie de l’art” or becoming life of art. The second is “la forme résistante” or resistant form, whereby the particular form of art resists being recuperated into the larger meanings and experiences of life. The productive tension between these two are particularly pertinent to the documentary genre, where the filmmaker makes specific invitations to consider the creation as part of larger life experiences and in fact draws from them, while on the other hand, and at the same time, the film’s autonomy and its singularity are constantly re-established through its own reflection on form. It is in this sense that I want to consider sound, where the participation of this element of the mise-en-scène has the paradoxical effect of both drawing the film out into reality and drawing in sensory reality as we know it, as well as fictionalizing the film, in the process of doing which it becomes an integral part of the various elements of composition which distinguish the art from reality. Keeping these points in mind, let us turn to Raoul Peck’s 1990 Lumumba, cleverly subtitled Death of the Prophet, thus immediately summoning our attention to the life of this man by announcing its power as a death and its owner as a mythical figure linked to Malcolm X by evoking the film Death of a Prophet (1983). Thus arranged, the fiction (in the sense of the arrangement of the signs, sound-signs particularly) is quite specifically oriented. This is Peck’s first documentary film on the subject of the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, and it was released in 1990. In Chapter 8 we will consider together both of Peck’s films on Lumumba: this one and a later, more commercial version of it that appeared a decade later. Raoul Peck is a Congolese filmmaker who, in 1963, when he was about ten years old, moved, with his family to the Congo from Haiti. The move to Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) came at the height of the Duvalier regime in Haiti. With French assistance many Haitian professionals moved to the Congo to take up professional and government positions. Peck’s father went as a professor of agriculture, while his mother worked for years as secretary

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to the governors of Léopoldville. The story unfolds as that of Peck’s family as much as it is that of the man who would emerge as the first prime minister of independent Congo, though, alas, not for long. Lumumba was executed just months after he took office. The film opens with a still shot of an eerie-looking corner of a European city that seems abandoned. A quick cut takes us around the corner to show more empty streets, lined with lamps, and buildings of what might be a ghost town. The drama is prepared for the sudden clap of thunder that ensues and is accompanied by a dramatic cut to a low-angle shot of the top corner of one of the buildings with the ominous dark sky framing it. The words of Henri Lopès’ poem “Du côté du Katanga” are chosen to open the film. The shot resembles a black-and-white photo. The sound of the wind is all we hear until the thunder interrupts its whistling. The “place” is Brussels’ La Place des Martyrs, the site of memorial for those who died in the two world wars. The film’s explicit opening demand is for us to see Lumumba as one of those martyrs … at the very least, with Peck’s voice, pronouncing the words of Congolese writer, and former prime minister himself, Henri Lopès. The poem has a child narrator who is ostensibly speaking to his mother, whom he tells not to believe anything regarding the death of a child, insisting rather that the one who died that night was a giant. A shot of the length of one of the cobbled streets with considerable depth of field then captures the morning light that will soon rival and overpower that of the lamps. The insistent repetition of “du côté du Katanga,” which by the very sonority disturbs the stony grandeur of the European city, characterizes how Peck uses sound to trouble what is called “fidelity” or congruence in the film with dissonance. What we see is surely not Katanga province in Africa, even the sonority of the word is alien to the European look. The spectator would wonder why the voice is speaking about Katanga and a martyrdom there while the image is of a quintessentially European square. Immediately following this there is an abrupt cut to documentary footage of a triumphant Patrice Lumumba at what we might assume to be public celebration of the victorious outcome of elections. The footage is shown in utter silence, while movement dominates: the waving, cheering crowds, the nodding, waving candidate. Once again, a jump cut to a random person, this time a young girl in the city of Brussels, is accompanied by voice-over narration (Peck’s own voice). The murdered prophet, we understand, is the youthful African winner we have just seen. And though the viewer sees incarnated in this young European woman the fact that time went on since that death, the narrator burdens her, through her very anonymity and her distance in time from the event, with the silence around Lumumba’s death. Lumumba becomes the prophet whose death killed the idea of the future itself. In incarnating that future, then, the young woman loses her innocence by merely existing. She violates the myth – in the words of the narrator, “no matter what they say.” The burden of Lumumba’s death is borne by those who never knew him, they are his “children.” Us. The now-peopled city, still dreary from its damp weather, is bustling with activity and movement, particularly that of the train, multiplying the inheritors of Lumumba’s death, and folding in very easily – by the rapid covering of space

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that early in the film mirrors the long hands of external interference in the affairs of the then “new” Congo – the spectator of any location. The spectator is rendered guilty simply for knowing the sensation of the familiar movement of the train that carries away the young woman on the screen: a child who does not care to acknowledge her father. The sequence ends, making sure to take in a quick image of the Belgian flag that frames the scene conceptually for the viewer, and then cuts to a puddle of water into which the rain falls. This segues into a dark screen before we see the title of the film, cleverly accompanied by the continuous sound of the rain from the previous image. This kind of sound overlap from one shot to another is thoroughly exploited by Peck in the demand his film makes for recognition of our collective responsibility for Lumumba’s death, and perhaps much more. Peck thus connects spaces and enjoins historically different time frames through the use of sound overlap. Peck urges the spectator to account for happenings in Africa after the cold war, when fear of the charismatic power of an individual to garner the following of a newly reconstituted “people” was at a high point in America (in particular). That fear drove a crude and brutal operation to, quite simply, extinguish Lumumba’s life. The sound of the rainfall continues until there is a cut to a black-and-white school photograph of children that then resumes the story of Peck’s own journey to the Congo. African arts of all kinds, as they have been practiced long before European museums or categories that allow for terms such as modernity, have always been “modern” in the sense of their dynamism, utility, and implication in societal rituals, and mostly for being closely aligned to collective thought processes, as well as being fully concerned with the evolving forms their artists have given them. One might say that colonial categories and structures were an interruption in that dynamism. Cinema as an African art form has revivified such a dynamism, particularly in providing its own sense of modernity for which it does not adhere to the notion’s European history. Naturally its modernism has to be one of its own medium and thus invented against the heritage with which it was bequeathed. Sensations, sounds, and movement together create experiences that make Peck’s film participate in the spectator’s outside world through the familiarity of the universal everyday that is highlighted at key points, as we have seen. At the same time, tactics such as the recuperation of the black-and-white photograph, the stylized documentary footage used without sound, and the dissonance of the meeting of colonial Katanga with contemporary Brussels all function to aestheticize the film, move it away from recuperation to the spectator’s everyday, and, paradoxically, through sensation create the resistant form of art. As art, this film immortalizes and universalizes not just the powerful, tragic, and yet hopeful myth of this African prophet but also our responsibility for his death. In essence, Peck turns every spectator into an African insofar as we witness a youthful man full of utopian poetry take the form of a political leader in what we soon recognize to be impossible political circumstances. We witness his hurtling toward an unjustifiable death in the name of democracy, Western values, and African savagery. The dissonance built up throughout the film and witnessed by the spectator becomes a questioning of history and a form of Africanization carried out by the film.

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Salem Mekuria takes the idea of triptych to a different level with her Ruptures: A Many-Sided Story (2003). Literally splitting the screen in three, and using all sections fluidly, for a dynamic play of images that sometimes match and sometimes do not, Mekuria exploits movement, sound, color, and shape in ways that are mesmerizing. In the first sequence, for example, we are taken over by a sensual apprehension of the city, the mosque, the traffic, the rain, a woman getting out of the rain, people going about their day, the lighting of fire, the blazing of fire. This succession of sensations captivates us utterly. The sounds come from fidelity to the particular action on each screen, but sometimes one screen’s action dominates the sound. Music is subtle and chosen with care for each sequence. We witness a pure love of image: the city is caressed and loved. This film opens with a strong imprint of memory and the importance of presence for the artist. The three screens convey a dizzying feeling. The motion is irresistible. When the three screens match up, this moment of coincidence and synchronicity of the three moving images and their sound are both relaxing and almost disappointing at once. Sometimes, the city can be one thing to a person. However, the variety hits yet again until in pure and absolute silence we read in red letters on a dark screen “My country is thorns lined with bones of brave warriors.” At another time it says: “Lush, breezy, multi-hued, and full of sunshine.” It is impossible to explain why we are moved. Indeed, one has no idea which country or what heroes are being evoked. Yet we have a very clear sense that we are about to witness something intensely personal into which we are invited not through a coherent and clear narrative but through a series of sensations that can be shared. The various anonymous persons whom we encounter or observe going about their tasks even before there is any dialogue in the film signal the whole collectivity of which we are ostensibly not a part – except through total participation in the experience of the triptych. The invitation to an open and unprejudiced engagement in what will follow on its own terms is successful. Image, sound, and music, all work with movement in inexplicably beautiful ways to elicit an emotive response that it is impossible to theorize (see Figure 7.1). In the first example the left screen has the movement of the vehicle from which footage is shot while the second two screens show weavers through the use of a still camera. Sometimes the movement is in opposing directions, sometimes it is from the camera and at others from other moving objects such as falling water, moving cars, or, in Figure 7.1, the flowing river. In another section, we hear the beautiful sounds of more simple forms of productivity: a field ploughed by a buffalo, waters, weaving of cloth, a child running along the mud road while the lush greenery of open area beyond seems endless. The sounds are simple and the mixing is exquisite. The movement can be varying, the focus and distance in each screen having a life of its own: sometimes the two outer screens have long tracking shots while the middle screen gives us a still camera, sometimes one screen goes dark. At these moments we are on the alert, anticipating the image’s return while our focus becomes changed as the two screens allow for easier attention. The excitement of the film comes from the lack of linear narration and the attempt to capture the totality of the city. However, the film

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Figure 7.1 Ruptures screens. Ruptures: A Many-Sided Story, directed and produced by Salem Mekuria, 2003.

is not devoid of dialogue, subtitles, and other necessary forms of narration to bring us an image of Addis, a modernizing capital with a Sheraton® Hotel to top it all, and the requisite garbage dumps of so many “third world” cities like Bangalore or Dakar. Mekuria’s films could mean different things to different spectators. She herself does not shy away from signaling her position as someone looking at her country from the perspective of a diasporic and, at the same time, as one who has worked there extensively in the last decades. The spectator is invited first and foremost to enter into the experience, to feel the movement and to savor the colors, the views of the countryside and the city, the open spaces, rivers, trees, leaves, water, people traffic, signs, the hustle and bustle of people and their routines. The unapologetic lyricism of the image and its natural sounds alongside the movement within each frame as well as the rhythmic effect of the three frames are reiterated in the poetic text that often accompanies them. At the same time there are plenty of instances for the spectator’s own narrative to accompany the journey. The presence of Islam and Christianity speak through images, the old traditions claim authority among the modern structures, the desolation of the wasteland of garbage and those who earn their living from it too starkly contrastive with the beauty of the land. Thus it is virtually impossible to walk away with only poetry or to allow the images to align themselves with a more traditional exotic discourse. Along with a memory of the breathtaking experience, the spectator has many questions and simple realizations.

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What Mekuria creates beyond the audiovisual is the visceral feeling of movement, of sensory perception of contradiction, the almost-present smells. As Laura Marks writes perspicaciously, in mainstream cinema references to non-audiovisual senses seem like excess. In what she calls “intercultural” cinema “memories of touch, smell, taste, rhythm are not ‘extra’: they are the very foundation of acts of cultural reclamation and redefinition” (Marks 231). Mekuria’s cinema, in this sense, lives through the senses beyond the audiovisual. It establishes an intercultural link with the spectator through the rekindling of the filmmaker’s own memories of various sensations that then construct the cinematic experience as a form of interpersonal sharing. The interplay between film as art and film as life in Rancière’s terms is sharply rethought through Merkuria’s vision. Joseph Gaï Ramaka is also a prolific filmmaker whose presence on the African film scene has been transformative and creative. We have already studied in detail his 2001 feature film Karmen Geï in Chapter 4. Like many other African filmmakers, he has used the documentary form extensively, working on themes as varied as pollution, flooding, and women’s rights. His current film is on the mendicant Talibés, a project that uses a fictional narrative. Ramaka has made documentaries with a sense of local urgency in ways that are quite different from many other documentarists, which is quite remarkable given that he has lived away from the continent for many years, first in France and then in the United States. However, spending considerable chunks of time each year in Senegal enables him to keep in touch with issues he cares about deeply. In Si Latif avait raison Ramaka tackles an urgent situation in his country, where the infamous Abdoulaye Wade might have been returned to power yet again by means of flawed elections. While Wade worked over the years to turn the Senegalese coffers into his own property, he also had wide agreements with many Western nations. An historic vote in February 2012 deposed Wade finally and prevented him from holding office for a third term, something sanctioned by his own “amendment” to the constitution, which limited presidents to holding office for more than two terms. In his documentary film Ramaka takes up the research of the journalist Abdou Latif Coulibaly that implicated Wade in the 1993 killing of a prominent politician, Babacar Sèye, President of the Constitutional Council, and paints the picture of a bully who makes himself out to be larger than life. Sèye had been responsible for the announcement that Abdou Diouf, who had already defeated Wade in the elections of 1983 and 1988, was the real winner of the elections, and that Wade’s claim to victory was based on electoral fraud. Ramaka stepped up production in order to release the film well before the 2012 elections (after Wade’s 2000 election he was reinstalled in 2007). Release of the film was clandestine in Senegal, and Ramaka put himself at great risk. Ramaka has, however, always had a penchant for tackling oppression, and his Karmen Geï, discussed in Chapter 4, is a strong testimonial to his dedication to the notion of freedom and liberty beyond the national political scene. Privileging the one-on-one interview, Ramaka (portrayed on-screen by a double) appears before a screen with continuous footage depicting Wade in various political capacities and situations. Cleverly, the person interviewed, though exposing Wade, is constantly shown to be smaller and less powerful in the darkened room. The scene is

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set for a virtual confrontation between the film and President Wade, who appears in an extreme close-up that distorts his face on a screen, making him appear monstrous. We see what we take to be Ramaka’s silhouette, with a cigarette in his hand, the smoke swirling between the filmmaker and the screen in the darkened space (Figure 7.2a). This is a bold move, not to be taken as a simple autobiographical statement; rather it is a courageous implication of the filmmaker in solidarity with the people whom he will interview in a climate in which their very lives were endangered (Fig 7.2b, Examples of two interviewees with Wade in background). The complex political intrigues that the film exposes require sound knowledge of Senegalese politics and reality. This film, made under stringent conditions because of the severe censure and limits placed upon Ramaka (and any investigative work against the regime), was utterly local. Ramaka uses chilling techniques including the voice-over of one of the people involved in the killing of the journalist. Various public figures are interviewed, including Aminata Tall-Sall, of the Socialist Party, who made an appearance in the film Bamako as well. The amnesty granted to the “killers,” known scapegoats, set up by others behind the scenes, came from an inexplicable presidential pardon. Ramaka extends the complete irresponsibility of the government to going beyond wishing to garner political and material power. The neglect that lay behind the sinking of the ferry Le Joola in 2002, was responsible for the deaths of well over 1,800 people. This ferry, which operated between Southern Dakar and the capital, should not have had more than 600 people on board. Wade’s response to the tragedy, and particularly the plight of the orphans left behind after that event, goes beyond irresponsibility. Raising matters beyond the censure, Ramaka shows that the entire structure erected around Wade’s presidency following independence holds up an impossibly corrupt state in which any form of national culture is unthinkable. Ramaka brings some of this indignation to his documentary with his calm voice and exploits the dark screen to highlight the scamming activities of the government, the silence around atrocities committed by the state, and the general lack of transparency that even the press cannot break through. While African documentaries stay closely linked to the realities that can seem urgent in terms of their effects on people’s everyday lives, it is remarkable that they remain so committed to exploring the limits of the genre and to experimentation and innovation in form. These and other documentaries by filmmakers such as South Africa’s Lerato Moloi and Tapiwa Chipfupa, the Cameroonian Francis Woukouche, or a host of others whose work is not always easy to access, are involved in reinventing the meaning of documentary. Indeed, despite the usefulness of preserving the notion of documentary beyond entries into film festivals or categorizations for catalogs, it is also possible to view the documentary/fiction genre as an experience related to spectatorship. The fiction/documentary experience might better be thought of as “moments” in the spectatorial experience, an idea nicely fleshed out by Vivian Sobchack (Carnal Thoughts 271–275). In maintaining the category of “documentary,” the so-categorized documentaries in African cinema are thoroughly adapted to the nature of the question treated, the material available, and the terms of their production without too much anxiety, as it is felt in American

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(a)

(b)

Figure 7.2 (a) Filmmaker in foreground contemplating his subject, Wade, in extreme close-up; (b) Example of two interviewees with Wade in background. Et si Latif avait raison, directed by Joseph Gaï Ramaka, 2006.

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and to a lesser extent in European conception of genre, around the essential fiction of the film experience being created. Yet they all share the urgency of pressing concerns in Africa that can no longer remain bound to local or national contexts. All these films seem to be telling the local spectator, but also the one situated across geographical boundaries, that those events are of immediate concern to him or to her. They unselfconsciously expose the conditions of their production at some level and expose their creators, making their vulnerability of identity a powerful form of building loyalty from spectators. The admiration one implicitly comes away with for Ramaka remains well beyond the experience of spectatorship of his film and fashions a different sense of unity among his films in the mind of any spectator over time. These filmmakers are very conscious of their “auteurship” in that sense and seem admirably unwilling to compromise that for other more lucrative forms of success. It seems to me from my own experience of meeting many of the filmmakers I have treated in this book that this may not be a “new” form of auteurship, but that the circumstances that these filmmakers negotiate, the dilemmas with which they are faced, and the struggles in which they are engaged to create their spectators through means that go beyond the aesthetic construction of the spectator, make them radically contemporary, if not modern. While keenly aware that spectators’ reactions can be unexpected, even idiosyncratic, documentarists have a strong desire to communicate issues in ways that need not always be non-fictional but which, most often, strike awareness of specificity in much more targeted ways than do overtly fictional films. Jean-Marie Teno’s two films on colonialism, for example, elicit responses by use of humor, irony, and the observation of various details of everyday life with which, although they might be “different” from one spectator to another, the narrator entices all to engage. Taking up, in Afrique, je te plumerai, the French folk song “Alouette,” which is practically universally recognizable, Teno forces us to pay attention to its words. In the end, it is nothing short of cruel, if we get beyond the nostalgia of schoolchildren singing the catchy tune, to pluck a little lark from beak to tail. Substitution of “lark” with “Africa” in the title makes the tune chilling once its innocence has been thoroughly stripped away by the detailed accounts of the lasting effects of colonialism that are traced in the film. By extension, there is no way for a spectator to decide that the colonial fleecing of Africa was a light matter. If this seems rather obvious, the merit of those films lies precisely in their delving into the details of life that are affected by this history in contemporary Africa. Issues as diverse as the availability of books, local printing presses and their functioning, scripts of African languages, the effects of missionary education, and the rush to modernize are all subject to valid scrutiny. In particular, we are afforded the opportunity of seeing where all these details collude and lead to what Teno demonstrates are simply wrong directions for most African societies when looked at in real terms, in interrogating the quality of life of their citizens and touching upon the sheer hunger in so many memorable “characters” to attain what might seem to be simple goals. The absurdity of what is lacking in some instances, such as books or access to materials, when shown to be systemic becomes a prise de

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conscience for spectators of any location or any persuasion, and at least momentarily it unites the spectatorship in a form of indignation that is Africanizing. While it is quite possible that people who frequent film festival circuits or who have access to these films through academic or other exclusive settings could potentially be moved to intervene beyond spectatorship, it becomes evident that the Africans whose realities are sincerely and empathetically, often autobiographically, confronted in these films prove to be the most urgent respondents. Sometimes “Africans” are reached by “others” who are Africanized in ways that are not ethnic or cultural but intellectual and empathetic. And that is the element of “faith” that goes into filmmaking of this kind, while it creates nothing short of an intellectualized form of true love that is not “romantic” but based in commitment. The magical thing about commitment is, as Fanon showed, that there is no person, no law, no wall, no prejudice, no disbelief, and no impediment, not even illness, that can sap its energy because it comes from love. If these thoughts seem to be bordering on their own form of romanticism, there is only one way to test it out without being a cynic: to enter into the simple agreement to become a spectator of a repertoire of films that breeds love through the beauty of image, sound, color, and light crafted into films by the intelligence of some of the finest minds to make up a collection that together creates an African discourse that speaks to every spectator in more ways than this book can possibly explicate owing to the failing of having only one author. Whether it be the question of train “surfers” in Sarah Blecher’s Surfing Soweto (2007) or abused children in Durban in Kim Longinotto’s Rough Aunties (2008), African filmmakers are telling their stories in ways that Western journalism just cannot access. And they are telling them as much for Africans as for non-Africans. They are asking the spectator to understand through an Africanized viewpoint, which is not about nostalgia or essentialism but about understanding systemic issues through personal stories and perspectives that become real through spectatorship that is taught to respond with an inventive intelligence that matches the many tonalities of the interpellation. In different ways, the various works that are part of the documentary ensemble characterized in this chapter set up a form of intertextuality which in the Bhakhtinian sense is far more complex than simply a relation to context. It is for this reason that they are thought provoking – sometimes subversively – and that they remain thoroughly “new.” Their newness is not merely about the recentness of their phenomenon; rather, it has to do with the fact that their “work” has not extended itself beyond the urgency of the situation within which it was begun. It is in this sense that African cinema has not become a langue but is instead a langage, as Christian Metz argued in assessing cinema from his vantage point in history, particularly coming out of the engagement with New Wave films (40). We might say that it is not just that intrinsically cinema is a langage but that all langage risks solidifying into langue. It is a langage in the sense that it is a system we might term semiotic, that has its own networks of signification but that they are not conventionalized to the point of becoming a specific langue, which is a far more rigid and, indeed, limiting concept.

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Langage has the implicit sense of parole (speech). Becoming langue is not yet – and far from – the case for this version of African cinema, which is why it is an exciting moment with every film expanding the spectatorship of this cinema and activating various networks of signification in different ways that include relationships to the real world but go well beyond it. If the personal in African and diasporic documentary film becomes a style, it remains a fact that this element functions in different ways in the films we have considered. Peck’s Prophet, the making of which is itself a form of Africanization in the filmmakers’s life, implicates the filmmaker by showing us a picture of himself in Haiti before his family moved to the Congo. Peck’s interpellation of the spectator in this film is one that seeks to assume and place on us the responsibility for the way democratic processes in the Congo were brutalized through the murder of Patrice Lumumba by vested interests that rendered its future hazardous for ordinary citizens. His use of overlapping sound to connect disparate geographic spaces tells of his attempt to wrest the spectator out of whatever point in time or space he or she occupies to propel him or her into the realities of the film and becomes a form of Africanization. Mekuria’s sensuously rich and innovative portrayal of Addis and its surroundings brings many contradictions to the spectator within a dizzying format that etches images rather than narrative. This transportation of the spectator as a form of Africanization is interesting in that the filmmaker herself reminds us of her own journey, which is shared through these images. In Ramaka’s film, the urgency of bringing to the voting public a sense of the stunning loss of freedom under Wade’s long and unethical tenure had a definite link to time-bound issues in Senegal. Spectatorship was crafted for that voting public while the film conveys the power of spectatorship as a form of witnessing to any spectator of the film. Africanization for (in particular) the Dakarois voting public was in that moment an exigency to historicize itself in fidelity to the struggle for independence that had seemed futile for the servility the postcolonial government had systematically cultivated over decades. Africanization for “others,” including non-Africans, might be thought of as the openness to follow the complex story of corruption and censure and the various other signs of the sickness of the structure that upholds it. That understanding in and of itself Africanizes the same spectator’s consumption of other media reportage of all kinds on the same issues. Signaling the spectator’s presence is a form of willingness to assume solidarity against the regime that the film denounces. These filmmakers, then, are leaders who provide a flexible and dialogically forged idiom for both Africans and non-Africans to Africanize their thought about concrete issues germane to Africa and the wider world. If we (of any origin or affinity) deplore the media’s negative images of Africa and yet care about various atrocities that both draw Africa and the diaspora into the world while excluding so many identified as Africans from participating in “global” culture, why don’t we turn to documentary films, which are being made at a rate that we could elevate to rival Nollywood and Gollywood?3 It is up to us to watch them and to find others who will become their spectators.

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Notes 1 Safi Faye, who was pioneer not just in entering filmmaking as a woman but also for the films she made, recognized the enticement of documentary to tell African stories at the time she began filming in the early 1970s. See Ellerson. 2 Personal communication October 2011. 3 Wanuri Kahiu (Kenya), Cedric Ido (Burkina Faso), Akosua Adoma Owusu (Ghana) Jacqueline Kalimunda (Rwanda), Stephen Abbott and Samantha Nell (South Africa), Dyana Gaye (Senegal), Julius Onah (Nigeria), and Melissa Gomez (Antigua/USA) are some of the documentarists making shorts in a variety of different formats.

