New Discourses of African Cinema / Nouveaux discours du cinéma africain

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791.43 Ww4 1983-

REVUE DE THÉORIE DE L'IMAGE ET DU SON A JOURNAL OF THEORY ON IMAGE AND SOUND

New Discourses of African Cinema

Nouveaux discours du cinéma africain

IRIS No. 18, Spring 1995

is-anglais, qui paraît Iris est une revue de théorie de l'image et du son, bilingue franca o à un sujet particulier de la deux fois l'an. Depuis 1983, /ris consacre chaque numér printemps aux Etats-Unis théorie et de l'histoire du cinéma. ris depuis 1989 paraît au et à l'automne en France. in film theory and the Iris is a biannual publication that presents current scholarship issue to a different aspect relation of image to sound. Begun in 1983, Jris devotes each hed in the United States of film theory or history. Since 1989, the Spring issue is publis and the Fall issue in France. Marc Vernet. Fondateurs/Founders: Jacques Aumont, Jean-Paul Simon, Anne GoliotComité de direction/Editors: Dominique Bliiher, Claire Dupré la Tour, , Lauren Rabinovitz Lété, Margrit Trôhler (France), Rick Altman, Dudley Andrew

(USA) sité de Paris ID), Comité de rédaction/Editorial Board: Jacques Aumont (Univer

(Universita di Raymond Bellour (CNRS), Janet Bergstrom (UCLA), Francesco Casetti André Gaudreault Trento), Donald Crafton (University of Wisconsin at Madison), Hayward (Université de Montréal), Miriam Hansen (University of Chicago), Susan Nijmegen), (Birmingham University), Frank Kessler (Katholieke Universiteit N. Rodowick Christian Metz} (EHESS), Dana Polan (University of Pittsburgh), David of Florida), (University of Rochester), Jean-Paul Simon, Maureen Turim (University Marc Vernet (Délégué Général de la Bibliothèque de l'Image).

iris (USA): Institute for Cinema and Culture 162 Communication Studies Bldg. University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242

iris (France): 41 Avenue Gambetta 75020 Paris France

e-mail: iris @uiowa.edu World Wide Web: Attp://www.arcade.uiowa.edu/film/ no

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Secrétaire de rédaction/Editorial Associates: Scott Benjamin (Iowa City).

À PARAITRE / FORTHCOMING (1995-6):

- Cinéma, souvenir, film / Memory in Cinema and Films

- On the Notion of Genre in the Cinema / Sur la notion de genre au cinéma - European Precursors of Film Noir / Précurseurs européens du film noir - Le bonimenteur au cinéma / The Lecturer in Cinema ©IRIS Directeur de la Publication (France) : Jean-Paul Simon Printed by the University of lowa Printing Department, Coralville, IA

ISSN: 0751-7033 Cover: Hyénes (Hyenas, Senegal, 1992)

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SOMMAIRE/TABLE OF CONTENTS

IRIS N° 18

NEW DISCOURSES OF AFRICAN CINEMA NOUVEAUX DISCOURS DU CINEMA AFRICAIN

Introduction DENSA Ee TE Bec

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Articles Brian Goldfarb A Pedagogical Cinema: Development Theory, Colonialism, Ben sta ELineration African Fini. in reine 7 Jude Akudinobi Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African Cinema .........:cscsseeseeseereees 25 Michel Serceau Le cinéma d’ Afrique noire francophone face au modèle occidental : la rançon du refus .............ccssesceteseeeseeeees teen mnt 39 Bruno Tackels COTE WC TAS Od RS OR RS LA it TERRE ST, ARC SOS EE 47 Keyan Tomaselli and Maureen Eke mecondary Orality in South African Film... steve 61 Onookome Okome 71 Cinema and Social Change in Nigeria: the Political Imperative N. Frank Ukadike The Other Voices of Documentary: Allah Tantou and 81 Afrique, je te plumerai "ss... Richard Porton 95 Hyenas: Between Anti-Colonialism and the Critique of Modernity LR. Rayfield Hyènes : comment trouver le message? ........sssesereeseeesseesseesstseseseneeeesenenenens 105 Dudley Andrew 113 Falaises sacrées et espaces COMMUNS Philip Gentile 125 In the Midst of Secrets: Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen Sheila Petty Miseria: Towards an African Feminist Framework of Analysis ............::000+ 137 Ken Harrow Camp de Thiaroye: Who’s That Hiding in Those Tanks, and How Come We Can’t See Their Faces? .............sssceccsssssessssssscssseneesesessevsesseonees 147

Comptes-rendus / Book reviews

Eric Porter, Sheila Petty, Lee Freeman, Frank Kessler, Scott Curtis, N. Frank Ukadike ss...

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N. Frank Ukadike

New Discourses of African Cinema? Nouveaux discours du cinéma africain ?

Why study African cinema? Why is it necessary now? Who should champion the explication of the film images of Africa for a balanced assessment of the way things are, offer a lucid [reinterpretation of the media images of this most misrepresented continent in the world? What is it that needs to be addressed concerning the ongoing debate about the adequacy of current critical methodologies for dealing with what cinema has become in Africa? Since my attendance at the Society for Cinema Studies conference held in Toronto, Ontario, February 11-14, 1993, these questions reverberated in my mind. Usually in such an intellectual forum, young scholars are eager to meet with colleagues and big names in the field, and having the opportunity to be introduced to senior colleagues and the “big wigs” of the profession can be rather intriguing. However, my experience was not quite so. It happened that a Canadian friend at the conference introduced me, as the author of a forthcoming book, Black African Cinema, to one of America’s foremost scholars, a “big wig” in the field. This scholar gave me a chilling response when he asked, “After Manthia Diawara’s book (out only a few months) is there anything else to be written or said about African cinema?” My Canadian friend, herself working on two books on African cinema and television, was astounded. I left with the dilemma of

how best to perform the herculean task of speaking on the African experience — how to dispel these outmoded and untenable myths which permeate the interpretation of African history, culture, and now, cinema — of how Africa is seen as a cinematographic desert, a filmic cul-de-sac.

The Toronto conference also showed that not everyone is as naive about Africa as the learned intellectual enveloped in his ethnocentric vision of the world, an enclave

analogous to baseball’s “World Series” where only one nation is that world. Two other occurrences manifested themselves as visages of African progressivism. While working on this issue of iris specifically, Ibecame aware of other journals in the U.S. devoting space to African cinema. My book, Black African Cinema (University of California Press, 1994) is now published. At the recently concluded Pan-African Festival of Film and Television of Ouagadougou, the world’s largest film festival (yes, N. Frank Ukadike, (1995), “Introduction,” iris, pp. 3-6.

in Africa), which opened with pomp and pageantry, a superb anthology, Africa and the Centenary of Cinema, was launched. These developments attest to victory for the continent and its cinema. Perhaps the most amazing thing that has happened in this dissemination of knowledge about the burgeoning African cinema is that the learned professor who derided African film practice is now himself writing and publishing articles on African cinema. We now begin to wonder why the wall tumbled! Even the baseball World Series has added a new country to its world (Canada now competes with the U.S. in the series), gradually moving from the center to the margins, from seclusion to integration. What has all this preamble to do with development, understanding, and analysis of African cinema? Certainly we are led to think about what the articles in this issue force us to reflect upon: the larger question of whether African cinematic discourse is at a crossroads. African cinema does not aspire to colonize other nations’ cinemas, and it is high time it attained the recognition it deserves. Similarly, African cinematic discourse should not be merely appended to dominant cinematic discourse. As academic interest in African cinema grows, so too should the impetus to abhor the tyranny of the canon, to destroy the illusory ideology that ostracizes “oppositional” forms from dominant forms of representation, by which all aesthetic criteria and production strategies are unfortunately measured and evaluated. One of the major themes to emerge from the viewpoints expressed by the contributors to this special issue is the relationship of African cinematic discourse to questions of dominant modes of representation and scholarship. As scholars, we are all committed

to diversifying the field, in particular to moving African cinematic discourse from the margins to the center. Would it not be beneficial to think of ways to repostulate the otherwise sterile scholarship and theoretical frameworks that have impeded understanding of film works as pluralistic cultural art that demands a reassessment of critical canons and approaches to African historiography? It is in this direction that iris tries to introduce perspectives on not only the core information about the history and production of culture, but also on the dynamics of criticism and theory contexts in order to facilitate the understanding of African films as multicultural and pluralistic aesthetic phenomena working in social contexts. If conventional ideologies that ghettoize alternative practices persist, it is due to the lack of adequate critical exposure needed to inform academic discourse. To bridge the

gap, one would have argued that incisive works conceived from an African-centered rather than an Euro-American-centered focus should have been the mainstay of this critical inquiry, but that would imply new forms of hegemony, a retrenchment to the tyranny of a (new) canon. The selection of the articles published here, therefore, does not symbolize a monolithic dialogue, but does signify a monolithic tendency — a tendency which argues for the broadening of investigations. Some of the authors write as African insiders, while others write from Africanist and Western perspectives. From

this mix of stances the unique synthesis of the African film image stands to raise complex ideological and analytical questions that emerging discourses are beginning to address. One way or another, the thoughts expressed here exemplify an interdisciplinary investigation of African cinema as an aesthetic force which challenges traditional cinematic paradigms. As an examination of the variety of cultural productions in Africa, this issue also tries to account for the hybrid nature of films, combining what is occasionally direct political commentary with subtle, indirect work on cultural and cinematic codes. I hope this special issue of iris will widen the perimeters of the African cinematic discourse, moving that discourse from the margins to the center, not just de-marginalizing its status. I would like to thank the editors and staff of iris for making this issue possible. Many thanks also go to all of the writers who contributed to the discourse. For your indefatigable endeavors, I say, A Luta Continua. N. Frank Ukadike

Pourquoi étudier le cinéma africain ? Pourquoi le faire maintenant ? Qui doit expliquer les images du cinéma africain ? Qui doit réinterpréter les médias de ce continent mal représenté ? Que faut-il dire sur les méthodologies critiques qui conviennent à l’analyse du cinéma africain ? Depuis le colloque de la Society for Cinema Studies à Toronto en février 1993 ces questions n’ont cessé de me tracasser. Normalement, dans ce type de réunion les jeunes sont contents de rencontrer les grands noms du métier. Et pourtant. Pendant le colloque une amie canadienne m’a présenté, en tant que jeune auteur d’un livre à paraître sur le cinéma africain, à un des véritables gros bonnets du domaine. Ce professeur estimable m'a lancé une réponse glaçante : «Après le livre de Manthia Diawara [qui venait de paraître] que peut-il rester à dire sur le cinéma africain ?» Mon amie canadienne, ayant deux manuscrits en cours sur le cinéma africain et la télévision africaine, est restée

étonnée. Je suis reparti avec le projet de dissiper cette nouvelle version du vieux mythe selon lequel l’Afrique serait un désert, un cul- de-sac, cette fois-ci filmique. Les articles de ce numéro d’iris nous invitent à considérer une question importante : le discours cinématographique africain se trouve-t-il à un tournant de son histoire ? Puisqu’il n’a jamais cherché à coloniser le cinéma d’autres pays, le cinéma africain n’a pas toujours attiré toute l’attention qu’il mérite. Mais peut-être gagne-t-il ainsi sa propre voix oppositionnelle. Ces articles reviennent sans cesse au problème de la différence qui existe entre le discours cinématographique africain et les traditions occidentales qui

dominent I’ analyse du cinéma et de ses oeuvres. Ce numéro cherche donc à introduire de nouvelles perspectives non seulement sur les données nécessaires à toute analyse et a toute histoire, mais aussi sur la dynamique de la critique et de la théorie, facilitant la compréhension des films africains en tant que phénomènes esthétiques — multiculturels et pluriels — dans leurs contextes sociaux. Offrant des points de vue tant africains qu’occidentaux, les articles ici présents évitent à la fois le monologique et le monolithique, en faveur du dialogue et de la dialectique. C’est à partir d’un tel mélange que l’unique synthèse de l’image filmique africaine peut provoquer de nouveaux discours sur le terrain fertile des complexités idéologiques et analytiques. Chacune à sa façon, les pensées exprimées ici exemplifient une investigation interdisciplinaire du cinéma africain comme force esthétique, exploitant ainsi la façon dont ce cinéma a su mettre en cause les structures cinématographiques traditionnelles. En tant que mise en question de la production culturelle africaine, ce numéro cherche aussi à expliquer la nature hybride de ces films. On comprend à quel point l’analyse de ces films dépend d’une compréhension plus large de la nature composite du cinéma africain, qui marie commentaire politique direct avec le travail indirect des codes culturels et cinématographiques. J'espère que ce numéro spécial d’iris servira non seulement à élargir le champ du discours cinématographique africain, mais à déplacer ce discours des marges jusqu’au centre. Je voudrais remercier la revue iris et sa rédaction, qui ont rendu possible ce numéro,

et tous les auteurs qui ont contribué à cette tentative d’établir un nouveau discours. Pour vos travaux infatigables, je vous dis : A Luta Continua. N. Frank Ukadike

Brian Goldfarb

A Pedagogical Cinema: Development Theory, Colonialism and Post-Liberation African Film

In his successful career as a novelist and in his earliest films, Ousmane Sembéne

worked most often in the language and cultural conventions he was taught by the French colonial educational system in Senegal. Sembéne recalls that using the colonial tongue seemed appropriate at the time: French “was a fact of life.” However, when he began to show his films in Senegal, peasant audiences criticized his language choice, identifying it as emblematic of an internalized Eurocentrism. “The peasants were quick to point out to me that Iwas the one who was alienated,” he explains. “They would have preferred the film in their own language, without the French.” Sembéne’s story is at bottom about relations of pedagogical authority. It illustrates the broader struggle around language, colonialism and pedagogy that has marked African cinema since its inception. Like Jean Rouch, the French anthropologist and documentary filmmaker who taught many now well-known African filmmakers during the years of liberation, Sembéne viewed film as a pedagogically useful medium. However, Sembéne and other post-liberation directors radically reconceived the didac-

tic role of the cinema. Films could teach the western audiences about the damaging effects of colonialism; moreover, they could demonstrate to Africans strategies of political resistance against imperialism. As Frangoise Pfaff explains, Sembéne turned from writing to film precisely because he saw the latter as a more viable medium for reaching audiences in Africa across divergent language groups and among nonliterate people.” But Sembéne’s anecdote also suggests that the cinema served another, perhaps more important, political function. An institution historically and currently reliant on western industry and conventions, the cinema had become in post-liberation Africa a critical site of contestation over language and pedagogical authority. To understand Sembéne’s own pedagogical strategy in telling the anecdote related above, it is important to note that cinematic pedagogy and linguistic imperialism were not new issues for him during the period in question. Even before this exchange with a peasant audience, he had produced a film that raised exactly those questions of language and authority posed by his critics. The narrative of his film La Noire de... (Black Girl, 1966) centers precisely on the linguistic and cultural isolation of the film’s displaced Brian Goldfarb, (1995), “A Pedagogical Cinema: Development Theory, Colonialism and Post-Liberation African Film,” iris, 18, pp. 7-24.

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Senegalese protagonist, representing in French voice-over her interior monologue (though we know that she cannot speak French well) while portraying her isolating experience as a maid in a French household. The film can be seen as a pedagogical vehicle through which the filmmaker teaches his audience about the profoundly debasing effects of colonial servitude combined with enforced isolation from one’s own country, language and culture. But Sembéne’s anecdote also tacitly demonstrates how the audience can itself play the role of pedagogue, teaching the filmmaker a lesson about cultural imperialism. Sembéne’s story suggests that, though film was introduced to Africa by the West as a means of “educating” African colonial subjects to assimilate, and though it was appropriated for counter-colonial political “education” in antiassimilation and the retention of cultural forms, it has become a critical site of a more

complex contestation over agency, authority and pedagogical form in post-liberation colonialism. If in Africa a pedagogical tradition of cinema is in part artifactual of overt colonial disciplinary practices (practices by which the cinema “taught” language and values), then this same tradition has become an important means of intervention in the current dismantling and reconfiguration of colonialist cultural forms. Confronting western theories of Third World development that were closely bound to western theories of pedagogy and child development, indigenous filmmaking in Africa has appropriated and transformed these same developmental and pedagogical theories. Many of the postliberation films of the seventies and eighties produced by African filmmakers engage the colonial legacy of filmic didacticism, critiquing and dismantling it through textual allegory, while also appropriating and subverting its conventions in local struggles and broader oppositional and cultural politics.

Colonial development and development theory

Paternalistic programs of education and development in colonial and post-liberation Africa drew on social science theories that derived not only from fields devoted to the study of “other” cultures (anthropology), but also from apparently unrelated fields, specifically child psychology — a field that takes as its object the western child. Overt links forged between anthropology and pedagogical theory, and between the colonial subject and the western child, indicate that the terms “‘paternalism” and “infantilization” were not simply convenient analogies for colonialist techniques of social management, but were institutionalized methods in emergent paradigms of western pedagogy during precisely the same period. These methods were employed both inside and beyond educational settings such as schools. Not coincidentally, visual representation figures centrally in both anthropological developmental theories and theories of child development. Pedagogical theories of visual representation informed a broadly conceived,

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colonial “educational” system that embraced the cinema as a medium of schooling uniquely suited to the management of African subjects. In his well-known critique of anthropology, Johannes Fabian suggests that a focus on visual representation unites the various forms of domination that contributed to the maintenance of western imperialism. He describes how early anthropology “[presented] knowledge through visual and spatial images, maps, diagrams, trees, and tables.” The practices of collection and display of photographs and artifacts taken by colonizers and missionaries became the basis for a body of work produced by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anthropologists, many of whom never left Europe. This emphasis on visual methodology was reinforced in the instructive manuals on fieldwork written by twentieth-century anthropologists such as Marcel Mauss.? An important contradiction marks this focus on visual media. While favoring visual modes in the representation of its own data, anthropology nonetheless considered the visual forms used in the cultures they studied to be indicative of “lower” cognitive ability. Furthermore, as Fabian shows, social scientists made explicit connections between the designation of “lower” cultures and “lower” developmental stages of western subjects — that is, between subjects of colonialism and children, in part on the basis of these groups’ common reliance on visual modes of representation. The implications of this alignment are suggested in the following passage: It is commonly believed that the visual-spatial is more germane to the infantile and adolescent mind than to the mature intelligence. Whether such is indeed the case may be for the psychologist to decide. However it is easy to see how arguing from ontogenetic to phylogenetic visualism may turn pedagogical principles into political programs.‘ As the final sentence makes clear, Fabian centers his critique not on the West’s

devaluing of visual systems in its textual hierarchy, but on its deft linking of individual development and development of the species — an association that grounds a profoundly paternalistic and pedagogical social science program. If some sectors of the species are “developmentally lagging,” these sectors must be raised and schooled. This crucial slippage between individual and societal development encourages a blurring of boundaries that gives a biological cast to political and cultural decisions. Thus a country’s political decision to “develop” (e.g., to industrialize with the help of the West, to support the introduction of western industrial/cultural institutions like the cinema) becomes the cognitively advanced, “intelligent” decision. This recasting of ethnographic evolutionism in a discourse of national development became the paradigmatic response of western diplomacy to the impending dissolution of direct colonial rule in the post-World War Two era.° The “lower” place that anthropology afforded visual culture within the narrative hierarchy of social and technological development was critically linked to the central

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role literacy had attained as a marker of class distinction in the West, and as marker of

difference between colonizers and nonliterate colonial subjects. Still, the late nineteenth-century anthropologist favored visualism as a means to study and moniter colonial subjects. Film historian Fatimah Tobing-Rony clearly ties anthropology’s visual discourse of racial evolution to the emergence of cinema, ameans of ethnographic classification and surveillance, in her analysis of the chrono-photographic typologies of human gesture produced by French ethnographer Félix-Louis Regnault.° These two tendencies — to designate a “lower” culture as visual, and to privilege the visual as a means of monitoring that culture — converge in the decision to use visual media as a means of disciplining and schooling colonial subjects. Fabian states that visualism forms ajuncture among the various forms of domination that crisscross modern western empire. Here he is referring to the pervasive use of visual systems to observe and to educate:’ The hegemony of the visual as a mode of knowing may thus directly be linked to the political hegemony of an age group, a class, or one society over another. The ruler’s subject and the scientists object have in the case of anthropology (but also in the case of sociology and psychology) an intertwined history.®

Fabian draws a connection between various implementations of visual modes of knowing within both western science and political domination. In short, he suggests that science is one means by which colonial rule has been established and maintained. Through the combined social science discourses of anthropology, sociology and psychology, a pedagogical principle was formulated as a mechanism to maintain imperial power relations. This principle was based on the conception of visual cultures and cognitive modes as “inferior” or “subservient” and also as sites for control, via visual aids. Fabian’s discussion of the visual and developmental models of colonial anthropology encompasses a broad period of history. How was what Fabian calls anthropology’s developmental “visual mode of knowing” enacted in liberation and post-liberation Africa? As Fabian points out, anthropological theory drew on ontogenetic models to naturalize its own cultural hierarchies, and developmental and pedagogical theories have been important sources for these social science models. Child psychologist Jean Piaget is a useful example of the specific theories that informed social science discourse on development during the first decades of African cinema. His theories intersect in explicit ways with writings on Third World development during the sixties—a period of African liberation struggles. He openly draws on the colonial stereotype of the African as a mentally underdeveloped primitive to support his claims about the development of the western child. Indeed, Piaget regards the stereotypical view he presents of African culture as so universally accepted that he finds it unnecessary to

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indicate his sources. African peoples are otherwise excluded from Piaget’s widely accepted developmental model by virtue of the fact that he deems African adults developmentally analogous with western children. Not surprisingly, Piaget’s model of a highly developed individual is a scientist — and more specifically, an anthropologist. Moreover, Piaget provides an explicit theoretical explanation of the relationship between visual representation and pedagogy that informs his own and anthropology’s developmental theory. This explanation offers some insight into anthropology’s pedagogical cinema and its legacy in liberation and post-liberation Africa. Piaget uses the term “realism” to refer to what he sees as nascent conceptual schemata that inform children’s concrete physical activity. For Piaget, realism has important ties to visual representation. It is a precursor to the more developmentally complex and abstract forms of scientific reasoning that he attributes to western adults. Piaget’s use of the term realism can be traced directly back to the work of developmental psychologist Georges Henri Luquet. In 1895, coincidentally the year of cinema’s first public screenings, Luquet used the term “intellectual realism” to describe what he saw as similarities between children’s perception and drawings and those of “primitive peoples.” Perhaps not surprisingly, this nineteenth-century association is repeated by Piaget in 1965, a period marked by African liberation struggles. The fact that he perceived as identical the political management of African subjects and the pedagogical management of children is spelled out in clear terms in the following passage: Social constraint — and by this we mean any social relation into which there enters an element of authority and which is not like cooperation, the result of an interchange between equal individuals — has on the individual results that are analogous to those exercised by adult constraint of the child. Two phenomena, moreover, are really one and the same thing, and the adult who is under the dominion of unilateral respect for “Elders” and for tradition is really behaving like a child. It may even be maintained that the realism of primitive conceptions of crime and punishment is, in certain respects, an

infantile reaction.'° What Piaget perceives as the prevalence of “developmentally lower” cognitive modes in “primitive” societies, he attributes to traditional authority and indigenous rule. He thus deems this authority unhealthy, claiming that it stunts moral and cognitive development of the social group across generations: One can... surmise that the outstanding features of “primitive mentality” can be explained by the conjuncture of childish mentality with the effects of the constraint exercised by one generation upon the other. Primitive mentality would therefore be due to social constraint being refracted through the childish mind."

Piaget attributes the perceived “childish mind” of African colonial subjects to traditional values and ancestral authority, a fact that is highly ironic, considering the

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infantilizing strategies of colonial paternalism. His logic becomes a rationale for western authorities advocating constraining decrees in the management of colonial subjects.'? Piaget’s theory thus lends itself to discussion of colonial endeavors during a period of struggle for independence, rationalizing both the imposition of western pedagogical discipline in the colonial setting (in order to aid the future development of “primitive” peoples) and the maintenance of authoritarian rule in conjunction with national autonomy. Piaget is only one example of a long and complex relationship between pedagogical methods exercised locally and at a distance. Ashis Nandy analyzes the parallel and interconstitutive relation between colonial rule and the changing western conception of the child at the turn of the century: Colonialism dutifully picked up [social science’s] ideas of growth and development and drew a new parallel between primitivism and childhood. Thus the theory of social progress was telescoped not merely into the individual’s life cycle in Europe but also into the area of cultural

differences in the colonies.!*

Nandy’s point is that there were no ahistorical notions of the child or development which could be simply transposed onto colonial subjects. Rather, a modern conception of the child—its development and its management through pedagogical practices— emerged in conjunction with imperialism. While colonial administrators, aided by the classificatory work of anthropologists, developed mechanisms to discipline and indoctrinate colonial subjects, the same sort of research justified an elaborate system of discipline and education of western children. As Guari Viswanathan has shown in her study of British colonial power and literacy, modern English studies originated in an educational system initially imposed on colonial subjects and only later imported into England’s own schools.'* The geopolitically broad project of pedagogical relations forms a complex relation between local and distant points in the imperial web. In a discussion of the significance of Europe’s colonial legacy to African independence movements and to contemporary film production, Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes note that the need for cultural and linguistic intermediaries between the metropolitan nation and colonized peoples led to the creation of educational institutions which taught European ideas. Assimilation held out to African subjects the false promise that colonies would eventually achieve equal status with the paternal state. Assimilationist policy served to mitigate resistance, justifying colonial rule by presenting it as a temporary measure with a program to dismantle itself.'° This paternalistic posture constituted an attempt to maintain colonial rule by ideological means despite waning economic and military resources in Europe. French, British, German, and League of Nations policy reports from the period reveal a widespread effort to shore up

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failing colonial administrations through reform of pedagogical and cultural institutions

in Africa.!? But assimilationist strategies were not entirely successful. Ideals of democracy and nationalism strongly embedded in the assimilationist pedagogy of European states clashed with the experience of the colonial student. Malkmus and Armes quote Alistair Horne’s account of the colonial Algerian school experience as “an admirable breeding ground for revolutionary minds.”'* Along similar lines, Said suggests that although the liberation movements followed upon the instruction in “colonial schools which taught generations of the native bourgeoisie important truths about history, science, culture,” the indigenous elite also gained “... a pronounced awareness of culture as imperialism, the reflexive moment of consciousness that enabled the newly independent citizen to

assert the end of Europe’s cultural claim to guide and/or instruct the non-European.”!? Said stresses the role of pedagogical autonomy as a goal of revolution. The very institutions of assimilationist education fostered resistance to European authority, carried out by means perhaps inspired by, but not wholly appropriative of, European revolutionary models. Colonial administrators’ decisions to implement developmental pedagogical models as part of assimilationist policy were prompted by a motivation essentially distinct from western educational authorities’ implementation of such models at home. The institution of assimilationist policy in the colonies, though purportedly aimed at bringing colonies to a status equal with that of European powers, was at the same time a means of maintaining their status as dependent. Colonial administrations were never fully committed to bringing “childlike” colonies into the fold of “adult” national power. Rather, they selectively imbued a colonial elite with the degree of European culture and authority needed to serve specific imperial interests such as administering and ruling other colonial subjects. Consequently, the limits of colonial assimilation were determined by the need for the establishment of an indigenous administrative authority. The radicalization of the educated colonial elite within the assimilationist system was not, then, merely the effect of exposure to European revolutionary models, but a confrontation with the hypocrisy of assimilationist policy itself.

A pedagogical cinema

Given the overtly pedagogical mission of colonial rule, it is not surprising that the history of western-produced cinema directed at African audiences begins with the consciously didactic use of film by missionaries, colonial administrators, and anthro-

pologists. In his recent history of African cinema, Manthia Diawara points out that this project had contradictory implications for newly formed African nations and their subsequent film practices. We find didactic films that were clearly implicated in a

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colonialist pedagogical “civilizing mission,” such as those produced by the British Bantu Educational Cinema Experiment (Post Office, Savings Bank, Tax, Progress, 1935-6) and The Congolese Center for Catholic Action Cinema (Father Van de Heuvel’s 1940s Les palabres de Mboloko and Father Van Haelst’s late-1940s series Matamata et Pilipili). These films were designed as lessons to be learned easily by an indigenous viewer assumed to be developmentally immature, illiterate, and in dire need of instruction. By insisting on the use of visual form, colonizers (the French in particular) helped to institute a representational mode that would later prove useful to African filmmakers interested in using film in liberation struggles that spanned multiple language groups and included nonliterate communities. As with post-World War Two U.S. and European independents, the relatively low-budget 16 mm filmmaking techniques provided missionaries with a media alternative that allowed a greater degree of economic and technical independence from the European industry. For better or worse, the didactic film of missionaries, anthropologists and colonial administrators was the

first cinema shown in Africa to take into consideration the specificity of its audiences’ languages and cultures. These circumstances contributed to the emergence of independent African film production.

Emitai and Camp de Thiaroye: the critique of assimilationist pedagogy

Ousmane Sembéne’s own experience in the French colonial army during World War Two no doubt gave him firsthand insight into the apparent necessity of assimilation to the imperial military project. In Emitai (1971), set in Senegal during World War Two, Sembéne draws upon this experience to show how the expedient implementation of assimilationist policy was carried out in a haphazard and even hysterical manner by the troubled French regime. Early in the film a French officer assembles and instructs young men of a Diola village: “You have been volunteered. France is at war with Germany, Marshall Pétain is the chief of France. He is my father and yours. France does you a great honor. You will go to Dakar and then to France. On return you will have war stories to tell your children.” The officer conjures up the image of Pétain as collective father, ceremoniously implying the consummate assimilation of colonial subjects into the imperial culture. But, in this instance assimilation is invoked prematurely — that is, before any pedagogic approach has been applied to inculcate the would-be soldiers into the imperial fold. The oxymoronic notion of “being volunteered” underscores the hysterical illogic of French rule. Clearly, the colonizers desire to have it both ways: the officer holds out the motivation of inclusion while refusing to grant colonial subjects self-determination. “Assimilation” appears as a flimsy justification for the forced inscription of the Diola.