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Raoul Peck, the Haitian-born filmmaker who has lived in the Congo and France as well as the United States, provides us with two rich, and quite different, versions of his examination of the death of Patrice Eméry Lumumba, first prime minister of Congo, who was brutally assassinated just months after he took office. The first film, Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (1992) raises important questions that are pursued in Lumumba (2000). The dramatic beginning of the 1992 film (abbreviated in this chapter as Prophet), which was discussed in Chapter 7, cuts to documentary footage that is presented with no sound, soon after the Henri Lopès poem “Du côté du Katanga” opens the film with a presentation of the deserted, grey early morning in the city of Brussels. The short, silent interlude then cuts back to the morning in Brussels with a shot that captures a young woman through the window of a modern train. The colors are muted and therefore allow for the old grainy documentary of the victorious Lumumba to effortlessly slip in between the two contemporary shots, thus permitting him, as the narrative will suggest in a few minutes, to come and “tickle the feet” of the guilty! In this comparison of the two versions, I am interested in pursuing the different methods chosen by Raoul Peck for presenting this African leader. In these analyses, I will privilege the earlier documentary version and refer to the biopic in order to highlight some aspects. In the 1992 film, the narrator says in the voice-over: “Faut il ressusciter le prophète, faut-il lui donner la parole?” ‘Should we bring the prophet back to life, should we give him a voice?’ Peck’s documentary is full of doubt about whether one can access Lumumba’s reality, and indeed it becomes a rumination on the filmmaker’s role as an African. How to confront and understand a history that has been willfully erased?1 Africanizing the spectator, in the sense in which I have been activating this idea, becomes, in this film, implicating the spectator in the way the past enters into the present. Such a move, the film seems to say, is where our agency can come together for betterment of our collective human condition. In Prophet, Peck seems to suggest that his filmmaking itself is not quite mature enough to take Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, First Edition. Anjali Prabhu. © 2014 Anjali Prabhu. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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on the task of giving voice to a dead man whom he admires so greatly. In the biopic version released some eight years later, Peck actually takes the risk of “giving voice” to Lumumba in a very dramatic way. In a very obvious linking of anonymous people in Brussels (an old woman wearing a headscarf, a man smoking on the street, a young woman on the train), Peck’s voice suggests, “Aujourd’hui ses fils et ses filles pleurent / sans même le savoir, sans même le connaˆıtre” ‘Today his sons and daughters weep / without knowing it, without knowing him’ (my translation).2 The voice-over continues, “Faut il resuciter le prophète? / Faut-il lui redonner la parole, une dernière fois?” ‘Should the prophet be brought back to life again? / Should he be given the floor one last time?’ These questions sum up the dilemma of form that presented itself to Raoul Peck. How should he bring Lumumba back to life on screen? Where should he begin? How tell his story? One clear move was to link Lumumba’s fate and his life to Europe and the West, represented here in the images of Brussels and its people, while evoking other Africans who had perished in the inhospitality of Brussels during the colonial period. To suggest, as the narrator does several times, that Lumumba roams this city and haunts it (tickling the feet of the guilty) also sharpens the meaning of European implication in Lumumba’s life, this film, and African reality. In both the Prophet (1992) and the subsequent biopic, Lumumba (2002), Raoul Peck presents Lumumba as a martyr, a promising and charismatic leader identified early on by the Belgians as dangerous to their own causes and conveniently taken up as a “communist” particularly by the American intelligence agencies. Ludo de Witte’s book on Lumumba appears to be an important source for the later film, in particular the presentation of his last days, something Peck could not access at the time he made his earlier film because the documents de Witte relies upon for his book were classified. Finding an actor to convey the personality of Lumumba (Eriq Ebouaney) goes a long way towards giving the Prophet a different reach. In casting Alex Descas as Mobutu (Lumumba’s personal aide and subsequently chief of staff of the Congolese army, who, with American backing, would lead a coup against him twelve weeks into his presidency), Peck manages to include a second proven actor, known in particular to French-speaking TV audiences. In the biopic, Peck follows many of the details de Witte provides in his book to document Lumumba’s last days, and the particulars give the assassination a poignancy that the earlier film achieved through the lyricism of Lopès’ poetry transferred deftly through image, sound, and montage. The first film presents the filmmaker’s dilemma before his own art form, his responsibility, and his limited capacity to represent something that clearly went beyond his engagement with Africa in general, as a Haitian, and with Lumumba in particular, as a resident Congolese. The biopic in some ways provides direct answers to intuitive questions raised in the earlier documentary. This is partly due to circumstance: Peck did not have material evidence upon which to base his take on the African leader’s life and its tragic ending. These came to light, a development that indeed might have prompted the making of the second film. Peck’s films since then include Sometimes in April (2005), which tells the story of two brothers during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and Moloch Tropical (2010), a more controlled satire about “a”

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Haitian president. Peck proves to be an admirable director who has been successful in breaking out of independent filmmaking to reach a wide audience and bring together “entertainment” and “thoughtfulness” in what might be risky endeavors for the expanded forums from which he now operates and for the audiences he reaches. His Sometimes in April premiered, for example, on HBO. One of the most purposeful shots of Lumumba in the Prophet comes from documentary footage that is cleverly juxtaposed with video footage of Peck’s parents and pictorial representation of the Berlin conference at which King Leopold of Belgium was given his “share” of Africa, which would become the Belgian Congo. In this shot, Lumumba is obviously at a press conference, and he carries within his expression, the tilt of his head, and his utter focus, the aura of greatness. The shot is a close-up with a slight downward tilt. A journalist’s voice from off camera indicates that he will be asked a number of questions, to which Lumumba nods. The first question is his age. “J’ai 35 ans” ‘I am 35 years old,’ he says, and then breaks into a smile, looking down to right of screen to acknowledge the journalist (Figure 8.1). We, as spectators, are outsiders – primarily because we are well aware that we are outside the time frame of the footage we are watching, the black-and-white film footage clearly reminding us it was a different era from the narrative of the film– one where that kind of charismatic greatness was still possible. For those who know, Lumumba is dead. We are captivated, won over by Lumumba’s warmth, innocence, and what seems to be his acknowledgement of how young he is for the task he is to take on. His slight naïveté is endearing and irresistible. It is a mesmerizing moment at the beginning of the film,

Figure 8.1 Downward tilt shot from documentary footage of a youthful Lumumba acknowledging a journalist. Lumumba: Death of a Prophet, directed by Raoul Peck, produced by Andreas Honegger and Velvet Film, 1992.

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at which point the spectator knows she or he has just witnessed the prophet speaking directly as a simple, slightly naïve man on the brink of taking over a task that will lead to his violent death. Unreasonably, we want to change his fate. The shot cuts to a black-and-white photograph of the same era with focus on some white men who seem to be journalists taking notes. The camera tilts upwards on the photograph, taking our gaze to the men standing behind the journalists’ chairs. The group is made up of both Africans and Europeans. There seems to be a lot of movement on the part of the Europeans while the Africans appear to be listening intently or waiting. The camera darts about the photograph giving us a series of stills, including a framed photograph on a mantelpiece within the photograph that we are drawn into by the camera’s movement. The voice-over narrative of Peck’s voice tells us it is a dusty photograph that his mother (who had worked in the mayor’s office) had brought home. Next the camera’s panning changes direction, and it moves from left to right scanning the various standing men as well as capturing those sitting right in front of them, until the narrator says “Patrice Lumumba” for the first time in the film, naming the “prophet.” The camera stops its movement once his image is at center frame. In Prophet, Peck adopts the form of Henri Lopès’ poem, in which the poet laments the death of the prophet in terms of the story his mother told him. This is mirrored by the voice-over of the narrator/filmmaker, who reflects upon his arrival from Haiti in Africa by referring to the stories his mother has told him. At various points in the film, black-and-white photographs from the colonial era (workers in a factory, crowds of enslaved Africans carrying ivory, for example) accompany the history of the arrival of the colonizer as told to the filmmaker by his mother (“Ma mère raconte” ‘My mother recounts’ repeats as another leitmotiv, giving continuity to Lopès’ poetry). The film opens with a class photograph of a little boy in Haiti; 1960, as the narrator announces. A cut takes us to Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo (today Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo). The transition between the video footage of his parents and the photograph in question actually comes from his mother’s story about the division of Africa. An abrupt cut to a black-and-white picture of King Leopold, with his emblematic beard, his gaze directed straight at us then cuts to another black-and-white daguerreotype of the Berlin Conference of 1884–5, where, as the narrator’s mother tells it, the king made such a fuss that he was given the Congo in the hope he would choke on the huge piece of “cake” he was crying for. An equally abrupt cut takes us to the black-and-white footage of the press conference seen in Figure 8.1. The photograph has caught him as he looks up from his script, and his expression and the tightness of the look match up exactly with the preceding documentary footage. Obviously the photograph was taken on the same occasion at which the documentary footage had been shot. There is a sudden cut to a different photograph that shows Lumumba speaking to someone holding a hand microphone (“Tel un Christ, il est entouré, mais il est seul. Peut-être ne l’écoute-t-on même plus” ‘Like Christ, he is surrounded, but alone. Maybe no one listens to him.’) The jump out of the photograph to a different one (which, from the framed picture we see in

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the background and the identical clothing of Lumumba and the man next to him, appears to be the same context) would not be discernible to the spectator. Apart from this cut from and back to the photograph his mother brought home there are no interruptions, while the narration is accompanied by the panning movement of the camera that travels over different parts of the photograph without breaks. However, we never see the entire photograph itself with the white edges as an object within the film. There is, thus, a seamlessness between the reality of the cinematic medium and that of the totality of the photo without any gesture to step outside the photo to allow it to become an artifact or object. Intercepting a view of the photo as object, Peck invites his spectator to step into the context that the photo has frozen and to reanimate its secrets.3 Peck makes his dilemma of form (of how to think of and by what means to present history) not just the prerogative of the filmmaker but rather the very viewing experience of the spectator. Just as this story he sought to tell about Lumumba turns out to be as much about himself as it is about his subject, the photograph handed over to him by his mother that he now presents to us is inserted into the film so that it cannot be an object of information; instead it becomes a cinematic moment of contemplation and thoughtfulness about “history” as the latter is accessible to the world well beyond its specific protagonists or their more obvious progeny. In fact, the gesture becomes an invitation to the spectator to insert him-or herself into the open-ended process of reflection that the expressions in the photograph provoke as the very structure of the film. The spectator is also invited to share the filmmaker’s thoughts as he wonders if the “Marshall” will allow him to film in Zaire. In a remarkable “confession,” his need to go to Zaire is exposed as what the spectator wants. His TV producer tells him that he must have pictures of Zaire for this reason because the spectator does not care about anything else. Peck’s education of the spectator is intimate and presumes intelligence. He does not use irony to distance and exclude but instead captures us within his discourse, within his image, and within the history to which he fully admits himself. In the story of his quest, however, a warning from the secret service makes him decide against a filming trip to Zaire. This invitation to participate in the contemplation of history and its telling is brought to bear on the medium quite cleverly. Peck draws attention to the fact that the conspiracy around Lumumba was staged: “Le metteur-en-scène a dit soyez objectifs” ‘The director said be objective’ is the narrative in imagining the scene of the photograph. This is followed by a cut to the filming of one of the interviews. The documentary footage and photograph of Lumumba’s era are joined up with the interview treating that time with the repetition: “Le metteur en scène a dit: ‘Action!’” ‘The director said: “Action!”’ The interview is with the journalist Louis Willems, who was with the Belga News Agency in 1960 and who speaks to Peck about the interview. This is followed by a similar conversation in a close-up shot of Jacques Brassinne, the Belgian ambassador, in Léopoldville the same year. A cut takes us to a subway station in Brussels, while the narrator wonders why he has come to Brussels to look for the prophet, but this doubt and the rumination about the roaming soul whose body has never been produced, is key to communicating to the spectator that

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Lumumba’s life and particularly his death have no geographical limit insofar as our implication in it lies as global citizens, whether or not we happen to be African. For anyone watching the film in a movie theater, the crowds of anonymous people in the subway would be reminiscent of the crowd of which they were a part. In any case, one is easily, from any point on the globe or persuasion of the mind, implicated in the anonymous public space of moving crowds, each of us feeling some sense of implication in the narrator’s discourse. Serge Michel was Patrice Lumumba’s press attaché and a one-time member of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). Michel is thought to be the person who put Gillo Pontecorvo (who made The Battle of Algiers) in touch with Yacef Saâdi. Michel played a role in various aspects of early Algerian cinema, before and after independence. His presence in Prophet is in some ways the most direct contact we have with the Patrice because, despite his daughter’s thoughtful comments, the film depicts him as a man of power, of the state, and of fateful charisma much more than as a father. And it is for this reason that his end has to be the beginning for that contemplation. A task the biopic takes up in a dramatic way. One of the most redeeming parts of Prophet occurs when the camera focuses on a black-and-white photo from the colonial era to fantasize freely about the characters, both black and white, seen in it. We wonder, following the narrator’s guiding words, if this one beats his wife, if that one wants to send his son to study at the University of Louvain, if the other wants to be a solider. It matters little if they are black or white, they are joined in the photo, through circumstance, history, and, as the narrator says, the ambition of one king. A jump cut to a man on a Brussels street waiting for someone then prompts the narrator to invent a name for him and continue the method: he wonders on the unknown man’s behalf where a certain, arbitrary “Marie-Claire” might be. All this is interspersed with documentary coverage alternating between Mobutu and Lumumba. Mobutu explains at a political rally that if those granted amnesty come out of prison or exile just to go back to their old ways they will once again be picked up, while Lumumba talks to the press of his childhood, when he was not able to reconcile the Christian values taught by Europeans at school with the way the same Europeans treated Africans outside it. Endearingly, Lumumba tells his interviewer that this awareness made him study revolutions, and in particular the French revolution. All these revolutions had one common thread, he says, which is a fight against injustice and oppression. The simple, almost naïve, and open words, directly from the prophet–martyr make the next image almost intolerable to the spectator. A picture of Lumumba, without his glasses, bearing the words “La Mort” ‘Death’ above the image and below it “du diable” ‘of the devil.’ Obviously taken from a magazine, it is a desecration of the image presented in the previous shot. Little would Lumumba have guessed the contradiction that would be most starkly known by him. Arrested in the coup, hardly fed, and held under terrible conditions by Mobutu, he wrote a clandestine letter which contradicts Mobutu’s announcement that he had three servants at his disposal and, along with other political prisoners, was maintained at financial cost to the army. Juxtaposing in this way the image of the two men, Peck gently gives the prophet the upper hand, at least in the film.

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The same mode of narration is reserved for presenting the filmmaker’s own memories. A personal video of some young boys dancing, shot with his father’s new video camera, as the narrator tells us, is accompanied by the voice-over informing us that among the enthusiastic jiggers are a nurse and a filmmaker. Inviting us, by example, to insert ourselves more modestly into the world of living images and of possibility, this film insists on the connections between colonialism and newer forms of domination. Via a shot of the cold stones of the tombs housing Africans who died in the metropolis during colonialism, Peck asks us to remember the bodies that never returned from the colonial exhibition of 1897, whose souls are keeping the prophet company. One chilling moment complements the few we have discussed in greater detail above. This is also taken from documentary footage of Lumumba arriving on a plane in Brussels and being greeted by his compatriots gathered there for the independence talks after they demanded his release from prison. As he goes down the stairs from the airplane the men rush to the bottom of the steps and mount in a group to embrace him, while in voice-over we hear “Mais déjà, parmi ceux qui l’étreignent en bas de l’escalier, les futurs complices de son assassinat” ‘His future assassins are amongst those who embrace him.’ This moment is also memorably reconstructed in the later film in great fidelity to the documentary footage. It is significant that the moment Peck chooses to show how African solidarity crumbles under such complex Western interests occurs when these new African leaders are veritably on Belgian soil. In this way, the filmmaker takes an explicit position to speak for the injustice of the terrible tragedy and loss for Africa, a loss that weighs heavily today for all who understand that bemoaning African dictators is somewhat disingenuous without looking at the impossible situation in which modern African leadership itself came into being, rising out of colonialism and still trying to find ways to emerge from that history other than solely as the inheritor of its structures. The presentation of Lumumba’s fateful independence day speech is dramatic and chilling. The narrator takes on a quiet tone, almost whispering, as if we are privy to this scene in secret. Documentary footage is then presented of the Belgian king “granting” the Congo’s independence as the completion of the genius of his grandfather Leopold. A photograph or still presents, so the voice-over informs us, President Kasavubu thanking the king at the end of his speech. Kasavubu’s speech was lamentably lame in comparison to Lumumba’s. The camera pulls back on the still scene to show that “someone” is putting together a talk. Then the camera zooms in to capture Lumumba scribbling away with his head bent, while on both sides he is surrounded by people (mostly white) listening to the speeches. Then comes the cut to his speech itself (once again documentary footage is used). This is interrupted with a clip from an interview with Louis-François Vanderstraeten, a major in the Force Publique in 1960. He recounts hearing Lumumba’s speech and realizing there was something in it that did not sound good (from a Belgian perspective). This speech can be heard in what appears to be its entirety on the Web (“Refus des nationalistes”). Peck takes a strong position “for” Lumumba. In a picture or still from what appears to be the official dinner that king attended, Lumumba looks proud, somewhat suspicious, and

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thoughtful. The voice-over speaks directly to him: “On vous lâche au volant d’une bolide roulant à 200 km à l’heure en sachant que vous n’avez jamais conduit de votre vie” ‘They put you at the wheel of a racing car going at 200 km/hr knowing you have never driven in your life.’ As well, while focusing on a picture of the young Mobutu posing with his family, the narrator says, “Ne mords pas la main qui te nourrit. Il prendra la main et tout le reste” ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. He will take the hand and all the rest.’ These “asides” that the director tosses to us make the leitmotiv song “Indépendance cha cha” chilling rather than light. The same words are repeated once the film touches upon Lumumba’s death, focusing on an interview with Mobutu when Kasavubu and Lumumba had parted ways and Mobutu had power by virtue of being the head of the army. Often the sound is paired with incompatible images, the most notable being the trip to the Belgian museum. After taking us through the stuffed animals section, we arrive at the “art” – a statue of an angry-looking black man (specimen negro) and a naked woman shot in an extreme tilt shot to enhance her tight breasts. All the while, the song plays on, chillingly, while we are told there are many ways to kill a man. Or else we watch the crowds in a train or subway station and TV screens with a Nicholas Page movie playing in public spaces, while we hear the voice-over of the narrator muse about his subject, wonder about the way an image of Lumumba was created by the power of Western media and political discourse. We wonder, if these innocent spaces are familiar to us or have been traversed by us, perhaps, how much of what we see is embedded in us, how much we are embedded in it all. Peck’s interpellation of his spectator is gentle and brutal at once. Soon after the moment at an airport that is decisive in the filmmaker not going, as he had wished, to Zaire, a cut takes us to an incoming airplane from which Patrice Lumumba emerges. He has his hands behind him and he is surrounded by army personnel. We know at once that this is not a victorious arrival. It is already the end (Figure 8.2). When Serge Michel tells the story of Mobutu’s drunken “coup d’état,” and how the young Lumumba has to force him to go to bed we wonder if perhaps this is all a bad joke. The desolation of the truth is given to us with a long tracking shot – we must be on the front of a train going to nowhere, recalling the steering wheel Lumumba was handed when he had never driven before (Figure 8.3). The various visual references to trains and tracks cannot but recall the construction of the notorious Congo–Ocean railroad in the 1920s and 30s (CFCO: Chemin de Fer Congo-Océan) constructed between Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire. The shot in which we seem to hurtle down the tracks in the snowy Belgian countryside on the metaphorical journey to Lumumba’s inexorably approaching death brings in the colonial context in a very tangible way. The biopic takes up Lumumba’s end with the conviction of the new materials the filmmaker was able to uncover for it. As mentioned, after Prophet had been released, details of Lumumba’s end were documented with alarming clarity in Ludo de Witte’s book. Hindsight showed that secession of the mineral rich Katanga and Belgian support for its local leader, Moïse Tshombé, had significant and negative effects upon the reality of Lumumba’s notion of a united (non-ethnically identified) independent

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Figure 8.2 A subdued Lumumba emerges from an army airplane. Lumumba: Death of a Prophet, directed by Raoul Peck, produced by Andreas Honegger and Velvet Film, 1992.

Figure 8.3 A long tracking shot giving vertiginous movement on the endless railroad tracks. Lumumba: Death of a Prophet, directed by Raoul Peck, produced by Andreas Honegger and Velvet Film, 1992.

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Congo. Likewise, the fury that the redoubtable Force Publique unleashed was caused at least as much by the repression of Congolese soldiers under the Belgians as the press wanted the world to believe it was caused by Lumumba’s fiery speeches. While all the events of Patrice Lumumba’s last days emerge in the Prophet, it is in the biopic, Lumumba, that the spectator gets a real sense of what was suggested chillingly and evocatively in the first film. The intellectual work of the first film is rewarded in some ways by the detail the biopic provides, although the latter does more to construct a person and personality than to provide historically accurate answers. Lumumba (2002) opens with the dramatic sound of talking drums and the voice of a man speaking, whispering. There is nothing subtle about the “contradiction” that Peck presents as visuals. A grand party, where meat is cut for the invitees and served in classy European crockery is cross-cut with black-and-white pictures of Africans in various forms of bondage, several of which have appeared in Prophet (Figure 8.4). The quick historical background is provided by text that simply refers to the Berlin Conference of 1884–5 when Leopold was given the Congo and the date of Lumumba’s premiership. The introduction finishes simply: “Ceçi est une histoire vraie” ‘This is a true story.’ Ominous instrumental music follows, with a mellifluous singing voice causing a strange dissonance. The convoy of cars seems to accord with the sound of some kind of doom. The woman’s high-pitched, pleasant-sounding voice suggests something else, something positive. A cut to a close-up of a man in the car, looking tired and unshaven, permits us to understand that the voice-over we hear is the voice of the man in the car, who is dead and is now recounting his story. This brilliant and bold move in which Peck gives us Lumumba’s voice can only be understood if we have known the dilemmas and struggles of the first film. The beginning of this film strikes a spectator who has seen the first film as redemptive. Peck gives the biopic the opening of typical Out of Africa scenery. In Chapter 10 we will examine further some questions related to big-screen representations of Africa geared toward global, and particularly Western, audiences. But the savannah we see the cars going toward is then traversed by a truck, which is driven by two white men, while the ominous trumpeting grips us. The music stops, and we hear the sound of soil being shoveled. A body, covered and tied in a sheet, is removed from the truck by the two men. Three bodies are lined up after, it seems, being transported there in the truck. Then begins the gory scene of hacking and sawing at the bodies, the men doing the work toil under the stench, drinking to keep their sangfroid. The interview of these two men, now old, recollecting the act in Thomas Giefer’s documentary The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba (2008) is chilling to view.4 After a flashback that shows what might have been a fatal moment in Lumumba’s interactions with Tshombé, we are taken to a shot of Lumumba’s body in the truck, the face exposed and moving with the jostling of the vehicle as his voice reflects on his life: arriving in Léopoldville, being hired by a Belgian beer company to boost its sales, meeting with Mobutu. The narrative takes the form of a letter, the last one Patrice Lumumba wrote to his wife. The recreation of various moments for which documentary footage is available adds to the “reality” factor of the film. For example, the memorable embrace of Lumumba

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(a)

(b)

Figure 8.4 (a) Meat being sliced at a party; (b) Captured slaves. Lumumba, directed by Raoul Peck, produced by Jacques Bidou and Velvet Film, 2002.

as he descends the aircraft steps in Brussels that is used in the Prophet is to be found faithfully restaged in Lumumba (Plate 10). Various other scenes can be examined in this manner, but that is not where the interest of the feature film lies. What Peck manages to do in the second version is to bring to the spectator the texture of a life that was lost too soon. The end of the second film is rendered as dramatic as that of the first because in it Lumumba is shot against the same tree that was marked by the blood of his two comrades, Mpolo and Okito, killed just before him. The camera caresses the bloody tree, wounded by the bullets that passed through the bodies of his comrades before giving us a view of the shooting squad before him. The shots ring out, as the body falls to the ground, a cut takes us to Mobutu standing before a crowd. “Merci” ‘Thank you,’ he says. Applause breaks out and the camera travels

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Figure 8.5 Accusing looks directed at Mobutu from the crowd. Lumumba, directed by Raoul Peck, produced by Jacques Bidou and Velvet Film, 2002.

forward into the crowd past the mostly white members in front to a few rows behind where it brings to center frame a young woman in a colorful dress and a youthful man in army camouflage. The accusing looks of both of them alternate with Mobutu’s face (Figure 8.5). This occurs when Mobutu asks the crowd to observe a moment of silence for Lumumba’s death, which is interrupted for the specator by a cut to the shot that kills him against the already bloody tree. To end the film, Peck takes us back to the opening scene of the bodies being burned by the two Belgian soldiers. Although we may loosely call Lumumba a biopic, it does not provide a biography of the Prime Minister’s life. Indeed many aspects of his life, including his ties with his family are not explored in it. The film is about the reality and possibility of African leadership that, as it is now well known, emerged out of the terrific violence of colonialism and its unwilling but inevitable retraction. The interests colonialists had or came to have in their colonies could not be wiped out with the word independence. The manner in which colonists departed and/or were ousted has had a significant effect upon African leadership and African subjectivities more generally, as has the long and properly colonial period itself. When we consider the two films together, they give us insights into the dilemmas of African filmmaking, and in particular of narration for African histories. The background of the first film gives a different valence to the second. Lumumba, in this framing, is on the one hand about a filmmaker experimenting and finding the appropriate voice for his subject. It constitutes a bold step in resolving some of the difficulties before the material and the task the filmmaker was faced with, while also revealing a process by which information from colonial and other governmental sources becomes available – something that goes far to remind us how much it was controlled and protected from thought and critique by any public. Lumumba’s making also coincides with African cinema’s coming into its own, if not always