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The irony of this scene is underscored when, in a later scene, posters ofPétain, a fourstar marshal, are torn down and replaced with those of his successor De Gaulle, a two-

star general. One conscripted African soldier responds with incredulity to the change in the designated rank of the figurehead of imperial leadership, marveling at the seemingly arbitrary nature of France’s power structure. This brief sequence indicates that, though able to force African soldiers to fight for France, the French lacked a cohesive program for establishing and stabilizing their own authority. This point is reinforced again in a later scene in which the administration fails to convince the women of the village to give up their harvest of rice to feed French troops. Repeatedly facing such resistances to their various attempts to gain the Diola’s compliance, the French administration is brought to a standstill. Sembéne says that Emitai marks his own recognition of the need for a history of resistance. “For the struggle against neo-colonialism,” he explains, “it is possible to reactualize all these scattered and little-known battles.”*! Notably, the battles whose

memory Sembéne sees as essential to the struggle against post-liberation domination have escaped recognition precisely because they were not merely counter-military insurrections, but resistances to the very forms of authority that the forces of the colonial regime stood for. The film complements Sembéne’s Camp de Thiaroye (1988), a film in which resistance also ensues from within the ranks of conscripted troops upon recognition of the hypocrisy of the assimilationist experience they have been through. In Camp de Thiaroye Sembéne illustrates the effects of “successful” assimilationist pedagogy to show how the French investment in “educating” colonial subjects was deeply conflicted and proved disingenuous. Camp de Thiaroye is a study in the subtle and complex interaction of a range of pedagogical arenas. Based on an actual incident during World War Two, the film depicts the gradual realization of the limits of assimilationist policies by a battalion of Senegalese infantrymen undergoing repatriation after battling for the French. Exposed to European culture and the ideology of first-world struggles for democracy, the battalion is subject upon their return to opportunistic and often contradictory treatment by colonial authorities. In effect, the French officers attempt to reverse the process of

assimilation in order to repatriate the soldiers to their colonial setting. Feeding them an inedible mush, ceremonially stripping them of their uniforms, and finally withholding their pay, French officers infantilize and humiliate the Senegalese infantrymen. Ultimately, the colonizers’ desire to maintain a strict social and racial hierarchy overrides any pedagogical notion of abstract “human” development. For the French administration, no matter what degree of cultural assimilation colonial subjects achieve, they will

always be children. The success of assimilationist policy depended on the colonizer’s ability to maintain the illusion that attaining European status and power is possible. Sembéne’s primary focus is colonial subjects who have achieved within the military various levels of

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identification with European power. Through the character of Sergeant-Major Diatta, the Senegalese drill sergeant whose command of both French and English and whose knowledge of classical music and jazz place him at the apex of contemporary European culture, Sembéne underscores the relationship between cultural knowledge and power within the military hierarchy. Diatta is emblematic of the enforced limits of African subjects in France’s ranks. A modern Renaissance man, Diatta is a military anomaly. As an exemplary product of the heterogeneous pedagogical/disciplinary mechanisms of cultural, educational and military institutions, he occupies the pinnacle of the assimilationist hierarchy among colonized subjects. Yet, although he is intellectually superior to his French commanding officers, he is continually placed in a lower military standing — a rank determined by racial hierarchies. He can exercise authority only among his fellow colonial subjects. His situation is replicated in society outside the camp. When he ventures into town, he is thrown out of local establishments, beaten, and

abducted by U.S. military police. His authority undermined and eroded, Diatta is ultimately forced to confront his conflicted allegiances. In a move that recalls the third phase of Fanon’s native intellectual, he finally sides with his countrymen —albeit too late to avoid their tragic massacre by the French. Through the other infantrymen (who, as Malkmus and Armes note, bear nicknames

evoking the administrative divisions of France’s African empire), Sembéne represents degrees of European loyalty and identification. As the conscripted battalion members gradually come to recognize that they have lost their heightened wartime status in the eyes of the French, they argue among themselves in pidgin French about how to respond. Pays (whose name approximates the French word for country), a mute infantryman who seems to suffer from shell shock, is perhaps the character most symbolic of the predicament of the assimilated subject. Intent on wearing a Nazi helmet, he ambivalently identifies with both concentration camp victims and Nazi soldiers. His character embodies the tragic effects of Eurocolonial pedagogy: the contradictions of assimilation internalized as psychosis. In his schizoid identification with the colonizer, he is both subjugator and subjugated. His condition suggests the “colonized” side of complicitous infantrymen like Diatta. Pays is atone moment hyper-confident, the next terrified. Like Piaget and Luquet’s “primitive” subject, he is a childlike adult. But, unlike Piaget and Luquet’s “primitive” subject, his childlikeness affords him an incisive take on the colonial experience: he hallucinates that he is still ina concentration camp; by the film’s bitter end, this delusion proves more accurate than the waking experience of his apparently more stable comrades. The intertwined projects of colonial military and pedagogical control produce internal contradictions that lead eventually to the rupture in paternalistic policy, unleashing a barbarous reaction, as demonstrated in the film’s devastating conclusion. Faced with organized insurrection of the African infantryman, the French military authorities resolve to dispense with them altogether in a brutal

massacre.

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Emitai and Camp de Thiaroye comprise installments in a single sequential narrative, Emitai taking place during the height of World War Two and Camp de Thiaroye in the war’s immediate aftermath. The films’ historical settings are separated by only about one year. But the conflicts that form the core of each film’s narrative are distinguishable less by time than by the political and cultural situation of the characters. The films enact distinct responses to assimilationist pedagogy by colonial subjects. Emitai shows the unfolding resistance to inclusion in the European war effort by various groups within a traditional Diola village. The French fail to convince the Diola that incorporation into the French military campaign is in the villagers’ best interest. The response of the French commanding officer to the Diola people’s denial of support is the response of a failed pedagogue who resorts to irrational techniques of discipline and punishment. Camp de Thiaroye shows the resistance of soldiers who, through their participation in the war, have already been assimilated to various degrees. A similar outcome follows the dutiful compliance of colonial subjects to the war effort. They have learned too much from their participation in the western military enterprise and thus are perceived as threatening. In this case, the disingenuous nature of French assimilationist policy is evident not so much in the lack of investment in an effective pedagogy but in France’s inability to deal with the outcome of its program. In the end, French authorities are unable to manage these newly educated colonial subjects. The westernized African is, for the West, a threat which must be eradicated. In each film the colonial subjects call the bluff of French assimilationist pedagogy. Sembéne’s depiction of the failure of Eurocolonial authority at two historical moments is articulated alongside a critique of pedagogical models from the past. The critical representation of traditional leadership in films such as Emitai and Ceddo (1976) clearly suggests that Sembéne perceives as inadequate a return to precolonial African pedagogical authority. Sembéne’s critical relation to tradition is, however, never totalizing. For example, his historical narrative and editing style in both films incorporate the pedagogical address of the griot. His is a cautionary response to the uncritical embrace of the precolonial past (represented in Negritude, for example). He says of Emitai, “I wanted to show ... that the gods could no longer respond to the people’s needs.” Traditional culture is depicted as it is lived and experienced within the colonial conflict, rather than as a pure precolonial past. Sembéne is representative of a broader tendency in African cinema to take up modes of traditional authority, incorporating its pedagogical address while mitigating against reified notions of authenticity. Burkinabe filmmaker Gaston Kaboré presents an alternative approach to the critical appropriation of traditional culture. In his Wend Kuuni (1982), Kaboré approximates the style of precolonial oral narrative to depict change and conflict within African tradition. Kaboré’s appropriation of precolonial narratives undermines an essentialist conception of a reified heritage, but precolonial narrative also serves as allegory of colonial domination and liberation. Kaboré’s

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symbolic condensation of the overthrow of both traditional and colonial authority within Wend Kuuni points the way to an autonomous, contemporary African cinematic aesthetic in which visual pedagogy is an important mode.

Wend Kuuni and the subversion of visual pedagogical relations

Diawara performs an extensive narratological analysis of Wend Kuuni in order to demonstrate a tendency within African cinema toward the appropriation of traditional narrative form for contemporary agendas. For Diawara, Wend Kuuni is representative of works in which African filmmakers “use the material of oral literature to reflect the ideology of the [present] time and not that of oral tradition.” This appropriation of tradition is selective and transformative, rather than essentializing. When filmmakers

like Kaboré restructure oral narratives, he argues, they “emphasize a notion of Senghorism ... at the expense of historical authenticity.””? L. S. Senghor, one of the founding theorists of Negritude, sought not simply to rid African culture of western influences, but to assert African autonomy through the legitimation of tradition and its integration with contemporary culture. Diawara’s invocation of Senghor is significant to the consideration of pedagogical authority within African cinema. Senghor was one of many leaders of the early nationalist period who considered the formulation of a new pedagogy central to post-liberation struggles. The “Senghorism” of these filmmakers, which Diawara describes as a subversion of traditional cultural forms and symbols, is fundamentally associated with an appropriation of pedagogical authority from both traditional and Eurocolonial sources. Extending Diawara’s narratological analysis, I would argue that Kaboré appropriates and transforms the structures not only of oral narratives, but of traditional pedagogical relations, reclaiming the modes of visual pedagogy designated “lower” by colonial anthropology to forge a new anticolonial filmic form. As noted in the above discussion of Fabian, developmental models that have served

to legitimate western authority situate literate culture historically after and hierarchically above coexistent oral and visual cultures. But the same practices of western social science that produced these developmental models employed visual pedagogical methods and techniques to frame and control the cultures they studied. In Wend Kuuni, Kaboré appropriates cinema for the tradition of oral and visual culture. Kaboré’s emphasis on the oral as opposed to the visual properties of the filmic medium aligns cinema as the inheritor of the traditional pedagogical authority. The title Wend Kuuni (god’s gift) is taken from the name given in the film by adoptive parents to the character of an orphaned boy, after he is discovered in the woods — à scenario suggestive of European culture’s “discovery” of the primitive subject “in nature.” The film’s plot extends this allegory to the issue of language. The narrative centers on Wend Kuuni’s loss and recovery of voice, a loss which results from a bout

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of amnesia apparently brought on by his abandonment. This loss and recovery of voice is clearly an allegory of the suppression of African oral culture during the period of colonial rule. Thus in Wend Kuuni Kaboré draws upon traditional oral forms and symbols to construct a narrative that engages critically with the cultural and political significance of orality. The central role of the griot as community educator and historian is reflective of the great value placed on oral narrative as a transmitter of knowledge throughout African societies. Wend Kuuni is both an enactment of this crucial educational form, and a narrative about its politics. Diawara performs a close analysis of the complex interplay of narrative and diegetic voices to suggest that “orality is the subject of the film because it incorporates an oral rendering of the tale which it later subverts.” In support of this, he points to the construction of an external voice early in the film. The film begins with diegetic dialogue. But speaking characters are obscured; they are presented in long shot, hidden in shadow, in profile, or with their backs to the camera. Often dialogue is in fact situated

off-screen. As Diawara suggests, this making-external of voice suggests the mediating authority of the story-teller or griot in traditional oral culture even before voice-over narration is actually introduced. When voice-over narration is eventually introduced, it is, as Diawara suggests to “remind the spectator of his/her authority.” This first introduction of voice-over narration is marked by a lapse in narrative continuity. The narrator/story teller provides a belated introduction to the film that situates the narrative within a precolonial time—a point that is already evident. Kaboré’s introduction of the griot’s voice through this redundant passage signals the beginning of a shift in authority from the traditional forms of orality represented within the film, to the cinema itself as modern medium of oral culture. As Diawara points out, shortly after this point yet another narrative voice is constructed in the film.’ This is achieved through the more distinctly subjective diegetic dialogue of Pongneré, Wend Kuuni’s adoptive sister. She gradually becomes the dominant aural “point of view” through whom viewers are invited to experience the narrative.” As Wend Kuuni regains his voice, pedagogical authority is transferred from one generation to the next. At the same time, the formal structure of the film enacts a transfer of authority from the traditional story-teller to the cinematic griot. The structure of Wend Kuuni effectively enacts the supplanting of oral narrative by filmic pedagogical authority. By the time Wend Kuuni takes on the role of storyteller in the final sequences of the film, cinematic diegetic form has fully replaced the story-telling modes of narration. The film closes without a return of the framing external voice. Kaboré figures cinema, a medium based in contemporary technology and a world economy, as the progeny of oral and visual culture. This appropriation of the visual technology of western culture for African pedagogical tradition subverts its implementation within the western colonial project. The cinema remains a pedagogical medium,

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but its narrow construction as an emblem of western culture is challenged. In effect, Kaboré constructs an alternative and non-western (pre)history for the cinema. Also important is the fact that youth takes on a particular allegorical significance in

Wend Kuuni. With children in lead roles, Wend Kuuni presents an allegorical representation of the usurping of Eurocolonial authority that subverts western notions of youth as ignorance. A corollary to this is the film’s tacit representation of the transitory nature of adult/paternal pedagogical authority. Wend Kuuni constructs a new notion of youth by drawing on two divergent sources. First, the film uses youth to symbolize the leadership of a generation of young, institutionally educated revolutionary leaders. Second, it draws upon the pedagogical authority accorded to youth within their own age groups by many African cultures.”’ Certainly, youth has figured as a symbol of revolutionary change throughout the history of modern liberation struggles. But in different contexts this symbol takes on unique inflections. Comparing the revolutionary movements in the old world and the Third World, Benedict Anderson notes that metaphors of age had a more literal basis in the latter-day colonial liberation struggles than in European revolutions. He points to education as the factor which brings about this distinction: Both in Europe and in the colonies ‘young’ and ‘youth’ signified dynamism, progress, selfsacrificing idealism and revolutionary will. But in Europe ‘young’ had little in the way of definable sociological contours ... There was thus no necessary connection between language, age, class and status. In the colonies things were very different. Youth meant, above all, the first generation in any significant numbers to have acquired a European education, marking them off linguistically and culturally from their parents’ generation, as well from the vast bulk of their colonized agemates.?

Anderson’s suggestion that the literal significance of youth is a defining characteristic of Third World liberation movements has direct bearing on representations of generational difference in Kaboré’s film. This particular adult-child relation was not merely the archetypal tension created by the cyclic transfer of power from one generation to another — it was a transformed relation based on the imperial intervention of schooling in the traditional pedagogical transfer of authority. “In the colonies, then,” Anderson states, “by ‘Youth’ we mean ‘Schooled Youth.’” Institutionalized schooling

brought on a confusion between the paternal authority of the imperial state and local adult authority. In Wend Kuuni, this confusion of pedagogical authority is enacted through the intersection of literal history (precolonial narrative) and historical allegory (of colonization and liberation). This parallel representation of the transfer of pedagogical authority within traditional society and the resistance of the generation of liberation to

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colonial authority takes place within a space circumscribed by generational difference — a space defined by the distinct activities of children and of adults. Tounderstand the importance of this parallel itis necessary to note the overdetermined nature of age-solidarity in the colonial context. Anderson observes that the solidarity of age-mates was an effect of the transformative process of European education. But this formulation ignores factors that pre-existed European influence. Senghor suggests that there was already an ingrained source of age-solidarity within the pedagogical traditions of African cultures. He described age-fraternity as an historically maintained pedagogical mechanism of indoctrination into citizenship in many African societies. He argues that education and discipline within age groups ensured the cohesion of Black African society.”? Senghor supports this assertion through reference to the rituals and rites of passage that form significant components of traditional African pedagogies and that are often experienced by groups of peers who prepare for them together. Drawing upon the writing of Senghor and others, Pierre Erny argues that within African tradition it is possible to speak of “classes based on age.” He states that “[w]ithin the society of children there is thus set up a kind of mutual education which operates more or less outside the adult world.”*° Kaboré represents this delineation of distinct spheres of pedagogical action in Wend Kuuni by situating most of the significant narrative action in distinct adults’ and children’s spheres.*! Toward the end of the film the most significant unfolding of the plot is represented within the pedagogic arena of the society of children. Kaboré situates the viewer among children, and within the experience of age-solidarity. Thus, the transfer of voice from the external narrator or griot to Wend Kuuni and Pongneré by the end of the film evokes the transfer of pedagogical authority to representatives within youth groups. The film’s allegorical structure superimposes the transgression of rigid tradition and the overcoming of colonial oppression. This is exemplified clearly by the final turn of events. The resistance of Timpoko, a young unmarried women, to the village elders’ attempt to marry her to the elder Bila sets off a conflict over traditional rule. Timpoko’s insinuation that Old Bila is impotent symbolizes the viewpoint of youth that traditional culture is inadequate. Timpoko’s predicament and her resistance mirrors the situation of Wend Kuuni’s mother who was banished and perishes for refusing a similarly arranged marriage at the beginning of the film. Only the tragic outcome is reversed. The older husband kills himself leaving his resistant bride to carry on. When Wend Kuuni subsequently discovers the body of Old Bila, he is jarred into recovering his memory, and hence his voice. The restoration of Wend Kuuni’s speech and memory upon the death of Old Bila is a condensed symbol of the overthrow of colonial and rigid traditional authority. The allegorical representation of Africa’s colonization and liberation coupled with the literal narrative of precolonial history suggests an appropriation of authority from two pedagogical regimes, both figured as past.

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A generative ambiguity is created in the representation of generational transition which functions simultaneously as a symbol of social transformation and as a component of traditional culture. By treating the situation of youth as object of both imperial and traditional disciplinary authority, Kaboré avoids simplification of the conflict between tradition and modernization. The success of this strategy hinges upon both the historical and the symbolic significance of youth in the intersecting areas of Eurocolonial and traditional African pedagogy. Kaboré effectively resists the construction of an inferior, infantile mentality within development theory by attributing to the characters of children a contestatory authority. The children in Wend Kuuni actually take on pedagogic authority. The familial metaphor of “adult” colonizer and “child” colonized is subverted by playing out its obvious narrative consequences —the metaphor is embedded in an Oedipal narrative that serves to transform the colonialist myth of (arrested) development into a parable of resistance and appropriation of authority.

Conclusion

While post-liberation African film has been informed by the legacy of a colonialist pedagogical cinema, this pedagogical theory has been transformed through strategic appropriation and allegorical critique. A number of questions remain unanswered here: To what degree does the slippage between theories of western child development and Third World development continue in ongoing colonial endeavors? If contemporary African films do problematize this slippage both structurally and narratively, what is being done in the arena of the film industry to address this paradigm in development policy? The latter question is critical in light of African film’s continuing reliance on French funding. And finally, given the centrality of pedagogical concerns in both colonial and African-produced film, is it feasible to consider African cinema apart from the related institutions of social science, education, and policy that continue to intersect in important ways to inform Africa’s film culture? While my discussion of postliberation films has focused primarily on textual evidence to support my thesis about pedagogy, it would be important to study audience and industry politics as areas also critically informed by the colonial pedagogical legacy described by Nandy, Senghor, Fabian and others cited here. For, as Sembéne seems to suggest in the anecdote cited at the beginning of this essay, perhaps it is the African viewer who functions finally as the most crucial figure of pedagogical authority in Africa’s contemporary cinema.

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23 Notes

1: “Interview with Ousmane Sembéne,” Framework 16 (1989), pp. 84-85. 2: Françoise Pfaff, The Cinema of Ousmane Sembène, a Pioneer of African Cinema (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1984), p. 182.

3: Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 178. See also Fatimah Tobing-Rony, “Those Who Squat, Those Who Sit: The Visualizing of Race in the 1895 Films of Félix-Louis Regnault.” Camera Obscura 28 (January 1992).

4: Fabian, p. 121. 5: Arturo Escobar provides an insightful account of the emergence of political discourse on development as a “powerful mechanism for the production and management of the Third World” by the West. See Arturo Escobar, “Imagining a Post-Development Era? Critical Thought, Development and Social Movements,” Social Text 31/32 (1992), p. 24.

6: Tobing-Rony, p. 265. Also see Ella Shohat, “Imaging Terra Incognita: The Disciplinary Gaze of Empire,” Public Culture 3(2) (Spring 1991) for an extensive discusion of the intersection of the origins of cinema with the western projects of social science and imperialism. 7: Edward Said confirms this point clarifying the particular distinction of western marshaling of representational practice: “All cultures tend to make representations of foreign cultures the better to master or in some way control them. Yet not all cultures make representations of foreign cultures and in fact master or control them. This is the distinction, I believe of modern western cultures. It requires the study of western Knowledge or representations of the non-European world to be a study of both those representations and the political power they express.” Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 100. 8: Fabian, p. 122. 9: Jean Piaget, The Moral Development of the Child (New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1965), p. 188; Joseph H. Di Leo, MD, Young Children and Their Drawings (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1970), p. 40.

10: Piaget, p. 340. 11: Piaget, p. 348. 12: Pierre Erny, The Child and His Environment in Black Africa: An Essay on Traditional Education (Nairobi, New York, and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 161. Erny cites the work of R. Bastide who criticizes Piaget’s theories as being “based upon on a too-simplified and inexact conception of education amongst traditional peoples.” 13: Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 15. Nandy draws upon aspects of Philippe Aries’ thesis that the concept

of childhood was expanded in seventeenth century Europe, extending the scope and duration of pedagogic discipline and that the child became increasingly viewed as inferior to, rather than simply smaller than, the adult. 14: Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 42. 15: Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes, Arab and African Film Making (London & New Jersey: Zed Books, 1991), p. 37.

16: Francoise Pfaff provides further description of Emitai stressing the contradictions and opportunism of the French system in The Cinema of Ousmane Sembéne, a Pioneer of African Cinema (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 147. For a description of the connection between assimilationist policies and crisis in the West, see also Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” October 53 (Summer

1990), pp. 94-109. 17: David G. Scanlon, Traditions of African Education (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1964). This book summarizes and discusses notable European governmental documents of the

period which addressed the issue of education in colonial Africa, including: “Das Schulwesen in den

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deutschen Schutzgebieten” (“The School System in the German Colonies”), (1911); the “Phelps-Stokes Report of 1922,” International/League of Nations; “Education Policy in British Tropical Africa,” (1925); and “Reorganization of Education in French Equatorial Africa,” (1925).

18: Malkmus and Armes, p. 37. 19: Said, p. 264. 20: Manthia Diawara, African Cinema: Politics & Culture (Bloomington

& Indianapolis: Indiana

University Press, 1992), pp. 1, 10, 14-17, 104. 21: Noureddine Ghali, “An Interview With Sembéne Ousmane,” in John H. D. Downing, ed., Film and Politics in the Third World (New York: Autonomedia, 1987), p. 42.

22: Ghali, p. 49. 23: Manthia Diawara, “Oral Literature and African Film: Narratology in Wend Kuuni,” Presence African 142 (1987), p. 38. 24: Among them are Kenya’s first president; Jomo Kenyatta, who wrote Facing Mount Kenya (1938, 1962); Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah’s Africa Must Unite (1963); and Tanzanian leader Julius K.

Nyerere’s Freedom and Socialism (1968). For a more extensive bibliography, see George E. F. Urch, Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992), pp. 8-9. 25: Diawara, “Oral Literature and African Film,” pp. 39, 47, 48. 26: The voice-over narrative recedes only to appear twice more: once to remind viewers of the continued burden of Wend Kuuni’s voicelessness. Speaking for Wend Kuuni, the narrator informs the viewer that, though happy with his new family, he still bears grief within. The voice re-emerges the final time, again speaking for Wend Kuuni and foreshadowing his recovery of voice: “That day Wend Kuuni awoke ... with a strange foreboding. Throughout the day that feeling never left him.” 27: Accounts of traditional African pedagogy that I draw upon include: Donald G. Burns, African Education: An Introductory Survey of Education in the Commonwealth Countries (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); Pierre Erny (1981), Op. cit.; David G. Scanlon (1964), Op. cit.; and George E. F. Urch (1992), Op. cit. 28: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983), p. 119. 29: Erny, pp. 7, 56. 30: Ibid., p. 53. 31: Idrissa Ouedraogo’s Yaaba (1989) is another example of the breakdown of film narrative according to intra-generational pedagogical relations. The prevalence of themes of generation conflict/transition in African cinema is indicative of both the significance of age-defined pedagogical spheres and the divisive effects of Eurocolonial education. Other examples of this include Sembéne’s Emitai, Kaboré’s Rabi (1991),

Souleymane Cissé’s Yeleen (1987). These films’ representations of youth function symbolically as a locus of hope and change, but they take on a specifically historical and often literal significance as representations of the generation of national liberation.

Cet essai examine l'influence de la pédagogie visuelle coloniale sur le cinéma africain post-colonial. Les théories coloniales du développement social et technologique s'ajoutent à une théorie occidentale du développement puéril pour justifier l’infantilisation des sujets africains. Les stratégies employées dans les films coloniaux destinés à «éduquer» les Africains (ainsi que celles qui présentent les cultures africaines comme objet d’une science occidentale) ont été appropriées et subverties à l’époque de la libération des pays africains dans des films tel que Emitai et Camp de Thiaroye (Ousmane Sembène, Sénégal, 1971 & 1988) et Wend Kuuni (Gaston Kaboré, Burkina Faso, 1982).

Jude Akudinobi

Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African Cinema

Questions of identity and culture prevalent in contemporary African cinema are often mistaken as, essentially, a contest between “tradition” and “modernity.” This is perhaps a consequence of attempts to devise a critical paradigm that would “explain” the complexities of contemporary African social experience and cinematic practice. However, the realities of contemporary African experience cannot be productively assessed without the revision or abandonment of the tradition/modernity schema. Interestingly, this schema has gained currency in academic and popular “understandings” of contemporary African cinema. Witness a few examples: for Manthia Diawara, it is the basis of social realist narratives;! for Sheila Petty, it is a structuring

principle;* for Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes, it is a conceptual space? The restrictive nature of the modernity/tradition schema is clearly illustrated by the assertion that: “In Africa, modernity and tradition seem so incompatible more than anywhere else.””* This statement marks Africa as aberrant and recalcitrant, and is deeply embedded in racist mythologies (in so far as it suggests that there is something intrinsically wrong or somehow problematic about African peoples/cultures). Equally important, the schema promotes the consignment of African institutions to a primordial cultural space and the bifurcation of very complex social experiences/expressions.

LABYRINTHS Despite the developments that have occured in African arts,’ popular culture,° and cinema’ recently —cultural syncretism and a diversification of themes, styles, and genres — they must still contend with the fact that “western dichotomies of aesthetics and function, tradition and modernity have not facilitated understanding of indigenous

concepts”# and “realities.” Ideas of “modernity” in dominant discourse are implicitly synonymous with western civilization. But, one “cannot easily separate modernity and tradition from some specific tradition and some specific modernity ... The modern comes to the traditional Jude Akudinobi, (1995), “Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African Cinema,” iris, 18, pp. 25-37.

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society as a particular culture with its own traditions.” This specificity is especially important, since the structural opposition of the tradition/modernity formulation does not pit one tradition against another, but polarizes (African) tradition against an essentialist notion of modernity. As has been observed by A.E. Afigbo: In the rival mythologies of European imperialism and colonial nationalism, change was one of the many vital innovations which European rule introduced into what is usually described as traditional societies. If imperial apologists were to compile a dictionary of their own, init the word change, as applied to colonial peoples, would be defined approvingly as progress, a dramatic and beneficial linear transition from a static and unproductive traditional culture to a dynamic and

limitless modernism.!°

The reigning scenario explicitly assigns “tradition” different roles and meanings in the West and Africa. In the West, “tradition” is endowed with a curatorial function — to the extent that it preserves a coherent, albeit idealized, notion of self and continuity;

especially, since the “term tradition belongs to lexical fields that are emotionally charged and evaluative.”!! It should, also, be noted that at the most elementary level, the

opposite of “modern” is “ancient,” not “tradition;” but positing African traditions as opposite to modernity recasts the terms of reference and allows for the surreptitious projection of a narcissistic western(ized) self-image. As has been noted by Corinne Kratz, “notions of tradition are invariably implicated in the politics of identity, and domains central to representations of tradition bear on those politics.”

ROOTS The cinematic critique of ‘modernity’ has a literary antecedent in the works of African novelists whose books were instrumental to the collapse of the mystique of colonial authority. In these works, the disruption of colonial authority, and especially its fixed sense of stability, secured a niche for the construction of an unfettered Africanness. These works also raised questions about the position of Africans within the colonial order (since the latter’s discourse of progress, ventriloquially, is a discourse of power). Some examples include Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Weep not Child, Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood, Ferdidand Oyono’s The Old Man and the Medal and Mongo Beti’s The Poor Christ of Bomba. Close parallels to these examples abound in plays and poems. Consider, for example, the opening lines of Dennis Chukwude Osadebay’s poem, Young Africa’s Plea: “Don’t preserve my customs/ As some fine curios/ To suit some white historian’s tastes.”!? This call for cultural autonomy attacks the interpretive system through which African traditions are fossilized and exoticized; specifically, the institutional authority of the historian is inverted since “in the case of

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African history, colonial historiography denied African societies their past so as to legitimize the process of ‘colonial enlightenment’.”'* Taken together, the literature introduced here demonstrates an unapologetic political consciousness “born in a hostile melieu”'* engendered by “denigration and historical catalepsy.”!° Rather than being intimidated by their circumstances, these writers continued to redefine the status of Africans within the colonial ‘realities’and their post-colonial residues. Works like Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Chinua Achebe’s The Anthills of the Savannah, to name a few, are apt examples of this redefinition. As has been previously stated, the tradition/modernity schema is predicated on the idea of an eternal/unchanging Africa(n). Consequently, representations of African traditions are related adversely to change and the associative ideals of progress. But as has been pointed out by Tanure Ojaide!? — with examples from Things Fall Apart and Death and the King’s Horseman — African cultural life contains intrinsic and complex mechanisms for regeneration and did not need gratuitous catalytic innoculations into its body politic. As Diana Akers Rhoads observes about Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: What is remarkable about his Igbos is the degree to which they achieved the foundations of what most people seek today — democratic institutions, tolerance of other cultures, a balance of male and female principles, capacity to change for the better or to meet new circumstances, a means of redistributing wealth, viable system of morality, support for industriousness, an effective system of justice, striking and memorable poetry and art.'8

Be that as it may, Terence Ranger’s point about the realities of pre-colonial Africa adds an important dimension to this issue. According to him: These societies had certainly valued custom and continuity but custom was loosely defined and infinitely flexible. Custom helped to maintain a sense of identity but it also allowed for an adaptation so spontaneous and natural that it was often unperceived [emphasis mine].!°

Within these parameters, it is not difficult to see that (1) the demands of Euromodernity include overhauling African cultural systems (and the relegation of more diffuse aspects of cultural syncretism); (2) the indices of cultural dynamism are evident in African cultural systems, but their acknowledgement goes against the structures through which the observing (western) self is undeservedly superordinated. Further, as Gusfield points out, “the all too common practice of pitting tradition and modernity against each other as paired opposites tends to overlook [emphasis mine] the mixtures and blends which reality displays.”? It may be useful then, at this point, to point out a few instances of cultural syncretism in the films under examination. In Kasarmu Ce, there is mention of an upcoming local government election — an important event reflecting the people’s contemporary political realities. The unique

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painting on the tailboard of Alhaji Musa’s Mercedes truck shows a cowboy — an icon of western films — adopted and transformed into a unique African popular expression. Also, when Alhaji Musa plots to create artificial scarcity of fertilizer, hinting that the price would rise in two days, the villagers protest, saying that was what they heard from the radio. Even though a transistor radio initiates Kuru’s cultural and professional displacement in La Vie est Belle, it also fosters his resolve to “play electric music.” Thus, at the end of the film, he adopts western musical instruments but transforms his musical impulses in a unique, patently “modern” non-western expression. Furthermore, in Zan Boko, that the dispossessed farmer’s son (Tibo) fashions a car (a modern contraption) rather than a “traditional” toy, is metaphoric of the adaptive capacity of African cultures. Besides, a crucial point in the film is that there are not enough classrooms to absorb the overflowing demand for an ostensibly western education. Above all, the moral crusader in the film, Yabre, is not a town-crier but a “modern” TV/newspaper journalist. Similarly, in Sango Malo, the reformist crusader, Malo Malo Bernard, is a western-

trained schoolteacher who dons blue jeans and leather jackets, accoutrements of western pop culture, but nonetheless espouses the educational equivalent of liberation theology. Moreover, the centrality to community life of Honba’s shop attests to certain cultural modulations. In Quartier Mozart, the witch Maman Thekla uses a taxi as a means of

transportation (rather than the broom prevalent in western folklore or its indigenous variant). Atango (also called Young Ladies Candy) is a Sorbonne graduate and aspiring fashion designer. Crucially, the film’s locale — a working class neighborhood — is a feature of “modern” capitalist class distinctions. To be sure, the cinematic discourse on post-colonial identity is less premised on the reconstruction of a historical past, than it is interested in examining the present. It rests on the view that new frames of reference — terms, categories, premises — are necessary to revise the circumscriptions by means of which Africa is positioned in the dominant discourse on modernity. The idea of modernity is thus viewed not through idealized and universalist tenets, but in terms of its impact on African cultures and identity. This shift is remarkable because prior to it, African realities had been (1) interpreted for the African through the bogus logic of colonial authority; (2) obsfucated and rendered meaningless, except to the extent that they enhance the desirability of western values; or (3) otherwise consigned to the domain of absurdity. In the films under consideration, we find incidents of “magic,” “witchcraft,” and “divination.” In dominant discourse these incidents are often consigned to the realm of the absurd, since they ostensibly negate western rationality, logic, and accepted “scientific” modes of inquiry. But as Renaat Devisch notes: 39

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Traditional divination cannot be said to be pre-scientific any more than any other authentic symbolic practice, nor can it be said to be contrary to a rational outlook: it is qualitatively

different.7!