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as a collective, coherent unity presented to the outside world then as an ongoing, multiply configured process of cultural innovation, expression of selfhood at various levels, and artistic endeavor by individuals and collectivities committed to their métier. Africans from the continent or from the diaspora (among whom Peck himself stands out as an interesting example) or, for that matter, those of African persuasion, like Fanon of Martinique or the Frenchman who became Lumumba’s press secretary, Serge Michel, in this and so many other forms of expression speak from the place of Africa and address its concerns in ways that go beyond themselves as individuals. Their diverse positions do not preclude the idea of an African narration, committed to a re-centering of the structures of language and thought, of getting away from the easiest negative ascriptions to blackness that colonialism so effectively and pervasively established well beyond the European/African context. Lumumba, then, speaks to the world without apology, without hesitation, in giving voice to the dead prophet whose speech needs to come back from beyond the grave, as was pensively suggested in the first film. Lumumba remains the prophet the first film declared him to be because at the moment of his death he seized, fatefully, the word that had been wrested from his people for centuries. Like Frantz Fanon, Lumumba acted out his poetics with supreme courage and conviction. The words of his speeches fit seamlessly with the decisions he made to insert himself into his discourse, just as Fanon’s theorizing about national liberty grew out of his resignation from the colonially established psychiatric department of Blida-Joinville. The Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) was quintessentially of the moment of pan-Africanism that he, Patrice Lumumba embraced; as the President of the MNC, he was invited to speak at Pan African conference in Accra hosted by President Nkrumah of Ghana in December 1958. Raoul Peck shares with us the process for his own entry into an African discourse. Between the first film, when he is faced with telling the story of a departed leader whose political life had just begun, and the second, when he follows through on many of his instincts to tell that story – something that the authority of evidence now allows him to do – resides a process that is both personal and historical. This process plays out as a form of authorizing the narrator, of authorship, of legitimization. It is an authorization which occurs both in the individual’s subjective apprehension of himself and in the objective apprehension of him as a recognizable African in the world. In many ways, then, the movement from the first to the second film exposes the difficulty of African expression on the world stage because of the very real impediments to free expression, access to information, and sheer respect for the space of the speaking subject. To begin the second film directly with a representation of Lumumba’s death and the gruesome way in which every trace of him was eliminated, to then proceed to let Lumumba speak for himself before he emerges as a character in the film is a powerful gesture of reclamation of history and is formulated to accord with Lumumba’s brilliantly courageous seizure of the “word” in his life. Focusing on Lumumba’s political life, thus beginning with his arrival in Léopoldville, the film also does away with resorting to too many flashbacks to justify this or that characteristic of the

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protagonist. While it could be criticized on the one hand for not giving enough “information” about many of the political events alluded to or represented or, on the other hand, for not pursuing more personal aspects of his biography, the film could also stand as a very strong gesture toward ratifying African leadership as a mature and serious possibility in the character of Lumumba – leadership that was wasted in the desert left behind by colonization. Peck makes it eminently clear that he is interested in showing us the richness of one man’s thoughts and conviction at the moment of their full possibility. The tragedy is thus one for all of humanity to lament, the events make all of us who watch the film wish they were different; the construction is such that all of us feel helpless because they have already occurred and have been given to us from the start. That helplessness can only lightly suggest, but perhaps strongly translate into, the despair for Africa any spectator anywhere must feel, which in its turn demands of each of us through curiosity, depression, or any reaction to the film, that we find out more. The sheer waste of a beautiful life, the brutal end to an incisive and generous mind, the death of a father before he could fully occupy that space are the elements the film highlights to strike us with the meaning of potential struck down by an unfair and uncouth fate created for some human beings by other human beings. In many ways Lumumba is more of a documentary, in the sense of providing documentation, than we might imagine. Many conversations are faithfully recorded, much of the vocabulary used by the characters comes from quotes or interviews we can locate. The images of the savannah or the African landscape that are shot are fully matured and unselfconscious, and in fact authoritatively appropriated within the cinematic medium, despite the inevitable interaction with stereotypical representation of Africa, as we will discuss in Chapter 10. Peck’s cinematography has a boldness and form of conviction that falls like welcome rain upon a spectator who beheld the depressing, cold rain of the Prophet. By no means is the second a happy film, but the lilting voice that rises above the ominous music which makes up the opening and ending and the sheer beauty of Lumumba’s response to the king at the moment of independence together temper the irony of the repeated gay air of “Independence cha-cha.” While we cannot believe in the cha-cha of independence as spectators, the films exhorts us to consider African leadership as great possibility within great disadvantage. The implicit movement from the questioning method of the first film – the frustrations of trying to get film footage and gain access to information, some of which the filmmaker/narrator shares with his spectator – to the more self-assured narrative of the second is also seen in the disappearance of the dissonances in the first film commented upon earlier. However, this is quite different from the Kevin MacDonald’s 2006 adaptation of Giles Foden’s novel The Last King of Scotland. Lesley Marx convincingly shows how the film version of that historical story succumbs to its genre and commercial aspirations and uses the documentary function in service of these rather than to explore either the character of Amin or the predicament of Uganda and its people (54–74). As a spectator of the two films on Patrice Lumumba, one cannot fail to see the second as an instantiation of an authoritative (not authoritarian) narration of an

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African life to an audience that is interpellated with growing maturity and confidence in order to assert a cultural and historical reality that is both determined in its historical specificity and immensely filled with possibility for thinking about the agency of the subaltern in political conflicts that are most often economically motivated. If an African documentary cinema is to be spoken about for any purpose, it would only be for its power when it is fully implicated in constructing varying models of possibility for Africa and the diaspora and their cinema.5 The filmmakers who choose this mode of narrating Africa do so while properly theorizing their seizure of a genre so highly laden with its colonial past, something which comes through in the content (themes, but also the documentary footage used, and images of relics of that past that abound) as well as the innovative totality of mise-en-scène. Here, more than elsewhere, spectators are called upon to rethink the very presence of Africa in cinema as a world cultural artifact. Historically the question of perspective and voice return as essential areas of transformation, of Africanization, while in the current moment Africanization becomes about this cinema’s existence and growth in the changing cinema scene in Africa and its diasporas. It is for this reason that the most Africanizing gesture of the current moment is to view these films as being an interconnected whole and thus to privilege the conversations among them rather than strip them of the richness that such an interwoven whole offers: that is the task proposed in Africa Watch in the contemporary world of African and disapora cinema. It remains a proposal because it depends on (your) spectatorship for its accomplishment.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

See Barr “Raoul Peck’s Lumumba” for an excellent discussion of the juxtaposition accomplished by Peck between what he neatly calls “history as edifice and history of absence” (95) and for a reading, in particular, of the dramatization of particular scenes in the second film that in the first were presented from existing documentary footage. The English subtitling leaves out “without knowing him” and thus does not evoke the repetition of the verb “to know” in French: savoir (a fact) and connaˆıtre (familiarity with a person or a place or an idea). Fredric Jameson discusses Bazin and Kracauer’s use of the still frame in cinema and these filmmakers’ awareness of the impossibility of its joining up photography. He writes in Signatures of the Visible that the freeze-frames cannot “be translated back into photography, but constitutively presuppose the inevitability of time and change and loss as the price they must pay to become events rather than things” (192). Thomas Giefer’s documentary can be seen in its entirety on the web: http://www.youtube .com/watch?v=1uPc2YKDQ7Q Filmmakers from the historical diasporas, such as Harrikrisna Anenden from the Creole island of Mauritius (whose Cathedral was studied as both documentary and fiction in Chapter 2), for example, participate with equal consequence in this cinema. Similarly, the recent Jamaican film by Roy T. Anderson, entitled Akwantu: The Journey (2012), documents the lives of contemporary members of Jamaican society who are descendants of marroons and who are believed to have evolved over centuries to be a quite unique people.

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Jean-Marie Teno Creating an African Repertoire

Jean-Marie Teno has been devotedly African in his material, but that fact, one might say, is purely circumstantial. Teno has been totally committed to building what I want to call an African repertoire, providing lovers of cinema with a range of films in which to delight. Teno has a remarkable record of completed films and, admirably, has given his audience a steady stream of films since his early short Hommage (1985). In Chief (1999) Teno takes on the question of power becoming absolute and unrealistic as a concept but playing out in very real ways in the lives of many Africans. Clando (1996), Teno’s only feature film to date, is about the reality of dreaming of Europe. It tells the story of a Douala taxi driver who fulfills the dream of many of his compatriots by arriving in Cologne, only to discover the unsavory truths about immigration. Teno’s scathing criticism of colonialism in Afrique, je te plumerai (“Africa, I will Fleece You”; 1992) becomes more ironized and subtle in The Colonial Misunderstanding (2004). These films, though sometimes tending to be a bit heavy in their theme and perhaps somewhat laden with the filmmaker’s critique, are gripping experiences of Teno’s thoughtful presentation and artistic craftsmanship. In the lighter Le mariage d’Alex (“Alex’s Wedding”; 2002), Teno shows his fully mature filmmaking self in the ability to be lighthearted, amused, strongly critical, and doggedly hopeful all at the same time, while A Trip to the Country (2000) turns into an in-depth, though often tongue-in-cheek, critique of European-style modernization in Africa well beyond colonialism and thus is a strong call to rethink the meaning of development from the perspective of real people, in this instance particularly from outside the postcolonial space of the city. The underlying impulse not just of Teno’s cinema but also of his own identity remains yoked to an assessment of what modernization has meant for aspiring Africans as individuals, no matter what their location, and for African nations in the contemporary world. This anchors Teno’s filmmaking in a tradition of African cinema while his impressively creative and growing repertoire makes him a cornerstone for study by any spectator of African film.1 Teno’s contribution is to be assessed not just in terms of the range of his films but in providing an expansion Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, First Edition. Anjali Prabhu. © 2014 Anjali Prabhu. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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of something we might call a “style.”2 Teno’s films often invoke the past in assessing the present and contemplating the future.3 However, the way the past enters the film resists the type of packaging we could associate more readily with commercial films, whereby “the past [i]s a commodity [that is] offer[ed] [ … ] to the viewer as an object of purely aesthetic consumption” (Jameson, Cultural Turn 131). In fact, the appeal to the spectator to understand the dilemmas facing Africans at both the individual and the political, national, or other representative level well beyond a more individualistic and often “heroic” framing is something that distinguishes the African and diasporic cinema chosen for study here from the more commercially motivated cinema emanating from the same spaces. Needless to say, obtaining funding for his films has been a primary area of difficulty, yet Teno has been ferociously committed to producing a steady stream of films made on his own terms. More recently, short-term teaching assignments at Amherst, for example, have provided him the opportunity to engage with faculty and students and understand how his films are being received in the university setting. Teno’s films do lend themselves particularly well to teaching on African issues. Accolades have not been lacking either; most recently, he was awarded the prize for best documentary for Sacred Places (2009) at the 2012 Innsbruck International film festival in Austria. However, although Teno’s films are, on the one hand, adaptable to instruction, it would be a sad mistake to use them only as tools to tell about this or that aspect of colonization, development, or modernization in the African context. This most recent film indirectly summons any spectator to take notice of the painstaking development of a style that his career has quietly established. In this chapter, I will tease out this idea of style and study a few techniques that resist the recuperation of Teno’s films to a pure pedagogical function about African matters, because the larger pedagogy of the spectator that he develops over his career is of as great if not greater significance than the learning we associate with the classroom (particularly in the type of classroom usage where his films might function to illustrate historical facts or details of colonialism, modernization, or African life), though one does not exclude the other.

Origins of a Style From the time of his early films, Teno has been innovative with form in considering the central preoccupation of each film. How should one convey the absolute power that politicians wield against the creative capabilities and natural curiosity of productive citizens? In Chief this is narrated in a variety of ways: one technique put to good use to this end is slow motion. Rather than using slow motion to portray utopian love in the classic manner emblematic of the Bollywood film-song in particular, Teno, who is himself quite familiar, like many Africans of his generation, with the big Bollywood hits of the ’60s–’80s, uses it to a quite different end. Let us consider one example. The context is an interview with a journalist who was imprisoned because he wondered, in a published article, if Paul Biya, the Cameroonian president, might

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have taken ill, since he had to leave during the finals of the national football (soccer) competition. Interviewed by Teno, the journalist, Pius Njawé, who ran the newspaper Le Messager, explains that he needed no proof that the “prince” controlled absolutely “everything that moves in the country” ‘tout ce qui bouge dans ce pays.’ Several shots in slow motion are used while Njawé speaks. In one of them, a still camera captures an everyday street scene: a yellow cab drives past, someone crosses the street, and passers-by are moving around. One young man walks past the camera, looking at it suspiciously. Set to the voice-over (now Njawé’s voice) the scene is transformed by the slow motion of the uncomfortable young man unnerved by the camera, while his surroundings, also seen in slow motion, give us the eerie feeling that everything is being controlled by some unseen force. Music with a slow beat accompanies the camera’s movement, which consists of a gentle pan to the right and then upwards to capture the watchtower of a prison. This image fades into a picture of Njawé in prison, literally behind bars (Figure 9.1). Amazingly, Biya was recently re-elected, extending a reign that has been uninterrupted essentially since 1982, when his predecessor, Ahmadou Ahidjo, took ill. A scathing critique of power in both the indigenous and the colonially derived versions, Chief exposes the postcolonial legacy by taking us into the prisons to show us the open sewers, lack of food, and terrible conditions – including mice-infested quarters – while at the same time connecting the notion of the power of the state to the multiple structures that work in tandem with it. Teno suggests that the prisoners have in likelihood been imprisoned on a whim. He makes creative connections between all kinds of power structures in which domination occurs: man over woman, adults over children, chiefs over common people, and, of course, the government over its citizens. The film makes clear the ways in which legal documents such as the French civil code (which is still used), traditional sources of authority such as the village strongmen deriving power and backing differentially from the chief and the police, and the newer, official government structures all operate in tandem. This creates a fluid structure in which power circulates through all sections of society and all regions, whether urban or rural, private, or public. Links are made between words, images, and ideas that move seamlessly or startlingly from one to another by means of a variety of clever techniques such as word play, jump cuts, cross-cutting, fading in or out and thus linking what might seem disparate areas so that the concept of power becomes pervasive. Teno exposes the spectator to a vertiginous movement of power in Cameroonian society, where, to quote the narrator, “one half of the population is a ‘chief’” over the other half. Teno takes emblematic “African” images and manages to transform them. These are imageries that have been morphed from colonial reportage and taken on a life of their own in sensationalizing “news” for global consumption, particularly in television broadcasts and across Internet sites the world over. Their use and the meaning put to them have been hugely influenced by the news media but they are reclaimed by Teno. Such recognizable images are disturbed by Teno’s films, within which they speak a more complex language. Through the patience of his intuitively transformative crafting, they challenge us to Africanize (or modernize differently). For example, the picture of young children joyously playing soccer (Figure 9.2a)

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(a)

(b)

Figure 9.1 (a) Still camera shot of a street, slow motion; (b) Prison watchtower following pan fades out into a picture of the journalist Njawé behind prison bars. Chief , directed by Jean-Marie Teno, produced by Les Films du Raphia, 1985.

becomes a rumination on the gender imbalance, calling upon spectators to rethink this image, which often (and by now perhaps stereotypically) traces the stories of successful African soccer players such as Michael Essien from Ghana or Côte d’Ivoire’s Didier Drogba who both played for the UK club team, Chelsea.4 While the spectator might instinctively make such an association, here this scene is framed to show privilege: privileged boys who come home from school and get to chase around a ball while their sisters are summoned indoors to help prepare dinner that they will serve their brothers and the menfolk. As Teno’s interviewee, Béatrice Sime, who works with the women’s organization Association de Lutte contre les Violences faites aux Femmes (ALVF), tells us in a voice-over, once the meal is eaten the boys

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(a)

(b)

Figure 9.2 (a) Boys playing soccer; (b) Woman picking from rubbish heap. Chief , directed by Jean-Marie Teno, produced by Les Films du Raphia, 1985.

will do their homework while their sisters help clean up. Similarly, the seemingly random image of a woman picking up things from a huge rubbish heap on the side of the city street, ceases being a simple sign of the third world city and connects back to the dirty prison conditions elaborately described in the interview with Njawé. Teno transforms our instinctual thoughts about poverty into reflection on the workings of power (Figure 9.2b). Teno is thus particularly skilled at manipulating authoritative images in order to deconstruct them and give them newer significations. His appeal to the spectators he creates operates at multiple levels and in multiple registers. Teno’s patience, which we sense in the tenor of his mellifluous voice – now comfortingly familiar through his many films – his eye for detail, his wicked and often misunderstood irony, and his generous compassion all shine through in the context

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of the decades of filmmaking he has devotedly carried out to examine, study, and expose the many wasted opportunities in his native Cameroon as both an important situation in its own right that calls for specific attention and an example not just to all of Africa but also to the world. Teno’s confident camera, his unapologetic point of view, and his inimitable framing of contradiction are balanced by an openness to expose to us his voice and his total belief in his art. The basis for the assessment of his work by compatriot critic Alexie Tcheyap that his documentaries have a god-like voice-over that drowns out all other perspective might lie in isolating what is often taken to be the most salient feature of a documentary film, namely the voice-over narration. A look at his early short, Hommage, gives us some intimation of a better way in to understanding and appreciating his films. A spectator well acquainted with the town or the sounds of the narrator’s accented French sees what is familiar anew through the encounter of two friends. The one who left for Douala and then France and who knows where else incarnates Teno’s own deep attachment to and irrevocable distance from his homeland. Though not very often commented upon, Hommage is by far Teno’s most delightful film. It begins like a gentle mystery, with a voice calling out to, and then reminiscing about, an old friend named Boniface. The first shot of a dwelling with its courtyard comes to life with a playful young boy posing charmingly for the camera, striking an old-world dance style that sets up the story’s almost dreamlike recollections (Figure 9.3) before capturing an old man relaxing in a chair outdoors, looking pensive: the sepia colors add to the old-world atmosphere. The narrator’s

Figure 9.3 Boy poses for camera. Hommage, directed by Jean-Marie Teno, produced by Les Films du Raphia, 1985.

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words are punctuated with “Ay, Boniface,” swearing thus gently at his old friend. As he addresses the friend, the camera coaxes us into thinking Boniface might appear around the corner of the wall of the courtyard. Another swift cut focuses on the vegetation while the shot uses a still camera (perhaps the two friends played there together, we might think), but then the voice begins to speak of Boniface in the third person and therefore to us. “Is he perhaps dead?” we wonder, but not for long. A quick turn of the camera brings into sudden focus an aged photograph of two boys in a wheelbarrow, which might be the image the old man has in his thoughts (Figure 9.4). Surely in their childhood they would have gone down the long alley that seems to await Boniface’s presence as the camera remains still for a long moment giving us full depth of field down its length (Figure 9.5). The voice-over says, “I remember the last time I saw you.” Might Boniface appear again in this walkway as we wait? But no, the old man’s memory is of having gone to the Bafoussam market where all the vehicles stop. His monologue is finally rewarded, when they do at last meet, with Boniface’s voice, gentle and laughing. Teno chose not to use his own voice for Boniface; as we will find out at the end of the short film, the rather obvious coincidence between himself and the character is carefully kept discrete for a very sound reason. A panning shot scans the modest town while Boniface’s voice caresses the image by affectionately addressing Baffoussam as “tu” (the familiar form of “you”), speaking charmingly to the town as though it were a person of whom he is fond. Bafoussam, it seems, tells its inhabitants that they can go far and wide but they will always return to her. The narrator confirms that Boniface seems to have gone crazy and talks about the city as if it were a woman. When the narrator raises the subject of the old neighborhood where they grew up, Boniface’s delight is accompanied by guitar music as the camera cuts to artisanal work: people doing what they like, work that they like, according to Boniface. This last comment has the music burst out (plucking and strumming with humming) in the background while his joyous voice continues the commentary as we hear the sound of woodwork and see a labourer sawing and nailing something (“le travail qu’ils aiment” ‘work that they love’). This theme of the love for the work one does recurs through Teno’s films. Artisanal work or any kind of intricate physical labor or meaningful creation will often be accorded long takes in Teno’s films (whether it is, for example, the old-fashioned but mechanical production of the newspaper in Afrique, je te plumerai, or the character Jules making his drum called the djembé in Sacred Places). Here, the hustle and bustle of the weekdays of the market and of buying and selling is offset by the day of rest and festivities that Sunday offers. The narrator’s view of the same is somewhat more realistic for he sees the heat, the fatigue, and the sweat as the means by which to earn a living, and therefore as part of daily life and not as remnants of a nostalgic past. The narrator also admonishes Boniface, saying the money he might bring back is “easy” (“facile”). The two unseen characters continue their conversation, which quickly becomes a dialogue about the notion of diaspora and movement. Their meeting in the town is framed by a shot of the bustling street with two signs recognizable to any spectator whether she or he is from Bafoussam – or Douala, Yaoundé, or France where Boniface is said to have

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Figure 9.4 (a) Old man reminiscing; (b) Boys in wheelbarrow in foreground with depth of field. Hommage, directed by Jean-Marie Teno, produced by Les Films du Raphia, 1985.

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Figure 9.5 Long shot camera pauses on length of alley. Hommage, directed by Jean-Marie Teno, produced by Les Films du Raphia, 1985.

gone: “Mobil” says the sign on one side and “Total” that on the other. How is one’s perspective of place structured by the spaces that bond us to it and those that separate us from it? Our delight in knowing the two characters’ shared past is heightened by its value that knowledge of their now-disparate lives adds to it. But the Sunday-best scene, which follows, is full of sunshine that soon segues into dark images of a blade being taken to skin accompanied by the sounds of the night. The narrator reminds his returned friend that the night is alive with sorcerers, owls, and snakes. A light is turned off with a snap and the screen goes dark. We hear a drum roll whilst the sounds of night owls give the narrator’s voice greater authority. Then, in an extreme close-up shot of an anonymous face, a pair of eyes leaps out of the darkness filling the screen, after which, gradually, light fades in (Figure 9.6) The effect of the drum roll and more eerie hooting of the owls is cleanly dispelled as the face is illuminated (Figure 9.6b) and a cut takes us to daylight with the sound of a crowing cock and lighter guitar music. Not that kind of “African” story! Shame on you; Teno seems to have lightly teased us and we laugh with him for perhaps foolishly having expected something more forbidding, in the style of Jean Rouch’s The Mad Masters (1955). Are you expecting an exotic idea of juju or witchcraft or, more recently do you imagine the promise of Gollywood-style excitement? Teno is keenly aware that the camera in his hands is already in conversation with those who traversed the same images, giving the promise of African savagery and barbarism no matter if they were represented in genuine sympathy. The moment is magic in

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Figure 9.6 (a) Extreme close-up of eyes in the darkness; (b) Eyes illuminated. Hommage, directed by Jean-Marie Teno, produced by Les Films du Raphia, 1985.

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a different way: it is funny, admonishing, and generous all at the same time, creating a special bond between the filmmaker and us. Life, it seems, was simple then. Daylight broke and the world was right again. The strumming of the guitar is once again reassuring, while this time the humming voice actually breaks out into Talla André-Marie’s then quite contemporary, “Où vas-tu paysan?” In the original song the singer interrogates his interlocutors, from the peasant, the hopeful student, the young lady, to the driver, only to find they are each headed for the capital, Yaoundé, looking for happiness and a better life. Early on, we find that Teno is fascinated with symbolism and meaningfulness in the most simple tunes and words, as he is with the humblest of visual motifs. Teno’s cinematography might be described as the genius of small things. The narrator’s voice then takes on a different role. It is to expose the folly of Boniface’s idea of leaving. Boniface does not believe that the town is big enough for the multiplying children, but the narrator believes that it is in the land that one can find hope. Indeed he turns on Boniface, who might be a symbol of authority and ownership, which he brings back with his apparent success in the city, configured as a legacy of the colonial “massa.” The narrator’s despondent voice informs us that Boniface did not pay him any attention. There is a sense that the two lives cannot be joined as they once were. Boniface’s laughter at the thought of independence – which we assume would have been around the moment of his departure from his home town – is accompanied by black-and-white documentary footage showing the white army replaced by a black one; Ahmadou Ahidjo inheriting power at the moment of independence; the Cameroonian soldiers wearing the same uniforms, carrying the same guns, and marching in the same style as their predecessors. Gradually the tone changes: fear and silence become a vicious cycle, says Boniface’s voice, and then the silent black-and-white recording continues to show independence celebrations with marching school children as the voice takes to laughing a little madly. The narrator is at a loss before this kind of talk. His view of gift-giving, criticized by Boniface, is that it is just the tradition, whether one goes to see the chief or someone in an office. The imminence of disagreement between the two old friends is constant. Instead the narrator thinks about the last village feast. Traditional song and music is chosen to bring to life the photos shown as stills that fill up the screen. The women worked hard; the men, as usual, did nothing, we are told, apart from eating and drinking and pretending to solve problems. As we move from image to image, sometimes the camera is still, sometimes it pans gently to capture the different people in a picture. All of a sudden, a superimposed face emerges as the images of stills (perhaps they are photos the narrator has kept) change (Figure 9.7a and b). The people danced, the narrator tells us, to pay homage to a man who died in an accident in Douala. The narrator tells how they waited two hours before taking him to the hospital. The image is now a painting, possibly one done by a child (Figure 9.7c). The victim was Boniface’s father, says the narrator. The film is dedicated to the filmmaker’s father, who died in an accident on December 18, 1979, as the final text over the black-and-white still tells us: it is a photograph of Teno’s father.