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Fascination with the supernatural is not unique to Africans, as any observer of western popular culture would find. In fact, this fascination has roots in early Christianity:

The medieval church acted as a repository of magical power which it dispensed to the faithful to help them cope with a wide range of daily activities and secular problems ... Religious charms, talismans and amulets were worn as prophylactic agents against evil and bad luck. Such devices were the essential props of medieval superstition, symbolically expressing the potency of

religious magic mediated by the church.”

There is little doubt some of these elements exist in “modern” Christian beliefs and practices. Besides, commodification of these practices in the forms of psychics, fortunetellers, astrologists and the like provide an enormous repertoire of daily western life. The point here is not to argue for the validity or credibility of such beliefs — since as will be shown, they are treated ambivalently by the filmmakers — but to examine whether their supportive grids can offer any understanding of how the African constructs notions of self and world. Saddik Balewa’s Kasarmu Ce establishes the trangression of cosmic and cultural harmony as the predatorial Alhaji Musa Treda’s undoing. Appropriately, Musa Treda dies a rather mysterious death (framed in a context beyond empirical reality and logic). Furthermore, when a troubled Sani urges the diviner, Hadi, “to look into the sands” for

a clue to his grandfather’s death, it is waved off and countered with a parable about thievery that provides the moral imperative of the film. Ordinarily: People look into divination to uncover the hidden, to gain insight into occurences which go counter to the even tenor of life and to the normal sense of events, so as to enable remedial measures to be taken or to restore peace of mind. Such occurences include dangers and needs outside technical control, disasters, exceptional losses, misfortune, mysterious illness and death, insoluble conflict.”

Thus, Mr. Nganga, the diviner in La Vie est Belle, is at the core of the film’s narrative dynamics. We find asomnambulate Kuru, apparently under a spell, during a session Mr. Nganga holds for Kuru’s love interest Kabibi. The spell is, however, broken rather too easily and comically when the wife of Kuru’s employer, orders him back to work. Mr. Nganga also divines correctly that Kuru is a houseboy, not the free-spending rich man Kabibi had thought. Furthermore, Kabibi’s mysterious illness following Kuru’s attempted suicide, and her subsequent cure at the hand of Mr. Nganga, rather confirms the idea that in African systems of belief: Illness is not conceived of as a consequence of pathological changes; rather, the supernatural element is brought into a causal relationship with health and ill-health.

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This holistic approach restores her to health and love. In Quartier Mozart, the inexplicable explosion of a wine glass at dinner is attributed to witchcraft. Subsequently, Mad Dog, the imperious head of the household, hires a priest to exorcise the house — an action which, arguably, manifests his belief about the existence and efficacy of witchcraft. Interestingly, a recent report states that the persecution of witches in Cameroon has abated so much that “now some of them enjoy a degree of official recognition, since judges have no alternative but to rely on their version and expertise which has been established as conclusive proof.” A witch, Maman Thekla, is also at the center of Quartier Mozart’s narrative. Her transformation of a schoolgirl, Queen of the Hood, and of herself into

a man (Panka) who causes men’s genitals to vanish,

initiates an exploration of gender politics. The film’s construction of witchcraft as an assault on masculinity, incidentally, has its equivalent in the early Christian church: Interestingly, the church’s main handbook of witchcraft Malleus Malleficarum (literally — the hammer of the witches) was heavily concerned with such masculinity problems as castration, bedevilled intercourse, vanishing penises and impotence — neurotic fears which modern psychologists would correlate with increased sexual repression.”

While the above examples do not necessarily establish a universalist understanding of witchcraft, it could at least be said that its significance in the film points out certain

phenomena through which cultures mediate social order. In Zan Boko, the insistence on a water-ritual (to palliate labor pangs) is significant not just because the birth and the child are symbolic of the culture’s regenerative capacity; fundamentally, it positions the film within a system of beliefs in which other realities interact with everyday realities.

BRIDGES Itis important to note that contemporary African cinematic expressions are not much concerned with policing cultural identities and formulations. Rather than construct a monolithic persona anathematic to “modernity,” these works propose critical analysis of self and world. Mama Dingari, the citified landlady in La Vie est Belle, who is given to exploitation, at one point accuses Mr. Nvouandu, Kabibi’s rich suitor, of being a “fetisher” — that is, an aficionado of “dark” powers — bars him from setting foot in her compound and even suggests that Kabibi go to the village for “exorcisation.” Interestingly, her repugnance is not so much based on altruistic principles; rather, it stems from the belief that his alleged proclivity might bring her adverse business. In Quartier

Mozart, Lady Di is admired as a trend-setter; Michael Jackson is dismissed as “too effeminate,” to the preference of Denzel Washington, who is appraised as a “real man, fine as wine.” We also hear about Caroline of Monaco’ s menstrual cycle and how (some)

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African-Americans — tinted with racist propaganda and embroiled in a similarly complex identificatory melieu —reflect a negative view of Africans: “They think we are savages.” In La Vie est Belle we also hear the question, “Playing Rambo, eh?” — an obvious reference to Sylvester Stallone’s hyper-masculinist screen persona. In Zan Boko, aTV program, “The Golden Dream,” promises to take viewers to “the magnificient Riviera.” These examples seem to imply that the bulk of African films are more interested in opening up areas for understanding, negotiation and interpretation of their contemporary predicament. Further examples abound. In Sango Malo, a group of villagers listen, with rapt attention, to the airline steward’s “cosmopolitan” pontifications: “If you like noise, hamburgers and pop-music go to the States ... But Iprefer Paris— wine and cheese.” And when asked if he meant palm-wine, an indigeneous drink of choice, he replies, “No. Good table-wine.” A similar situation arises in Zan Boko where a local delicacy, Soumbala, is deemed unhygienic by Tinga’s rich neighbor, Mr. Tougouri, who instigates its prohibition by registering his distaste with health officials. Taken together, the two examples signal the rejection of a cultural heritage of which certain dietary preferences are logical extentions. Articulating these dietary preferences around absolute good/bad categories represents the characters’ cultural destabilization or alienation. Furthermore, it illustrates the limitations that “modernity” — here, the acquisition of “refined” tastes — places on African identity. Significantly then, these films dramatize the dilemma of self-representation. In Sango Malo, Malo Malo Bernard’s innovative curriculum subverts residual colonial education but, ironically, he is undone by his contempt for certain “traditions” —especially his decision to cultivate a sacred forest, the nexus between the ancestors and the living.’ Land is also imbued with a historical and spiritual significance in Zan Boko (which means, “The Place Where the Placenta Is Buried”’).”* In the film, the encroachment of the city on a village is equated with social atrophy. For the Mossi, land is “imbued with a meaning that is at once religious, cultural, historic and emotional but also signifies a real relation with place.””’ The issue here, therefore, is about estrange-

ment from home, hearth and heritage. In this vein, Saddik Balewa’s points about the metaphoric/nationalistic inflections of his film’ s title Kasarmu Ce (“This Land is Ours”) deserves note.*? Thus, Alhaji Malik, who covets a village’s land because of its rich mineral desposits lives in opulence — peacocks, Mercedes-Benz, waterfountain — and is constituted as a figure of disruption just like Mad Dog in Quartier Mozart. But in the case of Mad Dog, privilege establishes a tyrannical repertoire characterized by fantasies of masculinity. Ironically, Mad Dog recruits Panka (a man inhabited by the spirit of a woman, Maman Thekla) to be his nightguard. Having divorced himself from the land, Mad Dog finds reassurance and social legitimation outside “traditional” limits. When Honba the shopkeeper in Sango Malo is faced with adverse business conditions, fostered in part by his own greed and Malo Malo’s demystification of market

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forces for the villagers, he procures prostitutes to circumscribe the villagers’ demand for a fair market system. This move strategically expands his areas of profitability. The strongest link of sexuality with privilege could perhaps be found in La Vie est Belle. In this ribald farce, Mr. Nvouandu, an impotent, westernized African elite seeks remedy in ‘traditional’ medicine. But Mr. Nganga, the diviner, expresses this dilemma thus: “Not to get it up while still young, that’s a crime for a man as rich as you.” Clearly, this understanding conflates virility with wealth. The assumptions Mr. Nganga makes about ‘prevailing’ values, therefore, signal a broader, social crisis. As has been said by Ousmane Sembène: A society that has its own culture can confront all sorts of calamities and adversities with its head held high. I always say, if Iwere a woman, l’d never marry an African. Women should marry real men, not mentally deficient ones.*!

This rather provocative statement is not really about any unique pathological affliction of African men; its barbs are directed at a political and cultural framework that cultivates

uncritical submission to “modernity.”

MILIEUX Ultimately, the idea of selfhood the films propagate becomes feasible not by internalizing the extreme polarities of “tradition” or “modernity” but by foregrounding certain commonalities. This is very important because the dominant discourse about Africa in the West has stressed contrasts rather than commonalities. Interestingly, since the categories of distinction had ipso facto been based on antitheses, it seems fitting that the African may use those as points of departure in order to reconstruct his/her fractured identity. Indeed, this point is crucial to V.Y. Mudimbe’s observation: Marginality designates the intermediate space between the so-called African tradition and the projected modernity of colonialism... This space reveals not so much that new imperatives could achieve a jump into modernity, as the fact that despair gives this intermediate space its precarious pertinence and simultaneously, its dangerous importance... It reveals the strong tension between a modernity that often is an illusion of development, and a tradition that refects a poor image of a mythical past... rather than being a step in the imagined “evolutionary process,” it has been the locus of paradoxes that call into question the modalities and implications of modernization in

Africa.*? As acorollary, much has been made about the rural/urban ‘dichotomy’ — as a staple of African cinema— in sucha way that the African is essentially (mis)construed as homo ruralis.** Given such an approach, and shrouded as it is by undertones of biological/

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cultural determinism, it is not surprising then that certain African social realities are left open to arbitrary interpretation; for example, conceiving “the urban phenomenon as an expression of modernity and thus development.” Absent from this reasoning, usually, is any notion of modernity — other than progress —as accessory to the enervating cultural configuration of contemporary urban Africa. Thus, what is under scrutiny in African films is not urbanism per se, since cities existed in Africa before colonialism, but

colonial urbanism,* which expedited imperial interests and burdened the African with a position of severe marginality: Hence, there is need to investigate privileged “places of colonization,’ where change and westernization occured early. Obviously, the city is one of these places, not only as a geographical site, but as a privileged locus of inter-penetration and mediation where change was necessary for people to manage survival and future, neither by mere collaboration nor by stubborn resistance but through an increasing process to adjust and combine internal social structures with external

ones.*

Representation of the urban phenomenon in African films thus emerges at the intersection of African cultural assertion and imperial ‘domesticating’ efforts. In Sango Malo, prostitutes are recruited from the city; in Kasarmu Ce, the city is chaotic and corrupt; in Zan Boko, itis disruptive and rapacious; in Quartier Mozart, itis incarceratory; and in La Vie est Belle, itis asybaritic haven. These depictions, therefore, mark the cities as reference points for the reconstitution of fractured African identities. One must not,

however, overlook the multi-layered grids that shape this view. In Quartier Mozart, the city is both an enchanted place (it is bewitched) and a place of enchantment (it is fascinating). Furthermore, according to the director, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, the film’s title

signifies the hybridity of contemporary African existence; but both it and Vladivostok, the other city mentioned in the film, allude to a historical context in which the colonial

establishment of dominion included renaming African towns. Interestingly, despite the vicissitudes of city life, in La Vie est Belle, Kuru finds love, fame, and fortune there.

Thus, because the “modern” and the “traditional” exist side by side in contemporary Africa, their moments of friction — even collision —inevitably provide elemental sparks for investigating the situation that had previously been marked by evasion and insinuations. The infusion of political and cultural awareness in these films not only offers a contrasting ethos to the proposals of “modernity” but, also, attests to a complex tonality in the African experience. It affords the African a claim to and ownership of a unique and essentially unapologetic identity. The critique of “modernity” in these films, it must be stressed, does not advocate a return to anachronisms. In fact, it recognizes that society is dynamic, that changes are inevitable, but that the investment of Euromodernity with some kind of talismanic powers underwrites Africa’s cultural enslavement.

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Interestingly, various forms of ambivalence about “traditional” ideals manifest themselves in the films. In Quartier Mozart, the character “Good For Is Dead” (whose name means, No More Credit),** either out of frustration or individualistic affliction, declares: “Because I am a brother you want credit. Call me Good For Is Dead.” In Sango

Malo, the village chief — ideally the repose of tradition — is shown to be a corrupt and conniving rogue. Intimations of summary justice in Kasarmu Ce, where a mob chases arobbery suspect, could be read as an expression of community outrage, breakdown of judicial order, or a feature of ineffective law enforcement. Not even the age-old tradition of bride-wealth escapes scrutiny: In La Vie est Belle, it causes filial discord between

Mama Dingari and Kabibi but also receives a peculiar twist when Nvouandu offers a rotisserie (a modern gadget) as part of Kabibi’s bride-wealth; in Sango Malo, it results in tragedy; in Kasarmu Ce, it engenders debtorship. None of this, however, detracts from the idea that advocating new foundations for an African modernity favors cultural syncretism, but with the proviso that such a “synthesis must be within the parameters of African tradition rather than outside it.”*? Thus, Malo Malo’s efforts in Sango Malo are not so much about which developmental trajectory to follow, as a facile reading of the film would suggest, but the (re)definition of education itself. The talkshow sequence on “The Problems and Needs of Modern Urbanization” in Zan Boko, especially the officials’ vapid regurgitation of bourgeois “remedies,” echoes Malo’s concern. In Quartier Mozart, Maman Thekla provides an education of sorts to the schoolgirl, Queen of the Hood, outside of the “regular” curriculum. The moral imperative of Kasarmu Ce

does not derive from Euro-modernist or Islamic “traditions,” but from the timeless wisdom of the Hausas as articulated in parables and proverbs. Even La Vie est Belle, for all its frivolity, trumpets the value of perseverance. By and large, these instances provide the characters access to self-knowledge requisite for the reclamation of subjectivity and equilibrium. If the discursive frameworks through which the choices are constructed appear to favor “tradition,” it is perhaps because “modernity” had denied the African an autonomous identity and viable authority. If the “modernized” Africans appear to be the “baddies” more often than not, it is perhaps an index of their status in the “new” order — usually marked by authority and privelege, but also indicating their circumscription — to the extent that they have not been able to reconcile adequately the complexity of contemporary African existence, and to the extent that in exercising their newfound potency they duplicate those sets of relations which hitherto had held the African at a disadvantage.

CONCLUSION What the films discussed here do, among other things, is give the concept “African” a more realistic — complex and plural — representation. Kasarmu Ce, for instance,

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typifies the Mazruian* triple heritage — Arab/Islamic, Euro-colonial and indigenous strands — from which so many contemporary Africans weave their identities. These films also manifest the struggle to find a language to articulate the ideological tensions generated by casting African cultural heritage as a dark shadow on modernity. Thus, the phone disconnection at the end of Zan Boko accentuates the disjuncture within contemporary Africa exemplified by characters like Kouma, Tinga’s brother in Abdijan. In some instances, the sequesterment is marked by anthropomorphization: in Zan Boko, a muscian laments the community’s fate with the comment that, “The monster has

triumphed.” In Kasarmu Ce, the predatory Alhaji Malik is metaphorically linked to the serpent; and in Quartier Mozart, the alias of the tyrannical police officer Abina Charles de Gaulle — despite his invocation of authority/history/Frenchness by appropriating the late French president’s name — is Mad Dog. Furthermore, the films force us to acknowledge that inseparable from the discussions about self, society and change is the question of moral authority. This point is particularly noteworthy because “In the African traditional societies, the welfare of the individual was a function and conse-

quence of the welfare of the society, the society being summum bonum of African

traditional moral philosophy. Consequently, the films are suffused with instances of corruption —personal, official and religious. The latter, for instance, is shown with subtlety in Kasarmu Ce and through the caricatural priests in Sango Malo and Quartier Mozart. Evidently, the tradition/modernity formulation glosses over the categories and terms on which the discourse of contemporary African politics hinges. Not only is it mechanistic, it is patently simplistic and expressly misleading. As has been noted: Even the most industrialized nations have many “traditional characteristics,” while pre-industrial societies possess many of the traits usually imputed to “modernity”... all societies are transitional and more can be learned by starting from this assumption than by casually utilizing traditional-

modernity classification.”

Notes

1: Manthia Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1992), p. 140. 2: Sheila Petty, “Cities, Subjects, Sites: Sub-Saharan Cinema and the Reorganization of Knowledge,” Afterimage (Summer 1991), p. 11. 3: Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes, Arab and African Filmmaking (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1991),

p. 210.

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4: Tereza Wagner and Claude Ondobo, “African Cinema: A Young and Relatively Unknown Art,” Unesco Courier (March 1988), p. 27. 5: See African Studies Review 32(2) (September 1989).

6: See, also, African Studies Review 30(3) (September 1987). 7; N. Frank Ukadike, “African Films: A Retrospective and a Vision for the Future,” Critical Arts 7(1)

(October, 1993), pp. 43-60. 8: Paula Ben-Amos, “African Visual Arts from a Social Perspective,” African Studies Review 32(2)

(1989), p. 38. 9: Joseph R. Gusfield, “Tradition and Modernity: Misplaced Polarities in the Study of Social Change,” in Political Development and Social Change, eds., Jason L. Finkle and Richard W. Gable (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1971) p. 25.

10: A.E. Afigbo, “Education, Urbanization and Social Change in Colonial Africa,” in Readings in African Humanities: African Cultural Development, ed., Ogbu U. Kalu (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publish-

ers, 1980), p. 129. 11: Corinne A. Kratz, “We’ve Always Done It Like This ... Except for a Few Details”: ‘Tradition’ and ‘Innovation’ in Okiek Ceremonies,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35(1) (January 1993), p. 31.

12: Ibid., p. 60. 13: Isidore Okpewho, ed., The Heritage of African Poetry (London: Longman, 1985), p. 241. 14: Arnold Temu and Bonaventure Swai, Historians and Africanist History: A Critique (London: Zed Press, 1981), p. 113.

15: Omafume F. Onoge, “The Crisis of Consciousness in Modern African Literature: A Survey,” in Onigu Otite, ed., Themes in African Social and Political Thought (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers,

1978), p. 106. 16: Abdul R. Jan Mohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), p. 151.

17: Tanure Ojaide, “Modern African Literature and Cultural Identity,” African Studies Review, 35(3) (December 1992), p. 47.

18: Diana Akers Rhoads, “Culture in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,” African Studies Review, 36(2) (September 1993), p. 61. 19: Terence Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” in The Invention of Tradition, eds.

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 247. 20: Gusfield, p. 26. 21: Renaat Devisch, “Perspectives on divination in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa,” in Theoretical Explorations in African Religion, eds., Wim van Binsbergen and Matthew Schoffeleers (London: Kegan Paul International, Ltd., 1985), p. 56. 22: James Curran, “Communications, Power and Social Order” in Culture, Society and the Media, eds., Michael Gurevitch et al. (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 206.

23: Devisch, p. 50. 24: Onigu Otite, “Introduction: The Study of Social Thought in Africa” in Themes in African Social and Political Thought, ed., Onigu Otite (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1978), p. 24. 25: Catherine Sackey, “Witchcraft in Cameroon,” West Africa 3943 (19-25 April 1993), p. 663 26: Paul Hoch, White Hero, Black Beast: Racism, Sexism and the Mask of Masculinity (London: Pluto Press, 1979), p. 130.

27: See Chinua Achebe, “Literature of Celebration,” West Africa (5-11 February 1990), p. 167. His points about the Earth goddess, Ana, in Igbo culture, provides a pertinent parallel: “Ana combined two formidable roles in the Igbo pantheon as fountain of creativity in the world and custodian of moral order in human society {emphasis mine]. An abominable act is called nso-ana, taboo-to-Earth.” 28: In another interesting parallel, the Igbos bury the umblical cord. 29: Gaston Kabore ... Production notes as quoted in Sheila Petty, Op. Cit., p. 11.

Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African Cinema

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30: ‘Biyi Bandele-Thomas, “This Land is Ours,” West Africa (12-18 August 1991), p. 1326. 31: Firinne Ni Chreachain, “If I were a woman, I’d never marry an African,” interview with Sembene Ousmane, African Affairs, 91(363) (April 1992), p. 244. 32: V.Y Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 5. 33: Catherine Coquery-Vidvrovitch, “The Process of Urbanization in Africa (from the Origins to the Beginning of Independence),” African Studies Review 34(1) (April 1991), p. 44. 34: Ibid., p. 37. 35: Ibid., p. 71. 36: Ibid., Op. Cit., p. 73. 37: Library of African Cinema (San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1993), p. 15. 38: Ibid., p. 14. 39: Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechuku Madubuike, Toward the Decolonization of African

Literature (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1980), p. 239. 40: See Ali A. Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Boston: Little Brown, 1986). 41: Friday M. Mbon, “African Traditional Socio-Religious Ethics and National Development: The

Nigerian Case,” in Jacob K. Olupona, ed., African Traditional Religions in Contemporary Society (New York:

Paragon House, 1991), p. 102.

'

42: Finkle and Gable, p. v11.

Mettant en question l’idée du progrès et l'utilité de | ’opposition tradition/modernité, cet essai suggère que la question de l'identité — telle qu’elle se dessine dans le cinéma africain contemporain — est bien plus complexe et plus importante qu'on ne l'avait jusqu'ici pensé. A travers une analyse des représentations de la conscience culturelle (ainsi que celles de la résistance à la culture), l'essai suggère que les forces qui font du cinéma un outil politique sont créées par la tension entre d’une part l’histoire politique et sociale de l'Afrique et d’autre part le désir de revalider les institutions africaines (et par là l'identité africaine elle-méme).

IRIS offers a new African film for 35mm rental or videotape sale SABABU

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Joanny Troare

Burkina Faso, 1992, 89 minutes, English Subtitles

1992 was an incredible year in African cinema. It was the year of Guelwaar, of Hyenas, and of Samba Traore. In the excitement over these masterworks by noted directors, the press had little space to promote SABABU, a film in the same class as these others. Now it can be yours. SABABU, acommon term in many west African languages, is nearly impossible to translate. It identifies a situation that produces a result, suggesting chance, choice and perhaps predestination. Joanny Traore feels it may best be translated by the French term grace à as in “thanks to this sudden sandstorm, I have met the person of my dreams.” Questions of chance, choice, and predestination weave their way through the several interrelated village anecdotes of SABABU. Binding them together is amurder mystery: a stranger who comes to the village is found dead the next morning. Is the chief culpable? That’s what the authorities claim. But the village elders disagree. And to extricate themselves from this imposed guilt, as well as from an imposed new chief, they

send a pair of young men on a long and marvellous journey to meet a diviner. SABABU exhibits at least three aspects of African cinema we have come to appreciate. Its satire of bureaucracy pits French-speaking townsmen against the villagers who have their own language and other secret ways of communicating. Ousmane Sembène has done much with this in Mandabi and most recently in Guelwaar. Between these forces sits the comic translator who does his best to keep everyone happy, perhaps profiting just a bit from his position. Ingenuous tales of village life form the second aspect of SABABU that we have loved in African film, especially in Idrissa Ouedreago’s work. And indeed Samba Traore shows distinct debts to SABABU. Finally, no one will forget the incredible landscapes this film of initiation takes us

through. Like Yeelen, the young men traverse forest, savannah, water, and rugged mountains in search of a strange person in a distant village. SABABU is a genial film, told with humor, irony, and a love of story-telling. Along the way one sinks into the rhythm of traditional life in West Africa. This has been a welcome experience for its audiences in Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and

throughout Europe. Youcan experience it yourself. Rent the 35mm print at $175 or buy a videotape (specify VHS, Beta, or Umatic) at $79 (shipping not included). Write Institute for Cinema and Culture, 162 BCSB, University of Iowa, Iowa City IA 52242.

Michel Serceau

Le cinéma d’ Afrique noire francophone face au modele occidental : la rançon du refus

Le cinéma del’ Afrique noire francophone naît autour de 1960 dans un continent qui n’a pas de tradition propre en ce domaine. Il va donc emprunter sa conception du récit et de la représentation au cinéma occidental, qui est alors, bien qu’il existe (comme en

Inde) d’autres et importantes cinématographies, le modèle dominant. Mais on se trouve devant un double paradoxe : 1. Le type de récit et de représentation auquel adhère le public africain ne correspond pas exactement, de toute façon, aux normes de ce cinéma occidental. Ce n’est ni le

modèle européen ni à proprement parler le modèle américain. S’il fallait définir l'esthétique entre les formes les plus sophistiquées du cinéma hollywoodien et celles du cinéma oriental. Ce public recherche moins — c’est là sans doute qu’ est le dénominateur commun — l’effet de réalité, la logique romanesque et le psychologisme que la puissance imaginante des personnages et des situations. Qu'il s’agisse du mélodrame ou du film d’aventure, c’est le genre qui, avec ses conventions et la complicité qu’il appelle chez le spectateur, est et reste le cadre pragmatique du spectacle cinématographique. 2. Le cinéma occidental est confronté à ce moment à d’importantes remises en question de son langage et de son statut : — Le système hollywoodien entre dans la plus grave crise de son histoire. — Uncertain nombre de cinéastes européens affranchissent le récit et lareprésentation des normes et codes de ce que l’on a appelé depuis «cinéma classique». Ce dernier était, rappelons-le, fondé et motivé par la vraisemblance, |’ effet de réalité, des schèmes narratifs hérités du roman du 196 siècle.

—

L’affinement des technologies donne par ailleurs un nouvel essor au documentaire, l’engage même dans une mue à partir de laquelle l’appellation tombera en désuétude. On préférera parler de «cinéma du réel».

Il y a donc, on l’a maintes fois souligné, un écart entre la démarche des cinéastes

africains et le goût, voire l’horizon d’attente de ce qui était dans le principe leur public. Le problème est que, éduqués et venus à l’âge d'homme à la fin de la période coloniale, formés en Europe, les cinéastes africains se donnaient une mission d’observation et d’analyse critique. S’ils entendaient parler à leurs compatriotes, ils les considéraient Michel Serceau, (1995), «Le cinéma d’ Afrique noire francophone face au modèle occidental : la rançon du refus», iris, 18, pp. 39-46.

Michel Serceat

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plus comme des citoyens à éclairer que comme un public à séduire. La fonction éducatrice et démystificatrice du cinéma passait avant sa fonction de spectacle. oe

x

Mais, eu égard à la situation et à l’évolution du cinéma occidental, leur démarche ne

s’est pas caractérisée seulement par le refus de ces formes les plus stéréotypées qu’affectionnait leur virtuel public. La modernité, le cinéma du réel, qui apparaissaient alors comme des alternatives (en même temps que des révisions critiques) au modèle hollywoodien, ont été également refusées. Logique ou contradiction ? Telle est la question à laquelle je voudrais tenter de répondre ici en examinant successivement les modalités et les conséquences de chacun de ces refus.

Refus de la modernité

Il y a eu certes des exemples notoires de films ayant une facture moderniste. On peut citer Sur la dune de la solitude (1964), La femme au couteau (1969), de Timité Bassori, A nous deux France (1970), de Désiré Ecaré, Touki-Bouki (1973), de Djibril Diop Mambety, à un moindre titre Soleil O (1969), de Med Hondo. Mais on remarquera combien, groupés autour de 1970, ces films ne sont pas seulement liés aux recherches

et mutations qui travaillaient alors le cinéma européen. Ils en dépendent. On en verra une preuve dans la nature quelque peu hybride de plusieurs de ces films. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra' avait justement remarqué dans La femme au couteau «l'influence d’ Antonioni, mais un Antonioni mal digéré». On peut se demander donc s’il n’y a pas emprunts plus qu’influences. Ces films témoigneraient au total de ce qu’un nombre non négligeable de cinéastes africains se définissent implicitement comme une sorte d’élite intellectuelle, une sorte d’avant-garde artistique. Mais, si Sur la dune de la solitude et Touki-Bouki sont hybrides, c’est aussi parce que,

quoiqu’a des degrés différents, ils se réfèrent tous deux à la littérature orale africaine. La rupture avec la linéarité et le psychologisme du cinéma classique ne sont pas tant donc, dans le second surtout, mis au service d’une quelconque modernité qu’ils ne témoignent de la recherche d’ homologies entre la structure et la pragmatique du conte et les possibilités du langage audio-visuel. II s’agit là, cependant, d’ oeuvres isolées et non de tendances, d’oeuvres isolées qui n’ont pas fait souche et qui datent dans la carrière même de leurs auteurs. Celle de Med Hondo est à cet égard significative. Après deux films qui articulent de manière complexe, en dehors de la logique narrative du film de fiction, plusieurs modes d’énonciation et de représentation, il oeuvre dans le champ du cinéma du réel, dans l’ordre plus précisément du cinéma d’intervention (Nous aurons toute la mort pour dormir, 1977), pour en venir finalement, avec Sarraounia, à la forme la plus classique qui soit du récit, du personnage et de la représentation. Cette trajectoire n'est-elle pas emblématique de toute une partie du cinéma africain ?