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Figure 9.7 (a) Fade-out of festivities, fade-in of the outline of a face; (b) Close-up of black-and-white photo of a man near to smiling looking straight at camera; (c) Painting depicting accidental death. Hommage, directed by Jean-Marie Teno, produced by Les Films du Raphia, 1985.

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(c)

Figure 9.7

(continued)

The casual encounter, the lightness of nostalgia, the simplicity of day and night, for Teno, are all worthy of our stopping to notice and contemplate. The generosity of this filmmaker, which will unfold henceforth, is fully present in this homage to his father and to the medium that sustains him. Gently introducing “Boniface’s” father in the course of the story is an oblique way to touch on something as personal and painful as the death of his own father. We have learnt of his death in the tender conversation of the meeting of two old friends in some space hovering between the real and the imaginary, very much in the way death might greet us after the fact when it is that of someone beloved in a distant but familiar place. Even a return to the place can never finalize that death, particularly when it has occurred in our absence. Walking the familiar streets or seeing the walls that once might have framed the person, we half expect them to emerge out of nowhere, just from our memory. These feelings are perfectly evoked through Teno’s magical film. Yet at the same time, the film quietly places the dream of Douala and Yaoundé, the capital, and of even more distant France and its promises, in the context of the migrating individuals whose hopes must be interwoven with the political and economic realities of what independence and decolonization meant and did not mean. Boniface’s impossible return becomes the tragedy alongside this death. Teno’s oblique reflection on the changed possibilities that took many Africans on a path of no return and the highly personal resonance of this fact will lead him to search relentlessly for another modernism. An alternate modernism, an African modernism, that puts his films in conversation with a host of Africans rethinking the consequences of modernity as we now know it “universally” without

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question. Sharing his personal loss and bringing to bear an emotionally laden moment for reflection upon the greater social situation in his country, Teno sets the tone with Hommage for the films he would go on to make and the form of commitment that cannot be named or separated from the actual filmic creation because they are one and the same. Dissecting it in this short somehow does it damage, but his lengthier documentaries allow us to examine with greater amplitude his use of specific techniques that continues and develops the gentle but unambiguous form of critique that has systematically created a unique style through the development of a method that is reinvented and renewed in such creative ways through each film.

From Style to Method Rather than commenting upon the two well-known films on colonialism, I will focus on aspects of A Trip to the Country in order to highlight some of the tendencies noted above that mark Teno’s style but that also signal his method as an intellectual whose work is African only as much as it is wed to his cinematic medium.5 A Trip to the Country begins with a still camera. The establishing shot fades in and purposefully draws our view beyond a little papaya tree out to the city with sounds of crowing cockerels and singing birds (Figure 9.8a). The little hills that characterize Yaoundé are carefully touched upon in the depth of the shot that begins a slow pan to the right. The dense collection of roofs of the small homes we can see from this more elevated vantage point are given their time in the frame as the camera halts its motion again. A swift cut moves us to the traffic of the city, which the camera reveals by panning against the movement: the camera moves right while the traffic moves left.6 Is it a simple coincidence or can we already sense the unease? The gentle instrumental music disarms and dispels such a notion. Moving from the larger roads in the center of town, the camera jumps to a narrower street lined on both sides by vendors, the considerable depth showing pedestrians and vehicles continuing all the way into the distance, engaged in a form of dissatisfied but acquiescent sharing of road space, before we hear Teno’s voice: “Yaoundé” (Figure 9.8b). Here and in other films, Teno is careful to show the spectator the city within its framework and in connection to the vastness that lies beyond it. While this might seem like a straightforward establishing shot, which it is in some measure, when viewed within the repertoire of Teno’s film, it already suggests the push and pull that Teno will exploit in his narrative. The title of the film is already lightly ironic: he is going home on “vacation.” Of course these trips home are full of real joy, but they also represent a critical engagement that is often filled with urgency, nostalgia, disillusionment, hope, and always the hard work behind the filmmaking itself. It is also tinged with self-mockery, as he casts himself in the role of the successful diasporic, returning home, thus open to the ironic eye of the narrator in Hommage who mocked Boniface. In this film in particular, he will make a trip out of Yaoundé to his native village. The film begins as a proper autobiography, casually recounted. We view the city through the narrator’s eyes, he came here in 1965 when he was eleven years old, he tells us, to attend secondary school.

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Figure 9.8 (a) Establishing shot from behind papaya tree with view of city in the distance; (b) Dense traffic, vendors, and people in frame, considerable depth of field: Yaoundé. A Trip to the Country, directed by Jean-Marie Teno, produced by Les Films du Raphia, 2000.

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Teno’s return to Yaoundé after thirty-three years of absence, his visit to his now dilapidated school building and to various familiar sites that have been transformed with the growth of the city, the arrival of European modernity, and the terrific impact this has had on people’s lives through a ravaging of other forms of sustenance are all captured in this film. The school has become an “historic monument,” says the narrator, enunciating the word historic (“historique”) with a bit of exaggeration that makes the rusted gate a point of severe admonition: historic in the sense of abandoned. Commenting on the name of the school – it was named after one General Leclerc – Teno says schools are always named after generals who sent the sons of his country to fight a war in Europe. The tension rises, but the voice is as soothing and calm as we have come to know it. Acknowledging that he has changed as much as the city since he last visited it, Teno inserts himself into the film as one who is also responsible for how he apprehends the city, and thus gives it to us. This is the kind of gesture that could easily go unnoticed, but it is surely significant if we are interested in probing the form of Teno’s documentary films, which in many ways exemplify what Trinh T. Minh-ha so boldly stated: “There is no such thing as documentary” (24). There is truth to that statement, and yet Teno’s particular use of the handheld camera reminds us of the films of the Maysles brothers or John Rouch in the sense that there is some truth worth telling and it is worth taking a position about it. Sometimes the truth is in the telling itself. It would be hard to define Teno’s films as adhering to any one documentary “mode” as Bill Nichols’ useful model proposes: from the poetic, the observational, the reflexive, or the participatory, for example (Introduction 99–138). Teno would likely refuse any direct comparisons with these or other predecessors, yet we cannot but think of Rouch, even Resnais, as we experience the various techniques and approaches that wish to expose a vision of the truth, shake the spectator, and yet do so by being true – even creatively – to what is out there in the everyday and how it affects him. Teno’s films might seem highly “ideological,” but that ideology is “itself a possibility of knowledge,” cognizant of the fact that, “our constitutive difficulties in imagining a world beyond global standardization are very precisely indices and themselves features of just that standardized reality or being itself” (Jameson, The Cultural Turn 69). Many of Teno’s quiet reflections and ironical observations have to do with imagining a world beyond the one that is readily embraced and triumphantly enjoyed, particularly in his native Cameroon, as evidence of being part of a cosmopolitan and progressive world culture. If there is a reason to separate “art” film as we have called it here it is in order to privilege its commitment to thinking beyond the screaming signs of modernity that “Africa” is so eager to flaunt – a feature that dominates what we have called “commercial” films in this book. It does not mean that the latter films cannot or do not tackle important social issues or that they are somehow to evolve to in order to become the higher form of art film. The commercially oriented video film industry is a force in its own right. It is not always and in every way distinct from the art cinema discussed in this book. Indeed, one might find films in that repertoire that could be productively engaged for the type of analysis undertaken here (though I admittedly did not feel prompted to do so in the viewings I have made over the years of researching and writing this book).

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However, art film’s sustained commitment to rethinking meanings, destinies, and futures for African peoples does not require any further qualifications for the repertoire it provides. The challenge that these films make to us to become their spectator is linked to an idea of newness, of revolution, and imaginative change. It is in this that they share intricate and strong links to the Fanonian-inspired notion of Third Cinema and not in what today would just be a simplistic dichotomy between colonized and colonizer as many who wish to dismiss this cinema as essentially Western, elitist, stuck in an old paradigm, or disconnected from African reality would have it. The historical specificity of Third Cinema belongs to itself. Contemporary cinema of Africa and the diaspora shares in not its moment but rather in its methods, which, as disparate as they might be, are all ferociously dedicated to rescuing the many possibilities from the missed opportunities and the tragic destruction of human potential and celebrating and promoting the human successes that are obscured most often by terms invented in a warped time frame that has been anything but African, anything but kind or advantageous or even fair to Africa’s own development, its own modernity, its own conception of a future for humanity well beyond Africa and its diaspora. It is in this sense that Teno participates in and indeed defines African and diasporic cinema, both. In A Trip to the Country, we enjoy a moment of conspiracy in which we learn that the filmmaker does not have permission to film in the school area. Jerky zooms to the broken windows and dilapidated parts of the building are accompanied by triumphant trumpeting music which could be either that of the ignorant authority which imagines its control is successful or the triumphant “we” the filmmaker has created, proceeding to draw us in since unveiling himself as “I.” The empty building is desolate in its shabby lack of attention. A long shot makes the abandoned pillars against which students no longer lean multiply the incongruity of an empty school, while the rubbish, the unkempt yard, and the abandoned shuttered windows gaping open scream their silent neglect. The lush green of a tree in the depth of the shot is poignant with its promise of nothing but life (Figure 9.9 Long shot of desolate school yard and abandoned building). Later in the film, Teno will make more explicit the need to rethink not simply education French style but also all new symbols of progress and development that penetrate African life and change, forever, its collective experiences. From the school to the broken-down cars, the bus station, and the route out west, time has only brought worsened conditions. With a few asides to the spectator, we set off toward the west. Teno’s tactics do not usually entail the kind of alienation we might associate with the New Wave films that certainly influenced his thinking about his craft. Instead, we have a disarming and tireless narrator whose authority as the filmmaker is both the site of his commitment and the nodal point for dialogue. Teno tells us, as we are speeding along this road, that he is returning to the village of his childhood, where he will confront the hopes and aspirations he had then. What strikes him as new are the official and unofficial toll booths and a magnificent bridge that replaces the need for a ferry. But the bridge will also have destroyed life on the other side of it, where once the ferry took fish and agricultural products to the old national highway.

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Figure 9.9 Long shot of desolate school yard and abandoned building. A Trip to the Country, directed by Jean-Marie Teno, produced by Les Films du Raphia, 2000.

The film shows the great disillusionment that many African cities of its kind hold for the hopeful youth that have come of age in them. Teno’s camera, his voice, and his mise-en-scène unearth, with meticulous patience and a real desire to communicate the urgency and the pervasiveness of the situation to the spectator, the contradiction that characterizes urbanization, development, and modernity in the African time-space. All Teno’s films capture the huge gaps between country and city, between the well-established and the marginal in the city, and the way such unevenness and disparity are only versions of larger imbalances of power perpetuated in both space and time. We are not sure, then, what to make of the man who says that the people have become less barbaric, they are more civilized, like city folk! Is he serious? No comment from Teno, but we are already prepared for what the newly civilized village is going to hold. On the way, at Ebebda, we find, predictably, a picture of Paul Biya in the subprefect’s office, which the camera forcefully notes. A naughty interview with the government official sets him up to look foolish, while the music mocks his sense of importance. The man’s discomfort before the camera is highlighted by the trumpet music that laughs at him. After our stop, before we cross the bridge over the Nile … oops sorry, says the narrator, I mean the Senega. This is a mischievous reference to the administrator’s comment that, like the Nile, the Senega is Ebebda’s gift, since its sand furnishes the material for building in Yaoundé. Through these means of interspersing his critique with complicity built up with the spectator, Teno makes the

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Figure 9.10 Extreme long shot; the possibilities of an unselfconscious savannah. A Trip to the Country, directed by Jean-Marie Teno, produced by Les Films du Raphia, 2000.

journey ours as much as his own. Dramatizing the scene creatively by adding music, focusing on the absurdity of what is being proposed in the name of modernization, Teno’s appeal to both African and non-African viewers is to take heed of the contradictions that are lived out by real people and which are essential for continuing on the mythical path of modernization and success that stifle organic newness, innovation, and creativity. The camera does not shy away from enjoying the openness of the vast savannah that appears in its magnificence and is traversed by the new highway to which the narrator takes us back (Figure 9.10 Unselfconscious savannah). We earlier noted Teno’s ability to transform stereotypical images of Africa and generate new meanings and ideas from emblematic images. In Chapter 10, we will note how the African landscape has been overdetermined by Out of Africa type films, which have made cinemas about Africa, and their spectators, much more wary of their lavish usage. Teno’s maturity as a filmmaker allows him effectively to wrest it out of that over-usage. He is unapologetic and refreshingly eager to share and value the breathlessness he still experiences when he sees the natural beauty of his home and, here, successfully questions both the exoticizing of and the huge defensiveness before such beautiful images that contaminate our reveling in the truly awe-inspiring landscape. Unafraid, in exploring all of his experiences, to include those that may have degenerated into cliché, Teno goes beyond the formulaic and seeks to make each experience new. Speaking of the New Wave directors’ desire to innovate and go

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beyond cinema in their time, Gilles Deleuze’s comment speaks to African filmmaking and its desire to refashion the cliché: The new image would therefore not be a bringing to completion of the cinema, but a mutation of it. [ … ] The mental image had not to be content with waving a set of relations, but had to form a new substance. It had to become truly thought and thinking even if it had to become “difficult” in order to do this. (Cinema 1 215)

But the ways in which filmmakers from Africa and the diaspora continue to rescue their reality and experience out of stereotype or cliché are necessarily different, and differently difficult. We have already noted that Teno’s films do not back away from many images that have become stereotypical to both Africans and non-Africans, particularly because of the frequency of their circulation in the media. What his cinema does “as method,” then, is to intervene in style by giving the same forms new substance, so to speak. The difficulty inherent in such a task is often underestimated along with Teno’s lighter side, which suffers the same fate: it is most often glossed over. The seriousness of the topics he addresses tends to obscure the subtle, ironic humor that one can trace throughout his films. His films ask of their spectators that they be open to the style on its own terms and the means by which they should comply are amply and generously provided in the experience of his films. Teno’s filmmaking stands as an urgent call to all spectators, Africans in particular, to break away from the cycle that inevitably perpetuates many “African” problems. Indeed as non-Africans we come into being as spectators of his films through a process that substantially Africanizes our thought process because the camera and his entire mise-en-scène in each film invite us into a space that it is up to us to develop. For his part, Teno provides a series of intellectual, emotional, and sensory experiences of “African” persuasion. That persuasion is developed by looking at contemporary problems and situations to reveal to varying degrees the reality and feeling of the subaltern human life within them, or to touch upon the stifled truth (truth of emotion, of being, of living) in each situation: a young boy on the verge of being lynched for stealing a hen and some chicks; a woman marrying a man who has another wife; the state of Cameroonian journalism under severe censure; the everyday life of children without access to books; a culture oversaturated with Christian missionary influence; dying traditional trades and crafts with the unacceptable corollary of no means of livelihood in the postcolonial system. These are just some of the issues from which Teno’s cinema invents clever ways of Africanizing spectatorship as a method for his mise-en-scène. In A Trip to the Country, Makanene provides a market for those going in either direction. Fruits and vegetables or fresh produce for those going to the city while those proceeding to villages could find canned food and other modern products. Accompanying the narrator, we arrive in Mbieng, a neighborhood of Bandjoun not far from Bafoussam. Reminiscing about his grandfather, Teno has his camera take us back to the long alley, which in Hommage suggested to us that Boniface, the narrator’s friend, might appear. But as far as change goes, Teno’s voice over and images

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convince us that the most stupendous is the commercialization of the annual celebrations (with Coca-Cola bags, recognizable alcohol brands, and branded Italian pasta) that now take place closer to the highway. This theme of the false promises of modernization (which is nothing but Westernization and capitalism rather than innovation and revolution through need and genius within the context in question) and its simultaneous destruction and especially its obscuring of other possibilities for development is repeated in various formulations in Teno’s works and a range of other African and diasporic films. The point is brought home when he questions his ignorance before the complexities of his grandfather’s stories, which he recalls on this trip down memory lane. Teno places himself in the typical “successful” postcolonial role only to dismantle its relevance. He blames himself for hiding behind the modern scholarly education he received. The shot captures a man making his way away from the camera and from us through a beautiful path of green, which then cuts abruptly to a truck bearing the emblematic, commercial signs of Africa’s modernization. After a fade-out to a dark screen, we reach the celebrations, where a truck selling food and drink displays various emblems including the Coca-Cola sign (Figure 9.11). This scene occurs on soil that is stripped of grass and vegetation at the brink of the highway, an ultimate symbol of “development” and “modernization” for the village. The company, Brasseries du Cameroun, brews many of the beers depicted in the congress scene as well as Coca Cola that makes it appearance several times. As it so happens, Paul Biya is one of the large stakeholders of the Brasserie and does not miss the opportunity to promote it (“Brasseries Celebrates”). The communal event now has paying participants for the sporting events, and politicians have entered the fray. Ordinary folk must pay just to enter and enjoy the festivities. Older men remember when the congress was about advice, argument, and developing a common discourse. This would then lead to the harmony necessary to working together. Certain disputes would be settled, as one man tells us directly, speaking to the filmmaker behind the camera. Teno himself recalls it with nostalgia and awe as having been a real grassroots form of democracy. It was an opportunity to bring generations together, particularly to bring back the youth who had left the village so they would be able to reconnect with other young people and the elders for greater understanding and exchange. If there were any doubt about the overtures Teno makes to his spectator to accompany him on this “trip to the country,” he comes out in the end to directly speak to us as “you.” This land that makes “you” want to praise its beauty, he says, “reminds me of my childhood.” It reminds him of his education and his school named after Leclerc, which we surely remember from the early shots in the film. It reminds him, he says, of the “broken promises” of the Brazzaville Conference. Although Teno does not go into the details, we know that the newly free France and the leaders of her colonies came to an agreement in 1944 that was to be for the good of the African people.7 “Natives” would represent their people; citizens of the colonies were supposedly equal to those of France, which portrayed itself as wanting to undo the economic damage it had wreaked on its colonies. Of course, none of this aligns too well with the realities preceding independence. Teno ends on a somber note, remembering the dead who gave

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Figure 9.11 (a) Focus on recognizable brands of beer; (b) Coca-Cola tote bag desirably positioned at center frame. A Trip to the Country, directed by Jean-Marie Teno, produced by Les Films du Raphia, 2000.

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their lives for Africa and Europe and those who died in Africa. He concludes with a modest shot of green trees amidst which we see the roof of a little hut. His narration turns into a sort of prayer or wish that modernity would become something that would improve the greatest number of lives in Africa. The film conveys a simple message that – depending on where and how we receive it – might be a plea to somehow act and rectify the broken promises of Brazzaville.

African Cinema: What, For Whom, How? In Sacred Places, Teno takes a look at the kind of “African Cinema” he has been involved in creating. He wants to know who watches these films in Ouagadougou, the city where the FESPACO takes place. While the majority of films shown at this and other festivals might never make their way to the dwindling number of movie theaters in Africa, in particular, how do so-called local audiences engage “cinema” in their lives and what is its meaning within the daily culture? To discover the answer to these questions, Teno takes us into a small neighborhood of St Léon in Ouagadougou, where the idealistic Jules César Bamouni (the charming djembé maker and player, always full of humor and wise sayings) has his little workshop next to a ciné club run by the cinephile Nanema Boubakar, whose inspiration for the idea was a ciné club he had seen on a visit to Côte d’Ivoire. The club is truly a part of everyday life for the locals as Teno presents it: a shot of a little baby walking around in front of it establishes its casual but rooted position in the neighborhood (Figure 9.12). Boubakar, recognizing that the area is primarily Catholic, decides to allow Muslims who work in the area to use his ciné club for their afternoon prayers. Teno tells us in voice-over that Ouagadougou is very dear to him because of the opportunities it opened for him, the exposure he had there to African films, and because it was a space in which to understand and debate what African cinema means. One of the young men interviewed about the ciné club likes action films, he expresses appreciation for African films such as Buud Yam (1997)8 by Gaston Kaboré and he also mentions Idrissa Ouédraogo’s The Law (1990). Teno is careful to distinguish women’s attitudes toward the same clubs. One young woman interviewed at an outdoor café says she goes to the bigger cinemas in town but avoids the ciné clubs in general because they are poorly lit, the quality of the film projected is not always good, and also because one risks being brutalized in some way as a woman. She states that, apart from African films, she likes Hindi films (mistakenly calling them “Hindu films,” as French speakers often do). In the course of the film we see that, as well as Hollywood films, French parkour films such as Yamakasi (2001) are announced at the ciné club.9 Boubakar explains that African films are the most expensive to obtain – others such as martial art films or Bollywood or Hollywood films are much easier. One evening the selection will be two Hollywood action movies and Idrissa Ouédraogo’s Yaaba (1989). That night, there is competition from a soccer match being televised, so the turnout is not as good as it could have been. Later, Teno catches up with his friend, fellow filmmaker Idrissa Ouédraogo, who

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Figure 9.12 (a) Inside of the ciné club; (b) Baby walking casually near the ciné club. Sacred Places, directed by Jean-Marie Teno, produced by Jean-Marie Teno and Les Films du Raphia, 2009.

talks about the labor behind making a film but also the hopefulness he felt at having witnessed his film being shown in a small ciné club twenty years after its release. It is likely that it was a pirated version of the film that was shown. Ouédraogo admits that African filmmakers have not thought about the local economy in the distribution of their films. Teno is silent on the question of the video industry that has been smart enough to capture the local markets just as Ouédraogo suggests is the right thing to do. In an animated conversation Boubakar says that African directors should do more to reach the common person in the poor neighborhoods. In discussing the relationship between cinema and traditional forms of social communication, Jules claims that the djembé is the big brother (koro) and cinema is the little brother (dogo) while Teno teases him from behind the camera saying he

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disagrees as a filmmaker: for him cinema would be the big brother. From Teno’s conviction in a universalism of film language, he does not hesitate to put his experience and thoughts in such a context. He ponders the djembé’s role and says that the great innovators in film like the Lumière, Dardenne or the Coen brothers had all unjustly ignored the djembé – just as he had. When Teno screens his film Chief (discussed above) at the ciné club, he is asked all kinds of questions about his filmmaking and what it means to Africa. In giving us Jules’ profile as someone who immersed himself in the art of making musical instruments and music itself and who wants to live from his art, Teno cleverly places himself and filmmakers like him within the same structure – whether as big or little brothers. The point is that they are characterized first and foremost as artists who want to live by their art. Jules talks about his commitment to the quality of his work and of the importance of doing all his workmanship himself. Teno uses a long take of Jules in the process of making a djembé, using a painstaking technique of tightening the skin by pulling on the threads that fit it over the frame. Jules fixes a bamboo pole in the weave and winds it around to tighten it as we hear the sound of the skin stretching and the straining of the threads as the tension increases. Although there are several shots of the drums themselves, Teno gives importance to Jules’s human effort by using a close-up for much of the take, thus focusing on the artisan’s effort. He also chooses not to use any music throughout this shot, preferring the diegetic sound, which is the natural sound of the craftsman’s effort. This goes on for about four minutes, the only punctuation being Jules occasionally making a comment or stopping to wipe the rivulets of sweat running down his face (Figure 9.13a and b). Finally, the camera pulls back in a continuous shot to allow us to see the fruits of his labor and enjoy him testing out the instrument he has just created. The drumming is a triumphant moment in which we participate (Figure 9.13c). Through various suggestions, Teno pursues the theme of artistry as one of labor and likens his own craft to the work of the humble Jules César who has big dreams: he wants to become a djembé player with a music studio right there in the neighborhood. The group of young men, Jules and Boubakar included amongst them, discuss politics, life, corruption, and hope over tea, both at the beginning and toward the end of the film. In one of the final sequences, Boubakar goes to an electronic store to salivate over a large-screen television set that he cannot afford. After some discussion with the storekeeper he realizes that he will need a lot of liquid cash to acquire it. Although they are open to his paying in installments, the man informs him that if someone else comes up with the cash and wants it, he will have to sell it to them. The shot focuses on the television screen while dramatic instrumental music suggests a grand finale; a disappointed but hopeful Boubacar leaves the store while his reflection is caught on the television screen (Figure 9.14). Boubacar’s desire for the beautiful wide screen is so closely linked to his desire to succeed and provide opportunities for spectatorship in his neighborhood that it ceases to be the object of status that it is in countless commercial films. This shot mitigates the disappointment that he feels, and that we feel along with him, that he cannot fulfill his dream at once. The fact that we see him walk out of the store in the reflection on the television that

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Figure 9.13 (a) Close-up of Jules laboring over djembé; (b) Close-up to focus on the tightening process; (c) Long shot of Jules playing newly made djembé. Sacred Places, directed by Jean-Marie Teno, produced by Jean-Marie Teno and Les Films du Raphia, 2009.

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Figure 9.14 Boubakar’s reflection in the television screen. Sacred Places, directed by Jean-Marie Teno, produced by Jean-Marie Teno and Les Films du Raphia, 2009.

he longed for is highly suggestive. It could hint at the fictionalization of the story or, on the contrary, its veracity. Most of all, it is a reminder of the precariousness of filmmaking, spectatorship, and the mediation between the two, and though this relationship is the base for cinema anywhere, the terms in which the film interrogates this nexus joins up with the Africanization that this and other films discussed here mobilize in their interpellation of the spectators they visualize. Despite ourselves, we are caught up in all the hopefulness of, and for, African cinema, including this film, of the kind that Teno has worked tirelessly to create and promote. What is endlessly satisfying in Teno’s films is the way his images are rendered robustly enduring because they are lovingly and painstakingly captured and accompanied by a narrative that is so carefully crafted in its easy flow that dissonances catch the spectator off guard. Jacques Rancière’s insightful conclusion about Eisenstein’s art is that it was not really about bringing about a new communist consciousness but rather that it was “an ecstatic art that directly transformed the links between ideas into chains of images in order to bring about a new regime of sensibility” (Film Fables 31). Jean-Marie Teno’s repertoire ushers in a new Africanized regime of sensibility by transforming the links between ideas such as those of colonialism and modernity for Africa into chains of images from the lush countryside to the crowded streets, the insides of numerous bureaucratic offices to family courtyards and children fooling around, rubble and trash to paintings and pictures, dreams, ambitions, and fantasies. What appears as “style,” in the sense of the style of an “auteur,” is in fact a method: it is a method by which Teno Africanizes his spectatorship through disarming forms of address to his spectator that include activating what might seem as cliché in order to give it new meaning and indeed transform the spectator’s view it. In this, if we follow Teno, Africans, more urgently than anyone else, need Africanization. Teno’s Africanization of the spectator occurs through gentle forms of irony

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and laughter, in which he teases himself along with the spectator and thus extends explicit forms of invitation to engage in the critical thought process that his films galvanize through appeal to our minds but also through sensory forms of connection. Teno does not shy away from a “show and tell” method, but by his inclusion of the spectator through various means to make those travels that the camera and his mise-en-scène generously permit he prevents it from becoming pontification.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6

7

Idrissa Ouédraogo, best known for his fictional Yaaba (Grandmother; 1989) or The Law (1990), is actually also a documentary filmmaker we should not forget. His many short films, some of the recent ones commissioned for TV or by NGOs place him in a difficult category. Ouédraogo also has a gift for the little detail, and yet his filmmaking is quite different from Teno’s. He also boldly uses the genre of documentary to suit the stories he wants to tell, and his films explore techniques and narrative strategies that seem unhindered by any considerations of genre. In some ways his films are more prone to explore interpersonal relationships and focus on the personal. An innovative filmmaker, Ouédraogo was born in Burkina Faso (then known as the Republic of the Upper Volta). His recent Kato Kato: Trouble Never Comes Alone (2006) is a tour de force of casual digressions. Ali, a schoolteacher, does not want his wife to work but has to take on other jobs to save his daughter who is sick. A young street child, Binetou, is recruited by him to make him some money. One day, in an unconnected incident, his wife shouts out on the street, that Binetou is a thief. In her desperation to escape, Binetou is run over, and dies. These traces of a Bollywood story still distance Kato Kato well away from that tradition. The style is controlled and innovative while the predictability or surprise in the plot are overtaken by the development of the thought process of the spectator regarding the environmental and social conditions experienced by children that have the potential to tell their fate as adults. The more commercially oriented Eddie Ugbomah pointed to the need to have an “African film style” in order to speak of African cinema. See his interview by Frank Ukadike, “Toward an African cinema” 178. His latest project is entitled Leaf in the Wind, a film that began with an interview with Ernestine Ouandié, daughter of Ernest Ouandié, who was executed in 1971. Although Drogba, who retired from Chelsea and now plays for a Turkish club, was sent to France at the age of five, news reports and stories have abounded of his numerous trips back to his home. These stories feature the conditions in which a vast number of future stars learn their skills. Essien talks, in his heyday, about playing on dirt pitches as a boy, see Jackson’s “The quiet rise of fearless Essien.” For more on his Afrique and The Colonial Misunderstanding, see Ukadike “The Other Voices” and “Transcultural Modernities” and Wozniak. Traffic scenes abound in Teno’s films. See Plate 11 for a casual cut to traffic in Sacred Places showing Ouagadougou traffic. Similarly he trains our eye to notice significant things in the city, such as the men doing salat at the appointed hour amid the bustle of the city (Plate 12), something that becomes significant when we learn the area is predominantly Catholic. See Conférence africaine française.

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8 The main character, Wend Kuuni, is picked up again from Kaboré’s film of the same name released in 1983. 9 Teno reaches out to banlieue films that extend the tradition of African cinema and speak to youth in Africa, many of whom idealize reaching Europe, even the banlieues. In another shot we see one of the bigger cinema houses showing the late Henri Duparc’s films Caramel (2004) and his earlier The Family (1972) as Teno again situates his own film and filmmaking within a tradition whose repertoire provides occasion for intellectual engagement and conversation beyond the festival circuits.

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Conclusion Inside/Outside or How to Make a Film about Africa Today

Throughout this book I have followed the ways in which contemporary films of Africa and the diaspora interpellate their spectators by engaging in processes of what I have called Africanization. One aspect of Africanization involves freeing up the clichés and stereotypes that burdened Africa and Africans in the cinematic medium because of its legacies from colonial and ethnographic film. It is also a fact, though, that ethnographic film has had a profound influence on African and diaspora cinema of the persuasion we have examined. In this chapter, I wish to test the convictions that this book places in art film by analyzing a blockbuster film that still aspires to be an African film in the senses we have defined that here. Placing Blood Diamond (2006) alongside Bamako (2006) allows for some interesting challenges to the notion of “art” film while also affirming how and when it parts ways from blockbusters in contemporary cinema. The ironic exhortations of Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina’s in “How to Write About Africa” offer a scathing critique of the representation of Africa in the media as well as in other types of literary and non-literary writing. This welcome critique assembles the familiar metaphors and hackneyed images of starving, killing, primitive Africans in vast and lush natural settings who need to be saved from various problems and calamities, ranging from famine to civil war and from disease to patriarchy, by the West. However, Wainaina’s critique also ends up remaining at a predictably superficial level and somehow continues to frame Africa as quite simplistically discernible from inside and outside. In the films we have been studying, the notion of Africa becomes an interconnected real, as well as an imaginary, space of socially, economically, ethnically, and historically important regions which maintain and forge political relations within and without the discernible boundaries of the continent and its outlying islands. It also becomes an entity that already engenders and depends upon the idea of diaspora, without which the world (and Africa within it) as we know it could not be conceived. As we have seen, these films interpellate a spectator, who becomes Africanized through the experience of the film, notwithstanding the fact that authenticated Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, First Edition. Anjali Prabhu. © 2014 Anjali Prabhu. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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“African” spectators with substantial “African” experience do help constitute their ideal viewers. The newer brand of commercial African cinema takes for granted an African audience at home and abroad that is ready to consume images and stories about the new “globalized” Africa where urban consumerism and growth mimics and surpasses the city life that Hollywood has made quasi-universally recognizable, because consumer culture itself is booming in at least parts of Africa and, as many critics have argued, that cinema is as much a part of this contemporary African reality. Often these films (which I have referred to as “commercial” African films in this study), although using fantasy, exaggerated wealth, or melodramatic elements such as coincidence, provide images and narratives of African stories that are recognizable with reference to a particular verifiable African reality on which the media and even literary writers have not cared to focus. Those are stories through which these films carry out the very important task of unifying a spectatorial position, while of course maintaining what might be considered different, exotic, or “local” specificity that distances the “Africans” in them from what is recognizably global consumer culture. This is done by bringing to bear upon the viewing experience that same consumer culture in its cinematic specificity: fancy hotel lobbies and offices, swimming pools where people die or laze, sharp dressing, coffee shops and bars for encounters, banks for shootouts, malls and flower shops for chance meetings or revelations, swanky cars, glamorous kick-ass women, exciting car chases and other getaways, hit men … wealth and possible wealth, as we see in the emblematic Ghanaian hit film The Game (2010) by Frank Rajah Arase (see Plate 13 and Plate 14). In other words, that Africa is one that might, to some extent, evoke disjuncture from a more easily shared global culture through the specificity of the African experience in the film; but it simultaneously promotes continuity for a potential viewer with the newer consumer reality in Africa and with Euro-American (urban) culture. Thus the huge success of what we can call commercial African films, the bulk of which are loosely ascribed to Nollywood/Gollywood provenance, relies on precisely such a global spectator and a particular African spectator upon whose familiarity with nuances of language and culture they depend. On the other hand, the African cinema we have been delineating in this book, while in no way excluding the same spectators, asks much more of its potential spectator than to be able to recognize and proceed from the forms of continuity the films call up with wider cinematic and “outside” or material reality. But a pertinent question might be, what can we make of films that do both? That is, how do we analytically approach films that are unabashedly commercial and yet set a task for the spectator which characterizes that operated by what we have thus far called African and diaspora cinema? We shall take a look at such an African film in what follows. In Blood Diamond, the casting of Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role as Danny Archer sets up the film to be a blockbuster. The film was a box office success, ranking number 56 in theaters that year (“Blood Diamond”). Edward Zwick, its director, was already well known for big casting (Brad Pitt, Demi Moore, Denzel Washington) or even making stars. Whether in the civil war story Glory (1989) or the family drama Legends of the Fall (1994), Zwick was already well placed to make a big issues film

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that would pull large audiences. In that sense, Blood Diamond does it all. It is a film about an urgent problem, provides a dashing cast, and does the big landscape scenes that are irresistibly beautiful in their aesthetic splendor. Tackling the issue of illegal diamonds harvested by Africans in terrible conditions along with the use of children in the mines and child-soldiers in the rebel forces, the film brings up the bloodshed amongst tribes and peoples resulting from the scramble for control of these mines and the smuggling of diamonds. One might argue that this film is ultimately a black “buddy” film, with Djimon Hounsou in the black buddy role while DiCaprio remains its legitimate star, and that it thus inserts itself into something of a Hollywood genre: like the Mel Gibson/Danny Glover pairing in Lethal Weapon. There is some merit in such a view, although the film makes various gestures to neutralize such a hierarchy and yet, as we shall see, is bold enough as to present the white protagonist as having a language and thought process that is historically specific and that reveals itself as such to its audience. This film attempts to be an “African” film in the senses we have described, and it accords very well with the clearly stated ambition for African films of all kinds made by Chief Eddie Ugbomah: “The days of Tarzan are gone” (167–180). Such attempts include personalizing the story of an African child soldier, Dia (Kagiso Kuypers); developing the emotions of his father, the black African protagonist Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou); and showing hope in the form of the white African protagonist (hero) Danny Archer, whose ruthless character shows flickers of humanity through the redemptive presence of the female protagonist (heroine) Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), the committed American journalist. Maddy represents the best of the West, Solomon the best of Africa. Danny, the white mercenary, indeed unites their goodness as a thread through the plot. The film also connects African nations in the contemporary historical context (Sierra Leone/Zambia/Zimbabwe/South Africa/Guinea), forcing what might be a typical Western or non-African-minded spectator of blockbuster films out of a vague sense of complacency toward all that is comfortably unknown in “Africa” by requiring proper mental location of the various nations and their borders. This in itself prohibits the murky idea of the “dark continent” and the film brings the spectator greater complexity through the plot, which includes the story of Solomon Vandy’s family. It deals with the loss of his son to the rebels and his wife and smaller children becoming refugees in another nation, with Solomon’s developing relationship with Danny Archer, his connection with Maddy Bowen, and ultimately, it delivers a “happy ending” for him rather than for the romantically paired white protagonists. The film shows that existing checks, such as the United Nation’s Kimberly Process Certification Scheme, which exists to certify that diamonds entering the market are not from conflict zones where human rights are routinely violated, are hardly effective. The film is plot driven and includes some ridiculous moments that attempt at lightness, such as that in which Maddy charms the rebel forces in the forest, who are ready to kill the threesome, by asking them to pose for her camera. It is an efficient cinematic story that is deftly captured under the experienced camerawork of Eduardo

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Serra, of Harry Potter fame. Effective crosscutting keeps the stories connected within the plot and posits the problems of the diamond trade as necessarily global and the responsibility for them as far-reaching, extending to the spectator and beyond. From giving us a quick lesson in the way supplies are controlled to elevate prices to how the stones are moved across various African borders into Europe and India for cutting and polishing before reaching their American market, the film exploits its medium to make those movements real and bring those spaces to us through breathtaking crosscuts that transport the spectator across these spaces with speed and deftness. The film opens with an orange outline map of the world with Africa at its center filling the dark screen, after which the location of Sierra Leone becomes a speck that remains visible while the prologue appears on the screen in orange letters, telling the spectator about the situation of the mines, its workers, the displaced people, and the rebels. It does not, in other words, “treat Africa as if it were one country” (Wainania). A struck match lights up the dark screen to reveal Solomon Vandy in close-up. He is lighting a petroleum lamp in the early morning before waking his son, Dia, for the six-mile walk to school. Solomon hopes he will become a doctor, as we learn very soon. As Solomon walks back with his son at the end of the day, the story begins with the rebels pillaging his village. Solomon narrowly escapes having his hands chopped off, but even so, he is captured to work in the mines, while the rest of his family escapes. Our acquaintance with the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) is mediated through the horrific character of Captain Poison (David Harewood), who can cut off your hands on a whim (“no more hands, no more voting”). The chilling account of the conversion of the innocent Dia Vandy into a child soldier of the RUF is presented via crosscutting with Solomon’s story of the discovery of a large pink diamond that he will hide. The quest to recover this diamond (which Captain Poison has seen him hiding) drives the plot and the union between Vandy and Danny Archer, who, for different reasons, need to find that diamond. Similarly, effective crosscutting between the diamond harvesting mine and an Antwerp conference on the diamond situation connects African realities to spaces that have an almost immediate impact on those realities. One such effective moment is the cut from the self-satisfied speech of Van de Kaap (a name reminiscent of de Beers, for example, thus evoking a reality close to the Western blockbuster spectator), the important diamond dealer in the story, to a worker in the diamond mine in Sierra Leone, who hides a stone in his mouth and is shot at arm’s length by Captain Poison. Thus the film evokes the United Nations’ work on diamonds that fund rebel wars in Africa, as evidence produced by its Fowler Report of 2000 shows (“Report”). It also evokes the Word Diamond Council, which was formed around the same time (World Diamond Council). While much of the impetus of international attention, and particularly that of the United Nations, towards addressing the question of the diamond trade arose from the crisis situation of the Angolan war and the participation in it of the US-supported UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) party, the report also drew attention to the wider implication of the involvement in the trade in diamonds and other resources of various African and European governments and African opposition

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groups.This ultimately works to sustain and promote conflicts that have had terrific negative impact on African peoples.1 Nevertheless, these moves within the film suggest its placement within the repertoire of African cinema as we have been designating it through our analyses and the particular interpellation of the spectator, who is “Africanized.” That is, from the start, Zwick does not fall into the trap of the mainstream and, in fact, he violates the idea of “avoid[ing] having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids” (Wainaina 1). The first scene shows a laughing Vandy sending off Dia on his long walk to school, when they talk about his education and his future (Figure 10.1a). At the same time, various “landscape” shots give away what we might identify as a subliminal exotic framing of “Africa” that requires some unpacking (Figure 10.1b–d). Does it simplistically say, in Wainaina’s ironic formulation: “Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces” (1)? The beginning of the film clearly speaks to a particular spectator, probably of Western blockbuster audience, whose presumed lack of familiarity with African geography makes it necessary for the specific location on the continent to be identified. The subsequent cut, taking us into the intimacy of Solomon Vandy’s hut in his fishing village, might be taken as saying something like: “I will take you into the real Africa, trust me.” Beautiful shots of the rising sun that pours golden light over fishing boats, Solomon’s strong silhouette as he starts work, and an impressive musical score all draw the spectator into a familiarly exotic “other” land. For an African spectator, it constructs a land well known in its beauty that provokes nostalgia if one is away or perhaps pride and a reminder to notice the landscape if one is there. In other

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Figure 10.1 (a) Vandy and Dia laughing and talking about education and the future; (b) Wide-angle shot of Danny and Vandy escaping into the wide empty spaces; (c) Wide-angle shot to show huge expanse of landscape; (d) aerial shot from above what is already a bird’s-eye view. Blood Diamond, directed by Edward Zwick, produced by Gillian Gorfil, Marshall Herskovitz, Graham King, Paula Weinstein, Edward Zwick and Warner Bros., 2006.

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words, the film interpellates its many real spectators through an aesthetic language that speaks to familiarity or unfamiliarity in multiple terms. As the spectator is thus invited in, it is not assumed that she or he knows either where Liberia is or what its relations are to its neighboring nations. An African spectator, or one familiar enough with these locations, might be amused by its pedagogical stance, but for a spectator with a hazy idea of African national boundaries, it serves as a clear admonition to go and look at a map. While the film only makes gestures about the specificity of the movements across borders to convey its complex plot, it does more than simply prey vaguely on the theme of historical white domination of African lands from colonial times. Danny Archer’s arrival on the scene to do business with the young rebels uses an aerial shot of his helicopter against the lush green of the mountains. However, the shot comes from above the plane, which would already have a bird’s-eye view of the verdant earth, thus signaling that his is not the view from the top. Although the young rebels try to rough him up a bit, Danny’s connection to the army gives him power. Archer must go to South Africa and do business with his former boss, Colonel Coetzee (Arnold Vosloo, whom we also see in Forgiveness [2004]), and here, once again, a plane is captured in an aerial shot of the coastline, enhancing a particular top–down view of a power which was established and honed well before the contemporary era. Although Danny Archer has left the establishment, this is still his bird’s-eye view: he has not left behind the background that has given him the knowledge of the landscape and the training to survive, and supposedly, dominate it. Similarly, as the car speeds away carrying Danny to his meeting with Coetzee, another landscape shot shows both the smallness of the car in comparison to the vast open space and the speed with which the white-dominated military in Africa controls that land. Although it is emphasized at various points (such as the moment when Coetzee pours the red earth on his hands) that Danny has no destiny outside Africa, one cannot help but wonder how the spectator’s positioning might have changed had Danny been a black African. In other words, could Vandy have been Danny? The answer is, of course, extradiegetic, and for blockbuster cinema it is a clear “no” because of the identity of the star, DiCaprio. Blood Diamond is also quite careful not to lapse into reserving the predictable “good” white man image for its hero. Danny Archer’s relationship with Solomon Vandy is firmly based in his interest in the diamond Vandy has hidden, which he hopes will finally give him freedom, perhaps allowing to leave the continent with which he associates the violent death of his parents during apartheid. A well-developed moment for this argument comes when Archer seeks Vandy out at his job as a doorman of a hotel. Vandy does not want to team up with him until they are united in their common aim to escape from what will be a huge raid by the RUF. A two-shot of the men, obviously dissenting and antagonistic (Figure 10.2a), is developed by a 180-degree turn of the camera until, from behind them as they remain in the foreground, deeper in the shot, we see an explosion. Their shared vulnerability before the explosion (Figure 10.2b) is what unites them in fleeing for their lives and brings together their joint and disparate desires to retrieve

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(a)

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Figure 10.2 (a) Two-shot of Vandy and Archer arguing; (b) Vandy and Archer similar position before explosion/camera. Blood Diamond, directed by Edward Zwick, produced by Gillian Gorfil, Marshall Herskovitz, Graham King, Paula Weinstein, Edward Zwick and Warner Bros., 2006.

the diamond and also to rescue Vandy’s family. Their movement away from the explosion is captured as situational rather than ideological. At the same time, Archer’s developing entanglement with Maddy Bowen and her obvious attraction for him opens the door for his redemption. Maddy, in true (US) American do-good fashion believes in doing good for one person at a time, as she says. At first she exclaims in frustration that she sees no reason to help one person, Vandy, when there are millions of refugees all around. However, she immediately regrets it: “I can’t believe I just said that,” she corrects herself and indeed the next part of the story includes Vandy’s reunion with his family (minus Dia) in a refugee camp in Guinea, an event engineered primarily by Maddy. Archer’s years in the army under Colonel Coetzee prepared him well to be a mercenary. Various moments in the development of the Vandy–Archer relationship – and particularly the point when they set out to find the diamond, having stolen ammunition and other supplies from Coetzee’s camp – hint at how Archer’s upbringing structures his perception of his relationship to black Africans in a way that draws inevitably on the comparisons formerly made by the colonial classes between the people they exploited and animals.

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Vandy has had a glimpse of his son with the rebel forces and almost exposes himself and Archer to the brutal gang. Archer’s presence of mind saves them. Following this, Archer hunts a baboon for the two of them. At this time he threatens Vandy, telling him that he has hunted baboons and can survive, that he knows how to smell their excrement, which is similar to that of the black man’s. He threatens to skin Vandy as he has done the monkey. As spectators, while we are intelligently indignant on Vandy’s behalf at such a hackneyed comparison, perhaps we might be relieved that the film has exposed Archer for what he is: a product of colonial history. In fact, Archer is sufficiently disdainful of human life, including his own, to fall short of being a convincing racist, but his language and thought are structured through the racist precedents still entrenched in so many ways on the continent and well beyond it. In managing to bring this out, the film Africanizes its spectator through inducing a form of reflection that disallows easy ascription of racism or victimhood based on skin color or a particular side of the colonial divide. Indeed, it troubles the “liberal” spectator or one imbued with “white guilt,” as the narrative does not lead us to take Vandy’s “side” quickly or easily. In fact, it is true that Archer is much better at surviving both the bullets of the revolutionaries and the dangers of the wilderness than is Vandy. As a matter of fact, he is “closer to the Earth” (Wainaina 1) than Vandy. In these ways, what the film allows and calls for is a more thoughtful engagement with these two fictional characters, and it opens up our reflection, no matter where we might situate our real selves historically, socially, or geographically, in the direction of a more historically informed thought process than is evident in the somewhat naïve idea that we are all just individuals with the free will to do whatever we want and thus invent justice. Neither, though, are we just individuals who have nothing to do with these characters: the moment initially draws us in with a quick and perhaps predictable reaction against what is clearly Archer’s disrespectful stance toward Vandy. However, various moments, including the conversations with Coetzee and with Maddy, complicate such easy ascription of racism to Archer, without necessarily touching our protectiveness toward Vandy. This ambiguity in Archer’s character is, of course, mitigated by DiCaprio’s star power, or if we wish to see it the other way, his star power is mitigated by the racist undertones of the character. However, the point is that the spectator needs to have recourse to some form of historical thinking to understand how the story of someone like Archer fits into the demise of colonialism and a new era of exploitation in many African contexts. The very fact that the diamond itself becomes his sole purpose highlights Archer’s lack of belonging in any of the groups we see in the film. We hardly believe, in the end, that he ever had any desire to leave Africa, making the diamond he sought nothing but a pretext for a death-defying adventure. Thus his death, cradled in the only comfort he ever knew, the land itself, becomes a fitting and convincing, if predictable, end. This film manages to enter into an Africanizing discourse in addressing the wide constituencies it interpellates as a blockbuster film. It stops itself from setting up Archer as a more than a credible human being and yet allows something of his humanity to shine through. While occasionally slipping into stereotypes, it still shows a remarkable intelligence for self-critique and pulls back to introduce these

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clichés to the spectator with care. Light moments might not always work but are thrown in for good measure. The action scenes are exciting, the cinematography is often breathtaking, and the actors are all beautiful by Hollywood standards. Blood Diamond is a meaningful blockbuster that we must take seriously in the changing discourse on Africa and the renewed hope in discourse from Africa, to Africa, and toward an Africanized conception of globalization in the future. On the other hand, Abderrahmane Sissako’s magnificent, allegorical Bamako, which came out in the same year as Blood Diamond, Africanizes the spectator in ways that go well beyond maps or careful moralizing in order not to offend the average blockbuster spectator; and it does more to create an enlightened spectator, in the sense evoked in Chapter 1, as quite central to the project of a particular African cinema under study here. It also asks a lot more of its spectator. Written by Sissako himself, this film tells its story by inviting the spectator into the courtyard where the director grew up. Here, Sissako sets a simple story of a couple on the verge of collapse. Though Chaka (Tiécoura Traoré) and Melé (Aïssa Maïga) and their little daughter live together in a small space in a communal house built around a courtyard, the couple cannot seem to find a way to connect to one another. However, the plot is more complex. The courtyard becomes the scene for a “trial” of those guilty of fleecing Africa – primarily the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – by the citizens whom their decisions and actions concern, thus unabashedly positioning the film as African and reinstating the notion of an African cinema more authoritatively than this or any book can do. The film opens with a casual shot of the morning with all the ambient sounds of Bamako: birds chirping, workmen clanging away with the dawn and the distant sound of a train’s horn. In moving through the city, scaffolding interrupts our view of the very early morning’s grey sky. Despite wanting not to, it is impossible not to compare this beginning with the grand opening of Blood Diamond. Here, no matter whom the spectator and how she or he reacts to the specific images and sounds that might be familiar or unfamiliar, the film clearly says this is just an ordinary morning in an ordinary place where life goes on like it does in a million other places in the world. Chaka is walking along and emerges from the gloom in his white boubou, while the accompanying metallic sounds of hammering and workmanship are musical but somewhat harsh to the ear. There is no attempt to showcase the morning for the spectator, to bring “Africa” to him or her in a grand gesture, as the previous film does effectively; rather, the spectator has the feeling of spying somehow on daybreak in the city. The flashlight Chaka holds in his hand suggests he has been walking for some time before the dawn. He looks down at a still dog, lying (we cannot tell if it is sleeping or dead) amidst rubble and discarded wood. We cannot yet grasp the significance of this animal. A swift cut takes us to a dark and cool interior where we see the shapely figure of Melé, captured from behind. She is dressed in a bright blue and yellow outfit and is making herself up at her dressing table, but the shot from one side of the actress does not allow us to see her image in the mirror. The next cut takes us out of the dwelling to the bright sun-drenched entrance of the compound, where much of the action will take place. The gateman (Jean-Paul Boiré) is