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Refus des genres

I n’y a guère que dans le domaine de la comédie que l’on peut discerner quelques tentatives suivies de productions répondant aux lois du cinéma de genre. Encore sontelles, là aussi, des oeuvres d’isolés. Si l’on ne peut pas, globalement, parler à propos de l'Afrique d’un cinéma de la modernité, s’il n’y a eu sur ce plan que des tentatives avortées, marginales ou ambigués, il faut parler par contre d’une véritable indifférence au cinéma de genre. Elle s’explique difficilement, si l’on tient compte tout du moins des dispositions du public africain. Mais il se peut qu’elle soit un corollaire de la visée politique et sociale que se donnaient ces cinéastes. Rien ne prouve que ce soit l’effet d’une analyse, qui les aurait amenés à constater l’impossibilité d’articuler la pragmatique des genres avec l’horizon d’attente d’ Africains formés par l’oralité. Car ils pensaient aux genres effectivement pratiques, que ce soit ceux du cinéma européen, du cinéma américain ou ceux du cinéma oriental. II n’y a pas eu en ce domaine de réflexion théorique. Ils ne pensaient pas au principe du genre, au genre comme matrice et condition pragmatique, dont il y a des antécédents dans la tradition littéraire africaine voire dans des formes de spectacle. Pierre Haffner a bien montré en effet dans Les fondements du cinéma africain? comment certains types de représentation et de mise en scène «théâtrale» pouvaient être les assises de l’invention de formes cinématographiques non déconnectées des modes d’énonciation et de praxis auxquels adhérait le public africain. Refus du cinéma du réel

Le mot est d’autant justifié qu’ici le paradoxe se redouble. IT y a eu en effet des Africains qui ont oeuvré dans ce domaine. Mais ils ne l’ont pas fait sur leur continent d’origine. C’est au Nord de la Méditerranée que des réalisateurs africains ont signé des documentaires ou des films d’intervention. Au sud de la Méditerranée 1’ écrasante majorité de la production appartient au cinéma de fiction. Soleil 0 et Les bicots-négres, vos voisins, qui relèvent du cinéma d’ intervention, ont été réalisés par Med Hondo sur le sol frangais. On pourrait citer aussi les premiers films de Désiré Ecaré (Concerto pour un exil, 1967 ; A nous deux France, 1970). Or, sur une rive ou sur l’autre, ces films ont, sinon une thématique commune, tout du moins un dénominateur commun : ils traitent

tous de la quête ou de la problématique de I’ identité. Le clivage des modes génériques met en corrélation la différence des deux contextes géographiques et socio-historiques. Alors que, sur le continent européen, la forme du cinéma d’ intervention est (outre que liée à un courant alors assez vivace) pertinente d’une volonté de dénoncer injustices et aliénation, on emprunte sur le continent africain, dans le contexte de la post-colonisation et des mutations économiques, les voies du réalisme critique. Mais on a affaire, dans le

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cadre du cinéma de fiction, 4 un mode de récit dont la pragmatique refoule la capacité à laquelle prétend (à tort ou à raison) le cinéma d’ intervention. Si l’on considére une autre catégorie de cet ensemble (ou de cette mouvance) que l’on appelle «cinéma du réel» : le film ethnographique, ce n’est pas seulement de refoulement qu’ il faut parler , mais —c’est ici que le mot prend toute sa force et tout son sens — d’un catégorique et violent refus. On connait a ce sujet les propos de Sembéne, reprochant aux Européens une démarche qu’il qualifie d’entomologiste. Si ce cinéma était tout entier et uniquement imprégné de colonialisme, on comprendait cette réaction. Mais la critique en question repose, cela ne saurait étre un hasard, sur une conception simplifiée du film ethnographique, ou tout du moins sur une indifférence (refus ou aveuglement ?) à son évolution. Rappelons en deux mots cette dernière. IT y a eu, c’est indéniable, un cinéma ethnographique — et plus largement un cinéma documentaire — qui regardait de l’extérieur les cultures, entretenant par là une distance pseudoscientifique. On peut parler à son sujet d’une utopie. Elle résidait dans sa prétendue objectivité, dans une façon illusoire de se situer en-dehors des deux cultures, celle de

l’observant et celle de l’observé, de prétendre appréhender un objet là où il y a deux sujets. Mais le cinéma ethnographique a opéré progressivement une véritable révolution qui l’a amené à prendre les êtres comme des sujets, à les donner à voir et à entendre au spectateur comme sujets. Non comme entités pseudo-scientifiques ou comme objets exotiques. Moins comme objets de connaissance que comme lieu d’une interrogation, témoignages d’une contradictoire, conflictuelle, voire ambiguë, inscription dans un

contexte historique et une réalité socio-culturelle. C’est le Rouch de Moi un noir (plus que celui de La chasse au lion à l’arc) qu’il faut prendre ici comme exemple. Or cette évolution du cinéma ethnographique, qui est un écho de l’évolution de tout le cinéma du réel, les cinéastes africains ne l’ont pas prise en compte. Elle ne les a pas conduits, alors que ce chemin (le film de Rouch en témoigne) leur était offert dès le début de leur aventure, à se l’approprier pour analyser les contradictions de leurs sociétés. Si l’on comprend la distance prise vis à vis du documentaire classique (fruit sans doute d’une tradition occidentale, expression du regard occidental et dans bien des cas nouvelle cristallisation de l’exotisme), on se demande si le refus de la démarche ethnographique n’est pas la marque d’un véritable évitement de la complexité du réel lorsqu'il s’agit de l’appréhender dans le présent historique et dans son véritable lieu (il ne serait totalement appréhendé que dans l’éloignement et dans la forme que lui donne l’éloignement). Paulin Vieyra s’est fait l’écho de ce refus en 1975 dans son ouvrage. Il en a fait une analyse juste quand il l’a imputé à la formation occidentale du cinéaste et de l’intellectuel africain. C’est parce qu’ils entendent engager |’ Afrique sur la voie de l’évolution qu'ils refuseraient d’en contempler le passé. Selon Paulin Vieyra cela peut motiver, même «la violence des réactions du public intellectuel africain... Non pas qu’il nie la réalité historique présente, mais parce que la représentation qu’il faudrait en faire le gêne : elle dérange l’image qu’il aimerait à travers sa propre évolution sociale, voir être

Le cinéma d’ Afrique noire francophone face au modèle occidental...

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celle de I’ Afrique...» Ce n’est pas seulement donc l’occidentalisme d’une démarche ; ce n’est pas un point de vue occidentaliste qui est réfusé. Si, bien sûr, la projection vers le futur occulte l’ observation de la complexité du présent, on refuse surtout — et plus radicalement — une fonction du cinéma : sa capacité d’ effectuer une analyse du réel. On préfère l’aptitude qu’il a à tenir, à travers l’histoire, un discours. En formulant les choses de cette manière, je crée, certes, une fausse dichotomie. Car il n’y a jamais, linguistiquement, de distinction entre récit et discours. Mais je n’ai recours à cette formulation que pour symboliser l’écart entre deux visées. Car il y a bien une visée ; le cinéma africain n’est pas fait que de refus. Ses refus sont, tout du moins, les empreintes négatives de ce à quoi il aspire. Ce n’est pas par hasard que, répugnant comme nous venons de le voir à la modernité artistique aussi bien qu’à la démarche documentaire, il a continué à emprunter les voies du cinéma de fiction classique, tant au niveau de la représentation qu’à celui du récit. Ce n’est pas par hasard non plus qu’il l’a fait dans une perspective et selon une conception du personnage l’apparentant plus au réalisme critique qu’au roman d’éducation. J’ entends par là que l’un des traits les plus prégnants de la fiction africaine réside dans le fait de définir davantage le personnage par son degré d’insertion économique, par son appartenance à une des classes issues du colonialisme et de l’indépendance, que par des traits de caractère. C’est la raison pour laquelle sans doute, en dépit d’une opposition quasi paradigmatique entre tradition et modernité, 1l y a si peu de films explorant les mentalités, mais beaucoup de drames sociaux. Le premier Cissé, celui de La jeune fille (1974) et de Baara (1978), est sur ce point en synergie avec Sembène. Le mode de construction du personnage doit encore plus, en ce sens, au néoréalisme qu’au cinéma classique proprement dit. Ce mode de construction, inséparable d’une visée sociale, a connu en outre, quels qu’aient été les avatars du cinéma africain et l’évolution de ses personnalités les plus marquantes, une pérennité. Car il est encore déterminant au début des années 90 dans des films comme Histoire d’Orokla, Laada, Sango Malo.

Il y aeu, certainement, des films qui allaient dans le sens d’une plus grande épaisseur romanesque, d’une plus grande complexité des personnages et de l’intrigue (Xala [1974], Finye [1982], plus récemment Tilaï). II en est — et ce sont parfois les mêmes —

qui mettent en exergue des traits, et des contradictions de mentalité. Mais les cinéastes africains se sont généralement méfiés de la psychologisation (qui est aussi un des traits dominants du cinéma classique occidental). Le personnage aura été chez eux un emblème

plus qu’un sujet, c’est à dire un être en devenir, siège de postulations

contradictoires 14 encore dans que, lorsqu'ils jamais vers la

et lieu d’une interrogation existentielle, selon une démarche qui se situe le droit fil du néoréalisme. Ce n’est peut-être pas par hasard en ce sens font une incursion dans un genre comme la comédie, ils ne l’orientent peinture de caractère. Qu'il s’agisse du Camerounais Daniel Kamwa

[(Pousse-pousse (1975), Notre fille (1980)] ou de l’Ivoirien Henri Duparc [Bal pous-

sière (1988), Le 6è doigt], le personnage comique reste une cible qui permet de

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Michel Serceau

stigmatiser des traits de moeurs. II n’est jamais, comme ce fut le cas par exemple dans la comédie italienne vers 1960 (que l’on songe notamment au Fanfaron), un individu problématique. C’est parce qu’il y manque ainsi un sujet que le récit n’a pas le profil et la finalité d’un récit d'éducation. Il ne s’agit là bien sûr que de l’une des formes du récit occidental. Qu'il soit bien entendu donc que je ne le prends pas ici comme une norme, mais que je désigne à travers lui un des termes de l’alternative qui s’offrait aux cinéastes africains à partir du moment où ils refusaient le cinéma du réel et le cinéma narratif. L’ important est en dernier ressort de savoir si, dans leur manière de se situer — ou de ne pas se situer

— face à cette alternative, ils ne se placent pas dans une position instable, voire contradictoire ou ambiguë. Il n’est pas dit que l’égalisation des statuts des personnages qui est le résultat de cette absence soit réellement le support, pour le spectateur, d’une analyse critique. Ne placet-elle pas au contraire tous les personnages dans un éloignement lui fermant l’entrée de la fiction ? Le réalisme critique des cinéastes africains ne passe pas par la voie de la distanciation brechtienne, inséparable — rappelons-le — d’une dimension et d’un statut épiques du personnage. Il n’y a pas non plus de sujet qui vectorise ce réalisme critique et le réfléchisse vers le spectateur, auquel tous les personnages sont également, sinon opaques, tout du moins étrangers, et ce dans la mesure où ils représentent des facettes de l’Africain, jamais sa complexité. L’ironie, qui en est un autre trait dominant, place le spectateur à une égale distance de personnages auxquels on ne l’invite jamais à s’identifier, desquels on l’invite au contraire uniquement à sortir. C’est lui donner à voir les termes contradictoires d’une situation historique. Ce n’est pas lui donner une représentation (au sens spectatoriel du mot) des appréhensions et interrogations qu’il est en train de vivre lui-même en tant que sujet de cette situation historique. Il est — encore une fois — indéniable que le cinéma africain a opéré une véritable focalisation sur la problématique tradition/modernité. Mais c’est une chose que d’en cristalliser sémiologiquement les termes ; c’en est une autre que de construire une représentation qui instaure à ce sujet un dialogue entre le spectateur et le film. Fait de réalisme critique et d’ironie, le cinéma africain appelle le spectateur à sortir de lui pour regarder, dans la représentation qui est faite, les termes de son inscription historique. Mais il ne l’appelle pas à lire et à vivre sa contradiction dans une projection identificatoire. Sans aller jusqu’à dire que le film n’induit chez le spectateur aucune démarche, il faut prendre acte de ce que l’énonciation ne l’engage pas dans un travail intérieur, de ce qu’il n’est appelé à rien d’ autre qu’à épouser le regard du cinéaste. Si le regard que l’on sollicite ainsi chez le spectateur n’est pas, comme dans le cinéma documentaire, le regard de l’autre, de l’ex-colonisateur, n’est-ce pas donc un

regard-autre, celui de l’intellectuel progressiste, qui objective ce qui n’est encore qu’impression subjective. Refusant l’immédiate représentation du réel, mais refusant

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aussi de se détacher du réalisme, le récit et la représentation que pratiquent les cinéastes africains permettent-ils au spectateur de conquérir un regard ? Ce dernier n’est-il pas de toute façon, dans ce mixte de vérisme et d’ironie, dépossédé, par une sorte de rançon du refus de celui qui le guide, de la spécificité et de l’acuité de son regard ? Il est, dira-t-on, un courant du cinéma d’Afrique noire qui tend à rapprocher l’énonciation et la représentation cinématographiques de celles de la littérature orale, de la tradition du conte. C’est une voie qu’a empruntée Sembéne dés 1976 dans Ceddo. Cissé apparait ici encore représentatif d’une évolution. Aprés étre passé de Baara a Finye, du néoréalisme à une forme proche du récit d’ éducation, il est passé en effet de Finye à Yeleen, du récit classique à un récit de type initiatique. Mais il n’y a jamais ainsi au cinéma que des substituts de l’oralité, du mode d’énonciation et de la pragmatique des contes. Ne sommes-nous pas, même avec un film comme Yeleen, dans une démarche

hybride, qui met les ressources du cinéma classique au service de la représentation, non plus de personnages et d’actions, mais de concepts, qui éloigne davantage donc, au bout du compte, le personnage du spectateur ? S’il emprunte à des données culturelles et à des cosmogonies autochtones, Cissé ne met pas en scène un conte ou une cosmogonie africaine. II l’a dit clairement. Et il a affirmé non moins clairement sa volonté d’être universel. Cette volonté n’a rien en soi de critiquable. Mais, et même si l’africanité n’est pas ici un simple avant-texte ou un prétexte, la démarche tend à en abstraire les termes. Que l’on m’entende bien. Je ne mets nullement en question la beauté et la profondeur de l’oeuvre de Cissé. Je me demande simplement si la recherche d’une forme universalisable, d’une dimension philosophique, n’a pas là aussi pour rançon la dépossession du spectateur africain. De tous les rayons qu’on le prenne, quelles que soient les strates que l’on considère, le cinéma d’Afrique noire est donc l’exemple d’un de ces jeunes cinémas qui, nés dans des pays que l’on appelle «en voie de développement», ne s’affranchissant plus exactement du joug politique occidental que pour en épouser le modèle économique, reflètent cette tension ou contradiction dans une esthétique qui, empruntant autant à l’Occident qu’elle lui refuse, sans exploiter la tradition, ne permet pas de construire un système de représentation propre. Elle ne permet pas d’explorer toute la substance et les racines de la contradiction en question. Les faits et problèmes de société continuent à y avoir la préséance sur les faits et problèmes de culture.

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Notes

1: Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Le cinéma africain, des origines a 1973 (Paris : Présence Africaine, 1975). 2: Pierre Haffner, Essai sur les fondements du cinéma africain (Abidjan-Dakar : Les nouvelles Editions Africaines 1978).

Certain early African films (Touki-Bouki) exhibit the critical modernism which all the first wave of African directors learned in European capitals, but generally African films have systematically refused modernist style, and refused genres (except comedy). This has not led them on the road to realism, whether of the ethnographic or documentary form, which they also refuse, emphasizing cinema as discourse, rather than observation. Their discourse aims at social critique but never invades character psychology; hence they do not offer audiences an invitation to identify, but stand outside their subjects with irony. Even more recent films with clear roots in African culture, like Yeelen, keep the spectator distant as they use African situations for a more universal appeal. African cinema has been unable to develop a tradition of vision proper to Africa. Given the economic situation, social issues will continue to take precedence over cultural ones in African films.

Bruno Tackels

Où va le métis ? Essai sur le cinéma Africain Pour Lumunba, et les autres qui viennent

L'homme de chez nous est délivré du souci de cette security qui écrase chaque américain, quel que soit son rang dans |’échelle sociale et sa situation de fortune. Voilà pourquoi le génie de Chaplin ne pouvait naître et s'épanouir qu'à l’autre bout du monde, etnon au pays où tout a été fait pour que l’âge d’or de l’enfance devienne réalité. Voilà pourquoi son génie ne pouvait rayonner que là où la méthode et le type de son comique constituaient une nécessité, là où la réalisation des rêves de l'enfance dans la vie de l’adulte doit se heurter à la déception. Eisenstein. Réflexion d’un cinéaste.

Quel démon m'a poussé en Afrique ? Qu’allais-je donc chercher dans ce pays ? J'étais tranquille. André Gide. L’immoraliste.

Ne parlez pas aux enfants. Ne leur dites pas qu'ils sont fils d’assassins, laissez le livre fermé, ce que vous avez fait suffit. Les parents ont mangé les raisins verts et les enfants en ont eu les dents agacées. Vous ne comprenez pas, Nour. Vous êtes un nègre, vous ne comprenez pas que ce combat est celui que, d’outre-tombe, nos pères commandent. Nous les blancs, les fils de blancs, nous portons la honte pour nos pères. Que faut-il faire ? Nos pères ont tué les vôtres. Nous avons été allaités de ce sang colonial. Comment vous regarder à présent, comment grandir autrement que comme fleurs effrayées ? Devonsnous crever nos yeux, Nour ? N'est-ce pas ce que font, partout en Europe, tous les jeunes blancs aux dents agacées ? Olivier Py. La Panoplie du squelette Bruno Tackels, (1995), «Où va le métis ?

Essai sur le cinéma africain», iris, 18, pp. 47-60.

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Le cinéma est devenu, en quelques décennies, l’un des phénomènes les plus saisissants du continent africain. On peut s’étonner de l’expansion du septième art dans des pays qui sont longtemps restés en dehors de cette “histoire des arts” et dont la précarité économique semble éloigner encore plus de ces pratiques issues d’une terre avant tout définie par sarichesse. Mais cette opinion s’évanouit très vite si l’on considère que l’art n’est pas le produit de la richesse, mais de la civilisation. Or, les civilisations d’Afrique se définissent essentiellement par le fait qu’elles ont été occupées et investies par des cultures étrangères. L’ Afrique est donc l’espace du métissage par excellence. Ce concept est précieux pour comprendre l’irruption et la force du cinéma d’Afrique. Ce dernier est un «métis» parce qu’il est tendu entre deux exigences inconciliables : d’une part la lutte contre le colonialisme et ses effets persistants, d’autre part, la tentation nostalgique d’un retour dans une afrique mythique pré-coloniale. Ces deux tendances n’ont jamais pu s’accomplir pleinement. Et ce n’est assurément pas un mal. La situation actuelle des cinéastes africains témoigne d’une volonté de dépasser cette alternative. Cette volonté se traduit aussi bien dans le contenu narratif de leurs films que dans les conditions de production et de distribution de leur travail. Le cinéma africain est un métis qui cherche à vivre en paix avec son histoire guerrière. Cette hypothèse oblige à un petit détour, afin de déterminer ce qu’est un métis. Qui est métis ? Est-ce le produit d’un mélange, de la rencontre d’identités que rien ne devait rapprocher ? Sans doute. Mais notre intention sera de montrer que le métissage est d’abord un fait de culture. La logique biologique des «sangs mêlés» n’a de sens qu’en assumant le métissage comme un «document de culture» dont il est urgent, aujourd’hui de mesurer la portée politique. Le métissage est d’abord le lieu d’un conflit, et c’est en ce sens que la prise de parole, en Afrique, s’est métissée avec l’image cinématographique. Où commence le métis ? Quelles sont les conditions de sa naissance ? De quelle civilisation est-il l’annonce ? Que nous apprend-t-il ? Que se passe-t-il lorsque deux entités (peuples, techniques, langues, individus, musiques) se rencontrent

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«pensées», différentes par leur provenance, peuvent-elles vivre ensemble dans un temps et un lieu donnés, sans que se mette en place une relation asymétrique ? Le produit de leur rencontre, leur métissage, garde-t-il ensemble leurs différences ? Que deviennentelles dans un être unique ? D’un mot, quel sens donner au métis ? Autant de questions qui traversent le livre de Michel Serres, Le Tiers-Instruit. Autant de questions qui l’amènent à des «solutions», bien souvent rassurantes, qui manquent pourtant la réalité qu’elles recouvrent, au double sens du mot. La réponse de Michel Serres tient dans ces mots, dont l’évidence équivoque semble

encore capable de rassurer : «Certes, je n’ai rien appris que je ne sois parti, ni enseigné autrui sans l’inviter à quitter son nid. (...) Qui ne bouge rien n’apprend rien»!. Le métis est le résultat d’un mouvement, d’une rencontre, le résultat d’une «traversée» des . extrêmes, la médiation qui fait la synthèse entre folie et sagesse, jeunesse et vieillesse,

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erreur et vérité, naiveté et expérience. Le métissage est le schéme central de toute éducation inventive. La formule est séduisante. Mais le voyage, comme espace de traverse où séjournent, égaux, l’autre et moi, reste une belle histoire. Et comme toutes les fables, celle-ci a un envers, qui tient dans ces mots : «Arlequin devient Pierrot». Le métis nait du voyage, il capte toutes les couleurs qui font le monde, les conserve toutes, les habite toutes et devient leur lieu commun, ou leur milieu. Le métis est cet universel voyageur qui, revenant d’un tour de monde, devient multiple et (donc) unique: «milieu blanc qui n’a pas de sens pour les rencontrer tous»?. Plus claire encore, cette définition : «Universel veut dire : ce qui, unique, verse

pourtant dans tous les sens. L’infini entre dans le corps de qui, longuement, traverse une rivière assez dangereuse et large pour connaître ces parages hauturiers où, quelque direction qu’on adopte ou décide, la référence git indifféremment loin. Le solitaire, errant sans appartenance, peut tout recevoir et tout intégrer : tous les sens se valent»? .Le métis, sous sa belle apparence plurielle, fait retour comme figure de l’homogène, comme un être complet à qui rien ne manque. Il est le premier habitant de l’universel, sans lieu et en tout lieu. Son existence ne se décide pour rien parce qu’il se décide pour tout. Devenu Pierrot, il se transforme en «masse éblouissante, incandescente, plus claire

que pâle, plus transparente que blafarde, liliale, neigeuse, candide, pure et virginale, toute blanche»*. Une fois posée la métaphore d’un métis universellement fait de «blancheur» (pourquoi le choix de cette couleur, ou plutôt de cette absence de couleur ?), il reste à savoir comment ce modèle de perfection atteint la réalité de l’éducation. La réponse va de soi, inévitable depuis le début : «Les instituteurs se doutent-ils qu’ils n’ont enseigné, dans un sens plein, que ceux qu’ils ont contrariés, mieux, complétés, ceux qu’ils ont fait traverser ?»° L'éducation authentique apparaît maintenant sous son vrai jour : enseigner, c’est faire traverser, c’est-à-dire contrarier. Le passage à l’autre est une contrariété — un devenir contraire — une négation de soi, immédiatemment compensée par la négation de cette négation. C’est pourquoi le métis tel que le pense Michel Serres est un être contrarié et complété — complètement contrarié. Pour répondre à l’argumentation de Michel Serres, reprenons dans l’ordre les déterminations du concept de «métis», tel qu’il se trouve élaboré dans Le Tiers-Instruit. 1. Le métis est d’abord pensé comme pure neutralité. Parce qu’il accueille toutes les différences, il ne peut que neutraliser leur spécificité. En tolérant tous «les» autres dans la plus stricte égalité, le métis les fait tous également disparaître. En portant ensemble les extrêmes, il produit une complémentarité qui les annule tous. Mais Michel Serres a lui-même vu l’objection, puisqu'il tente d’opposer ce gaucher contrarié «idéal» à l’ambidextre, «malade pour n’avoir pas de manque»*. Et pourtant, c’est la plénitude que vise le métis. À la manière de la chaîne de déductions cartésienne, qu’il faut accomplir de plus en plus vite pour la ramener à une intuition immédiate, le métis traverse sans cesse les extrêmes, de plus en plus rapidement, et atteint l'illusion d’un point médian.

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Le métis comme neutre est une pure fiction, une manière de reconquérir cette construction sans fond qui sans cesse a occupé la philosophie, de Descartes a Hegel. 2. Le métis n’a pas lieu d’être. Il est tiers, entre deux points, centre absent, un point sans épaisseur, pur être mathématique, infinitésimal au point qu’ «aucun appareil de mesure ne peut le déceler»’. A l’opposé de toute identité, il ne peut être observé ni analysé. Le métis est «le fondement ultime et ne fonde rien». Non seulement condition de toute expérience, qui ne fait l’objet d’aucune expérience, mais surtout condition d’impossibilité qui suspend toute expérience et toute analyse. Le métis n’est fondé sur rien et ne fonde rien. Sans effet, il est tout simplement l’inimitable : un principe métaphysique qui n’ouvre aucune «physique». 3. Le métis n’a pas d’histoire. Conformément à ce qui précède, le métissage, sans lieu, est nécessairement hors du temps. Il ne se produit pas dans le monde et son émergence n’augure aucune histoire. Métaphoriquement, il ne peut que prendre la forme du cercle, parfait et infécond. Le métis est «l’individu indivis», inentamable : un

être qui nie l’être et tout ce qui lui arrive. Ces déterminations du métissage (nécessairement négatives à force de vouloir en faire un concept positif) produisent alors cette croyance qu’un homme nouveau est arrivé, un homme qui rassemble les peuples et les cultures, un Christ laïc qui ramène la paix, réconcilie les classes et enseigne l’harmonie. Cette vision du monde — mais s’agitil encore d’un «monde» ? — est irrecevable, parce qu’elle idéalise la réalité qu’elle désigne. Pour faire sentir l’aveuglement qui la menace, il faut préciser l’idée de la traversée, déterminante dans la construction de Michel Serres.

L'éducation, en tant qu’elle est un métissage infini, se pense selon lui comme pure traversée, mouvement sans direction, sinon celle du mouvement. La véritable éducation nous jette dans le fleuve et nous coupe de tout bord, de toute référence déterminée, nous

invitant à atteindre et à nous maintenir au centre de ce «fleuve dans le fleuve» qui nous laisse étranger à la rive, à toute rive, celle de notre provenance comme de notre destination. La traversée n’a pas de sens, sinon elle-même — elle est pure dérive et c’est ence sens qu elle instruit : «Le corps qui traverse apprend certes un second monde, celui vers lequel il se dirige, où l’on parle une autre langue, mais il s’initie surtout à un

troisième, par où il transite». S’il fallait répondre sur le terrain même de la métaphore fluviale, on pourrait dire que le métissage comme traversée n’a pas de milieu. Mieux : il n’est pas un milieu (médium). La rivière, fictivement coupée en deux, est scindée par

une ligne sans dimension, sans épaisseur, un hapax inassignable que personne ne peut venir habiter d’expérience. Cette ligne ne peut donner lieu à aucun mode d’existence, pas même celui du métis. Ou alors, mais il s’agit au fond de la même chose, elle n’est

qu’un modèle, et cela ne peut faire sens, ni pourl’enseignement, ni pour aucun autre type de rapports sociaux. L'expérience, en revanche, nous pousse à redonner une teneur historique au concept de milieu. On peut notamment le rendre par le terme de transit, ou celui de refuge. Le métissage est le lieu même de la migration, le lieu sans lieu,

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intenable et contradictoire. Dans ces conditions, comment admettre que ce milieu soit pensé comme une fin ? Le transit, pour le réfugié, est un fait, sans doute, mais il reste tendu entre les rives qui le bordent, celle dont on vient, et qu’il a fallu fuir, celle où l’on va, même si d’elle on ne sait rien. Etle fleuve, outre son milieu, ne peut qu’avoir un sens :

sa traversée nous donne sens, fait apparaître notre sens. Le fleuve, pour reprendre cette image, est toujours fait de deux moitiés. Dans la première, je me sais près de la rive désertée et dans la seconde, le sens vient de ce bord attendu. La traversée est toujours

orientée, même dans l’inconnu. Le voyageur est toujours plus près d’un bord que de l’autre et c’est le rapport de ces distances qui lui donne sens (même si ce rapport s’inverse et que la côte la plus lointaine apparaît la plus proche). Même arrivé sur l’autre bord, le voyageur peut très bien n’être jamais parti. Mon propos n’est donc pas de nier la réalité effective de la traversée. Sans doute, elle ne cesse, pour le meilleur et pour le pire, de déterminer nos existences dans une société qui se fonde, toujours plus exclusivement, sur l’échange. Mais il faut dire alors que la traversée est un déchirement, qu’il est toujours risqué d’aborder sur l’autre terre et que souvent la violence est la seule forme de réponse à cette épreuve. Les migrations, quel qu’en soit le sens, prennent la forme d’une coupure. Quant au «retour au pays» des immigrés, comme le dit très justement Etienne Balibar, il suppose «qu’ils émigrent une seconde fois, non du pays de leur père, mais du pays de leurs enfants»!°, Le métis est toujours «entre», tenu entre deux rives que rien ni personne ne peut espérer réconcilier. Pour dissiper les faux espoirs de Michel Serres, il s’agit de reconnaître dans le métis (que nous sommes tous) qu’il y a l’autre, une existence irréconciliable que l’on peut juste espérer approcher pour ce qu’elle est : l’irréconciliable de l’existence. D'où la nécessité de penser le métis sur d’autres bases, que je ramène à quatre propositions, nécessairement provisoires : 1. Le métissage a toujours eu lieu. Il est sans origine. Pourtant sa phase «moderne» connaît une date très précise. 1492. Le métis moderne commence quand les sangs se mêlent à l’échelle de l’univers et quand la traversée ne mène plus à l’inconnu mais permet de «faire le tour». Quand le «Nouveau Monde» rend possible le tour du monde, notre monde, encerclant l’autre, devient /e monde.

2. Le métissage a toujours été signe ou lieu d’un agon, medium de domination, arme d’exclusion. Par ce geste, le colon inclut pour exclure. L’ autre n’est pas l’autre pur, il subit une assimilation par laquelle il est maintenu «en respect», sur le bord. Riche ou pauvre, la disjonction n’est pas exclusive. La pauvreté est le fait du riche, sa propriété. La misère ne vient pas d’ailleurs, elle est le code économique que |’ Occident mêle aux terres étrangères. 3. Le métissage est l'indice d'un monde qui lutte et vit de la contradiction. Contrairement à ce que projette le livre de Michel Serres, le métis ne nous annonce pas un monde réconcilié. Certes il est vecteur d’apprentissage, mais il nous apprend avec cruauté la scission sans appel qui nous constitue. Le métis structure sans doute la forme

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moderne de l’humanité, mais pour lui enseigner qu’elle vit de l’inégalité, qu’il y a toujours, pour nous, de l’autre et que les hommes ne risquent pas — mieux : ne doivent pas prendre ce risque, nécessairement totalitaire — de se mélanger et de fusionner dans une union sans autre, sans identité, sans différence. Le métis existe pour nous dire que

les identités se maintiennent toujours, même dans le sommeil d’un prétendu internationalisme. Elles survivent dans des relations asymétriques et inégalitaires, parce quelles naissent des relations de métissage, asymétriques et inégalitaires, précisément. Par le métissage les identités se révèlent à elles-mêmes, pour se figer aussitôt en termes qui s’excluent l’un l’autre, dans une lutte à mort.

4. Le métis est sans lieu, parce qu’il n’est jamais à son lieu. Fils d’une relation asymétrique, héritant du déchirement et de la division (sans égalité) des lieux, son destin est toujours en manque, incomplet. Que deviendra-t-il ? Comment vivre et penser cette origine coupée ? Tout dépend du lieu où il grandit, de l’éducation qui le destinera. Son père retournera-t-il, sans mémoire, en Europe, pour vendre l’or arraché dans les rivières d’esclaves et oublier ce rejeton sans raison dans la cour pouilleuse où il a été conçu ? Reconnaitra-t-il cet enfant comme le sien, pour lui donner son identité, son nom, son

savoir et son héritage ? Ces deux cas de figure illustrent bien l’asymétrie des rapports constitutifs du monde moderne. Elles montrent bien que le métissage n’est jamais univoque. Parce qu’il ne cesse de tenir les extrémes, il est toujours porteur de vie et de sa possible destruction. Le métissage recèle donc une force politique insoupçonnée que le cinéma africain, depuis une trentaine d’ années, tente de mettre à jour. La blessure, toujours possible, et l’attente, sans cesse en sursis. Ces deux détermi-

nations qualifient assez justement le cinéma africain. Assurément sans moyen, hésitant, inadéquat sur un continent qui tremble. Et en méme temps porteur d’avenir et d’idées qui demandent a étre minutieusement analysées. Mon hypothése serait au fond que le cinéma africain condense une expérience de métissage, au sens que j’ai essayé de donner à ce terme. Comment entendre le métissage dans le cinéma africain ? Une première réponse, trop évidente, consiste à dire que nombre de films'' produits sur le continent mettent en scène des couples mixtes, témoins de la rencontre des cultures. Mais le métissage s’arréte-t-il 14 ? Suffit-il qu’un Blanc apparaisse à l’écran pour que nous puissions parler de métissage ? Ou faut-il dire, en quittant le contenu pour la forme, que le cinéma africain est métissé parce que des Européens ont fait des images de l’ Afrique ou que les Africains se sont mis à filmer l’Europe ? Mon point de départ sera plutôt celui-ci : le cinéma se métisse dès le moment où un «Africain»” tourne la caméra comme une arme", selon la formule devenue célèbre du cinéaste sénégalais Sembéne Ousmane, c’est-à-dire dès le moment où le trauma de l’histoire devient la matière d’un témoignage. Si des hommes ont commencé à faire du cinéma sur ce continent, c’est d’abord pour rendre compte de cet intenable métissage qui les porte. Il est remarquable de constater que le cinéma, en Afrique, s’est immédiatement constitué comme lieu de résistance, comme un espace politique. Que les

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Africains n’ont pu prétendre au rang de «cinéastes» sans accomplir cette inversion, ce passage de l’arme à la caméra. Quand les Africains ont pris les caméras, comme en témoigne leur engagement constant pour l'émancipation des peuples, c’est bien l’arme suprême de l'Occident (la technique de reproduction, celle qui inaugure notre ère moderne, celle qui accouche de la marchandise, du génocide, du «village mondial», de la bombe atomique) qui se retourne contre elle-même. La cible, ces hommes et ses pays qui meurent lentement pour faire vivre la machine européenne, ces hommes et ces pays sacrifiés prennent pour cible, par le medium cinématographique, le monde de ceux qui ont inventé la cible et les instruments, toujours plus fiables, pour l’atteindre. Mais cette «révolution», cette manière de retourner les armes contre elles-mêmes,

ne passe pas exclusivement par la dénonciation directe et explicite. Je voudrais essayer d’en montrer brièvement —et trop grossièrement, sans doute — les différentes étapes, qui dessinent trois «générations» spécifiques. 1. Dans les premiers films africains, cette explication avec l’Occident a eu lieu de façon très polémique, militante et courageuse, en particulier dans les œuvres de Sembéne Ousmane”, en prise directe avec la réalité sociale désastreuse d’une Afrique nouvellement indépendante. La première génération des cinéastes africains revendique un cinéma politique qui, aujourd’hui, nous apparaît incontestablement vieilli. Le dernier film de Djim Mamadou Kola, Les Etrangers (Toungan) (1992), est à peine audible, en dépit d’un sujet brûlant (la question de l’immigration entre pays africains), tant le didactisme impose une vue manichéenne qui passe à côté de ce que devient I’Afrique des années 90. Autre témoignage récent d’une époque révolue, Guelwaar (1992), du même Sembène Ousmane — un film lourd et malhabile, presque débutant, empêtré dans ses assauts didactiques, inefficace à force de vouloir donner un contenu, une finalité, une

définition de ce que doit être la liberté : le refus de toute aide extérieure, l’autonomie, le repli sur soi. 2. Cependant le temps passe et le cinéma africain change de visage. Au fil des ans, d’autres maniéres de montrer, d’autres figures du monde sont apparues pour progressivement se substituer à l’impératif didactique des premiers militants. C’est ainsi que nous pouvons repérer une seconde génération de cinéastes, qui n’est pas nécessairement postérieure à la première, où apparaissent des films tout entier tournés vers les traditions d’une Afrique immémoriale que personne n’avait jamais osé mettre en scène — ni les chefs coutumiers (pour préserver la tradition), ni les colons (pour la détruire), ni les ténors de l’indépendance (pour neutraliser sa force «réactionnaire»). Cette alternative est clairement repérable dans les films du Malien Souleymane Cissé, dans les magnifiques courts métrages du Guinéen Mohamed Camara et surtout dans les productions de «l’école burkinabé» (Idrissa Ouedraogo, Gaston Kaboré, Drissa Touré), dont le succès dans les milieux cinéphiles français est très significatif. L’ensemble de ces filmographies, chacune à sa manière, tente de ranimer le passé africain. Dans cette optique, ces cinéastes tournent presque exclusivement dans les villages, afin de renouer avec les

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pratiques des «anciens», ceux qui détiennent le secret de l’existence, en passe de disparaître dans les affres de la «ville». L’argument général revient toujours a ceci : montrer qu’à mesure que la terre africaine révèle son infertilité et sa misère, s’impose aux hommes la nécessité de redécouvrir les richesses d’un monde oublié à force d’être méprisé. Mais cette veine commence sensiblement à s’épuiser. Le type même de sujets qu’elle engage suppose une clotire, un enfermement sur soi qui donne souvent à ces films la forme peu féconde — voire naïve — de la fable ou de la légende, comme en témoigne Rabi (1992), le dernier film de Gaston Kaboré.

3. Idrissa Ouedraogo le premier reconnaît cette limite, mais son cinéma semble plus lent que son discours à prendre en compte cette nécessité de sortir d’une Afrique mythique et de montrer aux gens l’actualité d’une société ouverte et métissée. Dans Samba Traoré (1992), il tente de montrer que le village de brousse est lui aussi (lui surtout) impliqué par l’univers(el) marchand de la ville. Il raconte l’histoire d’un jeune délinquant qui retourne se cacher dans son village après le braquage d’une pompe à essence. Pourtant, le scénario tourne court. Dans une interview publiée dans Télérama,

le cinéaste se défend et clame sa volonté de professionnaliser le cinéma africain, de rentrer dans les structures européennes de production, de bénéficier des outils techniques dont disposent les cinéastes européens. Et il est vrai que ce film est techniquement remarquable, qu’il vient de sortir à Paris dans quatre salles et que la carrière d’Idrissa Ouedraogo est prometteuse. Mais ce qui frappe, dans son cas, c’est la contradiction qui habite son film. Tout se passe comme si l’apport massif de moyens (techniques, humains, publicitaires) entravait son pouvoir de dire quelque chose de l’Afrique. A l’opposé de ses premiers films (Yaaba ou Yam Dabo), Samba Traoré sonne comme un excellent documentaire touristique sur |’ Afrique de l’Ouest. En ce sens, ce film pose, malheureusement sans le savoir, la question du métissage de fagon exemplaire : comment dire |’ Afrique avec des moyens qui ne sont pas les siens, sans pour autant la perdre en chemin ? Ou encore : comment dire |’Afrique telle qu’elle vit, c’est-à-dire l’Afrique dépropriée de ses forces propres et alimentée par celles des autres ? Le dilemme qui déchire Ouedraogo à son insu condense très précisément les difficultés que posent les rapports Nord-Sud. Beaucoup de cinéastes commencent à percevoir ces impasses, notamment parce qu’ils se posent, avec de plus en plus de lucidité, la question de la désertion du public africain : celui-ci ne va pas voir les films africains!. Il préfère les films de Karaté ou les films indiens, ceux que l’on ne veut même pas voir en Inde, tant ils sont ratés. Cette singulière absence de public pose incontestablement de nombreuses questions. Elle indique sans doute que les Africains ne se reconnaissent pas dans la vision mythique d’un monde qu’ils n’habitent pas (plus ?) de cette façon. Plus positivement, cette désertion du public révèle aussi que les cinéastes africains n’ont jamais fait de concession à la logique de marché. C’est en ce sens que nous disions que leur démarche et leur cinéma sont avant tout une arme politique. Cependant, cette quête désintéressée

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risque de s’étouffer elle-même si elle refuse d'assumer ce simple constat : les Africains se désintéressent d’un monde qui n’ existe plus. Ils rejettent la vision théâtralisée d’une Afrique qui aurait conservé, intacte, sa forme mythique ancestrale. Il y aurait beaucoup à dire sur le rapport du cinéma africain au théâtre. Lorsque les Africains expliquent leur rejet du cinéma africain, ils invoquent souvent cet argument, «c’est trop lent, cela sonne faux, ils jouent comme au théâtre». Cette remarque s'explique partiellement par le fait qu’iln’existe quasiment pas d’acteurs professionnels sur le continent africain. La plupart du temps, les cinéastes font appel aux gens qu’ils trouvent sur place et leur demandent de jouer leur propre rôle. Se sachant observés par la caméra, hiératiques et quelque peu figés, ils communiquent souvent au spectateur cette impression qu'ils savent que c’est «du cinéma». Ils ne collent ni au ton, ni à la pose qu'ils endossent et le jeu, en effet, sonne comme du théâtre. Mais cette remarque appelle une réflexion plus précise. En forçant un peu, on pourrait, sans accent péjoratif, répondre, à la question «Que fait le cinéma africain ?» par ces mots : «du théâtre». Cette réponse appelle quelques éclaircissements. D’une part, si le cinéma africain fait du théâtre, cela ne veut pas dire qu’il se contente de filmer le théâtre. Il n’existe quasiment pas, à ma connaissance, de «théâtre filmé» en Afrique (bien que l’on tourne beaucoup de téléfilms, structurés par une unité de lieu, de temps et d’action, que les africains ont

la curieuse — mais au fond très logique — habitude d’appeler «théâtre». D'autre part, si les spectateurs ressentent le cinéma comme du théâtre, cela doit vouloir dire que quelque chose du théâtre passe dans le cinéma, que le cinéma africain accomplit quelque chose du théâtre. Ce qui pourrait vouloir dire que loin de «faire du théâtre», il s’en passe. Mon hypothèse serait au fond celle-ci : le cinéma, aux mains (comme aux yeux et aux oreilles) des Africains, échappe à la distinction même du théâtre et du cinéma, précisément parce qu’il ne l’a pas produite dans et comme son histoire. Ne connaissant pas le «théâtre», au sens commun

que nous donnons à ce terme en

Occident, les images cinématographiques africaines construisent un espace qui n’a pas besoin, comme ce fut le cas de façon paradigmatique dans le cinéma français, de s’opposer au théâtre. Toute l’histoire du cinéma français en effet peut s’analyser comme un mouvement de reprise du théâtre, pour s’en déprendre. Le cinéma africain ne connaît pas cette histoire. C’est sans doute la raison pour laquelle il peut reprendre à son compte le théâtre et mener à son terme dans le médium cinématographique la tâche essentielle du théâtre — de ce que, pour dire cette tâche, l’Europe a nommé et produit comme «théâtre». Quelle est cette tâche essentielle ? D’une formule provisoire, disons qu’il s’agit de défaire la logique qui régit tous les rapports humains, cette logique selon laquelle les hommes sont invariablement dominés par l’unicité divinisée du pouvoir : il s’agit donc de désamorcer le pouvoir de la représentation que les hommes tirent de leur unicité, de leur aura. Cette tâche, notre théâtre n’a su l’accomplir qu’une fois né le cinématographe et sous sa lumière. La théâtralité brechtienne en est la figure la plus évidente. Il me

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semble que le cinéma africain, dont le temps, les lieux, les personnages et les actions, incontestablement, se théâtralisent, assume cette fonction libératrice.

Je ne peux exposer ici avec toute la rigueur de la démonstration le sens de cette libération par la théâtralité, qui s’annonce comme présentation de Il’existence. Je me contenterai de deux «observations». Il est troublant de voir à quel point le comédien africain n’est pas une «star» : il semble complètement dénué de ce que notre culture nomme l’aura. Ni le public, ni les comédiens ne semblent accorder à l’acteur ce pouvoir mythique qu’il revêt dans nos arts du spectacle. Par ailleurs, les réactions et les commentaires qui animent une projection de cinéma dans une salle africaine fournissent un exemple sans pareil de ce que Brecht entendait lorsqu'il parlait de la participation effective du public. Il faudrait longuement et patiemment analyser cette théâtralité du cinéma. Cette analyse, que je ne peux mener dans ce cadre, partirait notamment de la manière d’utiliser la caméra. Même si elle se trouve en mouvement, la caméra fixe un

cadre qui sert de scène. Elle délimite un espace qui attire et rejette les corps qu’elle abrite — à tel point qu’elle produit de véritables entrées et sorties. Il n’est pas un film africain qui ne comporte un plan où les personnages entrent et sortent du plan. Très souvent, après la sortie, ou avant l’entrée des protagonistes, la scène reste vide, comme un entracte fugitif. Que l’action se passe dans une cour, centre de la socialité, ou en brousse, lieu de l’agriculture et de tous les commerces, la caméra construit un cercle sacré, un

espace centré, véritable socius simultanément centripède et centrifuge, un espace rigoureusement composé où l’action se déroule frontalement, devant nous. C’est sans doute en partie ce recours mythique qui pousse beaucoup d’Africains à dire : «Le cinéma africain nous ennuie». Je ne crois pas que cet ennui provienne d’un excès d’intellectualité. I] naît plutôt de cette tendance pressante des cinéastes à inventer un monde qui n’existe pas et à en appeler le retour, de façon presque incantatoire. La pointe critique ultime est donc que cette esthétique du retour repose sur un mythe de l’authenticité du mythe. Ce mythe, construit de toute pièce, trouve tout naturellement son lieu dans les villages isolés d’une savane imperméable au développement et à la «civilisation». Cette tendance au «cinéma de village», séduisante etrassurante, voudrait

produire la vision d’une Afrique capable de résister par la force de ses racines. Cette volonté de résistance (encore une fois, incontestablement politique) par et pour l’authenticité d’un continent perdu, cette volonté me paraît suspecte, pour deux raisons au moins. 1. L'Afrique des villages — «la brousse» — en effet toujours immémoriablement enracinée dans les traditions coutumières, se trouve tous les jours davantage pénétrée par les cultures étrangères, «exogènes» selon le mot des ethnologues. «Par le capital» me semble être le terme le plus juste. Il n’est pas un village africain qui fasse l’économie des mobylettes, de la radio, des boîtes de conserve ou des sandales en plastique. Le monde-marchandise

définition.

est ostensiblement

présent, en tout lieu, fidèle en ceci à sa

Ot va le métis?

57

2. Un tel contexte me fait dire, paradoxalement, qu’il s’agit de radicaliser la tendance au retour, c’est-à-dire de penser comment (et quelle réalité de) l’ Afrique peut revenir, au lieu même de cet engloutissement mondial. Il s’agit donc de dire, en premier lieu, que la vie traditionnelle africaine s’est définitivement étouffée, au terme d’un siècle de colonie et de trente ans d’indépendance et de montrer, maintenant, |’ Afrique sacrée au temps de l'échange, dans son étouffement même. L’image, sans doute, est capable de tenir ensemble ces extrêmes, à condition de penser avec rigueur les termes en présence. La première exigence est de ne pas céder à cette tentation illusoire d’une tradition comme simple substitut du monde moderne. La vraie question, trop rarement soulevée, est de savoir comment la tradition, qui traduit et transmet déjà le capital, sans retour possible, peut trouver la force de ne pas se laisser neutraliser par la logique de l'échange. Comment la tradition peut-elle accueillir dans ses mots, dans son rythme, dans son temps, le processus de mondialisation qui nous définit tous ? Un tel accueil estil sa fin ? Comment peut-elle traduire dans sa langue ce monde blanc, cette culture sans couleur, que les Blancs eux-mêmes prétendaient intraduisibles ? Comment les Africains peuvent-ils défier la «règle colon» : «Il faut bien traiter les nègres — II faut les garder sots», qui leur a imposé pendant si longtemps une égalité factice. Le cinéma est peutêtre le seul medium qui soit capable d’affronter ces questions — de rendre compte de ce possible métissage. 3. En analysant la treizième édition du festival de Ouagadougou (FESPACO), où se trouve rassemblé l’essentiel des productions du continent africain depuis deux ans, il me semble qu’il se dessine une nouvelle tendance qui cherche précisément à développer cette langue métissée et à opérer cette traduction. Parce qu’il n’appartient à aucune langue, le cinéma — et c’est là sa force en Afrique — peut dire l’affrontement des langues qui se croisent, sans se connaître, et se bousculent, sans pouvoir s’éviter. Un certain

nombre de cinéastes en effet se posent les questions que nous évoquions. Ils ont voulu

éviter le didactisme engagé, troublant reflet d’un certain brechtisme européen, sans pour autant tomber dans la tendance inverse, elle aussi clôturante, d’une esthétique du retour et de l’authenticité. Avec cette nouvelle tendance, encore fragile, le cinéma disparaît

comme tribune et renonce en même temps au refermement sur soi pour devenir traduction, une langue de traduction, qui tient les extrêmes en fixant le moment précis de leur achoppement réciproque. Une telle vision cinématographique s’assume comme produit du métissage, parce qu’elle refuse l’univocité. Elle énonce quelque chose de la liberté (elle reste donc une arme), précisément parce qu’ elle montre que la contradiction nait de la rencontre indéfectible des continents. Un certain nombre de réalisations extrêmement récentes (Wendemi [L'enfant de Dieu, 1992] de Pierre Yameogo, Gito l’ingrat [1992] de Léonce Ngabo, Lumumba, la

mort d’un prophète [1992] de Raoul Peck, L’Africaine d'Amérique [1992] de Lancine Diabi, Siméon [1992] d’Euzan Palcy, Les yeux bleus de Yonta [1992] de Flora Gomez,Toubab-bi [Le Blanc, 1990] de Moussa Touré et quelques autres) éprouve,

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jusque dans ses ultimes conséquences, ce métissage dont nous avions suggéré qu’il témoigne du déchirement, du déplacement ineffaçable hors de soi, de l’attente d’un retour à soi et surtout de la conscience de l’impossibilité d’un tel retour. Tous ces cinéastes filment l’invraisemblable urbanisation de |’ Afrique prise dans le tourbillon d’une économie sans frontière. Ils parlent de l’irréparable rencontre du «blanc», du missionnaire, du colon, du chef d’entreprise, de l’université, des techniques de repro-

duction — la rencontre de l’Occident. Mon propos n’est pas de dire que jamais auparavant les cinéastes africains n’auraient évoqué |’influence, voire la pression, que l'Occident exerce sur les pays du Sud. Il s’agit plutôt de dire que le regard sur cette relation est en train de changer. J’illustrerai cette idée en prenant le dernier plan de deux films très représentatifs de ces deux manières de voir (ou de ne pas voir) le métissage. Dans Guelwaar, Sembéne Ousmane raconte l’histoire d’un militant assassiné pour avoir dénoncé les effets pervers de l’aide humanitaire. Le dernier plan du film montre des enfants qui accomplissent la parole du «Père» en déversant le contenu d’un camion chargé de farine sur le bord de la piste. Une Afrique libre doit sacrifier la nourriture donnée par les blancs, répandre le riz sur la terre. Cette image terrible, qui clôt le film —dans les deux sens du terme — supporte un discours revendicatif qui s’interdit d’emblée une véritable analyse de la situation politique mondiale et des stratégies de l’assistance. Autre film, autre plan final. Gito l’ingrat raconte l’histoire d’un étudiant burundais qui ramène au pays un diplôme en droit international et la certitude d’un poste de ministre. Il emporte aussi dans ses bagages un magnétoscope et une jeune Française du seizième arrondissement. Au terme d’un chassé croisé entre sa future femme et son amour d’enfance qui entend bien le retrouver, Gito, déchiré et incapable de choisir, se retrouve seul, victime d’un traquenard que ses

deux prétendantes décident de lui infliger ensemble : il se retrouve à la rue, vêtu de la robe rouge deux fois promise — déchirée. Dans cette comédie «populaire», seule la chute paraît suspecte : Gito redevient tailleur, fier et passionné, décidé à mettre son expérience occidentale au service de son pays, en attente de salut. Suspecte la fin, parce qu’il reste cette évidence, qu’elle semble oublier : rien en Afrique ne peut être tout à fait comme avant et rien de l’Europe ne peut vraiment s'appliquer à |’ Afrique. Le métissage ne s’efface pas. Par essence, sa quête reste ouverte. Je voudrais finir en évoquant Wendemi, le deuxième long métrage de Pierre Yameogo, qui nous donne un autre exemple de cette tendance au métissage dans le cinéma africain contemporain. Wendemi, l’enfant de Dieu et de personne, abandonné par une mère sans homme, est élevé par des voisins. Maltraité, mal aimé, il fuit à la ville

et devient souteneur. C’est pourtant dans la ville, dans le marchandage des corps, qu’il apprend la vérité. Il tombe amoureux, sans le savoir, de sa demi-sœur, qu’il doit initier

à la prostitution. Il ne peut accepter cette situation et s’enfuit, en abandonnant le bracelet

que sa mère lui avait donné à sa naissance. Sa mère le retrouve et devant le village réuni révèle l’identité de son père : le curé de la paroisse. Le métissage apparaît ici à son

Ot va le métis?

59

comble. L’enfant du silence (ou de Dieu ?) montre parfaitement la contradiction de la

colonisation et les désastres qu’elle provoque. Les conflits, dans tous ces films, révèlent l'épreuve quasiment «épique» d’un continent blessé, épuisé par nos victoires. L’ Afrique ne sort pas indemne de cette histoire. Et l’Europe ne peut se reproduire ici exactement. La tension ne peut que subsister. Les extrêmes ne se réconcilieront pas. Leur unité harmonieuse suppose un mensonge, la domination masquée de l’un sur l’autre. Mais le déni de l’autre est une autre imposture. La haine fanatique «du» blanc transmuée en intégrisme religieux, celle que met en scène le «Malcolm X» de Spike Lee, n’est que l’exact envers de l’idéologie de l’assimilation (et cela, malheureusement, Spike Lee n’arrive pas à le dire). La liberté

au cinéma, et partant la liberté comme telle, celle qui semble si fragile, même dans un festival de cinéma accueilli dans un pays nouvellement «démocratisé»!f, la liberté suppose d’assumer ceci : l’étranger n’est pas toujours celui que l’on croit, l’étrangeté nous tient et les étrangers, tous, restent liés, fidèlement, enchaînés peut-être, mais en

regard de l’autre. En s’acquittant de cette tâche, le cinéma reste lui-même : l’inépuisable mémoire de nos existences incertaines, aveuglées mais attirées par l’autre comme leur propre gouffre.

Notes

Michel Serres, Le Tiers-Instruit (Paris: F. Bourin, 1991), p. 27-28. Ibid., p. 27.

Ibid. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 27. : Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 46. : Ibid., p. 54. LOL THE TD: Ibid., p. 25. 10: Etienne Balibar, «Une Société métissée», Les Frontiéres de la démocratie, p. 77. 11: Rue Cases Nègres d’Euzan Palcy, Yelbeedo d’ Abdoulaye D. Sow, Gito l’ingrat de Léonce Ngabo, Toubab-bi de Moussa Touré, pour ne parler que de films récents, montrent bien les difficultés de cette mixité. 12: C’est-a-dire, pour être plus précis, celui qui, bien que né hors de l’Occident, n’a cessé de vivre sous son emprise. 13: Amère ironie de l’histoire : les cabines de projection et les projecteurs du Festival panafricain de Ouagadougou ont été fafriquées dans une ancienne usine soviétique, juste avant sa fermeture — celle qui produisait les Kalachnikov pendant le régime marxiste-léniniste. 14: Notamment dans le Camp de Thiaroye (1988), un film lucide et sans concession sur le massacre des «tirailleurs sénégalais». 15: Les films d’Idrissa Ouedraogo, par exemple, sont davantage projetés en France qu’au Burkina Faso.

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16: Pour donner une «idée» de cette fragilité, les militaires ont interdit I’ entrée de la salle au «public» (non festivalier) lors de la projection d’un moyen métrage sur Thomas Sankara, «le frère, l’ami de toujours» de l’actuel président du Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaoré, assassiné par ses soins le 17 octobre 1987.

African cinema garnered our attention through strident didactic films that attacked the west with western technology. Later came a series of more genial films that focused on village life and on ancient myths, as though the purity of a traditional past could steel Africa against an ugly present. Today the most interesting films are less self-righteous. Gito and Wendemi seem to advocate a mixed cultural heritage for their heroes, for their cinematic art and for the cultures to which they contribute. The condition of métissage is neither temporary nor compromised. As Michel Serres has amply demonstrated, it is an essential condition. We find it in Africa’s “theatrical cinema” and in an increasingly westernized culture which nevertheless is fully African.

Keyan Tomaselli and Maureen Eke

Secondary Orality in South African Film Africans are quintessentially Other to the historical Same of Europe. This relationship emerged from the experiences of colonialism and neocolonialism, where two entirely different ways of making sense — the literate and the oral — have clashed for centuries. Oral cultures speak a different world to those of written cultures. Orality makes possible a different basis for knowledge, predicated upon interacting forces rather than concrete objects.! It is against this background that we discuss cinema and orality. The fusion of African oral and western visual forms offers a bridge through ontological differences as encapsulated in the forms of life in which different groups of languages are found. The role of performers such as griots or izimbongi (bards) in recovering aspects of primary orality via film and video is treated in two films about South African oral poets and storytellers. The films, Songololo (1990) and The People's Poet (1987), offer dramatic stylistic evidence for the aesthetically successful meshing of ‘pre-modern’ (pre-capitalist modes of production) oral African codes with postmodern visual elements. Visual Literacy and Orality

A study of visual literacy would ideally examine (a) how texts are produced; (b) their narrative structures and form; and (c) how different audiences make meaning of them.

Such discussion, however, often occurs without reference to orality, which is often the reverse of the coin as far as much African cinema is concerned. Literate cultures, which stress the visual, store knowledge in written and other kinds of documents provided by recording and retrieval technologies. Such knowledge is abstract and analytical. Oral cultures, even those in urban areas which have been partially dislocated from purely oral forms of communication, encode knowledge in the popular communal memory — out of sight but not out of mind. Sound incorporates, locating the observer at the center of an auditory world. Oral cultures communicate thought and action together and are concerned with real people doing real things within small, geographically coherent communities. Keyan Tomaselli and Maureen Eke, (1995), “Secondary Orality in South African Film,” iris, 18, pp. 61-69.

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The encounter through industrialization between the two kinds of cultures — the literate/fragmented and the oral/unified —has resulted in imbalances that conventionally favor the dominance of the technological and visual in encoding and decoding. As storytellers, African filmmakers are cultural intermediaries between the two forms of expression and their respective subjectivities. This mediation is especially obvious in Jean Marie Ten’s film, Afrique, Je te plumerai (Africa, I will Fleece You, 1991). In the scene where one of Jean Marie Teno’s characters is typing in the middle of a street, he is calling attention to the new form of meaning exchange facilitated by writing and mechanized writing technology. The typist is part of both the sounds and the orality of the street scene. But her individuated literary ego also excludes and alienates her from the passers-by. The writer/typist’s subjectivity thus indicates her culturally schizophrenic location in both Cartesian dualism and African communalism. The direct importation to Africa of methods, theories, ideas and psychoanalytical

assumptions developed in the First World, and applied to textual analysis, is not without epistemological problems. These methods and theories — or “European deconstructivist rituals”? —assume particular sets of modern and postmodern conditions and periodizations not necessarily replicated in Africa in quite the same ways. As cultural intermediaries and historians, critical African filmmakers are also travellers. They travel physically and psychically between western/industrial and nonwestern worlds, cultures and ontologies. As global griots or bards they memorize and recite African legends and valiant deeds through story-telling. Thus, as griots they represent, incubate and transmit the cultural unconscious partly destroyed by colonialism and neocolonialism. Orality and Indeterminacy Film Maker as Griot African filmmakers as story-tellers are in some ways similar to the pre-modern European practice of bards or minstrels. A bard was a mediator of language who composed stories out of the available linguistic resources of the culture. The result was a series of consciously structured messages that served to communicate to a society a confirming, reinforcing version of itself.

The function of the griot in traditional African societies is to transmit knowledge from one generation to another. The griot often represents the collective consciousness of the community, and through praise songs, poetry, and stories weaves a constructed history of a people and its past. As custodians of a society’s traditions, griots maintain and reinforce links between past and present. This role of ‘cultural reservoir’ is also applicable to film, which has been described by Stoller as:records of the past, of people who are long dead. Thus, by facilitating a ‘living’ record that could be ‘recited’ in the future, the camera (filmmakers) becomes the guardian of traditions.’

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Stoller argues that griots define knowledge as the property of the elders, who through their experience in life, become a repository of communal wisdom as they learn the lessons of the past and the present. The elders prepare the young for the future. Griots, however, do not prescribe social positions or behavior. Rather, Stoller argues, they demonstrate possibilities and guide people down metaphoric pathways.® These pathways, argues Manthia Diawara in opposition to Stoller, Francois Pfaff and Ousmane Sembéne,

are concerned

with order-restoration,

not the creation of new

orders.’

Diawara states that while the “African film-maker rests on the shoulders of traditional storytellers such as the griot,” African cinema implicates “the griot with the old and stagnating content.” Contesting Diawara’s dismissal of griots as the opposite of African filmmakers like Sembéne, Henrik Overballe provides evidence to suggest that griots guard the values of traditional culture, and not necessarily the sometimes oppressive institutions or content through which they have been propagated. Though predicated on pre-modern traditional cultural values, the traditionalism of the griots, carriers of innovation and

change, is just as subversive in relation to the modern African society as is the filmmakers’ “modernism.” Overballe concludes: Instead of criticizing, even unjustly, the griots for wanting to conserve something which hardly exists any more, it may be an idea to try to look at the griots’ role as cultural innovator and dynamic cultural agent. They may even prove fruitful in a different sense inasmuch as the films that could come out of such an attitude would probably be even better. Films which, perhaps, would even have something to say about the rural population.’

Applying Overballe’s description to African films, it can be argued that some filmmakers are like griots. They learn a body of cultural and historical knowledge. In some cases the directors themselves are griots, transmitting knowledge, especially when they discuss their films with audiences. In other cases, griots are actually present as characters, particularly in the films of Ousmane Sembéne. Comparing the filmmaker’s role to that of a griot, Sembéne concludes: “The traditional story-teller no longer exists today and I think that the filmmaker can replace him.”'? Storytellers such as those discussed in this paper do, however, continue to exist in South Africa. They are found in both urban and rural areas, in the labor movement, in the sphere of entertainment, and

on radio and TV. In the South African context griots are known as izimbongi, from the Zulu.