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questioning an old man who presents himself as a “witness” (Zégué Bamba, who goes by the same name in the film). There is nothing romantic that resembles the haunting music, boats, and sunrise of the opening of Blood Diamond. Is it somewhat unfair to compare these two films in such a schematic manner? The answer is probably yes. The rationale for doing this is to illustrate how a film such as Blood Diamond, which was made in different circumstances, addresses its spectator in a completely different way. Even though Blood Diamond interpellates its average spectator as an “African” or at least one whose awareness goes beyond the stereotypical Western conception of Africa that Wainaina evokes, its attempts to “Africanize” the spectator remain gestures from an already constituted structure rather than stemming from, if not an African, then an Africanized construction of the structure of the film itself. One extraordinary shot that would draw the attention of a Westernized spectator is that in which Melé walks out into the courtyard and calls out to a character called Beï, who is one of those simply hanging around in the courtyard, to fasten up the knot behind her dress, while seeming almost slightly defiant in her splendid beauty. A few people only look at her with mild interest, among them a woman holding a child and one of the female lawyers, dressed in a black robe, but gradually everyone loses interest and not one person, either from among the now large group of witnesses or from the table of judges, bats an eyelid or pays her any attention whatsoever. Once she receives the help she has asked for, we seem to be the only viewers; the woman with the child passes on her way in front of the camera, interrupting our view of the scene for a second, and the lawyer has already turned to her notes. Although a few people from the crowd let their eyes wander over to her, nobody seems terribly interested or surprised. As spectators, we are completely guilty. It is not simply that we are engaged in an unhampered and unstoppable surveillance of the scene, but our guilt is articulated as such because in essence we are sharply aware that we are the only people watching her with the attention that the medium shot gives her and that the vibrancy of the colors of her clothes and the beauty of the actress attracts (Figure 10.3). The nice smooth entry with which Blood Diamond draws in its spectator stands in stark contrast to the discomfort that Bamako gives us, setting us up, literally, as voyeurs. It is only as Melé leaves the courtyard for the day that the camera cuts to a medium shot of Chaka, who follows her out with his eyes. We have no idea who he is or what their relationship to one another is. We are alerted, from the start, to the fact that this film is going to be a “thinking” experience. The old man we saw announcing himself to the doorman as a witness suddenly has the urge to speak. His language is comprehensible neither to the judges nor to us, if “we” are not Malian and/or cannot follow Bambara. Thanks to the inability of the judge (and various other lawyers, particularly the French one) to understand the man, a spectator with non-specific knowledge is able to follow what is being said because the khaki-clad courtroom clerk has to act as a simultaneous translator between the witness and the chief justice, who first has to tell him to take off his fez and wait his turn. The idea of having to wait to speak is not one that is met with too much confidence by the witness, because, as the subtitles tell us, he says “[words] seize you in the heart.” At the same time, the

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Figure 10.3 The first, stunning shot of Melé. Bamako, directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, produced by Denis Freyd and Archipel 33, Chinguitty Films, Mali Images, arte France Cinéme, 2006.

court usher’s job becomes full of possibilities as we get a sense that his translations are going to be creative and could take on a life of their own as he selectively alerts the justice to the old man’s philosophical response, which ends with “I’ll give him back his word, it won’t remain with me,” while the usher assures the justice that he has understood. When the judge thanks them with “D’accord, merci,” the spectator is at the very least skeptical about how things are going to proceed and immediately senses that the old man’s language is going to be sabotaged by the court. Our sensibility as any kind of spectator is situated squarely in favor of the weaker side. At the same time we become aware that African cinema is mediated not just for outside “others” but that, in terms of language alone, what it means to be “inside” or “outside,” is complex, so that there is a still pertinent role for ex-colonial languages in the negotiations across these borders. The “Africa,” that argues against these so-called global organizations will take them to task in various ways and through a variety of characters who are placed in contentious, humorous, or emotional relation to them, while the organizations themselves become humanized in roles that have to be carried out by individuals. Bamako does not provide only wordy invocations of Utopia (as we see in the defense lawyer’s closing argument). Rather, it brings the anger, hurt, suffering, and dignity of the oppressed to attention in the form of individual roles that are stunningly performed and captured, that pique our intellect and punch our guts all at the same time. The old man who has presented as a witness finally has his turn. The rage, tension, beauty, and emotion of his voice and his presence, which seem to leap out at us from the screen, do more in a moment of absolute non-narrative to tell the story of Africa’s fate from Structural Adjustment Policies and the management of its fiscal situation through artificial manipulations by world organizations. He waves around his broom, spills out his heart, it seems, while many who do not

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Figure 10.4 Medium shots of the old man’s rage, despair, and indescribable emotion. Bamako, directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, produced by Denis Freyd and Archipel 33, Chinguitty Films, Mali Images, arte France Cinéme, 2006.

understand him give him their full attention, as if they received his every word, every sound and gesture that seem to come from his depths with such urgency that it all must be articulated in a single breath (Figure 10.4). A former schoolteacher from Dakar also makes an eloquent statement, standing in silence for a few moments of the court’s time in testimony against the sort of capitalism that goes hand in hand with privatization and funding by these global organizations. Through these and other memorable characters who appear as “witnesses,” in this mock trial, Sissako enlightens any spectator not so much with the statistics that the lawyers of both sides use to fire at one another but through the thoughtful and thoroughly human witnesses so carefully constructed and captured in this film. What the film also does is to elicit from the spectator a willing participation in this trial, which is clearly not plausible but becomes real through the questions raised and the credibility of those questions through their consequences for a range of witnesses that we “meet” via the screen. The other inhabitants of this extended household become familiar to the spectator as they go about their tasks, fight illness, tend to their siblings, dye cloth, or sit in the open air. A little toddler wearing shoes that have a deliberate squeak punctuates many serious moments as he struts around. His shoes, quite possibly Chinese imports, and his presence, quickly connect what we have accepted as a fictional courtroom scene to realities we recognize. The shoes, the hawker selling “brand name” sunglasses (ironically to the lawyer for the accused, Mr. Rappaport), and the bleeding dyes of the cloth that the women hang just outside, are all strongly symbolic of the connections of this courtyard in Bamako to the huge global economy, in which Africa has mostly

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been granted a losing hand through history. Likewise, the cell phone that connects Melé to her mother in Dakar, or Mr Rappaport to his associate, to whom he speaks in English, do not simply suggest all the different forms of connectivity, but might also be symbolic of newer exploitation that is ongoing and relentless, as Blood Diamond argues. Natural resources such as coltan (columbite–tantalite), which supports not just cell phones but all manner of digital devices, along with others, become contested and lead to internal conflicts as well as interference from other African states such as Rwanda and Uganda.2 Needless to say, the local economies in all these cases and the fate of the people actually working in these mines are nothing short of catastrophic. Sissako’s keen awareness of the project in this film as one that requires thoughtfulness, and as one that is not some complete artifact or absolute authentic truth about Africa, is highlighted in his use of the film within the film in more than one ways. Drawing attention to his medium, Sissako playfully evokes the Western with a cameo role for the film’s producer, Danny Glover, along with Elia Suleiman, via a TV movie that is supposedly watched in the courtyard one evening by the many inhabitants of the household and probably the neighborhood. Thus Sissako does not call attention simply to spectatorship but to African spectatorship in particular – that is, spectatorship in Africa. In this scene, the TV anchor must deal with a glitch when for some reason the film does not begin after she has announced it and the camera remains focused on her though she has nothing prepared to say. Her obvious discomfort and dismay, along with her nervous and apologetic smile, remind us gently of our own viewing experience and responsibility. The moment highlights the fact that her discomfort as she faces the camera is witnessed by “other” viewers: those fictional inhabitants of the household who are watching. These glitches happen in the most slick of productions from CNN to the BBC, and they tend to humanize the massive system from which stories emerge in the media. You or I, watching the film, are also presenting stories every day, the moment might alert us. How exactly do we tell stories about Africa? Which ones? And what do we do when our narrative time has glitches? In the “Western” which is depicted both cowboys and “locals” are killed: a schoolteacher dies because they don’t need more than one; a young woman walking with her child is murdered, to the great amusement of their assassin, who is in his turn killed by the lone defending cowboy, played by Glover. Can our framing of Africa kill? Ah no, we are relieved that it is just a farce. Yes, but, as spectators, we are then compelled to ask whether the film is also in some ways a farce. After all right from the start we knew that average Africans across class and geography – the peasant, the writer, the professor, the teacher or the young unemployed man – giving testimony of their experience of the terrific exploitative consequences of decisions emanating in the World Bank and the IMF were neither real nor realistic. We went along with the “play.” But because of the way the trial transforms the space of the courtyard, giving everyday life (such as Melé’s movements, the sick man’s suffering, Chaka’s despondency, or the child toddling around in squeaky shoes, for example) the status of “performance” (for us spectators) while the trial becomes the natural activity, Sissako enlivens in his spectator a radical awareness that extends well beyond the drama in which he so effectively humanizes this African tragedy through his

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powerful array of witnesses. The awareness he awakens is of the link between the arguments in the mock trial and the “real” life that becomes the performance for us beyond the reality of the witnesses. Thus, when the trial arguments are against privatization of the educational system, our attention is subtly drawn to the various children hanging around and transporting the papers for the trial instead of making their way to school; the arguments about privatizing hospitals become poignantly linked to the sick man within the house. The film educates its spectator with this obvious example without resort to cutting that would have juxtaposed the two in the most obvious ways. It is only as we are educated into the film’s pedagogy that we start making these sorts of connections ourselves. In this, I will surely fall into the audience Jonathan Haynes has in mind when he writes, The motivations and tastes that have created and sustained African cinema remain; there will always be audiences who will prefer Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako to all two thousand of the Nigerian videos produced in the same year (2006). African fine arts and literatures, after all, have gone on for years without broad popular or African governmental support, depending in large part on foreign networks. (“African Cinema” 81)

While it is not possible to say with certainty that one prefers this film to all Nigerian films produced in 2006, it is undoubtedly the case that Sissako’s film engages in the type of discovery of sense and intellect that allows one to enter into a rich experience of cinema and an engagement with a process of Africanization (as I have suggested earlier) within it. Whether Africans are less interested in being Africanized than non-Africans might not be clear, although it is clear that fewer Africans are interested (or think they are interested) in being Africanized than in watching Nollywood films. But there is nothing surprising in this since there are fewer spectators for art film anywhere in the world than there are for blockbuster cinema. Period. On the other hand, Hayne’s subsequent statement that it is doubtful whether people should take art cinema to be the “authentic voice” of the continent is one we can accept in complete agreement. African and diaspora filmmakers would never want to be anything as banal as an authentic voice for anyone or anything. As we have seen, what they are interested in doing is creating new spaces and imagining new voices, indeed new ways of being that are not yet. To assume the continent could settle for one authentic voice is laughable. To presume African (art) film to be that voice would simply be foolish. But there is more to watching, loving, and sharing the beautiful, thoughtful, ingenious films produced by artists, many of whom risk their lives and their livelihood to make films that beckon any spectator to enter into a conversation that is African in spirit and commitment. On the one hand, acknowledging Bamako’s “passionate intelligence and aesthetic sophistication as it tackles the devastating but intangible problem of Africa’s insertion into the world economy and polity,” Haynes continues, invoking Karin Barber’s often-cited essay “Popular Arts in Africa”: “But if we pretend to be concerned with the African masses, we should take them seriously enough to listen to them, trying to understand their mentalities and desires” (“African Cinema” 82; my emphasis). African masses are not speaking in these films, as Haynes also rightly acknowledges.

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However, there seems to be some confusion regarding the structures by which art film “authenticates,” or at least states, itself and interpellates and constructs its spectator. It is because those structures in narrative, form, and interpellation are different (owing to the conditions of their production, to which Haynes and other critics have paid great attention) that it makes no sense to expect Bamako’s concern for the masses (and/or its spectators’) to be phrased in the languages, forms, or mode of, say, Female Lion (2008) or Bafana Bafana (2007). African cinema as presented here is surely an accented one: “the accent emanates … from the displacement of the filmmakers and their artisanal production modes” (Naficy An Accented Cinema 4), and fits less seamlessly with dominant and popular cinemas than might do other cinemas from the continent and its diasporic spaces. What Haynes rightly seizes upon, though he never articulates it in those terms, is a matter of “class,” visible in education and culture, between filmmakers themselves, internally and within the African and diasporic cultures and settings in question, rather than simply between filmmakers and Western academics as Haynes suggests in his assertion that “there are deep differences between the purposes and mentalities of most of the video filmmakers and the academics writing about them, and therefore more necessary work of interpretation.” Such a deep awareness of class difference within African cultures is interrogated in a much more sustained and complex manner in “art” films than in commercial films. The end of the film is constructed around Chaka’s funeral. Though we never see the mysterious gun that is evoked by the cross-eyed investigator, we hear the shot that tells us it is “real” within the film’s narrative because Chaka actually dies. Melé’s singing in the bar of the same unforgettable Christy Azuma song with which the film opened more joyfully becomes laden with the weight of all we have seen, experienced, and learned. Melé’s now tearful rendering of it tells the weight of our own burden and in the fiction foretells Chaka’s death. Chaka’s funeral is captured by his companion, the photo-journalist – an opportunity for Sissako to refer to himself. As we have seen in various films (including the cameo roles Sembene was known for) African filmmakers implicate themselves into their work without too much self-consconsciouness. The gesture follows from the deep awareness of the value of protecting their voice and the corollary gesture of standing behind their artistic creation in meeting their spectators (somewhat different in effect to, say, Hitchcock’s). The last few minutes of the film, before the pall bearers pick up the body and walk out, show the newly widowed Melé being supported in her moment of grief by the previously unconcerned lawyer, now dressed in traditional clothing. The scene is rendered entirely via a handheld camera that we understand is the journalist’s. We have encountered Chaka going through Hebrew lessons with audiotapes, repeating various everyday phrases after the female teacher’s voice that he follows on the cassette. He plans to be the gatekeeper to the Israeli embassy in the future – although there isn’t an Israeli embassy in Bamako … yet. The poignancy, for the spectator, of that future that was already imagined with the character, demands further reflection upon Chaka’s death. We are literally transformed through the experience in the way we listen: we must hear the future, and the urgency in the silence invites us

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to think of speaking, like the witnesses. The slightly grainy picture and give-away movement of the handheld camera, quietly passes the purview of the scene to one of the “spectators,” so to speak. The man with the camera was banned from filming the trial and becomes one of the onlookers who follow the proceedings casually in the street. He sits on a bench outside the compound wall, often with Chaka, under the makeshift loudspeaker that has been rigged up expressly to broadcast the trial. You might be a mere onlooker, but you can enter African cinema (and representation), says Sissako, just by doing your own framing. The final moments that we see through the lens of the same handheld camera focus on the doorway through which so many have entered and exited, Melé even needing to scale it at one time when she is late returning home. The entire passage seen through the journalist’s camera is shown in absolute silence. The long pause with the camera’s focus on the doorway suggests a sort of expectancy, almost a beckoning … perhaps we ourselves might enter. Finally the shot cuts to a black screen that bears a quotation from Aimé Césaire: “L’oreille collée au sol, j’entendis passer demain” (“My ear to the ground, I heard tomorrow passing”), which also closed Sissako’s earlier Life on Earth (1998). In that film, the director magically and humorously brought to our attention, through his own return to his native land, a gentle reminder of how connectivity functions in his humorous focus on the radio and telephone in a village in Mali. In Life on Earth, Sissako records a visit to his homeland of a diasporic, played by himself. The film is, appropriately, filled with quotations from Aimé Césaire, and one of them alerts us to the importance he ascribes to his spectator: “Beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear … ” (13). While it speaks seamlessly about the cinematic medium, it also establishes a strong link to a particular kind of thinking about humanity that both undoes, in the spirit of Césaire’s poetry, French (and Western) universalism and reclaims those ideals for the future of the world from an African perspective. Life on Earth captures the African countryside as the filmmaker/narrator makes his way to the village where he will see his father. Amazingly, although the courtroom scene in Bamako is itself a spectacle, Sissako undoes the spectacle to humanize the “African people” who bring the two powerful organizations to trial. As a filmmaker, Sissako himself is a sort of “first” spectator of the troubles that he identifies for Africa. Yet in the very making of this film he steps out of that role and further positions the next spectator, “created” within his film, in such a way that a demand is placed upon us in the form of an intellectual commitment to the making of collaborative meaning in this cinematic experience. That demand is to listen to a different voice, to heed a different narration, to “resist” as the French actress Juliette Binoche put it in a 2009 TV3 Monde interview alongside Sissako in Cannes, the domination of what she sees as “globalization” (mondialisation) (“Juliette Binoche”). Globalization is, however, presented quite differently in commercial African films. In the Ghanaian film, Game (2010), made by Frank Rajah Arase we follow various threads. There is the female gang that holds up shops and offices in pursuit of a better life. One of them, Brandy (Yvonne Okoro), dreams of going away to live in the

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Bahamas once she has made her killing. The plot thickens when she calls a “press conference” to announce her betrothal to Ronnie (John Dumelo); Ronnie gets wind of this and comes to the modeling agency where Brandy works, posing as a model, to find out who she is when the newspapers splash the false announcement. Another killer, Shennel (Yvonne Nelson), seduces her brother-in-law, Bill (Johannes Maier), who has been set up by his brother, Teddy (Majid Michel), who wants the insurance money that would come to him if Bill were to die. Bill then goes to a bar where intense crosscutting between his anguished self and the seduction scene reaches a wild frenzy before, predictably, she appears in the same bar, claiming to love him and saying she wants to divorce Teddy in order to marry him. So it continues, while the plot becomes dizzying and the image of card playing is thrown in for good measure. The Game (in two parts) is filled with images of big fancy cars, swimming pools and lobbies, fine alcohol and glamorous women, crime and passion, gated houses and designer clothes; the list is long. Success is immediately linked to material wealth that must be verifiable. Africans, it would seem, aspire to the same things which tell of success in the West. Tropes from Western blockbuster films abound with a vengeance. These films participate in radically undoing media and historical representations of Africa of the exact style and ideology that Wainaina so severely takes to task. Exhausting to watch when one has gone through the mighty education of African cinema that interests us in this book, these films nevertheless enjoy very wide spectatorship across Africa and even more in the diaspora. Many African critics situated in the West are rightly intrigued by this new form, which is somehow more truthful than the type of discourse Wainaina critiques. But those who look to Africa from within or without as the vast land that drew centuries of Europeans thirsty not just for gold but for the imagined self, the land that was patient, that was revolutionary, that was exploited and misrepresented, and continues to be all these things, those who look to Africa to be naturally a place of the strongest form of revolutionary art because of what it offers and has endured, these films will not be the place to find them. Commercial films as they are readily available via streaming, in DVD form at Accra’s Makola market or in Lagos at Alaba International Market, and which flood small stores from London to Boston, do not often offer the type of edification (not pontification) of the films studied here. Those who hold strongly to that idea, which is ultimately linked to liberation, wish very much to define African cinema in the tradition of Sembene, with the fine examples of Salem Mekuria, Joseph Gaï Ramaka, Abderrahmane Sissako, Nabil Farès, Moufida Tlatli, Safi Faye, Anne-Laure Folly, and so many others studied or mentioned here whose developments of and contributions to African cinema bear no trace of tyranny by the griot. What these films all do, is to raise us out of our seats at some of the wrongs we see in order to shout quite simply and instinctively, as when we know someone has stolen a purse, for example, and cause us to shout “Stop, thief!” as Fanon suggested was necessary for the people to learn how to have a truly meaningful social connection (Wretched of the Earth 145). While “Treason” is a charge that is well thought through intellectually and that the people in Fanon’s account do not fail to recognize, Fanon is calling for a more “subjective” or visceral accounting in which the instinctive, bodily reaction to being violated by a thief calls forth the cry. African cinema does undertake to do the historical and analytical work

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that can identify treason (as in Lumumba, Et si Latif avait raison, Colonial Misunderstanding, or Bamako). However, through these films and a growing array of others that all lovingly refashion the cinematic medium and experience, it also re-educates its spectators to follow that instinctive and ethical indignation to violations at the very intimate but basic level of our collective humanity. As was stated early on, “African directors, in decolonizing Western images of Africa presented to Africans, face the problem of Hollywood-hooked audiences and escapist entertainment-seeking in their own countries.” But to prevent what these critics, among others, strongly object to – the use of misleading forms of critique employed by “travelling scholars” who want to secure “First World relevance” for their essentially Western theories – the underlying impetus in this book has been less to theorize African cinema or apply theories to African films (Tomaselli, Shepperson, Eke 33) than to share in “Africa Watch,” as described in Chapter 1, and as it has framed our analyses. “Africa Watch” has been a journey of dialogue, interrogation, and pleasure in watching specific films from Africa and the diaspora that invite and accomplish the Africanization of the spectator. It is hoped that readers who come to these films will willingly travel as more than spectators through a journey that transforms global culture in starting from the powerful experiences they offer. While new cinematic vocabularies cannot fail to transform the watching experience, that experience surely transforms any gesture of “Africa Watch,” whether it is watching out for Africa, watching over Africa, watching Africa, or simply Africa watching. Because, as we have seen, these films make of every spectator something of an African. The meaning of African cinema, as delineated in this watch(ing), is such a unity only insofar as it is a particular and perhaps time-bound (though certainly not a-historic) interpellation of the contemporary world’s inhabitants that these filmmakers make through their vocation and genius. At the same time this book re-inscribes, from the viewing experience of African and African diasporic films, a compelling urgency which must take into account the changing frame of filmmaking and spectatorship that technology, economics, and globalization bring to their conditions of possibility. That urgency is for African filmmakers to “activate a very improbable combination [ … ] of realism, which implies minimal concessions to the denied [ … ] ‘economic’ necessities, and of the ‘disinterested’ conviction that excludes them” (Bourdieu 149). That is, African filmmakers have to exploit the very mechanisms of modernization and capitalism in the form in which it prevails in order to realize their ambition: to undo that very form. It is through their crafting of an alternative spectatorship that they have been striving to do this. As I have suggested earlier in this book, it is up to us to respond to such an alternate form of Africanization and become part of it in the act of spectatorship and beyond.

Notes 1 We should be reminded of Josef Gugler’s admonition to critics regarding the fact of “fiction” in film: see Gugler, especially 69–70. 2 For a gripping and enlightening account, see Nest.