In his critique of Pfaff’s'' description of Sembéne as a griot, Diawara cautions that such analyses are limited either to documenting the trace of oral literature (e.g., the presence of the griot), or to discussing film as oral literature (analysis of repetitious patterns, formulas, proverbs, epic moments and songs).' Our analysis, however, seeks to examine how the conventions of primary orality have been rearticulated into a form

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of secondary orality by South African story-tellers working with foreign video and film directors. Secondary (Electronic) Orality, and Orality in Film Secondary orality is also known as “electronic orality”: for example, the poetry, oratory, storytelling, formulaic narrative and mnemonic devices, music, and other elements of sound found in certain genres of South African radio announcing. Radio oralism in indigenous-language South African radio reveals striking resemblances to earlier pre-radio patterns of speech performance.* Following radio, the sequential developments of sound film, TV and especially video, heralded the age of secondary (electro-chemical and electronic) orality, and thereby the recuperation of a modified form of disappearing primary orality. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the South African storytellers and African film directors like Sembéne, are attempting to speak to both western and African audiences through a “technologized extension of our consciousness” that draws on codes of orality, literacy and visuality.'* The South African story tellers have incorporated the visual, including the creative use of captions, graphics, pictures and optical effects. These are combined in new ways with sound and the specialized bardic repertoire of the wider izibongo tradition. “Traditional” story-tellers exist in new guises in the age of radio, cinema and electronic media. Rather than totally adapting their stories into western poetic forms, traces of primary orality continue to be used in the new media by radio announcers, film and video producers. The content of these praise poems and stories is new, reflecting contemporary social and political concerns in parable form. They bear a critique of the present, calling for a new order that supersedes the oppression of the old. In The People's Poet and Songololo, the narratives revolve around spoken language rather than visual conventions. They interweave music, documentary realism, praise poetry, drama, surrealism, postmodernist editing techniques, interviews, news footage,

captions and titles sculptured in terms of the encompassing film frame and composition, all subordinated to the spoken. Oral story-telling is emphasized by the performers to teach audiences not just about past history, but also about contemporary processes impacting them directly, as well as about those which can be expected in the future. In The People's Poet'’, imbongi Mzwakhe Mbuli, a trade unionist, speaks about his work, his politics, and the role of art in the struggle to free South Africa from apartheid. At first glance, this video appears to be a politicized form of music television (MTV). However, its MTV-like style is only a facade that encodes Mbuli’s compelling political goals. Afravision, the film’s production collective, offers a postmodern form that draws on MTV, documentary and the conventional codes of international television address. Through the addition of oralism, the result is greater than any of these genres. The

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65

producers take legitimate artistic and documentary license, recreating, juxtaposing, and matching news footage of specific events to illustrate the poetic generalizations made | by Mbuli in his performances. Referring to his detention, Mbuli talks of how his “aloneness” in solitary confinement could be mobilized in an affirmative direction, to empower resistance culture to a future beyond incarceration. The upbeat black township music and Mbuli’s performance confer his communication of this experience with a positive dimension in the development of cultural forms to move towards and ultimately attain liberation. In one interview, Mbuli wears a blue cap that looks the same as those worn by the Riot Squad. Here he appropriates clothing that signifies oppression, and resituates it in a subversive context. In so doing, Mbuli disempowers the sign of riot policemen. He uses the image to undercut, to lampoon the cap’s claim to power. The imbongi (the singular of bard) mobilizes signs of police violence and what they represent politically to undermine them — a familiar image is defamiliarized to make a defiant statement. Mbuli develops an anti-colonial form which breaks with the pastoral poetry of the British inheritance: “How can I write about daffodils when the ground is so full of blood,” he says. The poet talks about the “Triple Ms”, Mangope, Mphepu and Mantanzima, to which Sebe is added. These “Ms” plus Sebe were four of the most brutal

and corrupt of the nine ‘independent’ bantustan leaders who collaborated with the National Party in the creation of the ‘homeland’ system. Brechtian strategies are evident in the editing structure of both The People’s Poet and Songololo. For example, Mbuli makes a statement in the foreground while overlaid on him is disjointed footage of TV news and photographs. This postmodern use of editing codes draws attention and suggests a fracturing of the veneer of apartheid, especially of its repressive arms, manifested in the Riot Police, which are contrasted with Mbuli’s confident oratory. The video’s images and Mbuli’s compelling poetry and performance describe overwhelming violence that ends with grounds for hope. The context within which Mbuli composes and reflects proposes its own textual and dramatic strategies, as Brecht discovered in another era. Mbuli’s performance, however, is only poetry at one level. “I will go on reciting ...” he insists — the political performance is foregrounded in his agenda. This arises out of the African tradition of praise poetry, modified in terms of the modern political context and the currents of labor theatre and poetry. The other level is writing, and the prophetic nature of his work. Poetry is not a solidification of the past, but a way to the future. As imbongi, social critic and political activist, Mbuli uses poetry and performance to negotiate apartheid, as well as to implicate Britain, the U.S., and the multinationals which cynically justify imperialism and colonization in “law and order” terms. In Songololo, feminist writer/storyteller Gcina Mhlophe and musician/poet Mbuli articulate hatred against apartheid. They argue the need to think constructively and positively to affirm the political power of their own lives. Added to this is the potential

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they identify for popular culture to help transform passive and perhaps uncomprehending black responses to oppressive conditions. The video shows people as agents taking control of their lives in opposing oppression, recuperating the history of the oppressed through popular cultural expression and performance. These memories of misery are reconstituted into weapons working for democratic change. The video includes sequences of culturally affirmative hostel dancing, township jazz, church reunion singing, and freedom songs. Stylistically similar to The People's Poet, Songololo, directed by Canadian Marianne Kaplan, deals also with gender issues. Whereas The People’s Poet focuses on Mbuli’s personal, male-oriented criticism of apartheid, Songololo represents an attempt to present both male and female perspectives. The latter film presents divergent experiences under apartheid, while dealing with the general question of national liberation. It also introduces gender as an integral aspect of the liberation struggle. The female poet radically asserts that, within the African context at least, the women’s struggle is not separate from the political dimension. The video acknowledges the participatory role of women, which has often been ignored in other expressive sites of the anti-apartheid struggle. The juxtaposing of masculine and feminine struggles, both working differently but symbiotically toward the same emancipatory goal, makes this film unique in South Africa. It emphasizes gender relations as an intrinsic part of the struggle for democracy, not merely as an addendum to it, or as something to be taken up only after victory. This is indicated in the video’s editing structure and alternating sequence of poets/storytellers. In this way, the film acknowledges the positive values of both masculinity and femininity. Mbuli’s presentation, however, is more aggressive, recalling male war cultures, while Mhlophe’s, whose artform is more nurturing in terms of relating to

motherhood, suggests alternative, non-aggressive modes of combatant resistance. Songololo is exceptionally well-made technically, offers an in-depth examination, and visually and orally captures the intense dynamism of Mbuli and Mhlophe. Additional references to other performers like Johnny Clegg and Savuka, writer Nadine Gordimer and others, broadens its appeal, situating the two poets within trans-class, trans-racial, trans-cultural struggle. However, two of these reference points (whites on anti-apartheid culture) disappear from the remainder of the movie, which concentrates on the two black performers. The two poets are always foregrounded, and not simply used as framing devices otherwise lost to the text. The male and female poets are either shown sequentially, or in the same frame, or face each other in split screens, as if attempting to provide alternative responses to each other’s catalogue of experiences under apartheid. This mechanism connects them as equals in the struggle, in terms of their respective ideas and life experiences, and reveals issues in a people’s history from dual perspectives. Mhlophe is more focused on grass roots consciousness-raising through art and music, whereas Mbuli emphasizes the

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communication of knowledge about the male-dominated political environment of the mass movements. From 1990 on, his performances introduced Nelson Mandela at mass rallies, some of which were internationally televised. This role instated Mbuli as a literal information-era imbongi. Both poets have become regular performers on South African radio and TV. Unlike Mbuli, Mhlophe uses old stories and fables to teach audiences not just about past history, but about contemporary processes impacting them directly, and about those to be expected in the future. Her art serves a similar role as traditional story-telling/performance, which functions as a way of linking the community to its past, present and future possibilities. Despite their divergent perspectives, both emphasize consciousness-raising about their peoples, cultures, and histories. Songololo places the personal histories of the two poets within the context of their own families and cultural history. Their personal experiences are seen as representative of the collective struggle of their people. Mhlophe talks about her painful experiences as a marginalized woman (within her black community and as a black female within South African society at large). Mbuli talks about how the migrant laborers in the single sex hostels come together in performance over weekends and leisure time. Both performers are seen in other films, but their coming together in Songololo is synergically dramatic, especially in its revelation of their softer, personal sides. One issue common to both videos is the nature of the sie RE that developed between the South African izibongi and their foreign directors. As the production crews represent both African and European heritages, the combination has successfully addressed the indeterminacy of radical translation in linking the ontological differences of three kinds of experience — oralism, oppression as blacks under apartheid, and technology, which arose out of the imperatives of literacy. Conclusion Modern

South African film directors and performers,

as bards, izibongos, or

story-tellers, have only residues of existing ‘traditional societies’ to bring to the surface. Although their societies no longer exist in what might once have been their traditional forms, some quite marked traces of traditional values remain, as do elements of primary orality. Where primarily oral cultures elaborate their stories within the epic form, fables, and extraordinary heroes and fantasies, the izimbongi in The People’s Poet and Songololo are more concerned with cultural loss, oppression, colonization and emancipation. Imbongi like Mzwakhe Mbuli and Gcina Mhlophe tend to offer concrete explications of their stories, offering a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, facilitated

through electronic media technologies and forms. Mbuli and Mhlophe speak to audiences personally, involving them in their stories, provoking memories of primary

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orality and earlier times through the use of metaphors, alliteration, repetitions, and mnemonic devices. In their videos, the izimbongi have adapted older forms to create new syntheses. Moreover, changing times and situations have called on radio announcers, film/video makers, and izibongi to communicate in oral forms of speech, which have adapted to electronic forms without loss of their artistic integrity. Though the oral traditions of black Africans have been influenced by their adoption of literacy, they have

not lost their vigor.!° Films such as The People’s Poet and Songololo attempt to arrest the process of exteriority, where consciousness breaks into the mind/body duality, by which the Subject is separated from its Object. Storytellers are trying to recover communality, sometimes in a new way through the meshing of western and indigenous cultures, sometimes by an appeal to the past. They are trying to address the problematic indeterminacy in the encounter between Africans and representatives of advanced industrial societies. Regarding their invocation of the past, Diawara’s criticism is justified, though the appeal remains subversive to both western domination and the new ruling elites of independent African countries who have forsaken traditional values. While both Mbuli and Mhlophe have become nationally known on radio and TV, it remains to be seen whether they will take this critical dynamic through to the post-apartheid era. The tendency amongst some grass roots cadres of the new African National Congress government is to suppress dissent and freedom of speech. The izimbongi who have for so long sung the praises of liberation may find it very difficult to retain their critical distance from the new state. Notes

1: Our theory of ontology is drawn mainly from Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: 1982), and A. Shepperson and K.G. Tomaselli, “Semiotics in an African Context: ‘Science’ vs. ‘Priest Craft’, ‘Semiology’ vs. ‘Semiotics’,” Acta Fennica Semiotica II (1993), p. 159-

176. 2: This is Willemen’s term. See Pines and Willemen 1989, p. 1-29. See as an example J. Higgins, “Documentary Realism and Film Pleasure: Two Moments From Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season,” Literator 13(3) (1992), p. 101-110. 3: J. Fiske, and J. Hartley, Reading Television (London: Methuen, 1988), p. 86. 4: P. Stoller, The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. xvi-xvii.

5: Stoller, p. 80. 6: Ibid., p.113. 7: M. Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp.

206-8. 8: Diawara, p. 210.

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9: H. Overballe, “Narrative Traditions Among the Mandinka of West Africa,” Ethnographic Film Aesthetics and Narrative Traditions, eds., P.I. Crawford, J.K. and Simonsen (Aarhus: Intervention Press,

1992), p. 197.

10: Quoted in N. Ghali, “Ousmane Sembene,” Cinéma 76(208) (1976), p. 89.

11: F. Pfaff, The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene: A Pioneer of African Film (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984).

12: Diawara, pp. 201-2. 13: M. McLuhan, Understanding Media (London: Abacus, 1964), p. 57. 14: V.V. Mkize, “The Spoken and the Written Word: Stylistic Creation in Black Broadcasting” Ph.D. Thesis, University of Natal, 1993, p. xii. 15: This is the title of the video produced in London. Another video, A People’s Poet, Mzwakhe Mbuli, was produced in South Africa. We have not seen this video and do not refer to it. The three films on Mbuli could be seen in conjunction with other videos of performances like Woza Albert, Bopha, Amandla and Travelling Poets. 16: Mkize, p. xx.

Acknowledgments: We are especially indebted to Arnold Shepperson for his comments and theoretical advice on this paper. Tomaselli thanks Fullbright, the Center for Research Development, and Natal University for funds to pursue this research at the African Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1990-1991.

Le rôle du griot est d’une importance capitale non seulement en Afrique occidentale, mais aussi en Afrique du Sud, où il paraît sous la forme de |’«izimbongi, » notamment dans les films Sangolo et Le poete du peuple. Ces films nous rappellent que |’épistémologie africaine - orale, unificatrice et sociale - s’oppose a celle d’un occident lettré, individué et fragmenté. Les cinéastes africains jouent le réle d’intermédiaire entre ces formes si différentes de connaissance et de subjectivité. Malgré la mise en garde de Manthia Diawara contre la tendance à identifier le rôle du cinéaste avec celui du griot (surtout dans le cas de Sembène), on peut concevoir une oralité secondaire ou électronique qui dépend ni de la présence de griots dans un film ni de la position éthique du cinéaste, mais bel et bien de la forme et technologie de la communication. Les conteurs traditionnels existent sous de nouvelles formes à l’époque de la radio, du cinéma et des médias électroniques. Plutôt que d'adapter leurs histoires aux formats occidentaux, les nouveaux communicateurs transmettent à travers leurs médias modernes des traces d’oralité primaire. S’attachant moins aux conventions visuelles qu’à la langue orale, les deux films discutés ici offrent une critique de notre époque. Leur montage postmoderne met en contact musique, poésie, informations, légendes, théâtre,

etc. Malgré l'influence d'une alphabétisation croissante, les traditions orales de l'Afrique n'ont pas perdu leur vigueur, comme le prouve l’oralité secondaire des nouveaux médias.

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Ookome Okome

Cinema and Social Change in Nigeria: The Political Imperative

The consciously constructed political film has not fully matured in the short history of the Nigerian Cinema. Although critics have argued that this problem is inescapable within the production strictures that filmmakers face, this can be countered by the relative successes that filmmakers of other developing nations have achieved in similar circumstances. Unlike such Latin American examples as Julio Garcia Espinosa and Miguel Littin, the Nigerian filmmaker shies away from his political self, thereby renouncing the medium’s potency as a vehicle for national growth and cohesion. This cinema has not been able to create a truly popular film culture. Unlike the print media, or even (in some instances) the Traveling Theater performances of the 1940s,! the film medium did not help in the fight for political independence. Still suffering from the vestiges of colonialism and saddled with a festering political situation, the Nigerian filmmaker vacillates between the mere glamorization of aspects of Nigerian culture and the uncritical portrayal of some dim historical past, producing in the final analysis films that are politically innocuous and culturally patronizing. Ethnic films, especially Yoruba folklore films, occupy a special rung of Nigeria’s apolitical film culture. Beginning with Ajani Ogun, ethnic Nigerian filmmakers have done nothing to use this genre to question the devious political life which military and civilian administrations have imposed on this nation. As is poignantly articulated in “The Rise of Folkloric Cinema in Nigeria”: “... [CJertain areas of our political and social life are still treated as sacrosanct. The Nigerian cinema shies from these areas of national discourse, or at best gives a superficial treatment of these ... institutions.?

Rare is the Nigerian political film, which problematizes cultural, political and social issues of post-colonialism, seeking unorthodox narrative means of unraveling these problems and situating them within a concrete historical and ideological framework. There are a few exceptions, or partial exceptions, to this rule: Ola Balogun, Wole

Soyinka, Lodi Ladebo, and Eddie Ugbomeh. Ola Balogun has made at least two directly political films, though in both cases they are set at a distance from the contemporary Nigerian situation, which renders their revolutionary fervor rather abstract. [ja Ominira (1977), adapted from a novel by Faleti and made with Ade Folayan, is about a popular Ookome Okome, (1995), “Cinema and Social Change in Nigeria:

The Political Imperative,” iris, 18, pp. 71-80.

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Ookome Okome

uprising against a tyrannical king. The revolutionary emotions of the 1960s and 1970s are parachuted into the Yoruba past in a way that is not altogether convincing as history, and not altogether illuminating as a guide to action in the present. Nevertheless, the film was very popular with audiences. It will be recalled that independent production of feature films began in the 70s and its immediate popularity is located in the audiences’ euphoria on seeing familiar black faces on screen for the first time’. Balogun’s Cry Freedom (1981), adapted from Meja Mwangi’s Carcass for Hounds —a novel about the Mau Mau struggle in Kenya— was shot in Ghana. Although Cry Freedom is directly, and even didactically political, it is unspecific in the deployment of its political landscape, so that the fight to oust colonialism, its major theme, is not situated within arecognizable Nigerian struggle for economic and political emancipation. To this end, it has not made a recognizable impression on the local population, who in any case were looking for more action and battle scenes in a war movie. The films Wole Soyinka has been involved with have also had a political dimension, though the results have been (in different ways) equivocal. Soyinka’s Culture in Transition (1963), a quasi-documentary on Nigeria’s richly diverse cultural heritage, depicts the beauty of Nigeria’s folk literature in transition. Regrettably, it stops short of moving its discourse beyond the beauty and pageant of bygone life. Culture in Transition is Soyinka’s first serious involvement with the Nigerian cinema. Shot as an anthology of disparate aspects of traditional and modern cultural forms of the Nigerian society, the episodes show this society in flux. The narrative logic is tight, the bottom line being that tradition is alive and is born of every experience, not situated in the antiquity of moribund cultural expressions. While the sound track makes this point, the narrative sequence does not quite illustrate it. This may be a failure of execution. However, as the episodes unfold one cannot help feeling that the film’s anthropological slant makes a special appeal to audiences not familiar with its cultural content. Soyinka wrote Culture In Transition himself in his apolitical, dramatic mode. He deals with certain cultural issues of contemporary art and plastic media in Nigeria’s cultural landscape and assumes a metaphysical slant which emphasizes the metaphor of transition. The notion of transition permits that luminous passage which links the three Yoruba worlds — that of the living, the dead, and the unborn. The primordial act of creation, aresult of the daring of Ogun, the ferocious god, who was the first to go through

this passage in a grand quest to harness and make available knowledge to man, is the first act of the artist’s product. This is categorically stated in the voice-over commentary by the narrator author: “not the product, not the final artifact, but the act of creation”. When it does appear, the political is often forced into the fringe of the film’s discourse. In 1965, Calpenny Nigeria Limited was inaugurated. Founded by pioneer filmmaker Francis Oladele, Calpenny made its first feature, Kongi’s Harvest, in 1970. Adapted from Wole Soyinka’s play of the same title, the film tells the story of the clash ofa fading, yet powerful traditional political system, represented by Oba Danlola, and the ferocious

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emergence of modern dictatorship on the African continent, depicted in the film as Isma. While Soyinka himself wrote the script,‘a very wordy affair, it was directed by A fricanAmerican filmmaker, Ossie Davis. There are points of controversy about the production — from scripting to editing. Soyinka, whose script was largely ignored in the shooting process, reportedly took a paid advertisement in the New York Times to denounce the final version of the film. Ossie Davis himself was accused of editing the film to suit a particular American slant. In other words, his aim was to make the film appreciated by an international audience — especially Africans in the Diaspora; therefore he emphasized spectacular aspects of African culture suchas festivals, dance, costumes, and food.

Soyinka declares: “If you look at the film, you will find that there is no mention of Wole Soyinka as scriptwriter. This is not without very good reason, which is simply because what is in the film is not eventually the script that I wrote.” The financial support for the production by African-American sources may account for some of the “misrepresentations” which Soyinka quarrels about. In Film in Nigeria, Hyginus Ekwuazi concludes that Kongi’s Harvest is a prop to the institutionalized cinema that is Hollywood: no wonder the film’s bold imprimatur of colonialism.$f Ekwuazi’s submits that early Nigerian films were made in isolation from world cinema culture, just like the first phase of Third World Film that Teshome Gabriel analyzes in “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films.”’ This phase of development is characterized as identified with the western/Hollywood film industry. In Kongi’s Harvest the link is made as obvious as possible and even the name of the company proclaims its American origin (Calpenny stands for California, Pennsylvania, New York). Even within Soyinka’s original conception of Kongi’s Harvest the ideological direction is doubtful. Dauda and Segi, the hopes of the new political future, are themselves not socially rooted in the problems of the people. Indeed Dauda has an obvious relationship with the dying monarch, and Segi, the legendary courtesan, has her affiliation well rooted elsewhere. In a very significant sense, Soyinka’s dramatic text is not different from the film. The story line of the film begins with the social disjuncture that the dramatic text darkly foretells would end in something morbid: Oba Danlola, the spiritual head of Isma suffers under the political pressure created by the dictatorial rule of Kongi, political head of Isma. The point of conflict between the two authorities is tangible enough. Kongi, the new dictator, realizes that his hold on the secular life of the people of Isma is total, but this hold does not guarantee him complete power over his mesmerized subjects: he covets the spiritual influence which Oba Danlola, the paramount traditional ruler, has over the people. When the film opens, Oba Danlola and his retinue are kept under strict watch in a

detention camp. The presence of Kongi is viciously visible even in this camp, and as Kongi’s plot is orchestrated towards the grand ceremony where Oba Danlola is coerced into giving up his spiritual authority in the earned ceremony of the New Yam festival, Soyinka paints, in vivid episodes, the crass modernity of Kongi and the ineffectual

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traditionalism of the local court. The author here opens up vectors of aristocratic sympathy. In Kongi’s Harvest, Soyinka proposes a decadent, almost obsolete traditional system of governance. Against this, he positions a political option—the rise of a debased, inhuman dictatorship. The picture of Isma is gloomy, neither side of the political debate capable of providing any viable future to the people. As a solution to the deadlock, Soyinka introduces a possible way out: the Dauda-Segi coalition. Dauda is heir to the traditional throne of Isma. He is the first son of Sarumi, the brother to Oba Danlola, and Segi, according to Oyin Ogunba, belongs to a respectable family in the society of Isma. In any case, Segi, who runs a bar Dauda frequently attends, has good reason to be part of the growing camp of dissidents to Kongi’s rulership, for Kongi is about to hang her daughter for some political offense. It is important that we take particular note of the social class of the Dauda/Segi coalition: these characters belong to the dying traditionalism of Isma. The introduction of Dauda, a part of the spiritual rulership of Isma, as possible way out of the political cul de sac only affirms Soyinka’s belief that viable political direction can come from one social class only: the established ruling class. Such an implied political dialogue would call for a total reformation of the traditional. Soyinka’s interpretation of modernity is unambiguous. Modernity is wayward and, in the example of Kongi’s Harvest, without direction. Moreover, its directionlessness can only result in mass destruction to the people of Isma: the gamut of philosophical postulations which the Reformed Aweri, the think-tank of Kongi’s government, proffers is mere mouthing, motivated by the turbulence of the modern temper. Biodun Jeyifo summarizes this feudal sympathy with profound clarity in his analysis of Death And The King’s Horseman, perhaps Soyinka’s most lyrical drama: In the process of polarism, the conflict of Death and The King’s Horseman between an alien, and an indigenous African world view, Soyinka has suppressed the real objective differences between conflicting groups and classes within the indigenous system. Itis illustrative of the gaps and dents in Soyinka’s present ideological armor that he selected this particular metaphysical and philosophical African civilization and not other more egalitarian African cosmogonic and metaphysical systems, the erosion of which ideological and political progressives can, with greater reason, regret. A metaphysics which idealizes and effaces conflicts and contradiction in African societies, which rationalizes the rule of a dazzling FEW (such as Elesin) over the deceived MANY

(the

women, the retinue, Amusa etc.) is an extension, in the ideological sphere and in the realm of thought, of class rule in the economic and political sphere.f

In Kongi’s Harvest, the dazzling few (Oba Danlola, Kongi and his Aweri members, Dauda and Segi) constitute the privileged pool of rulers and potential rulers. Power, political and spiritual, resides within this class, which Soyinka calls the “strong breed.” When a member of the ruling class become ineffective or when a new political upstart,

suchas Kongi, affronts the existing traditional authority, political change can only come from inside. Dauda becomes the possible solution to the political imbroglio.

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Soyinka’s Blues foraProdigal (1984) embodied a more thorough political imperative by questioning the legitimacy of political power wrested from the people. The social relevance of the film to the Nigerian people is not in doubt; the landscape is unquestionably Nigerian, the veiled characterization is quickly discernible, the faces are not farfetched because they represent the political hallmarks of Nigeria’s life as a union, and the stories that this film tells are actual events in Nigeria’s political life. The only shortcoming of this popular political film is that primary shortcoming of the industry as a whole: the problem of a reputable and efficient distribution outlet. Although the film does show some technical and aesthetic unevenness, Blues for a Prodigal was very popular in the 1980s on university campuses nationwide, where it made its rounds. Rightly, James Gibbs points out that “this film is an occasional piece, a response to a particular government.”” It is based on actual episodes during the devious political regime of Shehu Shagari (1979-1983). Toward the end of Shagari’s political mandate, Soyinka, a keen and avowed opponent of any form of political mismanagement, began the process of making Blues. But this was not to be completed until a little after the Shagari administration was ousted by the no-nonsense military regime of MajorGeneral Mohammed Buhari. Tired of the restrictions of the printed word and increasingly disenchanted with Shagari’s political system, Soyinka undertook his most perilous film project. Unlike the making of Culture in Transition and Kongi’s Harvest, there would be no financial help. He had to shoot Blues surreptitiously with amateur actors and mostly old equipment. But he had in mind a mission: the denunciation of oppressive government. Shagari’s government was extremely profligate, corruption and nepotism were rampant, and the acquisition of political power became a matter of regional affiliation. In the heat of the much debated squandering of Nigeria’s economic and moral resources, the regime of Shagari collapsed and a new military regime took over. The plot of Blues is simple. A group of students are recruited by Boye, himself a student recruit, and the prime mover of a mission to form a demolition squad intended

to intimidate political opponents. The cantankerous politician who animates this evil is Chief Muyejo. Soyinka’s intent is the precise recreation of what happened during this political darkness. It was, to use Pius Omole’s words, “to awaken the stupefied Nigerian people to certain unpleasant social realities.”'° The plot shows a heightened level of moral degeneracy: the police officer neglects his job and engages in dubious activities to enrich himself; students are used for suicidal missions to destabilize the political

system; politicians, rich and corrupt, deliberately mismanage power to their benefit; and aclan of political thugs arrives on the scene with terrific vigor and dangerous intent. The picture is typical post-Balewa Nigeria.'! In its relationship to the society which it represents so lucidly, Blues shows a marked departure in content and style of execution from films made before it. The irony, however, is that although it was obviously made to raise political consciousness, calling

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on the people to reject the political system foisted on them, its limited exhibition hindered the social force and influence it would have had. Bravely innovative, Blues is

an open text that departs from the petrification effect of the first (Hollywood-style) and second (art) cinemas. Blues generates social debate after screenings. Vendor, Ladi Ladebo’s most lyrical film to date, presents the same political period of Nigeria’s political life. It is as direct and forthright in confronting contemporary society as is Blues fora Prodigal. But it does this with grander poetic vision. Rather than restrict the narrative strategy to a single genre, the feature genre, as is the case with Blues, Ladebo introduces the intimacy of the documentary voice-over to express the political morbidity of the affluent. As a commentator on their outlandish tastes and on the economic options of a dying country, the DJ (disc jockey) is very articulate. The story line is straightforward: Jojo Finecountry, an ex-politician turned political fugitive, is on the run. He escapes through the porous border with the help of some friends. Now living in a European city, he monitors activities in his native Nigeria. He soon finds the situation at home tolerable. Disguised as a news vendor, he comes back home and plans his return to the center of political life. The means by which he acquires power is as interesting as how he escapes from the seat of power. Like Blues, this film emphasizes the futile circle within which the “lowly” people find themselves. Vendoris deliberately political; indeed, the deliberateness of the political themes are evident as soon as the credits roll. Beginning with a macabre display of a military van carrying combat-ready soldiers armed to the teeth in the street, the filmmaker positions the relationship between the military and the cowed civilian population. The chaos of the opening gambit foretells yet another reign of military terror. Soon enough the voiceover makes this obvious. The latest in the many unwarranted coups in the history of an African country has taken place. If the filmmaker tried to be cautious about identifying the country of his film, he does not quite succeed as he provides, wittingly or unwittingly, surfeits of political utterances in the voice-over commentaries, linking the

film world to the Shagari regime. But the political discourse which the take-over of the morbidly corrupt Shagari regime engenders is not exclusive to that single moment. In fact one of the fascinations of the film is the level of political debate which it calls attention to. As soon as the voice-over comments, “The face of politics changes so fast today that school children the world over can hardly keep up with it,” a huge space of political debate is opened. The spectator is invited into its labyrinth. From this open political space, the film comes to its recognizable point: the narrative sequence moves to a scene of a dugout canoe with a panicky man in cassock fleeing. This man, the voiceover assures us, is one of the thieving politicians of the deposed civilian administration. The mangrove swamp, which is framed in the shots of the river, the face of the politician, and the voice-over commentary, situate the tragedy. Vendor is about a specific class of people, showing how this class undermined many opportunities that would have made the Nigerian nation a true pride of the African continent.

Cinema and Social Change in Nigeria: The Political Imperative

PT

The film’s narrative, mobile and very daring, decimates its political debate into manageable bits, situating each bit within a parodic situation which creates laughter and pain. The ridiculous figure of the once famous, charming, and flamboyant politician, Jojo Finecountry, escaping in a dugout canoe, provides an early example in the film of an image that evokes laughter and pity at the same time. The filmmaker weaves around him the sad political debate of a country running from itself; a democracy scuttled, a dream long dead before the coup sends the senator escaping into exile. While the voice-over commentary is factual, the disc jockey, Shadow, provides lively digressions to the narrative. Although he comes into the debate rather offhandedly, he ultimately contributes to it a charm, wit and intelligence, not often associated with people of his profession in Nigeria. We know that the DJ could not have been working for a private broadcast company since private broadcasting came into being only later — 1993 to be precise — and so the insinuation is that he works for the government. This being so, the filmmaker may have assigned too much to the DJ, who is intelligent, calm and positively critical of the political situation. He does not waste words. His parodic strategy is to offer serious political statement from within the customary lightheartedness of his job as a disc jockey. But the depth and intelligence with which this is done and the very subtle sarcasm that fills his political commentaries produce a semantic intention that is directly opposed to the original one.!? His veiled critique of the people’s apathy to politics, especially the return of the refugees of the past regime, his critique of the wealth of dubious politicians, and his critique of the moral bankruptcy of the nation are the first but not the only targets of his discourse. For the filmmaker, politics is the bane of the society’s decadence; not even the DJ, that sarcastic commentator of the morbid display of affluence politicians, is outside the corrupt influence which the ill-defined politics of the Second Republic perpetrates. He is on the payroll of the devious illiterate politician, Chief Jibiti Wayo. The filmmaker evidently aims to show how corrupt practices have eaten into every aspect of national life. The voice-over commentary tells us of the impending return of Senator Jojo Finecountry and the DJ elaborates on the people’s opinion of this event. While the DJ begins from what the society already knows, he expands the frontiers of their knowledge about the subject and actors of politics by revealing something new. He democratizes information about social, political and cultural matters. He comments on literally everything in the society. The DJ is an instrument of popular discourse. It is from Shadow that we know of the extreme moral degeneracy into which the society has fallen. Most importantly, we know of the major narrative turn of the story through the casual intervention of the DJ: the

meeting of the Bomboko “family” to choose a leader to run its affairs. It is the DJ who makes an allusion that this “family” meeting is, in effect, a national, political gathering. In attendance at the meeting are the most vicious members of the decadent middle-class. The political-class is also represented. Not even the DJ’s assurance that the divination

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system of choosing a leader is the best traditional political option can assuage our skepticism. Senator Jojo Finecountry emerges. Then his disguise is discarded and the true person behind the mask comes forth. Protests arising from members of the Bomboko “family” (including the corrupt messenger who has risen to become a bigtime socialite, the “cash-madam,” the smuggler who wants to become a senator, the fraudulent academic who turns emergency contractor, the high court judge and the female journalist) wane when Jojo Finecountry offers them posh ministerial jobs in the new government. There is bound to be a military intervention. The seed of political chaos has been sown. The film makes this point obvious. The introduction of competing points of views in Vendor is particularly rewarding, providing a polyvocality which according to Mikhail Bakhtin’ governs the operation of meaning. The diegetic world of Vendor is presented from four discourse positions: the voice-over commentary, situated as the authorial intervention, the detached, casual

realism of the DJ’s comments on social and political affairs, the visual framing of actual political and social events, and the various radio announcements that pull the political plot forward. The DJ voices the popular opinion sarcastically. The voice-over is subjective, providing the filmmaker’s political perspective, while the radio announcements give us the official reaction to the political reality. These posts of discourse are given visual amplification and emphasis by effective third person pictorial composition. Vendor transgresses the moral narrative pattern of Nigerian films, presenting the viewer with many questions asked about Nigerian politics and culture from several viewpoints. Chief Eddie Ugbomah’s career as a filmmaker is particularly significant for the politically conscious Nigerian cinema. The political dimension of his work is unequivocal in the film texts as well as in his statements about these films. Recently, he restated his preoccupation to N. Frank Ukadike: “Film is a powerful political tool.... There are a lot of filmmakers now in Nigeria who use film as a medium for political criticism.” While quite correct about this, the point needs to be made that Ugbomah’s films are the most politically conscious of all and are socially situated in a recognizable Nigerian environment. His primary significance to the development of the Nigerian cinema is that he has produced more films invested with political themes than any other Nigerian filmmaker. As he put it in an interview with this writer in 1991, “Film is politics; huge

politics, film business, serious business.” The course of his career has followed this bifurcated path in creating “film in the service of (his) people.” Ugbomah’s cinematic oeuvre is richly diverse. The Rise and Fall of Dr. Oyenusi, a real life drama comparable to the life of MacHeath of the famous English play The Beggar’s Opera, was made in 1976. It deals with the notorious escapades of the feared robber, Oyenusi, in Lagos of the 1950s. The social message is a denunciation of this form of wealth. The Mask (1979) is one of Ugbomah’s most controversial political films to date. It is an espionage film which attempts to fulfill the wish of having the priceless mask of the FESTAC symbol brought back to Nigeria. Oil Boom (1980) concerns the

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disaster waiting at the end of corruption and mismanagement of the so-called oil-boom years. Bolus 80 (1982) is a social criticism of the Nigerian police force and Death of A Black President (1983) deals with the political and social implications of the assassination of one of Nigeria’s leaders whom Chief Ugbomah considers to have been truly great. The Great Attempt (1990) is a simple thriller. All these films are made in English, not the indigenous language, largely because they are directed toward the growing urban middle-class, containing social and political commentaries about their lives, their aspirations, their beliefs and their predicament. Take Oil Boom, for instance. While the film portrays the emergent middle-class of the oil-boom era of the 1970s, it is critical of their ruthlessness in relation to the entire social and economic system. The veiled criticism is made tangible in the banal display of sudden wealth by this class. Ubgomah’s filmic style is direct, fluid, and open. Themes dictate his stylistic options in most cases. His political films are devoid of any undue intellectualizing. For Chief Ugbomah follows the thread of his first love — filmmaking — and must circumvent the vagaries of business in Nigeria. Aware of this, he has recently directed attention to the making of Yoruba films, what Ukadike has described as “theater-on-screen.” Once

more, Chief Ugbomah has proven his enthusiasm and his prolixity. He released Esan Ake in 1984, Apalara in 1986, Omiran in 1988 and Toriade in 1992. These films are subsumed under the Yoruba film genre. The principal language spoken is Yoruba, and the primary target audience is that which the Yoruba Traveling Theater troupes had created since the 1940s. As Ugbomah points out in his interview with Ukadike, these films are apolitical, depending largely on the Yoruba culture of the supernatural, witchcraft, magic, and escapism to keep the audience captive. Although Ugbomah regrets following the Yoruba tradition of filmed theater rather than staying with his political filmmaking, he has to do this now to survive. Critical discussion of Ugbomah’s political films has been scanty in local media and scholarship. The Mask and Death of A Black President have had the ill luck of many uncritical analyses. A typical review of The Mask titled “The Maskis Very Rough’’* was concerned with the aesthetic finesse of the film, and never bothered with the explicit political point which The Mask obviously makes. To ignore politics in films like this is to judge from a prejudiced position. Such criticism contributes to the woes of distribution I detailed in the analysis of Soyinka’s Blues For A Prodigal. For this reason, such films hardly make the rounds or have an effect. Yet this kind of film must somehow complement other radical sources of contemporary popular discourse.

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Notes

1: The Traveling Theater shows of Hubert Ogunde, dean of contemporary popular theater has been said to have aided the fight for political independence in Nigeria. Ebun Clark’ sbook, Hubert Ogunde: The Making of Nigerian Theater (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1980) is outstanding in its analysis of the political posture of this theater tradition and the momentum it gave the drive towards self-rule in Nigeria. 2: Onookome Okome, “The Rise of Folkloric Cinema in Nigeria.” Ph.D. Thesis, University of Ibadan,

Ibadan, Nigeria. 3: This point is poignantly made by the Nigerian filmmaker, Chief Eddie Ubgomah in an interview with N. Frank Ukadike. See Ukadike, “Toward An African Cinema,” Transition 63 (1994), p. 150-163. In this

interview, Ugbomah reveals that “The (Nigerian cinema) industry is still alive not because of the production quality, but because of huge, enthusiastic audiences...” (p. 156). 4: Wole Soyinka, “Theatre and The Emergence of The Nigerian Film Industry,” The Development and Growth of the Film Industry in Nigeria, eds., Alfred Opubor and Onuora E. Nwuneli (Lagos and New York: National Council For Arts and Culture 1979), p. 95-104. 5: Soyinka’s film script of Kongi’s Harvest is in the Reference Section of the University of Ibadan Kenneth Dike Library. The motion picture made out of the play can be found at the Film Archives of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. 6: Hyginus Ekwuazi, Film In Nigeria, 2nd Edition (Lagos and New York: Third Press International, 1991), p. 26. 7: Teshome H. Gabriel, “Towards A Critical Theory of Third World Films,” Third World Affairs (1985),

p. 355-368. 8: Biodun Jeyifo, The Truthful Lie: Essays In The Sociology of African Drama (Port of Spain: New Bacon Books, 1985), p. 35. 9: James Gibbs, “Blues For A Prodigal: A Review,” Wasafari 3 (1985), p. 34. 10: Pius Omole, “Wole Soyinka’s Idiom in Blues for a Prodigal,” Ibadan: Institute of African Studies,

1986 (Unpublished), p. 2. 11: Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was the first Prime Minister of Nigeria. 12: Jeffrey S. Rush, “Who is in on the Joke: Parody as Hybridized Narrative Discourse.” Quarterly Journal of Film and Video 12(1-2) (1990), p. 5-11. 13: M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). 14: Eddie Ugbomah, “Toward An African Cinema” interview with N. Frank Ukadike, Transition 63, p.

150-163. 15: N.F. Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). On page 149, Ukadike uses the phrases “Theatre-on-screen” and “Filmed Theatre” to describe what contemporary Yoruba filmmakers are doing with the film medium. 16: “The Mask Is a Very Rough Film.” West-Africa, 11 August, 1980, p. 1487-1488.

Par rapport aux autres cinémas du tiers monde, le cinéma politique nigérien a été secondaire et inefficace, aussi décevant que la politique du pays lui-même. Il existe quand-méme quatre exceptions partielles : Ola Balogun, Wole Soyinka, Lodi Ladebo, et surtout Eddi Ugbomeh, de loin le plus important du groupe, tant par le nombre que par la popularité de ses films. Mais le systéme de distribution marche si mal pour les films politiques que méme Ugbomeh a di privilégier des films de genre anodins (qui suivent les conventions du théâtre yoruba) afin de s’assurer du travail.

N. Frank Ukadike

The Other Voices of Documentary: Allah Tantou and Afrique, je te Plumerai

In reviewing the history of cinema and documentary film practice, one finds a deliberate mockery by western filmmakers of Africans and their historical traditions and cultures.' The pattern upholds an inexorable use of the image for “scientific” inquiry, for studying cultures. In fact, critics have observed that most documentary films, specifically ethnographic and anthropological films, are mere spectacles constructed to titillate western viewers; or, at best, they serve as fragments of reality, depending on the nature of the real or what one conceives of as the real.” This paper examines new African documentary practices and the strategies utilized in the construction of cinematic “reality” of Africa. It does so in the context of two films, Allah Tantou (‘God’s Will’, Guinea, 1991) by David Achkar and Afrique, je te plumerai (‘Africa, I Will Fleece You’, Cameroon, 1992) by Jean-Marie Teno. The films are considered in relation to their theoretical contexts so as to redefine the relationship between the dominant (western) and oppositional (pan-Africanist) cinematic representations of Africa. A critical issue at stake is whether the new African documentaries can be wholly comprehended without fathoming the radically divergent ways in which the pan-Africanist imagery positions the subject, the viewer, and the filmmaker to promote spectator participation. In addition to stressing the documentaries’ manifestations as social art, I will also consider their inventive approaches to issues of formal structuration, experimental modalities, and modes of address. In this regard, the African documentary seeks to interrogate the African experience;

the documentary frame presents what might be seen as a transparent window on history, culture and other issues of resistance. The social issues, cultural values and politics of the African world are portrayed with both sensitivity and realism. It is this connection between documentary and the real circumstances depicted, between the filmmaker and the subject/audiences, that is the most distinctive characteristic of this genre. I will argue that the passion for truth stems from the penchant for historical accuracy and communicability, hence the impact of “the belief that what is seen (and heard) is the essence of what is, and of what is knowable about what is,’’ this forming the basis for African historical truth. N. Frank Ukadike, (1995), “The Other Voices of Documentary: Allah Tantou and

Afrique, je te plumerai,” iris, 18, pp. 81-94.

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Towards the History: Toward the Criticism

Bill Nichols’s observation regarding the dichotomous relationship between fiction and documentary film is germane to our discourse. He notes that “If narratives invite our engagement with the construction of a story, set in an imaginary world, documentary invites our engagement with the construction of an argument, directed toward the historical world.’’* The hegemony of the colonizer relative to the colonized peoples has, in conjunction with the history of oppression, institutionalized social differentiation and inequality. This imbalance also promoted the assumption that colonial histories offer a privileged perspective from which to analyze both worlds. Countering this assumption implies the demystification of colonial histories, exposing their method of reification, objectification, and representation of the “Other”. Hence, the quest for African cinematic reality (the image) in film has produced a genre of social documentary meant to combat the false image presented by traditional cinema. In attempting to confront the distortion, the perspectives of “alternative” cinema specify an ideological mission that functions as a specific mandate in reexamining hegemonic power relations. Stating that “narrativity emerges as a fundamental condition that binds together all three representational practices — history, documentary, and the fiction film,” Philip Rosen argues that “meaning arises through a process of sequentation which is constitutive of historical discourse.”° This latter concern, as Rosen rightly points out, has been an integral component that documentary theory and practice have always embraced, since the time of Grierson. But the truth is that documentary films about Africa have also privileged fiction at the expense of authentic history in exactly the same way that the history and theory addressing the genre most often ignore the willful destruction of the relationship which non-western subjects enjoyed in early documentary experiments.° These flaws result from an inability to comprehend the complex relationship between history and culture, which requires patience and integrity to circumnavigate. As we shall show, it is from this perspective that we locate the mission of African cinema, specifically the documentary genre. The development of cinema in Africa is directly connected to both historical circumstances and movements in film practices. There is a relationship between history/ politics in society and history/politics in the text, which may culminate in the decolonization of the screen and the repositioning of the cinema as the site for what critics are calling political contestation. A concerted effort to crystallize national struggles and identities may be an indication of a society that is moving to regain its belief in itself. This belief had been shattered by the “[un]humanitarian uses of the cinema”? entrenched in the standard narrative and visual structure of the dominant tradition, which the “alternative” reinventing representations of Africa now seek to reverse.

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Western methods applied to the construction of African film images constitute what might be termed spurious art, antithetical to the longings of a genial art which indigenous cultural productions predicate. Afrique and Allah Tantou contrast sharply with many films, both documentary and fiction, that have made Africa their focal point. For example, in the two popular films used in American classrooms, Reassemblage and Unsere Afrikareise, we find that the African lives proffered make a mockery of human intelligence. In Reassemblage for instance, (which obfuscates African subjectivity) the all-knowing voice of God in the film is that of an itinerant docent — a Peace Corps volunteer, the filmmaker herself. Similarly, Unsere Afrikareise, heralded by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross* for its “innovative” editing technique, and by Michael Renov for “shar[ing] with mainstream documentary a commitment to the representation of the historical real,” deliberately disregards African sensibility. Here an African is used as a stand to hold the white man’s rifle as it blasts its salvo right next to his ear to hit a lion. Moreover, the Austrians in the film, who constantly ridicule the Africans, exhibit

themselves as racists and poachers, their manners no less animalistic than the giraffes they slaughter mercilessly in their Kenyan safari. The filmmakers’ racist and sexist bias is epitomized in a shot where the long neck of one of the giraffes is contrasted with the elongated necklaces adorning an African woman. Yet this blatantly racist and sexist image is not even mentioned by the critics who admire the film for its cinematic inventiveness. Most attacks on such works focus on the abuse of authorial power, an abuse which

in turn invalidates claims to documentary authenticity. Elements of authenticity can be found in segments of any film, but this does not mean that the segment carries the full weight of the entire film. The question is, should the audience or critics capitalize on the importance of a film’s particular stylistic tendency at the expense of the elements that have vitiated the reality that the film ought to be exposing? History has proved this to be true if we remember the virulent impact of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), Luis Buñuel’s sardonic Land Without Bread (1932), Jean Rouch’s Les Maitre fou (1953), or Terry Bishop’s Daybreak in Udi (1949), all of which were vehemently protested or criticized because of their racism, but nonetheless classified as “masterpieces” and classics. How does one know that certain aspects of history and culture have been misrepresented, and why does the audience see the images presented differently from the

perspectives of the filmmaker? I have argued elsewhere that it might be theoretically correct to polemicize authorial interventions with intriguing theories as some artists have done when they try to help the consumer understand their “complex” approaches to visual representation.'? However, in the visual and performing arts, one would agree that the image speaks louder than, say, the voice-over in any documentary film, or the polemical treatise which explains or miseducates the audience. (It is ironic too that frequently the theories deriving from most films also create mental confusion for

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readers.) For the critical observer, issues concerning selectivity (choice of shots/image), and intrusion (method of selecting) play important roles in deciphering any work of art. In the case of film, the above observation applies to the use of camera, composition, and the way in which the footage has been assembled to convey meaning. Since film has always been an ideological project, it cannot be politically neutral. Its ideological subjectivity also prepares the curious observer to think about how methodology impacts upon what is presented on the screen (the cinematic sign) and what was out there on the open (the referent). It is pertinent to note that while many African fiction films are structured as fictional narratives, they exhibit a documentary/fictional synthesis. It is here that, stylistically, we find reminiscences of treatment that recalls Latin American documentary film practice. For example, such early films as Afrique Sur Seine (1955), Black Girl (1966), Mandabi (1974), Last Grave at Dimbaza (1976), and Harvest: 3,000 Years (1976) are inundated with a documentary mode of address; the juxtaposition of fiction and documentary images embeds the diegesis in oral tradition, and heightens emotional impact. Like their Latin American counterparts, African filmmakers believe in the political use of film and see less entertainment value for films than Hollywood does. If anything connects African and Hollywood films it is that African cinema is directly related to the results of earlier movements in film practices and historical circumstances. The rise of the realistic and formalistic tendencies — neorealism, docu-drama and

Marxist dialectics — expedited the dissolution of what has become the line between fiction and reality, between documentary and ethnographic film practice, and, I may add, the anomalies of representation — the North and South dichotomy. It is also from

this perspective that I have argued that although African films exhibit hybrid conventions—those originating from Hollywood, Russian Socialist dialectics, Italian Neorealism and Avant-garde traditions — no single stylistic criterion predominates. Therefore, any critical component applied to the evaluation of this film practice must also consider how these syncretic “master codes” are disarticulated by the cultural codes embedded in the

oral tradition.!! From the very beginning of filmmaking, some of the above distinctions already began to emerge to address the visual polarities and characteristics of Lumiére’s Workers Leaving The Factory (1895) and Méliés’s A Trip to the Moon (1902). While Lumière’s film was believed to have captured an unmediated event, Méliès extended the potentials of the cinematic apparatus beyond the capture of “physical reality” (Kracauer) to encompass a rearrangement of filmed events. This counter-hegemonic impulse has greatly influenced filmmaking ever since. In the African sector, in oral art, film production and other cultural productions, an event can be rearranged without necessarily distorting'the meaning as connected with the historical, social, and political realities. This intervention is appreciated for radiating

the fictional impulse in the process of enhancing the creative and didactic value of the

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intended message. On this level, film watching becomes synonymous with history lessons, instilled with culturally specific codes and awareness, rendering this tradition unabashedly political. This is why, depending on the circumstances that have influenced a film’s production, audience acceptability is a given. Hence, the polemical discourse around documentary veracity would also take a new approach. What is generally discernible as a documentary in dominant analysis assumes another name, a filmed essay in documentary dialect, a topic that will recur in the subsequent sections of this paper.

Historical Specificity: Documentary Conscience Films from the francophone zone popularized African fiction film and the didactic trend, and although documentary segments interspersed most narratives, the documentary genre never manifested itself as a common genre. It is in the anglophone and lusophone regions that documentary film continues to thrive — unfortunately at the expense of fiction film. However, documentary film practice has different agendas in these regions. That of the anglophone region was modeled after the British colonial pattern of instructional filmmaking—documenting the activities of the ruling oligarch, praise singing even when there was no genuine development to boast of. That of the lusophone was much more focused — film was accorded the status of weapon of liberation in the war against Portugal. Pedro Pimente, the assistant director of the Mozambique Film Institute (Instituto Nacional de Cinema or INC) felicitously remarked that it is necessary to change the dominant image to “produce a new thing, the product of a new ideology.” This production of a “new thing” came to mean much for Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique as socialist film ideology meant for Russia, in this case leading to the acquisition of a documentary film practice engendered in Africanist/Socialist ideology. As an emancipatory project, African cinema has always concerned itself with wide ranging issues — from decolonization of history and liberation to Africa’s resistance against oppression. During the first decade of African film practice, this concern specifically manifested itself in anti-colonialist projects. After independence, however, when African elites proved to be even more perfidious than the colonial administrators they replaced, cinema placed all contemporary issues on its agenda. As Harold W. Weaver pointed out, there developed “a cinema of contestation between the filmmakers and the political leadership.”'? Some of the films that were extremely critical of the

establishment were censored and some filmmakers embarked on social criticism only after the political leadership was driven out of office or eliminated through natural causes. One such instance was Allah Tantou, which was made in Guinea. Both this film

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and Afrique are remarkable for the manner in which they address larger issues of continental dimensions. Two elemental analyses can be set in motion: the first is contextual and concerns the forces bearing on the production of films — the social institutions and production practices that construct media images of Africa; the second entails personal/ideological manifestations as a synthesis of the collective struggle against oppression. Four principal characteristics in documentary film practice define this agenda: a) authority: as a metadiscourse referring to the validity of the subject’s treatment, or even the legitimacy of the filmmaker, and his/her knowledge and relation to the issues being portrayed; b) transparency: embodying the processes of introspection, as in “looking in” (hence subverting the original meaning of the term, “transparency” — that which appears to be mere recording), and presenting issues as transparent windows on the world, raising and increasing public awareness; c) immediacy: the reflection of “nowness,” the subject’s or viewer’s relationship to the present, which may involve the invocation of past events to explain the present situation, or even the use of present events to amplify past events in order to make them more immediate; d) authenticity: almost synonymous with reality, an expression of the filmmaker’s truthfulness in presenting the real, questioning societal norms and increasing public awareness of issues and dichotomies." Allah Tantou and Afrique have used their structures to transform the above filmic attributes to further cinematic scrutiny of the African issues depicted, which, in turn,

forcefully informs and moves the audience. In their respective ways, each film uses creative modes of address and conventions of traditional documentary cinema, but each is recontextualized to offer a means of challenging the nature of representation. This can be seen for example, when footage originally broadcast to promote colonialist or neocolonialist propaganda is given a new meaning. The films are reconfigured as turnaround images, refurbished as veritable critiques of colonialist/repressive ideologies. Before we analyze these documentaries

in more detail, however, it is pertinent to

consider some critical assumptions of the documentary film practice since they are bound to influence my approach, particularly in relation to my understanding of how certain conventions may have been appropriated or subverted. Bill Nichols points out that, in documentary film practice, of the “dominant organizational patterns around which most texts are structured,” four modes of production stand out, namely, “expository,” “observational,” “interactive,” and “reflexive.” He notes that in this paradigm, the expository text speaks to the “viewer directly, with titles or voices” which are meant to convey progressive thoughts “about the historical world.” The voice-over narration, dubbed “voice-of-God” or “talking heads,” presents

objectively persuasive arguments. The observational mode is more directly connected with “direct cinema” or “cinéma vérité’ and “stresses the nonintervention of the filmmaker,” who relinquishes control of the image to the unobtrusive camera. In the

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interactive mode, the coalition of “monologue and dialogue predominate” in the narrative, whereby “textual authority shifts toward the social actors recruited,” thus,

“putting the actors into direct encounter with the filmmaker,” involving participation, conversation, or interrogation. Lastly, the reflexive mode of representation positions the viewer to experience the method or process of representation and actively stimulates awareness of both the cinematic form and the issues inherent in the text.!5 The above modes of representation also apply to African documentary film practice. What is most interesting in Nichols’s theory, however, is his contention that reflexivity “need not be purely formal; it can also be pointedly political.” As he states: “[W]hat works at a given moment and what counts as a realistic representation of the historical world is not a simple matter of progress toward a final form of truth but of struggles for power and authority within the history arenas itself.” In this respect, the structures of Allah Tantou and Afrique reveal a deliberate application of mixed modes of address, with filmmakers opting for acombination of two or more of the above characteristics in one film. “Since few documentaries are pure examples of their form,” observes Burton, a mixed or multiple mode of address “is the category in which most documentaries will fall—those from an oppositional tradition that encompass experimentation, innovation, and marginality all the more abundantly.”!?7 This statement also alludes to the interrogation of cinematic codes and dominant cinematic practices. In oppositional structures, experimentation with technique conforms with the search for new organizing principles in the construction of a new image. When the filmic criteria works, it strengthens the rapport between the filmmaker and the spectator — a rapport, as cultural producers and critics in the developing world have argued, that could not be realized with the cinematic codes originating from formal structures. Both documentaries pointedly present themselves as prototypes of African investigation-in-progress (in Burton’s term). By using cinematography, sound and commentaries to scrutinize present history and issues, they not only contribute to the resuscitation of popular memory, but also construct an active audience as witnesses of that history. The unconventional structures of Allah Tantou and Afrique stem from the juxtaposition of documentary with fictional images, and from narrative discontinuity. In the dominant tradition of African cinema, the fictional and the documentary coexist to illuminate and expand the borders of reality. Similarly, in the documentaries discussed here, documentary reality is infused with fictional images to achieve the same goal. But what would seem on the surface to be a melange of film styles (documentary, experimental, and narrative; montage editing, lighting, alternation of silence and sound) becomes a cohesive film that expresses significant, deep-rooted issues. Although the method of representation is imaginative, the subject matter is real. As historical reenactments, these two films are also very reflexive. In each case, the film

begins with a voice-of-God type narration; however, the images quickly take control,

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transforming it to a kind of voice-of-the-people presentation. Much of the dialogue and monologue are premeditated and the background and dramatic sequences staged. Yet, in both films the dialogue, monologue, and off-screen voice-over deal with real issues. Allah Tantou exposes the lies propagated in the official account of the death of Marof Achkar, father of the filmmaker, and the suppression of individual freedoms by Guinea’s tyrannical regime. Similarly, Afrique reveals the colonialist and neocolonialist methods of exploitation and subjugation. At times, the artistry renders some of the mesmerizing sequences of torture too ethereal or attractive for the viewer, but it is this

enchantment that also compels the viewer to examine, confront and contemplate the real images behind the illusion. The viewer sees the young David in Allah Tantou playing his father, the chiaroscuro effect of the lighting throwing him almost off screen to haunt the viewer. However, the impact lies not in the lighting itself, but rather in the darkness of the torture cell, which signifies a dark momentin history. For the viewer ingrained in western realist aesthetics, it is the dissonance of this thought in relation to the artistry of the lighting effect in the background that forces him or her to reflect on its artificiality. In pondering its affect, it is not unreasonable to be skeptical about the impact of art in such a fictional/historical reenactment, but it is the fusion of reality (the fact that Achkar languished and died in

jail) and fiction (the reenactment and artistic magnification of the mood in his cell) that bears the ire that compels the viewer to concentrate on the message and the details of the argument. Robert Stam has argued that “reflexive works break with art as enchantment and call attention to their own factitiousness as textual constructs.’’!* Here, in Allah

Tantou, it is the mental anguish illuminated with artistic devices, not the beauty of the sequence, that enables the viewer to share the experience of the tortured victim. Allah Tantouis an autobiographical film which uses personal reflections to examine a dark chapter in Guinea’s history. It is also the first African film to address human rights abuses in the African continent outside of South Africa.!°In the study of documentary theory and practice, critics have noted that the “autobiographical documentary consists of evidentiary sound/image constructions’ that focus on “oneself or one’s family, and the subject of the film and filmmaker often begins witha level of trust and intimacy never achieved or even attempted in other films.’”””! In Allah Tantou David Achkar mobilizes a search for his father in the “Guinean past, his father’s search for himself inside prison and Africa’s search for a new beginning amid the disillusionment of the post-independence era.” Thematically, this is a unique film in that it sheds light on important aspects of African history that would otherwise not be told. For one, the image of Sekou Touré, as we know him in the West, is that of

first president of Guinea and undaunted pan-Africanist. But inside his empire stood the gigantic and infamous Camp Boiro Prison, where political detainees languished and wasted away without trial. As the film shows, no official explanation is provided for those who died.

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As Achkar had been charged with treason and jailed, his family was obliged to flee into exile, and it was not until after the president died that his family was told that their relative had long since been executed: Ironically he who championed his country’s crusade against apartheid at the time he was Guinea’s Ambassador to the United Nations would suffer exactly the kind of maltreatment against which he had spoken. The filmmaker constructs audio and visual images of his father’s state of mind, his anguish, his personal criticism and self-evaluation, and his spiritual transformation from Islam to Christianity. This ordeal is meticulously expressed because of David’s own personal involvement, and because of the recovery of his father’s secret “memoir” which was written in jail and which aided in the story’s reconstruction. The “memoir”, an archival gold mine — horrifying and introspective as the account undoubtedly is — has the impact of an historical document of significant value. And if indeed, according to Nichols, “documentary offers access to a shared, historical construct” it is accurate to say that “instead of a world,” Allah Tantou gives us “access to the world.”

If Allah Tantou is an historical film which addresses, by implication, the appalling human rights record in Africa, Afrique is an intensive study of one nation’s history — that of Cameroon. However, Afrique does offer a continent-wide critique of colonialism, especially cultural colonialism, and openly calls on Africans to reclaim what is theirs. According to Angelo Fiombo, “Africa today is linked to the past by aclose cause/effect bond: from colonial violence to the single political party, from repression to intolerance.” It is from this perspective that Afrique verifies this claim with cinematic pyrotechnic. Fiombo notes: … [iJn a skillful melange of contemporary images, fiction, important period documents and precious reconstruction, the director venturing into the corridors, often forbidden, of the memory

of his country, with a will to reaffirm that ‘right to speak’ which has been denied too long.*

Reminiscent of Hour of the Furnaces (Argentina, 1968), Afrique employs multiple conventions, mixing elements of caustic satire, comedy, music, straightforward didacticism, and neorealistic camera work. The film does not simply ask Africans to wake up to the challenges ahead, it indicts tyranny through a critique of colonial decadence made comprehensible from colonial and neocolonial histories. Teno, the filmmaker, had originally intended to make a film about African publish-

ing. After witnessing the brutal suppression of public demonstrations in Cameroon, however, he decided “to examine language as either a tool of liberation or of domination.” He goes on to state that “in confiscating language, in reducing language to codes accessible only to the minority, it becomes easier to silence and exploit the people.” Before the film’s title appears on screen, a teaser provides the viewer with a brief synopsis of the entire movie. It is early morning, an intimidating voice-over (“Yaounde, you inspire shame — Cruel city, city of official lies”) introduces the viewer to the routine

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life in this boisterous capital. A hand-held camera maneuvers jerkily through the crowd. We are told that the situation is similar in various big cities, and that one death has already occurred. A scene from archival footage takes us back to the 1960 independence celebration where we witness people dancing with joy at their freedom. The first president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, acknowledges the crowd’s greetings. He dies and Paul Biya takes over, eventually imposing iron-fist control, with repressive crackdowns and concomitant upheavals. This segment summarizes the history of Cameroon. Afrique inundates the viewer with a barrage of images. They are not collages of images in the usual sense, but historical documents and political manifestoes. This strategy is a calculated way of presenting complex histories. The film is carefully researched, emanating as it does from the filmmaker’s understanding of the colonial history before his birth, extending into his present life, and made more incisive from his hybrid stance — his status as an exile living in Paris. Teno creates a meta-cinema that draws from the archival propaganda newsreel images of the colonial media. This cinema, constituting an unintentional critique of its own history, is evolved by powerful images compelling the viewer to understand the media’s impact upon African consciousness; it shows how that consciousness was eroded over the years, paving the way for the creation of more young evolies.** Too often western news media — including films and documentaries — have failed to probe African problems; rather, they report them in a prejudiced and biased manner. I wanted to trace cause and effect between the intolerable present and the colonial violence of yesterday to understand how a country could fail to succeed as a state which was once composed of well-structured, traditional societies.”’