Filmography

Throughout the text every film is referred to by its English-language title if it has one. Here, however, all films are listed first by their original title. The works of each filmmaker ordered chronologically. Absa, Moussa Sene. Twiste à Poponguine/Rocking Poponguine. Senegal, France, 1993. Ampaw, King. Kukurantami: The Road to Accra. Ghana, Germany, 1983. Anderson, Roy T. Akwantu: The Journey. Jamaica, 2012. Anenden, Harrikrisna. Rêve et Réalité. Mauritius, 1981. Anenden, Harrikrisna. Blood. Mauritius, 1999. Anenden, Harrikrisna. Gift of Life: Facing Up to AIDS. Mauritius, 2000. Anenden, Harrikrisna. La Cathédrale/The Cathedral. Mauritius, 2006. Anenden, Harrikrisna. Les Enfants du Troumaron/Children of Troumaron. Mauritius, 2012. Arase, Frank Rajah. The Game. Ghana, 2010. Arase, Frank Rajah. Who Loves Me. Nigeria, 2010. Asli, Mohamed. Al malaika la tuhaliq fi al-dar albayda /In Casablanca, Angels Don’t Fly/A Casablanca, les anges ne volent pas. Morocco, 2004. Attenborough, Richard. Cry Freedom. UK, 1987. Ayisi, Florence, Kim Longinotto. Sisters-in-Law. Cameroon, UK, 2005. Baginski, Tomasz. Katedra/The Cathedral. 2002. Poland. Bekolo, Jean-Pierre. Le complot d’Aristote /Aristotle’s Plot. France, UK, Zimbabwe, 1996. Besson, Luc. Subway. France, 1985. Blecher, Sarah. Surfing Soweto. South Africa, 2007. Blomkamp, Neill. District 9. South Africa, USA, New Zealand, Canada, 2009. Boughedir, Férid. Asfour Stah/Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces. Tunisia, France, Italy, 1990. Boughedir, Férid. Un été à la Goulette/A Summer in La Goulette. Tunisia, France, Belgium, 1996. Bouzid, Nouri. Man of Ashes. Tunisia, 1986. Boyle, Danny. Slumdog Millionaire. UK, 2008. Camara, Mohamed. Dakan/Destiny. Guinea, France, 1997. Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, First Edition. Anjali Prabhu. © 2014 Anjali Prabhu. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Filmography

235

Chahine, Youssef. Iskanderija … lih?/Alexandria … Why? Egypt, Algeria, 1979. Cheik, Doukouré. Paris selon Moussa. France, Guinea, 2003. Cissé, Souleymane. Waati. France, Mali, Burkina Faso, 1995. Dahan, Olivier. La vie en Rose/La môme. France, UK, Czech Republic, 2007. Denis, Claire. Chocolat. Cameroon, France, Germany, 1998. Diop Mambéty, Djibril. Hyènes/Hyenas. Senegal, 1992. Djansi, Leila. Sinking Sands. Ghana, 2010. Djansi, Leila. The Prostitute. Ghana, 2002. Donner, Richard. Lethal Weapon. USA, 1987. Dornford-May, Mark. U-Carmen eKhayelitsha. South Africa, 2005. Dridi, Karim. Bye-Bye. France, Belgium, Switzerland,1995. Duparc, Henri. Abusuan/The Family. Côte d’Ivoire, 1972. Duparc, Henri. Caramel. Côte d’Ivoire, 2004. Emannuel, Ofem. Female Lion. Nigeria, 2008. Faye, Safi. Mossane. Senegal, 1996. Faye, Safi. Selbe et tant d’autres. Senegal, 1982. Folly, Anne-Laure. Femmes aux yeux ouverts. Togo, 1994. Folly, Anne-Laure. Les oubliées. Togo, 1996. Folly, Anne-Laure. Sarah Maladoror ou la nostalgie de l’utopie. Togo, 1998. Fortunato de Oliveira, Orlando. Comboio da Canhoca. Angola, 1989. Friedman, Simon. Material. South Africa, 2012. Fregene, Shola. Bafana Bafana. Nigeria, 2007. Gabriel, Ian. Forgiveness. South Africa, 2004. Gamboa, Zézé. O Herói/The Hero. Angola, France, Portugal, 2004. Gerima, Haile. Sankofa. USA, Ghana, Burkina Faso, UK, Germany, 1993. Giefer, Thomas. Assassination Colonial Style: Patrice Lumumba. Congo, 2008. Gilou, Thomas. Raï. France, 1995. Gomes, Flora. Udju Azul di Yonta/Blue Eyes of Yonta. Guinea-Bisseau, France, Portugal, 1992. Hamed, Marwan. Yacoubian Building. Egypt, 2006. Harrikrishna, Anenden. La Cathédrale/The Cathedral. Mauritius, 2006. Hood, Gavin. Tsotsi. South Africa, UK, 2005. João Ganga, Maria. Na Cidade Vazia/Hollow City. Angola, Portugal, 2004. Julien, Isaac. Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks. UK, 1996. Lakhmari, Nour Eddine. Casanegra. Morocco, 2008. Lean, David. Lawrence of Arabia. UK, USA, 1962. Longinotto, Kim. Rough Aunties. South Africa, 2008. Kassovitz, Mathieu. La haine. France, 1995. Kaboré, Gaston. Buud Yam. Burkina Faso, 1997. Kilani, Leïla. Sur la planche/On the Edge. Germany, Morocco, France, 2011. King, Woodie, Jr,, Death of a Prophet. USA, 1981. Korda, Zoltan. Cry the Beloved Country. South Africa, 1951. Kurys, Diane. Sagan. France, 2008. Macdonald, Kevin. The Last King of Scotland. UK, Germany, USA, 2006. Madoror, Sarah. Sambizanga. Angola, 1973. Marawan, Hamed. The Yacoubian Building. Egypt, France, 2006. Mattera, Teddy. Max and Mona. South Africa, Sweden, 2004. Mekuria, Salem. As I Remember It. USA, 1991.

236

Filmography

Mekuria. Deluge. Ethiopia, 1996/1997. Mekuria. Ruptures: A Many-Sided Story. Ethiopia, 2003. Morel, Pierre. Banlieue 13/ District 13. France, 2004. Moustafa, Mohammed. Awqat faragh. Egypt, 2006. Munga, Djo. Viva Riva! Congo, France, Belgium, 2010. Ngangura, Mweze Dieudonné. Pièces d’identités/Identity Pieces. Congo, 1998. Ngangura, Mweze Dieudonné. You didn’t see anything in Kinshasa. Congo, 2008. Ouédraogo, Idrissa. Yaaba. Burkina Faso, 1989. Ouédraogo, Idrissa. Tilaï/The Law Burkina Faso,1990. Ouédraogo, Idrissa. Kato Kato: le malheur ne vient jamais seul/Kato Kato: Trouble Never Comes Alone. Burkina Faso, 2006. Palcy, Euzhan. Rue cases-nègres/Sugar Cane Alley. France, Martinique, 1983. Palcy, Euzhan. A Dry White Season. USA, 1989. Palcy, Euzhan. Aimé Césaire: une voix pour l’histoire. Congo, 1994. Peck, Raoul. Lumumba: la mort du prophète/Lumumba: Death of a Prophet. France, 1990. Peck, Raoul. Lumumba. Congo, 2000. Peck, Raoul. Sometimes in April. France, USA, 2005. Peck, Raoul. Moloch Tropical. Haiti, France, 2009. Pontecorvo, Gillo. La battaglia di Algeri/La bataille d’Alger/The Battle of Algiers. Italy, 1966. Pollack, Sydney. Out of Africa. USA, 1985. Prata, Teresa. Terra Sonâmbula/Sleepwalking Land. Mozambique, Portugal, 2007. Rajaonarivelo, Raymond. Quand les étoiles rencontrent la mer/When the Stars Meet the Sea. France, Madagascar, 1996. Ramaka, Joseph Gaï. So Be It. Senegal, 1997. Ramaka, Joseph Gaï. Karmen Gëi. Senegal, 2001. Ramaka, Joseph Gaï. Et si Latif avait raison. Senegal, 2006. Rouch, Jean. Les maˆıtres fous/The Mad Masters. France, 1955. Rouch, Jean. Jaguar. France, 1977. Schiller, Greta. The Man Who Drove With Mandela. South Africa, 1999. Scorsese, Martin. George Harrison: Living in the Material World. USA, 2011. Sembène, Ousmane. Black Girl/La noire de … . France, Senegal, 1966. Sembène, Ousmane. Borom Sarret. Senegal, 1969. Sembène, Ousmane. Xala. Senegal, 1975. Sembène, Ousmane. Guelwaar. France, Germany, Senegal, USA, 1992. Sembène, Ousmane. Faat Kiné. Senegal, 2000. Sembène, Ousmane. Moolaadé. Senegal, France, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Morocco, Tunisia, 2004. Sissako, Abderrahmane. La vie sur terre/Life on Earth. Mali, Mauritania, France, 1998. Sissako, Abderrahmane. Bamako. Mali, USA, France, 2006. Teno, Jean-Marie. Hommage. Cameroon, 1985. Teno, Jean-Marie. Afrique, je te plumerai. Cameroon, 1992. Teno, Jean-Marie. Clando. Cameroon, 1996. Teno, Jean-Marie. Chef!/Chief! Cameroon, 1999. Teno, Jean-Marie. Vacances au pays/A Trip to the Country. Cameroon, 2000. Teno, Jean-Marie. Le mariage d’Alex. Cameroon, 2002.

Filmography

237

Teno, Jean-Marie. Le malentendu colonial/The Colonial Misunderstanding. Cameroon, 2004. Teno, Jean-Marie. Lieux saints/Sacred Places. Cameroon, 2009. Teno, Jean-Marie. Leaf in the Wind. Cameroon, 2014. Thackway, Melissa. Permis de Construire. France, 2008. Tlatli, Moufida. Samt el qusur/Silences du palais/ Silences of the Palace. Tunisia, 1994. Vieyra, Paulin. Afrique sur Seine. France, 1955. Wood, Simon. Forerunners. South Africa, 2011. Yates, David. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows I/II. UK, USA, 2001. Zamoum, Fatma Zohra. Le docker noir, Sembene Ousmane. France, 2009. Zeitoun, Ariel. Julien Seri. Yamakasi – Les samouraïs des temps modernes. France, 2001. Zwick, Edward. Glory. USA, 1989. Zwick, Edward. Legends of the Fall. USA, 1994. Zwick, Edward. Blood Diamond. USA, Germany, 2006.

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Tomaselli, Keyan G., Arnold Shepperson, and Maureen Eke. “Towards a Theory of Orality in African Cinema.” Research in African Literatures 26.3 (1995): 18–35. Tyler, Clyde. “We Don’t Need Another Hero: Antitheses on Aesthetics.” Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema. Eds. Mbye B. Cham and Claire Andrade-Watkins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. 80–85. Ugbomah, Eddie. “Toward an African Cinema.” Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality. Interview by Frank Ukadike. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. 167–180. Ukadike, Frank N. Black African Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Ukadike, Frank N. “Reclaiming Images of Women in Films from Africa and the Black Diaspora.” Redirecting the Gaze: Gender, Theory, and Cinema in the Third World. Eds. Diana Robin and Ira Jaffe. Albany: SUNY, 1999. 127–149. Ukadike, Frank N. Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Ukadike, Frank N. “Video Booms in Anglophone Africa.” Rethinking Third Cinema. Eds. Wimal Dissanayake and Anthony R. Guneratne. London: Routledge, 2003. 126–143. Ukadike, Frank N. “The Other Voices of Documentary: ‘Allah Tantou’ and ‘Afrique, je te plumerai’.” Focus on African Films. Ed. Francoise Pfaff. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 159–172. Ukadike, Frank N. “Transcultural Modernitites and Modes of Narrating Africa in Documentary.” Matatu (2009): 297–312. Wainania, Binyavanga. “How to Write about Africa.” Granta 92 (2005): 91–95. Web. November 29, 2013. “War Came to Kenya.” Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire. Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2010. Web. November 15, 2013. Wexman, Virginia. A History of Film. 7th edn. Boston: Pearson, 2010.

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Glossary

ambient noise: Background sound, sometimes unwanted. aerial shot: A camera shot filmed in an exterior location from far overhead (from a bird’s eye view), as from a helicopter (most common), blimp, balloon, plane, or kite; a variation on the crane shot; if the aerial shot is at the opening of a film, it is also known as an establishing shot. See shot camera angle: Angles are used to make comments about the shot, to create meanings that are subtle by slight changes in angle, or major meaning by extreme changes in angle. The same subject can be given a variety of meanings by changing the angle of the shot. See shot chiaroscuro: From the combination of the two Italian words for “clear”/“bright” and “dark,” the term refers to a notable, contrasting use of light and shade in scenes, often achieved by using a spotlight. See scene crosscutting: Cutting back and forth between shots from two (or more) scenes or locales. This alternation suggests that action is occurring simultaneously in the different scenes. See scene; shot cross-fade: A sound transition similar to a visual dissolve. See dissolve cut: The most immediate, and common, of transitions from shot to shot. It is effected in the laboratory simply by splicing one shot onto another. On the screen, the appearance of the second shot immediately replaces the first. “To cut” also means to edit and, during filming, to stop the camera. See editing; shot . cut away: A cut to a shot that is related to the main action or separate from it. cut in: A cut to a close-up detail of a shot or scene. See scene cut out: : A cut to a wide or establishing shot after a close-up.

Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, First Edition. Anjali Prabhu. © 2014 Anjali Prabhu. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Glossary

247

jump cut: A discontinuous transition from one shot to another caused by a difference in the size and position of the subject in the two shots. match cut: A transition that involves a direct cut from one shot to another shot matched in subject, composition, or other unifying factor. deep focus: Use of the camera lens and lighting that keeps objects in both close and distant planes in sharp focus. See focus depth of field: Area in front of the camera where everything is in focus. See focus dissolve: A gradual transition in which one visual source slowly fades out while another fades in and the two sources overlap during the transition. See fade dissonance: Lack of consistency between two elements, as for example, when the sound does not match the action. editing/montage: The joining of shots to make a sequence. Sound and visuals are coordinated and matched. See sequence eye-level angle: Eye-level shots of subjects. See shot exposure: Amount of light that is reflected off the subject into the camera through the lens. See lens fade: A gradual transition from black to an image or sound or from an image or sound to black. See fade-in; fade-out fade-in: Gradual brightening of the picture from a black screen to normal brightness. Suggests passage of time. fade-out: Gradual darkening of the picture to a black screen, usually signaling the ending of a sequence. See sequence fill light: Non-directional light, set at one half to three quarters of the intensity of the key light and positioned opposite it. Used to fill in, but not eliminate completely, the shadows created on the subject by the key light. See key light focus: Degree of sharpness of an image; bringing images from blurry, fuzzy state into sharp, clear patterns. frame: The basic unit of a scene that contains the mise-en-scène. Also one of the basic units of the video signal. There are 30 frames per second in the American NTSC. See mise-en-scène; NTSC; scene freeze frame: A special effect which permits the film to be frozen to a certain image. This effect is sometimes used to end a movie. A freeze frame may also be used in order to better analyze the details of the image. high-angle shot: A slight change from the eye-level shot in which the camera looks down on the subject. The high-angle shot is used to suggest harmlessness or insignificance, low self-esteem, powerlessness, or entrapment. See eye-level shot iris: The circular diaphragm composed of overlapping leaves that can be manipulated to create a hole of variable size in its center which controls the amount of light passing through the lens. See lens

248

Glossary

key light: The brightest light on the scene. Establishes the form of the subject by providing bright illumination and producing shadows on the subject. See scene lens: The optical component of a camera. The lens collects incoming light and focuses it on the camera image sensor. low angle: Shot taken from below the position of subject which increases height, speeds motion, or captures a sense of confusion, It shows minimal environment, mostly sky or ceiling, and is used to inspire fear, respect, or authority, and to heighten importance. mise-en-scène: A theoretical term coming from the French and taken from its use in the theater. It includes everything within a shot: camera movement, sets, props, direction of the actors, composition of formal elements within the frame, lighting, etc. montage: Often suggests interventionist editing intended to build toward a particular climax or effect. parallel editing: Cutting between two actions that are happening at the same time in different locations or between events happening at different points in time. See cut; editing scene: A segment in a narrative film that takes place in one time and space or that uses crosscutting to show two or more simultaneous actions. See crosscutting sequence: A section of the film that can be taken as a discrete whole in terms of plot, action, or character development. A scene is made up of shots, which may construct a sequence. shot: Basic unit of film narrative, refers to one “take” by the camera that runs uninterrupted by editing or any other interruption for its duration. Shots are described in terms of distance from the subject; camera angle (low, high, eye-level); by content (two-shot, three-shot, reaction shot, establishing shot); and any camera movement (pan, track, dolly, crane, tilt). . close-up: A shot that shows only the human face from neck up; it can sometimes include the shoulders. crane shot: A shot taken by a camera traveling vertically. establishing shot: A wide, all-inclusive shot of a scene that establishes major elements. Also known as a master shot. extreme close-up: A tight shot that only shows the face between the chin and the forehead; it can sometimes include the full face or isolate the eyes, mouth, etc. extreme long shot: A shot in which the camera is placed at a great distance from the object such that the entire object, often a human-being, is visible in its surroundings, which become as important as the object itself. It is also referred to as a wide shot and is often used as an “establishing shot” that sets the scene. general shot: A shot of part of the set and the totality of the characters. hand-held shot: A shot for which the camera operator carries the camera while filming the action; this has become possible since the 1980s with the invention of lighter cameras.

Glossary

249

insert shot: A detailed shot of a scene, usually shot after the master shot. long shot: A shot in which the camera is far enough from the object such that this object, often a human being, can be seen in its entirety. long take: A shot that lasts a long time without interruption (by editing). medium shot: A shot that shows the human body from the knees or waist up. middle shot: A shot of character(s) standing. moving shot: A shot taken by a moving camera. pan shot: A shot taken by a camera which remains fixed but swivels horizontally. shot reverse shot: In filming conversations, an alternation or crosscutting of shots filmed from a position over the shoulder of each character in turn is reverse angle shooting. Each shot shows the face of one character and, often, the back of head and shoulders of the other. tilt shot: A shot taken by a camera which remains fixed but tilts vertically in a movement of the camera head similar to that of of a person looking up or down. total shot: A full shot of the set. tracking shot: A shot for which the camera is mounted on a dolly or truck, and moves horizontally on wheels or railroad-like tracks to follow the action being filmed or to survey the setting. Also called a dolly shot. zoom shot: Technically not a moving shot because the camera itself does not move, the zoom is made by the zoom lens, which has variable focal length. The zoom became a popular technique in the 1960s. On screen a zoom-in resembles a tracking shot, but its telephoto optics as it moves in on the subject differ from the more realistic, dynamic look that a tracking or hand-held shot retains. See lens take: The name given to each time that the same shot is filmed; several takes of the same action may occur before a shot is chosen for the final product. See shot voice-over: The voice of a narrator heard though he or she is not visible on screen. When the voice belongs to a character who is visible but not speaking on screen, the use of voice-over may be a device to indicate that we are hearing their thoughts.

Index

Achebe, Chinua 9 Things Fall Apart 9 acuity critical 6 intellectual 110 Adtoji, Ariane Astrid 18 aesthetic(s) 1, 6, 7, 10, 13, 16, 17, 27, 29, 30, 31, 75, 85, 86, 93, 134, 136, 141, 158, 159, 160, 162, 168, 188, 218, 221, 229 aestheticization 162 Africa African governments 11, 220, 229 Africanization 1, 12, 21, 26, 55–57, 60, 71, 72, 97, 138, 141, 160, 169, 170, 189, 213, 216, 220, 223, 224, 225, 229 Africanness 6, 21, 62, 138 Africa Watch 1–33, 233 see also pan Africanism African American(s) 2 agency 22, 47, 61, 85, 86, 93, 95, 98, 108, 110, 118, 136, 172, 186, 232, female 79–84 agenda(s) political 9 Ahidjo, Ahmadou 189, 197 Akudinobi, Akin 13, 63, Algerian(s) 6, 20, 23, 25, 61, 177 Algiers 15, 60, 61 alienation 56, 61, 141, 142,

allegory 22, 37, 53, 66, 83, 96, 99, 110, 113, 116, 224 Althusser, Louis 3, 4, 109 ALVF (Association de Lutte contre les Violences faites aux Femmes) 190 AMAA (Africa Movie Academy Awards) 18 Andrew, Dudley 13–14 Anenden, Harrikrisna 18, 35–54, 90 Cathedral, The 35–54, 90 Angola 118–120, 113–132 Arabic 67 Arase, Frank Rajah 217 Game, The 217, 231–232 arena 18 political 9 Armes, Roy 11 art cinema 6, 7, 8 assembling 61, see also repertoire, corpus Attenborough, Richard 20 Cry Freedom 20 audiences reaching 16 Augst, Bertrand 158 auteur 168, 213 authenticity 3, 15, 20, 26, 60, 110, 158, 216, 228, 229, 230 awakening intellectual 27 sensory 27

Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, First Edition. Anjali Prabhu. © 2014 Anjali Prabhu. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

252

Index

Bachelard, Gaston 37, 53 Bakhtin, Mikhail intertextuality 169 banlieue 21 Banlieue 13, 20, 65, 70–72, 75 films 21, 70 Bantu Educational Cinema Experiment 8 Barlet, Olivier 19 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 228 Belle, David 75 Beni, Alphonse 20 Benin 8 Berlin Conference 8, 175, 181, Besson, Luc 70, 75 BFI (British Film Institute) 8, 15, 19 Bhojpuri 44 Biddel, Stephanie 96 Biko, Steve 20 Binoche, Juliette 231 biopic 9, 10, 172, 173, 179 Biya, Paul 189, 204 black(s) (racial) 4, 10, 20, 21, 22, 61, 96, 138, 152, 177, 179, 218, 221, 222, 223 blackness 96, 184 black-and-white film/photo 19, 61, 65, 67, 70, 161, 162, 174, 175, 177, 181, 197 blackface 8, 26 Blecher, Sarah 169 Surfing Soweto 169 blockbuster 25, 29, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 223, 224, 229, 232, see also film, commercial body 4, 21, 83, 85, 91, 95, 97, 106, 108, 114, 129, 142, 176, 181, 182, 230 Bollywood 10, 11, 14, 16, 39, 56, 63 Bordwell, David 13 Boughedir, Férid 15 Bourdieu, Pierre 233 bourgeoisie 6, 152 society 80, 83 values 16 bourgeoisification 16, 131 Bourguiba, Habib 100 Bouzid, Nouri 113 Brazil 16 Brazzaville 209

Brazzaville Conference 179, 207 Burkina Faso 15, see also Ouagadougou Camara, Mohamed 113 Destiny 113 Cameroon 18, 20 Cannes 6, 16, 70, 231 capitalism 25, 55, 227, 231, 233 capitalist 66 Carthage Film Festival 15 Césaire, Aimé 9, 60, 231 CFCO (Chemin de Fer Congo-Océan) 179 Chahine, Youssef 11 change(s) 39, 62, 64, 72, 135, 136, 149, 159, 160, 203, 206 historical 110 political 5 character 2, 3, 8, 11, 13, 20, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29, 37, 42, 44, 45, 47, 51, 53, 54, 55, 58, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 75, 77–154, 161, 168, 169, 177, 184, 185, 193, 195, 218, 219, 223, 225, 22, 229, 230 African 6, 15, 220 female 5, 75, 86, 90, 96, 110, 131 chiaroscuro 80, see also light cinema apparatus 7, 61, 107 colonial use of 12, 19 content 11 effect 90 experience 2, 3, 4, 14, 21, 27, 28, 138, 165, 231 form 79, 93, 114, 141 intercultural 165 language 5, 39, 126 medium 1, 2, 8, 13, 15, 27, 29, 35, 60, 109, 134, 176, 185, 200, 216, 231, 233 possibility 12, 86 technique(s) 26, 114, 137, 146 Third Cinema 12, 22, 52, 152, 203 theory 13 tradition(s) 13, 126 vocabularies 233 see also art cinema; First Cinema; global cinema; Second Cinema cinema theater 6, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 28, 63, 67, 130, 177, 209, 217 cinematic moment 52, 176

Index cinematic reality 97, 140 cinematic specificity 217 cinéma vérité 45 cinephile(s) 18, 19, 27, 209 circumstance(s) 19, 81, 118, 129, 150, 168, 173, 177, 225 contemporary 75 historical 152 political 162 Cissé, Souleymane 15 Waati 15 city 10, 55–76 class 137, 230 colonial 222 middle 42, 48, see also bourgeoisie cliché(s) 11, 205–206, 213, 216, 224, see also stereotype CNN (Cable News Network) 228 collection 134, see also corpus; repertoire collective 13, 15, 19, 22, 37, 42, 43, 47, 52, 116, 130, 133, 134, 159, 162, 172, 184, 203, 233 collective spectator 42–44 collectivity 27, 28, 43, 47, 48, 51, 67, 83, 91, 97, 98, 136, 152, 163, 184, Congo 160–161 corpus 11, 14, 17, see also collection; repertoire colonial city, the 55, 62 colonial classes 222 colonial cinema 12, 19 reportage 189 colonial divide 223 colonial documentaries 158 colonial exhibition (1897) 178 colonialism 168, 187, 188 categories used under 162 government during 106, 107 oppression under 135 see also missionaries; postcolonialism colonial power structure 62, 106 colonial reportage 189 colonized 10, 22, 60, 61, 62, 92, 203 colonizer 9, 175, 203 commitment 16, 26, 114, 123, 134, 140, 141, 169, 200, 202, 203, 211, 229, 231 conflict(s) 85, 116, 152, 153, 186, 218, 220, 228

253 conflicting images 149 continent (African) 7, 8, 11, 14, 37, 72, 230 conversation(s) 1, 4, 26, 36, 37, 39, 41, 44, 45, 59, 90. 91, 105, 106, 116, 121, 123, 126, 130, 140, 147, 176, 185, 186, 193, 195, 199, 210, 223, 229 cosmopolitanism 14, 55, 60, 141, 202 Creole communities 21 Creole island 2 Creole language (Morisyen) 44 Creole songs 42 critique 3, 14, 28, 66, 75, 85, 114, 116, 117, 136, 158, 160, 183, 187, 189, 200, 204, 216, 223, 232, 233 cultural artifact 186 capital 75 coding 110 development 19 divide 96 form(s) 31, 113 heritage 61 innovation 184 instincts 4 liberty 113 margins 54 reality 186 reclamation 165 redefinition 165 silence 107 subversion 85 terms 2 ways 169 valences 137 culture(s) 3, 4, 9, 11, 13, 14, 18, 19, 22, 27, 39, 43, 61, 83, 100, 110, 131, 135, 137, 141, 160, 166, 202, 209, 217, 230, 233 cut jump cut 94, 161, 175, 177, 200 cross-cutting 94, 121, 142, 219 Dadié, Bernard 9, 136 Dakar 10, 22, 59 dance 8, 36, 43, 64, 86, 87, 90, 91, 96, 98, 114, 146, 192 sabar 86, 91–98, 110 dark 165, 195, 219, see also light

254

Index

decolonization 11, 19, 22, 118, 199 de Lauretis, Teresa 5, 108 Deleuze, Gilles 206 dénouement 64, 95, 96, 148, see also ending, finale depth of field 87, 193 depth of shot 121 desire(s) 5, 27, 52, 111, 128, 221 desiring subject 98 Devi, Ananda 40, 44 de Vitte, Ludo 173 dialectic(s) 2, 5, 6, 86, 131, 138 Diawara, Manthia 7 didactic 82, 121 diegesis 5, 67, 86, 90, 99, 114, 125, 211 extra diegetic level 134 see also story Dikonguè-Pipa, Jean-Pierre 20 dimension 85, 102 political 85 Diouf Abdou 85 dirriankhé 83, 97 discourse 2, 29, 60, 86, 160, 164, 169, 176, 177, 207, 224, 232 African 169, 184 Africanizing 223 colonial 13 exotic 164 Foucault and 3 French language 22 nationalist 23 political 179 dissent 85, 221 dissonance(s) 58, 162, 213 Djansi, Leila 18 Sinking Sands 18 Doane, Mary Anne 108 documentary 7, 40, 44, 62, 118, 161 Bill Nichols on 202 Documentary Filmmakers Association 158 Doho, Gilbert 20 Dovey, Lindiwe 86, 91 Dridri, Karim 70 Drogba, Didier 190

education 3, 12, 18, 19, 21, 119, 141, 143, 150, 152, 168, 176, 203, 207, 220, 229, 230, 232 of spectator 35–54 see also pedagogy Egyptian cinema 12 Egyptian films 16 Eisentein, Sergei 142, 158 elite(s) 62, 115, 131 endeavor(s) 2, 3, 5, 133, 174, 184 engagement 2, 6, 12, 21, 22, 53, 58, 72, 83, 98, 102, 115, 119, 129, 138, 139, 152, 163, 169, 173, 200, 223, 229, affective 110 ethical 3 intellectual 110 pedagogical 133, see also pedagogy political 86 spectator’s 3, 52, 148, 153 emotion(s) 21, 27, 128, 130, 131, 142, 149, 200, 218 emotive 12, 152, 153 ending(s) 90, 93, 95, 98, 99, 109, 140, 148, 152, 153, 185 happy 16, 64, 126, 218 essentialism(s) 5, 6, 169 strategic 2, 22 Essien, Michael 190 ethics 3, 10, 53, 66, 72, 134, 137, 138, 142, 146, 151, 152, 233 Europe 9, 10, 161, 187, 219 European governments 220 Euro-Americans 10 events political 185 exoticism 9, 164, 195, 205, 217, 220 experience 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 14, 22, 27, 28, 106, 107, 164, 165, 233 African 7 collective 159 diasporic 6 emotional 206 Fanon and 4 intellectual 206 sensory 206 experiential anguish 22 conceptual 55

Ebert, Roger 24 editing 37, 56, 80, 81, see also montage

255

Index expression (facial/demeanor) 5, 45, 121, 143, 144, 150, 174, 175, 176, 184 theoretical 55 Facebook 19 failure 56, 114, 116, economic 115 political 115 Fanon, Frantz 4, 6, 9, 12, 21, 60, 138, 232 Fanonian 60, 115, 134, 151, 203 Farès, Nabil 232 Faye, Safi 8, 44 female agency 79–84 female characters 79–106 femininity 79–112 feminist(s) 86, 91, 98, 107, 108, 109, 186, FEPACI (Fédération panafricaine de cinéastes) 15, 60, 96 FESPACO (Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou) 12, 15, 18, 134, 209 fidelity, filmic, see filmic fidelity filmic fidelity 161, 163, 178 film theater, see cinema theater film(s) art 17, 39, 114, 230 big budget 20, 138, 152, see also film, commercial biopic 9, 10, 172, 173, 179 buddy 218 colonial 7, 8, 19 commercial 6, 12, 17, 56, 140, 202, 217, 230, 232, see also blockbuster diasporic 2, 12, 13, 26, 39, 136, 141, 142, 160 documentary 8, 10, 19, 44 ethnographic 7, 8 European 10 experimental 8 gangster 56 independent 39 Indian 10, see also Bollywood material aspect of 7 mob 56 political 108, 159, 160 propaganda in 7, 8 theoretical 20 watching of 4

film content 3 film festival(s) 6, 15, 17, 19, 39, 140, 166, 169, 209, see also Cannes; FESPACO filmic experience 5, 6 filmic truth 36 filmmaker(s) 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 24, 135, 139, 158, 160, 172, 230, 233 third world 11 filmmaking 9, 10, 16, 17, 19, 20, 44, 200, 211 African 19, 134 independent 36 male-centered 97 film noir 10, 55, 65, 75 film scene 20 film story 3 film units 19 finale 150, see also dénouement, ending First Cinema 12 flashback 59, 67, 81, 99, 102, 105, 149 FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) 20, 62, 177 foreground 87, 105 Fortunato de Oliviera, Orlando 118 Foucault, Michel 3, 108 Fowler Report 219 framing 11, 87 wide 72 France 10, 56, 59 freedom 10, 52, 59, 63, 85, 92, 94, 98, 102, 110, 158, 165, 170, 221 fighters 62 intellectual 134 freeze frame 42, 67, 95, 114 Freidman, Simon 20 Material 20 French (language) 13, 22, 40, 44, 83, 116, 173, 192, 209 Fugard, Athol 20 funding 10 Gabriel, Ian Forgiveness 129–131, 137, 138, 221 Gabriel, Teshome 136 Gamboa, Zézé 118, 137 Hero, The 118–129, 137 Ganda, Oumrou 8–9 Ganga, Maria João 118

256

Index

gaze 5, 21, 23, 24, 45, 85, 86, 87, 93, 95, 99, 102, 108, 135, 144, 175, gender 6, 54, 59, 94, 100, 110, 190 genre 3, 10, 44, 55–76 Getino, Octavio 12, 152 Ghana 6, 10, 12, 16 competition with Nigeria 17 video production 17, 39 Gilou, Thomas 70 Glissant, Edouard 60 global audience(s) 16, 39 global capitalism 25 global cinema 84 global contemporaneity 159 globalization 10, 12, 96, 217, 231 global organizations 226 global realities 136 global representation 134 global stage 6 Godard, Jean-Luc 9 Gold Coast 19 Gollywood 6, 14, 18, 63, 170, 195, 217 Bafana Bafana 230 Female Lion 230 film plots 16 Gomes, Flora 30n.2 Gordimer, Nadine 15 Gorki Studios 11 Guinea 218, 222

individuals 3 Innsbruck International Film Festival 188 intellect 229 intellectual(s) 6, 9, 11, 12, 14, 65, 200 intellectual accord 14 intellectualization 27, 98 intellectual montage 81 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 224, 228 intent 13, 19, 26, 36, 51, 56 political 85 interpellated audience 186 interpellated constituency 223 interpellated as guilty 4 interpellated individuals 4 interpellated spectator(s) 3, 13, 36, 39, 47, 64, 142, 158, 216, 221 interpellation 4, 5, 6, 16, 22, 96, 136, 230, 233 Ile de France 43, 35–55, see also Mauritius

Haiti 9, 160, 170, 174–178 Haynes, Jonathan 17, 229 hegemony 109 history 2, 5, 7, 9, 11, 14, 20, 21, 26, 27, 35, 16, 37, 40, 60, 63, 83, 110, 131, 137, 138, 139, 152, 159, 163, 162, 169, 172, 175, 177, 178, 184, 223 political HLM (Habitation à Loyer Modéré) 70, 72, 75, Hollywood 10, 14, 16, 39, 56, 108, 140, 217, 233 Hood, Gavin 20, 64–65 Tsotsi 20, 64–65, 72–75, 137, 138, ideology 4, 109, 202, 222 India 6, 9, 10, 16, 35, 219 Indian Ocean 21, 35

Jameson, Fredric 66, 98, 159, 188, 202 Johannesburg 20 Johnston, Claire 108 juxtaposition 43, 48, 56, 100, 174, 177, 229 Kaboré Gaston 209 Budd Yam 209 Kamwa, Daniel 20 Kant, Immanuel 109 Kaplan, Ann 3 Kassovitz, Matthieu 70 Kimberly Process Certification Scheme 218 knowledge 3, 21, 44, 51, 54, 71, 92, 96, 98, 99, 160, 166, 195, 202, 221, 225 emotional 4 intellectual 4 sensory 4 Kracauer, Siegfried 25 Lakhmari, Nour Eddine 65 Casanegra 65, 67–70 landscape 220, 221 Larkin, Brian 17 Latin America 6 Laval decree 8, 19 leader(s) 9, 19, 62, 114, 121, 123, 139, 160, 170, 172, 179, 184, 207

Index African 172, 178 moral 83 political 162 leadership 17 indigenous 113 African 178, 183, 185 Lefevbre, Henri 35 Levinas, Emmanuel 27, 28, 110, 139, 144 face-to-face 27, 35, 139, 144 liberation 2, 23, 100, 232 economic 134 political 134 sexual 94 social 12 Liberia 221 light 23, 42, 44, 45, 48, 72, 75, 82, 95, 149, 151, 161, 195, 219, 220, see also dark London Film School 36 Longinotto, Kim 169 Rough Aunties 169 Lopes, Henri 161, 172, 173, 175 Lumumba, Patrice 9, 160–163, 172–186, see also Peck, Lumumba: Death of a Prophet; Peck, Lumumba Maingard, Jacqueline 30n.3 Maldoror, Sarah 118, 135 Mali 15, 15, 225, see also Bamako Mambéty, Djibril Diop 136 Manifesto (of Third Cinema) 12, see also Getino; Solanas Marseille 10, 11, 56, margin(s) 54, 72, 79, 80 marginalized Africans 6 marginal space 204 marginal women 108 Martinique 9, 60, 62, 119, see also Palcy, Sugarcane Alley masculine gaze 93 masculine world 66 masculinity African 113–132 masculinized terms 75 masquerade 108 Mauritius 35–54, see also Ile de France Maysles brothers (Albert, David) 202

257 meaning(s) 2, 3, 4, 14, 53, 83, 99, 109, 110, 116, 133, 138, 158, 159, 160, 166, 173, 185, 187, 189, 203, 205, 209, 213, 231, 233 political 85 meaningful alliance 90 meaningful creation 193 meaningful female society 91 meaningful language 61 meaninglessness 19, 86, 197, Mekuria, Salem 18, 44, 52, 157, 163–165 , 232 Ruptures: A Many-Side Story 163 melodrama 47, 106, 217 Mérimée, Prosper 84 Metz, Christian 4, 5, 169 Meyer, Brigit 12, 13, 17 Minh-ha, Trinh T. 44, 202 mise-en-scène 84, 90, 91, 97, 116, 186, 214 Misr Studios 11 missionaries 52 modernism 199 modernity 10, 52, 55, 61, 53, 63, 70, 110, 131, 135, 159, 162, 199, 202, 203, 204, 207, 209 modernization 3, 75, 110, 136, 164, 187, 188, 189, 205, 207, 233 moment(s) cinematic 52, 176 climactic 47 concluding 152 contradictory 149 cosmic 96 decisive 125, 141, 144 dramatic 23, 56, 95, 138, 139 elongated 90 emotional 200 ethical 152 final 98, 142, 231 historical 4, 54 light 125, 224 long 193 lovely 146 mesmerizing 174 pioneering 63 pivotal 36 poignant 99 revolutionary 98

258

Index

moment(s) (cont.) romantic 125 serious 227 static 98 stunning 100 tense 152 triumphant 211 montage 59, 81, 82, 86, 173, see also editing Moore, Demi 217 Morin, Edgar 8 Moroccan film noir 65 Morocco 19 Morel, Pierre 65 Banlieue 13 65, 70–72, 75 Moscow 9, 11 Gorki Studios 11 motion, see movement Moustafa, Mohammed 11 Free Times 11 movement 25, 45, 55–72, 95, 163, 165, 175, 200 MPLA 118 Mulvey, Laura 5, 92, 93, 98, 108 Munga, Djo Tunda Wa 18 Viva Riva 18, 71 Murphy, David 101 music 142, 144, 146, 163, 200, 211, see also song; tune Muslim community 20

Ouagadougou 12, 15, 158, 209–214, see also FESPACO Ouédraogo, Idrissa 209 Law, The 209 Yaaba 209 overlap 162

Naficy, Hamid 28, 230 narrative 2, 6, 20, 22, 29, 43, 118, 155–233 New York 16 Ngangura, Mwezé 63, 135 Pièces d’identité 63, 135 Niamey Congress 7 Nichols, Bill (on documentary) 202 Niger 8 Nigeria 6, 10, 12, 16, 19, 52 competition with Ghana 17 video production 17, 39 Nollywood 6, 14, 18, 52, 63, 170, 217, 229 film plots 16 Okome, Onookome 17 Ong, Walter 16 Onwurah, Ngozi 21 Organization of African Unity 54

Palcy, Euzhan 44, 60–61, 62, 64, 119, 135, 137 Dry White Season, A 137 Sugar Cane Alley 60–61, 64, 72, 119, 135–136 pan, see shot pan Africanism 8, 12, 14, 15, 27, 60, 114, 134, 184 Paris 9, 20, 39, 65, 70, 138 parkour 75, 209 patriarchy 3, 66, 93, 107, 108, 110, 114, 216 Peck, Raoul 6, 9, 63–64, 160, 170, 172–186 Lumumba 181–185 Lumumba: Death of a Prophet 63–64, 160–162, 170, 172–181 Moloch Tropical 173 Sometimes in April 173, 174 pedagogy 5, 20, 28, 39, 148, 149, 150, 221, 229, see also education persuasion(s) 17, 72, 169, 177, 216 African 184, 206 artistic 8 political 26 photograph(s) 40, 48, 99, 114, 162, 175, 176, 178, 193, 197, see also black-and-white film Platt, General 8 plot(s) 218, 221, 224, see also diegesis; story of The Game 231–232 politics 5, 7, 16, 27, 93, 96, 97, 98, 119, 158, 160, 211 Pontecorvo, Gillo 20, 61, 135 Battle of Algiers 20, 61, 135, 177 postcolonialism postcolonial capitalism 136 postcolonial city 62, 135 postcolonial context 47, 52, 53, 55 postcolonialism 26, 27, 53, 62, 97, 116, 131 postcolonial nation 53

Index postcolonial societies 131 see also colonialism postcolonialist(s) 62 power 1, 4, 6, 12, 62, 106, 108, 110, 114, 116, 129, 144, 152, 162, 165, 166, 177, 189, 189, 197, 204 Powrie, Phil 91 Prata, Teresa 15 Sleepwalking Land 15 processes associative 4 political 4 unforeseeable 4 psychoanalysis 5, 108 mirror stage 5 racist 223 Ramaka, Joseph Gaï 79, 85, 113, 158, 165, 232 Karmen Geï 79–98, 110–111, 113, 117–118, 136, 165 Et si Latif avait raison 85, 165–168 Rancière, Jacques 158–160, 165, 213 reaction 3, 7, 25, 28, 80, 98, 119, 125, 128, 138, 146, 147, 152, 168, 185, 223 bodily 232 emotional 119, 158 ethical 146 intellectual 3, 158 spontaneous 152 visceral 148, 152, 153 wild 149 see also response reality/realities 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 23, 29, 35, 36, 40, 41, 43, 45, 52, 53, 62, 91, 92, 96, 98, 110, 117, 119, 126, 128, 135, 141, 157, 159, 160, 166, 169, 170, 172, 187, 202, 206, 207, 217, 227, 229 African 1, 6, 7, 20, 60, 97, 114, 131, 136, 140, 173, 176, 179, 181, 183, 203, 217, 219 cinematic 22, 97, 109, 140 cultural 186 economic 199 extra-diegetical 134 filmic 42 global 6, 136 historical 186

259 national 199 patriarchal 107 political 199 sensory 160 response 3, 15, 91, 128, 142, 158, 166, 168, 185 emotive 163 philosophical 226 virtuous 124 repertoire 3, 7, 13, 14, 17, 39, 72, 118, 131, 140, 152, 187, 202, 213, see also corpus Réunion (island) 35 Rouch, Jean 8, 9, 202 Mad Masters 8, 195 Jaguar 8 RUF (Revolutionary United Front) 219, 221 Rwanda 228 SAHO (South African History Online) 137 Sankara, Thomas 9 Sanskrit 44 Sartre, Jean-Paul 14 Screen 3 Second Cinema 12 Sembène, Ousmane 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 52, 56, 62, 66, 71, 96, 114, 133, 135, 232 Black Girl 10,19, 22–25, 56–60, 64, 83, 134 Borom Sarret 20, 24 Faat Kiné 65–66, 79–84, 109–110, 117, 133, 134 Guelwaar 66, 114, 133 Moolaadé 117 Xala 66–67, 83, 113, 114–116, 133, 134 Senegal 8, 59, 158 sensation(s) 3, 26, 27, 162, 163, 165 sense 165, 229 sensitivity 22, 37, 124 sensory 3, 4, 27, 28, 59, 60, 140, 141, 158, 160, 165, 206, 214 sensuousness 138, 170 Shiel, Mark 43 Shohat, Ella, Robert Stam 52–53 shot(s) 41, 42, 47 aerial 40, 80, 129, 221 close-up 45, 48, 56, 100, 147, 176, 211 establishing 37

260

Index

shot(s) (cont.) extreme 99, 195 full 120 high-angle (downward tilt) 80, 88, 100, 174 long 45–47, 67, 72, 203 low-angle 41, see also shot, tilt; shot, upward-angle medium 48, 120 moving 95 pan (panning) 40, 56, 95, 119, 129, 176, 189, 129, 193 point-of-view 47, 56 shot-reverse-shot 45, 47, 89, 90, 116, 125 tilt 67, 147, 179 traveling 149 two 37, 86, 90, 103, 147 upward-angle 87 zoom (zoom-in) 37, 102, 149, 178, 203 Sierra Leone 218, 219 Silverman, Kaja 5 Sissako, Abderrahmane 37, 52, 136, 232, 233 Bamako 37, 136, 166, 216, 224–231 Life on Earth 231 Slumdog Millionaire 64 slave(s) 1, 52, 61, 62 slavery 22 Sobchak, Vivian 166 Solanas, Fernando 12, 152 song 179 “Alouette” 168 “Indépendance Cha Cha” 179 “Naam” 230 “Où vas-tu paysan?” 197 see also music; tune sound(s) 2, 37, 40, 42, 45, 53, 58, 61, 67, 75, 100, 114, 126, 158, 161, 162, 163, 172, 179, 181, 193, 195, 200, 211, 224, 227 South Africa 15, 18, 20, 129–131, 137–153, 158, 166, 218, 221, see also Gabriel, Forgiveness; Hood, Tsotsi Soyinka, Wole 85 space(s) 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 14, 20, 13–16, 29, 33–76, 87, 79, 94, 96, 97, 99, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 110, 123, 128, 134, 149, 161, 162, 166, 170, 184, 185, 188, 195,

199, 200, 206, 209, 216, 221, 224, 228, 229 African 6, 14, 15, 110, 139 cinematic 56 city 10 colonial 187 diasporic 21, 230 emotional 53, 99 filmic 111 intellectual 53 open 138, 140, 141, 164 liminal 45 political 53 public 11, 177, 179 spatial 26, 54 subaltern 153 time 204 urban 33–77 spectator(s) 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 26, 27, 28, 35–54, 60, 81, 225 spectatorship 1, 3, 5, 7, 12, 13, 16, 22, 18, 26, 27, 28, 35–54, 97, 107, 110, 138, 139, 150, 166, 168, 170, 186, 206, 211, 213, 228, 233, education/pedagogy of 28, 35–54 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 5, 22, see also essentialism, strategic stasis 25, 96, 98, 115 stereotype(s) 127, 185, 190, 205, 206, 216, 223, 225, see also cliché still camera 67, 100 Stop Thief! 133, 142, 148, 151, 232 story 95, 109, 136, see also diegesis storyline 100 Structural Adjustment Policies 226 subaltern(s) 22, 134, 135, 186, 206 subaltern spaces 53 subject(s) (psychological) 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 21, 22, 29, 62, 98, 108, 158 subjectivity 5, 7, 12, 22, 60, 183, 184 suburb(s) 21, 62, 65, 66, 70, see also banlieue superimposed 67, 95, 197 superimposition(s) 40 Sutherland, Donald 137 Taiwan 9, 15 Teno, Jean-Marie 18, 29, 44, 52, 61, 71, 75, 157, 158, 168, 187–215

Index

261

Afrique, je te plumerai 61, 157, 168, 187, 193 Chief 187, 188–193, 211 Clando 71 Colonial Misunderstanding 157, 187, 233 Hommage 192–200 Sacred Places 18, 158, 188, 209–214 Trip to the Country, A 157, 187, 200–209 term(s) theoretical 63 theorizing 27, 138, 184, 186 cultural 26 film 26 political 85 theory 3, 4, 5, 13, 20, 28, 82, 107, 108, 233 third world 14, 15, 17, 39, 66, 97, 134 city 164, 191 literature 141 Third-Worldism 97 Thompson, Kristin 13 Tlatli, Moufida 79, 232 Silences of the Palace 79, 99–109 totality 6, 16, 36, 72, 79, 86, 97, 107, 110, 116, 158, 163, 176, 186 tune(s) 168, 197, see also music; song Tunisia 19, 99–109 two-shot 37, see also shot

viewer 3, 5, 18, 25, 29, 37, 39, 43, 54, 56, 60, 92, 93, 109, 115, 121, 138, 161, 162, 188, 205, 217, 225, 228, see also spectator viewership 15 Vieyra, Paulin 8, 20 Afrique sur Seine 8, 20 voice 191, 193, 197, 200 voice-over 40, 41, 44, 107, 173, 175, 179, 193 voyeur(s) 147, 225 voyeurism 5, 85, 93, 108

Uganda 228 Ugbomah, Chief Eddie 218 Ukadike, Frank 12, 91, 96 United Nations Population Fund 55 United States 9 urban 9, 10, 11, 56, 71, 72, 79, 83, 142, 189, 204, 217 (does not include city) urbanization 66, 140, 204 unconscious, the 4 UNITA 118 Utopia 226 utopian ideal 111, 162 African woman as symbol of 116 utopian texts 98 Vertov, Dziga 9 video 2, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 39, 52, 157, 174, 175, 178, 202, 202, 210, 229, 230, see also Gollywood; Nollywood

Wade, Abdoulaye 85, 165–166 Wainaina, Binyavanga 29, 216, 219, 220 Washington, Denzel 137, 217 ways empathetic 169 intellectual 169 political 13 white(s) (racial) 56, 58, 59, 121, 131, 137, 218, 221 WHO (World Health Organization) 35, 37, 109 Williams, Patrick 101 Wolof 13, 24, 83, 95, 96 women (category of) 16, 25, 55, 59, 61–62, 65–66, 79–112, 113, 114, 116, 126, 117, 137, 165, 189, 190, 209, 217 Wood, Simon 20 Forerunners 20 Woolfalk, Saya 85 work intellectual 181 practical 6 theoretical 6 World Bank 109, 228 World Diamond Council 219 World Bank 224 Zambia 218 Zamoum, Fatma Zohra 22 Le docker noir 22 Zimbabwe 19, 218 Zwick, Edward 217 Blood Diamond 216–224, 225, 228 Glory 217 Legends of the Fall 217

Plate 1 The Silences of the Palace, directed by Moufida Tlatli, produced by Ahmed Baha Attia, Richard Magnien and Cinétéléfilms, Mat Films, 1994.

Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, First Edition. Anjali Prabhu. © 2014 Anjali Prabhu. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Plate 2 Bamako, directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, produced by Denis Freyd and Archipel 33, Chinguitty Films, Mali Images, arte France Cinéme, 2006.

Plate 3 The Children of Troumaron, directed and produced by Harrikrisna Anenden, 2012.

Plate 4 Casanegra, directed by Nour Eddine Lakhmari, produced by Pierfrancesco Fiorenza, Omar Jawal, Ali Kettani, Aziz Nadifi, Mohcine Nadifi, Dino Sebti and Global Media, Sigma Technologies, Soread-2M, 2008.

Plate 5 The Yacoubian Building, directed by Marwan Hamed, produced by Imad Adeeb and Good News, 2006.

Plate 6 Permis de Construire, directed and produced by Melissa Thackway, 2008.

Plate 7 Karmen Gei, directed by Joseph Gaï Ramaka, produced by Richard Sadler and Canal+, 2001.

Plate 8 Karmen Gei, directed by Joseph Gaï Ramaka, produced by Richard Sadler and Canal+, 2001.

Plate 9 Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood, produced by Peter Fudakowski and The UK Film & TV Production PLC, Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa, The National Film and Video Foundation of SA, 2005.

Plate 10 Lumumba, directed by Raoul Peck, produced by Jacques Bidou and Velvet Film, 2002.

Plate 11 Sacred Places, directed by Jean-Marie Teno, produced by Jean-Marie Teno and Les Films du Raphia, 2009.

Plate 12 Sacred Places, directed by Jean-Marie Teno, produced by Jean-Marie Teno and Les Films du Raphia, 2009.

Plate 13 The Game, directed and produced by Frank Rajah Arase, produced by Heroes Productions, 2010.

Plate 14 The Game, directed by Frank Rajah Arase, produced by Heroes Productions, 2010.