Many scenes in the film foreground these concerns. They can be examined from the privileged position of the oral tradition and from works written in the early Cameroonian alphabet”, from the official Cameroonian information network, from foreign print media, and from television. In another sequence, Afrique focuses on the dearth of African-authored books in

Yaounde when a young lady reporter discovers that there are only a handful of books written by Africans in the French Cultural Center, the British Council, and the Goethe Institute libraries. Even audio/visual and children’s book sections contained holdings relating only to Europe. Despite the establishment of sophisticated printing presses, thirty years after independence, Cameroon and other African countries still import books from Europe. Although the film did not examine this important issue from the economic developments of the past eight years or so when African economies began to be mortgaged to the IMF and World Bank, new forms of slavery and economic subjugation have emerged. Indeed, it is increasingly difficult to manufacture books in Africa due to IMF-imposed “Structural Adjustment Programs” and currency devaluations.

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If the lack of books written from the African perspective is one area that continues to promote western hegemony, the influence of electronic media, I would argue, is even

more devastating. Afrique identifies this problem. Just as the filmmaker recalls his youth reading western comics and being told in school and at home to study hard so as to become white, so too does television continue at an alarming rate to become the arbiter of cultural change. Consider the scene where the director of Cameroon National Television asks the producer of Afrique how much he will pay to have his film shown ontelevision. The producer brags that “Dallas and films (sic) like Dynasty, Chateauvallon, Derrick, and Mademoiselle, are offered to us free, and the people love it.”2 On the level of delineation in both films, we find a constant shift in the voice of authority, as the form of narration turns to what we might term a filmed essay in documentary dialect. The many kinds of presentation within the films, such as dramatic narrative, allegorical monologue, and film within a film, diversify the authoritative voice. These forms are also evocative of multiple voices, as in Africa’s oral tradition, which appropriates many forms of representation in its abundant use of culturally established iconographical codes of explication. Since the inception of African cinema, oral tradition has formed the basis of its cultural and aesthetic grounding. It is interesting that the structure of both films, particularly of Allah Tantou, is indebted to this traditional technique of disseminating knowledge. In returning to the actual impact of oral tradition, we find that oral art can bear upon the method of narration, including repetition of dialogue and images, satire and dramatization; the primary result is to externalize the text, validating the voices of authority by neutralizing their hierarchy. Afrique and Allah Tantou position the African filmmaker and his audience in a world dominated by injustice, and offer a vehement and sardonic critique of the oppressive mechanisms of power. Both use a variety of cinematic approaches to examine history, the self, and the collective in that history, as do many African fiction films. Allah Tantou is especially concerned with the family and the filmmaker’s position in it. Although it does not seem to involve the collective, the state apparatus that tore Achkar’s family apart has national and international implications. For example, by juxtaposing newsreels of recognizable Third World liberation leaders — Castro, Kenyatta, Lumumba, and Nasser with Achkar’s prison experience, the film resonates with memories of “testimony of existence and struggle,”* in Teshome Gabriel’s terms. In this way one is also forced to think about all those other people who have died fighting for just causes, “those unrecorded and unremembered millions of Africans” who have disappeared.*! By contrast, Afrique takes a different approach in its questioning of history and the

positioning of the self in that history. Unlike Allah Tantou, it confronts the collective head-on. The film emphasizes historical and contemporary European hegemony and cultural domination in Cameroon, particularly in print and electronic media, and urges Africans to “reclaim their culture as well as their political and economic institutions in order to achieve true independence from Europe and the West.’ That is a positively

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conclusive statement directed toward achieving a specific goal. The title Allah Tantou means “God’s Will” — a denomination as speculative and restrictive as the events it depicts. For some critics, this is why the film “refuses to construct an authoritative narrative space/time.”* The director is careful not to alienate his audience. In fact, it is the clever juxtapositions of “fragments of contrasting, sometimes contradictory, texts into aresonant collage of home movies, newsreels, a forced confession, a prison journal

... and his own dramatizations of his father’s prison experience,” that maximize the cumulative impact. In essence, the strategies employed by both films prove that every documentary is equally a product of its period. The biases of the time, the place, and the concerns of individual filmmakers, all work to dismantle the myths of objective or subjective documentation. The legacy of these multi-accentuated works of art provides for new ways of exploring the African experience.

Notes

1: A shorter version of this essay appears in Research In African Literatures (Fall 1995). 2: See, for example, J.R. Rayfield, “The Use of Film in Teaching About Africa,” Film Library Quarterly

17(2), (3) and (4) (1984), pp. 34-52. 3: Julianne Burton, The Social Documentary in Latin America (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), p. 77.

4: Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 118. 5: Michael Renov, ed., Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge, 1993). Cited by the editor, p. 2. Renov’s article, “Toward the Poetics of Documentary,” is in p. 58ff.

6: The French pathologist turned anthropologist, Felix-Louis Regnault (the first practitioner of ethnographic filmmaking) had good intentions for the use of cinema for cross-cultural study of movement. His earlier experiments dating back to 1895, the same year the moving image was first projected to paying audiences, involved studies of Africans which he contrasted with the images of peoples from other great civilizations such as Egypt, India and Greece. Shortly after, subsequent foreign filmmakers turned Africa into exotic decor. See Emilie de Brigard, “The History of Ethnographic Film,” in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed., Paul Hockings (The Hague: Mouton, 1975). 7: This statement originates from Paul Rotha’s contention that “Hollywood did little to further the humanitarian uses of cinema.” Cited in Nichols, Op. cit., p. 108. 8: Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, “Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha,” Camera Obscura 13-14

(Spring-Summer, ), p. 87. 9: Renov, “Toward the Poetics of Documentary,” in Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge,

1993), p. 34. 10: Vertov’s theory in relation to his socialist cinematic practices is a clear example, but theoretical tendencies such as this are gaining prominence among avant-garde filmmakers who sometimes use theory to give meaning to what otherwise would have been meaningless images except for the aesthetic orientations. 11: N. Frank Ukadike, “African films: A Retrospective and a Vision For the Future,” Critical Arts 7(1), 1993.

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12: Clyde Taylor, “Film Reborn in Mozambique,” Jump Cut 28 (1983), p. 30. 13: Harold W. Weaver, “The Politics of African Cinema,” Gladstone Yearwood, ed., Black Cinema

: Aesthetics, p. 85. 14: Although the four characteristics mentioned are pivotal to the dominant film and media practices, their application to this essay is influenced by Koberna Mercer’s reformulations of the terms in “Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination,” Black Frames: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema, eds., Mbye B. Cham and Clare Andrade-Watkins (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988), pp. 50-61. I also acknowledge the views of the students in my “Cultural Issues In Cinema” classes about these concepts and their applications to the discourse of the Black British cinema. 15: Nichols, Representing Reality. See chapter 2, “Documentary Modes of Representation,” p. 32ff. 16: Ibid., p. 33. 17: Burton, p. 5. 18: Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

19: End of a Dialogue (1967) and Last Grave at Dimbaza (1974) are well known films made by Africans about apartheid. 20: Jim Lane, “Notes on Theory and the Autobiographical documentary Film in America” Wide Angle, 15(3) (July 1993), p. 21. 21: John Stuart Katz and Judith Milstein Katz, “Ethics and the Perception of Ethics in Autobiographical Film,” Image Ethics: The Moral Rights of Subjects in Photographs, Film and Television, eds., Larry Gross, John Katz, and Jay Ruby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 120. Quoted in Jim Lane, Op. cit., pe 2k. 22: As described in the catalogue, Library of African Cinema 1993-1994 (San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1993), p. 8.

23: Nichols, p. 109. 24: Angelo Fiombo et al., “Afrique, je te plumerai,” Ecrans d’Afrique 2 (1992), p. 29. 25: Jean-Marie Teno, quoted in the Library of African Cinema, p. 4. 26: Before independence and during the early years after independence, the assimilated class consisted of the few educated elite. This number is now rapidly growing: more and more Africans seeking better lives outside of the continent are leaving in droves creating a more assimilated class of people. Even those in their respective classes find they can not hide from the onslaught of foreign influences: radio, TV, billboard advertising, textiles (T-shirts, etc.) are western oriented.

27: Jean-Marie Teno, quoted in the Library of African Cinema, p. 4. 28: One scene shows that before colonialist intervention there already existed an indigenous system of writing — the Sho-mon alphabet developed in 1885 by Sultan Ngoya. It was taught in schools until 1914 when French imperialists outlawed it and introduced their own. ; 29: After the Gulf War, CNN extended its services to China, India, and Africa, among other countries. In Nigeria, for example, rich people who can afford cable TV do not waste their time tuning in to the poorly produced Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) programs. CNN and BBC provide the news, MTV provides the entertainment — to the detriment of the children. In hotels and restaurants, MTV, which most people equate with decadence, plays 24 hours a day. 30: See Teshome Gabriel, “Third Cinema as Guardian of Popular Memory: Towards a Third Aesthetic,” Questions of Third Cinema, eds., Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (London: BFI, 1989).

31: Library of African Cinema, p. 9. 32: Andrew F. Clark, “Lumumba: Death of a Prophet,” American Historical Review (October 1993), p.

1158.

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33: Library of African Cinema, p. 8. 34: Library of African Cinema, p. 8.

A travers un survol de l’histoire du cinéma narratif et documentaire, cet essai montre que le cinéma occidental emploie depuis longtemps les images de l'Afrique comme spectacle destiné à amuser et à exciter son public. A travers l'analyse de deux films, l’un guinéen (Allah Tantou, David Achtar,

1991), l’autre camerounais

(Afrique, je te

plumerai, Jean-Marie Teno, 1992), l’essai cherche à redéfinir le rapport entre la pratique d’un cinéma dominant (occidental) et celle d’un cinéma d’ opposition (panafricain). Une synthèse de l’histoire et de la théorie du cinéma documentaire mène à une considération des approches spécifiquement africaines de la forme, de l’expérimentation et des modes d’adresse.

Richard Porton

Mambety’s Hyenas: Between Anti-Colonialism and the Critique of Modernity In the wake of what has been termed the “multinational redistribution of scarcity,”! African cinema cannot help reflecting, albeit in allegorical form, the deleterious effects of a New World Order in which the World Bank and the I.M.F. play the roles of neocolonial sovereigns. Although it would be simplistic to suggest precise analogies between economic crisis and crises in cinematic representation, a film such as Djbril Diop Mambety’s Hyénes (Hyenas, 1992) seems to reveal the status of African cinema as itreaches a transitional juncture. The film pinpoints an ongoing dialectical oscillation between anti-colonialism, and a critique of Western modernity that has inspired a reassessment of African tradition. V.Y. Mudimbe’s influential The Invention ofAfrica presents these tensions within African intellectual discourse as a dynamic engagement with “two principal sources, Marxist and traditionalist.” While it would be somewhat mistaken to present these two tendencies as mutually exclusive, both positions suggest specific contradictions that are certainly pertinent to recent stylistic and thematic permutations within African cinema. Marxism (heavily filtered through a lens that Mudimbe labels the “Africanization of Marxism”) certainly informs a key anti-colonialist treatise such as Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, as well as seminal films such as Sembéne’s Xala and Maldoror’s

Sambizanga. Yet Marxism — or at least the diluted Marxist-Leninist amalgam that often patronizing Westerners bequeathed to the third world — often advocated a crude modernization that ignored the best aspects of the African communal tradition. In fact, the assimilation of a potted version of Marxist theory by bourgeois elites in Africa often produced distinctly anti-Marxist results. The nuances of this contradiction were well charted by C.L.R. James in his critique of Nkrumah’s idiosyncratic brand of state socialism. In addition, mainstream Marxism’s huge debt to Enlightenment rationalism (with its attendant racism and condescension toward non-Europeans) has alienated many African theorists. As Basil Davidson has recently argued, despite Amiclar Cabral’s call for “people’s participation,” Africa was often faced with either the Scylla of “Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism” or the Charbydis of unfettered “free enterprise” — the cul-de-sac of “one form of non-participation or another.’ Richard Porton, (1995), “Mambety’s Hyenas: Between Anti-Colonialism

and the Critique of Modernity,” iris, 18, pp. 95-103.

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An alternative to Marxism-Leninism was formulated by Cheikh Anta Diop, the Senegalese historian whose efforts to re-evaluate the forgotten African past foreshadow Martin Bernal’s analogous project in Black Athena. * Mudimbe writes that Diop uses “Marxism as a foil,” attempting to disentangle the “cultural unity of pre-colonial Africa.” While some have claimed that this culturalist strand falls prey to a romantic organicism, Diop’s work represents a strategic intervention that suggested an antidote to the “Euro-Africanism” that enticed intellectuals during the early neocolonial period. While Diop’s work contained the potential to encourage a romantic immersion in a prelapsarian past, young critics such as Anthony Appiah recognize the need to maintain a balance between the competing intellectual tributaries of Césaire and Fanon’s militancy and Diop’s historical excavations. If Hyenas assimilates these two currents, it is not without an uneasy equilibrium that reflects the film’s status as a French-Swiss-Senegalese co-production. Various film historians including Manthia Diawara and Francoise Pfaff’ have chronicled the dependence of the Francophone industries upon French capital, despite the official end of the colonial epoch. Yet Hyenas ‘s narrative, and its very source material, incorporates and subtly comments upon the current mordant relationship of those problematically theorized entities, the core and the periphery. Hyenas is loosely based on The Visit, perhaps the major work by the Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Before outlining the ways in which Mambety’s film departs from and transmutes Diirrenmatt’s text, it might be helpful to briefly clarify Diirrenmatt’s own aesthetic vantage point.

Diirrenmatt’s work has affinities with both the full-blown absurdism of Beckett and the more explicitly didactic dramaturgy of Brecht. Yet while acknowledging the importance of both theatrical currents, Dürrenmatt rejected their modernist polarities. He proposed instead a theater rooted in parable and a tragicomic irony, which he viewed as the only possible option in an era that supposedly renders genuine tragedy unrealizable. Although Diirrenmatt’s plays were frequently termed allegories, the playwright rejected the term, believing that the presupposition of allegory froze the process of interpretation.’ Mambety’s appropriation and transformation of The Visit decolonizes the play while transferring Diirrenmatt’s parable to a new ideological context. Although the Swiss dramatist’s vaguely existentialist (to invoke the colloquial use of the word) play seemed to at least partially excoriate European lassitude in the face of the radical evil of Nazism, Hyenas (as parabolic in its own fashion as anything written by Diirrenmatt) engages in a social and political critique that is irreducible to sterile platitudes. From a richly multivalent perspective, the film can be seen as an assault on ongoing economic imperialism (one that should be contrasted with other recent African films such as Ouedraogo’s Samba Traore and Sembéne’s Guelwaar), and a mournful commentary on the current state of African communalism.

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Despite Diirrenmatt’s own vehement rejection of allegorical intentions, Walter Benjamin’s rehabilitation of allegory in The Origin of German Tragic Drama suggests acritical apparatus that could fruitfully elucidate both the links, as well as the disparities,

between Diirrenmatt’s and Mambety’s critiques.’ A rigorously subversive recasting of allegory might also help us to differentiate between Western and African modes of moral inquiry, as well as to distinguish the cinematic ploys that Mambety uses to create a parable that is radically different from the unobtrusive realism favored by many African directors. Benjamin acknowledged that allegory was usually denigrated as a product of periods of supposed decay, but his anti-classicist, radically modernist sensibility elevated what were termed (specifically in reference to the Trauerspiel of the German baroque) artifacts of societal fragmentation into an aesthetic virtue. Since allegory depicts, and in fact revels in, the “brokenness” of the world, it is a genre that is well suited to the requirements of contemporary African directors, filmmakers who simultaneously mourn recent economic and environmental devastation and want to actively negate the hopelessness that envelops them. Mambety’s allegory synthesizes the militancy of earlier African cinema with a dispassionate, reflexive analysis of political despair that does not share the nihilism of reactionary variants of modernism. Benjamin labeled allegory a “natural history” of the past’s ravages, or what one commentator has called “shards of memory that frustrate the oscillations of organic closure.”!° In other words, allegory resists narrative closure, but does not, unlike the

more rarefied examples of modernism, operate within an ahistorical void. Benjamin saw in the allegorical world view a representation of the “Passion of the World” in the “stations of its decline.” This metaphor is more than applicable to Hyenas, a film that casts a cold eye toward both the rapaciousness of the West, and a local African “New Class” that has forgotten the needs of “the wretched of the earth” who were often in fact the protagonists of the important third world films of the Sixties and Seventies. Although Benjamin’s conception of allegory highlights the “transience of human history” and the instability of meaning, it does not foreclose the possibility, however unlikely, of utopian reconciliation, and this hope occasionally surfaces in Hyenas’ tragicomic version of allegory. Hyenas revolves around a wealthy old woman’s return to the village where, years before, she was “seduced and abandoned” by aman who now seems completely benign. Yet despite the film’s apparent embrace of grim determinism, Mambety strips Diirrenmatt’s parable of its quasi-theological veneer. The desolate town of Colobane encapsulates many of the contradictions of Senegalese society as both revolutionary hopes and traditional bonds of solidarity erode. Samir Amin has described the rivalries between Senegal’ s indigenous bourgeoisie and the former colonial “traders.” Colobane, with its faded bourgeoisie and rapacious petty bourgeoisie, serves as a microcosm reflecting Africa’s current economic crisis.

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Linguére Ramatou, the film’s vengeful elderly woman, agitates Colobane’s populace to the point of frenzy by promising a future of untold wealth. “Ramatou is coming back to us ... richer than the World Bank ... only the lady can save us” is the townspeople’s hopeful exhortation. The local politicians and clergy, immobilized by despair, view Ramatou’s largesse as the only possible solution to the never-ending cycle of poverty and exploitation. Dramaan Drameh, the amiable shopkeeper who never fails to sip calvados with his eager customers, awaits the eminent grand dame with more anticipation than any of the other inhabitants. Ramatou’s beneficence eventually turns sour, of course, and the cataclysmic series of events that inevitably bedevil Calobane seem designed to frustrate critics and audiences who might be tempted to indulge themselves with moralistic interpretations. The film’s allegorical structure is directly mediated by the suffering imposed on African countries by “structural adjustment,” the World Bank’s attempt to control the internal policies of debtor nations by coercing them to increase exports and seriously curtail social spending, thus insuring misery for the poor. As one of the most acerbic recent critics of the World Bank has observed (echoing the spirit of Max Weber)” the centrality of economic, material growth as the basis of all modern societies created a unique rationale for new forms of political and social domination.”''! Given these constricting material realities, a misguided moralist might, for example, see the film merely as an indictment of consumerism, a tract that apparently blames the victims of structural adjustment for their yearnings to enjoy some paltry material pleasures. In the final analysis, however, the film seems more like an intermittently comic dirge than a sermon. Despite Mambety’s occasional rhetorical flourishes — the juxtaposition of a “Sony” sign and shots of African starvation is one of the flashier examples — the film is far removed from earlier examples of African social realism, whether exemplified by the novels and films of Sembéne or Safi Faye’s synthesis of documentary and autobiography. Hyenas’s overlapping ironies and tragicomic tone shares a kinship with an earlier Mambety film, Touki-Bouki (1973). In that film, rather ethnocentrically stereotyped as

an African Breathless by some critics, the rebellious protagonists hope to escape to France, but their nihilistic exaltation of violence dooms them. The lure of Parisian

glamour proves a hollow fantasy, but the film does not promote an artificial recuperation of pre-colonial tradition. Similarly, Hyenas presents a bleak sketch of contemporary acquisitiveness, without endorsing, however hesitantly, a return to some sort of Edenic,

pre-colonial bliss. In discussing various African films including Touki-Bouki, Roy Armes

and Lizbeth Malkmus

claim, in a vein of dubious

essentialism,

that the

preeminent directors “structure their films around a series of external oppositions (e.g. past/present, tradition/modernity).'? Yet the interest of Mambety’s films seems to lie in their concerted attempts to explode this kind of binarism, posing these alternatives not as choices but as self-consuming artifacts.

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The gruesome carnivalesque crescendo of Hyenas turns out to be a case in point. As the villagers satisfy their cravings for shoes from Burkina Faso and sparkling refrigerators, Ramatou imports an actual carnival to Colobane, with a dazzling ferris wheel as the fair’s centerpiece. If these diversions are meant to pacify the townspeople while Dramaan is made a scapegoat, Ramatou’s plan succeeds all too well. Despite his genial manner, We are resigned to accept Dramaan as the man responsible for the millionairess’ s former life of privation and forced prostitution, yet Ramatou herself does not embody moral probity of any sort. Dramaan’s plaintive outburst — “Madam, we hold fast to the principles of our civilization” — evokes more the pain of a self-inflicted wound than the shrillness of arallying cry. Unlike the unambiguously affirmative heroines of Sambizanga and Med Hondo’s Sarraounia (1986), Ramatou is not an icon of empowerment. She can only offer the mere negative freedom of ruthless demystification. In the final analysis, therefore, Mambety’s thematic tapestry is geared more toward narrative polyphony than a series of sterile oppositions; as in all complex parables, the interpretive work is left to the audience. The film suggests several disparate, if complementary, points of departure: a materialist gloss, as well as a contextualization within African cinema’s elaboration of the oral tradition. On the one hand, a materialist departure point can enable us to see Hyenas partially as an allegory of what Immanuel Wallerstein has termed Africa’s integration into the “socioeconomic hierarchy of the world system.” !* In the mid-1980s, Wallerstein prophesied that the upcoming period “will be one of acute suffering for truly peripheral areas whose nonessential exports will find a very weak world market and whose internal food production may collapse further.” '*This generally accurate prognostication was made before the end of the Cold War emboldened the I.M.F. and the World Bank to implement even more Draconian austerity programs. As a suitably jaundiced economist puts it, in what used to be referred to as the third world (perhaps an outmoded term since the implosion of the second world) so-called “development is paramount to a form of underdevelopment.”'* Environmental devastation and increasing pauperization is the end result of the multinational presence of conglomerates such as Mobil. Given this grim scenario, Ramatou’s delight as she bombards Colobane with commodities of doubtful

value represents a fanciful solution to a seemingly insoluble quandary. Hyenas’s final shot—a bulldozer laying waste the town’s temporary plenitude —irrevocably negates the previous transient pleasures. In his recent comprehensive survey of African oral literature, Isidore Okpewho demonstrates how contemporary writers such as Ousmane Sembéne and Wole Soyinka transform and subvert traditional trickster narratives for the purpose of radical social critique.'°In works such as The Road and Kongi’s Harvest, traditional solidarity with victims is transformed into barbed attacks on entrenched power. Hyenas ‘s relationship to the critical legacy of oral tradition is somewhat different. Mambety’s tragicomic stance contains the seeds of social critique, but is not prescriptive or programmatic in

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the tradition of Soyinka or Sembéne. Mambety’s approach is abrasively parodic. With a skillful deployment of what Mikhail Bakhtin termed “double voiced discourse,”!? Hyenas expertly reframes motifs from both the oral tradition and more earnest, hopeful African films. The film could not be characterized as cynical, but this example of goodhumored despair is a far cry from the insurrectionary cinema of years past. In addition, the film deviates from the simple observational style of recent African films such as Yabba. Unlike that film’s unobtrusive lyrical realism, Mambety’s film employs a form of rhetoric that unashamedly calls attention to itself. Autonomous shots of hyenas herald the villagers’ joyous anticipation of wealth, and stark overhead shots punctuate Dramaan’s interrogation by the town’s clergy. The rhetorical overlay cannot be viewed as heavy handed, however, since it is impossible to distill a monolithic credo

from the ornate, self-conscious editing style. Mambety’s penchant for repeating certain visual motifs and passages of dialogue is in keeping with allegory’s own peculiar compulsion to repeat, and its ability to compress “the experience of all that is untimely, sorrowful, and unsuccessful.”!* This strategy allows the film to continually circle around the political and social traumas that animate the narrative. Unlike many Western varieties of radicalism, Benjamin’s conception of allegory does not fetishize progress, and its emphasis on the arbitrariness of human history is congruent with a film that coolly examines historical contingencies without suggesting facile solutions. Like many of the female protagonists featured in recent African films, Ramatou, with her potential for both moral fervor and destructive rage, is a catalyst for emancipatory hopes, and a figure who helps to make the audience aware of a social fabric under siege. “The world made a whore of me, I want to turn the world into a whorehouse,” is

Ramatou’s

sorrowful cri de coeur as she surveys a community that has become a death-

infected shadow of its former self. Actual prostitution, and the threat of AIDS, is,

unsurprisingly, a subject that has been examined in recent African films — Henri Duparc’s Rue Princesse is one of the most recent examples. In Hyenas, prostitution becomes a metaphor for how a distorted conception of modernity has made a whole continent subservient to the West’s paternalistic ideology, and it is entirely fitting, within this context, for a woman to unmask the ethical morass that has contributed to the current economic debacle. Hyenas‘s carefully modulated syncretism’? helps to modify — perhaps even undermine — some of the strictures laid down in studiously nationalist works such as Toward The Decolonization of African Literature.” The Nigerian literary critics who collaborated on this lively polemic provide a derisive account of the condescension endemic to most accounts of African literature, and the “severance” of contemporary African fiction and poetry from the roots of oral tradition. The authors reserve their choicest epithets for Wole Soyinka; the playwright and novelist who would eventually win the Nobel Prize is condemned for his capitulation to “Euro-modernism.” Conversely, other authors are seen as more exemplary representatives of anti-colonialist zeal, and more

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genuine progenitors of a new African tradition. Ousmane Sembéne, for example, is praised as a “people’s griot.” If European modernism and indigenous African modes were irreconcilable polarities, Mambety’s cinematic parable would prove unsettling indeed. Mambety is certainly not ashamed to proclaim that “it is a joy for me to pay tribute to Friedrich Diirrenmatt.” Yet this homage to a modernist European playwright is as politically acute as Sembène’s most didactic novels and films and, in paradoxical ways, as attuned to important currents in African tradition as the stories of Amos Tutuola. It could be plausibly asserted that Hyenas incorporates a “double consciousness” that is almost endemic to many African co-productions of recent vintage. While W.E.B. Du Bois’s use of the term “double consciousness” ?! described African-Americans’ anguished oscillation between black identity and American selfhood, filmmakers like Mambety must delicately balance African identity with a modernist legacy that influenced an earlier generation of African intellectuals, most notably the founders of Présence Africaine. Several sequences in Hyenas can be viewed as sardonic (and subtly parodic) interludes which chronicle the contradictions stemming from Africa’s ambivalent embrace of both modernity and literary and cinematic modernism. With astringent irony but without any taint of self-righteousness, Mambety reveals the impasse that his protagonists’ self-estrangement engenders. The film’s foregrounding of a strangely uncelebratory

carnival allows the filmmaker

to lampoon

the icons of Negritude,

although Hyenas itself is unimaginable without that literary precedent. As he confronts the now pathetic Dramaan, Colobane’s pompous mayor inhales Havana cigars and observes that “Senghor once went for a walk with Queen Elizabeth II.” This is a particularly agile commentary on neocolonialist hubris, since the mayor’s boast is also a self-indictment. The coupling of the English monarch and Senegal’s former poetpresident is a fairly scabrous parody of the links to European culture that can be detected in some of the most rigorous examples of African anti-colonialism. One writer has remarked that “even so radical a radical as Frantz Fanon ended up as perhaps the most existentialist of the disciples of Sartre.”?? The fact that Hyenas can reject a Manichean traditionalism, while poking fun at the fatuities of modernist Europhiles (despite the fact that the film itself is an example of an idiosyncratic modernism) reveals an unusually sophisticated sensibility. Mambety’s film is more a slyly subversive appropriation of Western modernism than a concession to its homogenizing lingua franca. Like the West Indian cricketers celebrated by C.L.R. James in Beyond a Boundary,”? Mambety transforms a petrified Western aesthetic into a vibrantly critical practice. Toward the end of the film, Dramaan silently views news footage of starving Africans on a television monitor, an image that is as provocative as it is cryptic. Ultimately, this brief allusion to concrete victims serves as a form of despondent counterpoint to Colobane’s consumerist orgy. These images typically inspire condescending pathos, and have become almost banal in their ability to induce short lived

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international guilt. Mambety’s narrative cannily recontextualizes these scenes of starvation in a manner that does not evoke the feel-good but anemic humanism of “We are the World,” but instead subtly rebukes all those who remain under the vapid sway of the culture industry. It was perhaps Aimé Césaire who best fused anti-colonialist leftism with a respect for the African past that looks skeptically at the lure of modernity’s threat to eradicate all traces of traditional African life. Césaire speaks of “communal societies ... that were not only ante-capitalist, but also anti-capitalist ... co-operative, fraternal societies.” The unmistakable fact that this communal vision is seriously threatened haunts recent African cinema, whether one considers the magisterial allegory of Hyenas or the more restrained social realism of Idressa Ouedraogo. The eponymous protagonist of Ouedraogo’s recent Samba Traore participates in a violent robbery, a transgression that threatens the delicate equilibrium of village life. Within Ouedraogo’s intimate narrative, the ravages of modernity are exemplified by a single tragic error, while Mambety’s larger canvas depicts the erosion of traditional modes of solidarity as a collective melee. Mudimbe’s ground-breaking work has helped to define the components of what he designates as a distinctively African gnosis — a dynamic concept informed by the attempt to break free from Western hegemonic power and the continuing, irksome penetration of imperial modes of perception. African cinema will undoubtedly continue to grapple with the shifting contours of that gnosis at a time when debt crisis, environmental disaster, and political impotence continue to plague the continent and make a mockery of the feigned innocence so dear to the West. Benjamin hailed allegory for its unwillingness to construct a “false totality.” Similarly, Hyenas’s inevitable and necessary inconclusiveness is a testament to recent African cinema’s complex tendency to engage in what might be labeled constructive self-laceration, while still reminding the audience that the old sources of external oppression have not disappeared.

Notes

1: Midnight Notes Collective, eds., Midnight Oil (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1992), see pp. 303-316. 2: V.Y. Mundimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington and Indianapolis:Indiana University Press, 1988), p.4. 3: See C.L.R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (London: Allison and Busby, 1977). See also

Paul Buhle, C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary (London and New York: Verso, 1988), esp. pp. 137142. 4: Basil Davidson, “Africa: The Politics of Failure,” in sia cs ted” eds., Ralph Milliband and Leo Panitch (London:Merlin Press, 1992), p. 222.

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5: See Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill and Co., 1974). For a critique of Diop, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, Jn My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 101-102. 6: The Invention of Africa, p. 96. 7: See, forexample, Francoise Pfaff, The Cinema of Ousmane Sembène (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), esp. pp. 20-25. 8: See Kenneth S. Whitton, The Theatre of Friedrich Diirrenmatt (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1980).

9: Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans., J. Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977). 10: Rebecca Comay, “Benjamin’s Endgame,” Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, eds., Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p.255. ll: See Bruce Rich, Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development (Boston:Beacon Press, 1994), p.108. 12: Roy Armes and Lizbeth Malkmus, Arab and African Filmmaking (London and New Jersey: Zed Pres, 1991), pp.187-190. 13: Immanuel Wallerstein, Africa and the Modern World (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc., 1986),

p.102. 14: Ibid., p.125. 15: Midnight Notes, p.88. 16: Isidore Okpewho, African Oral Literature (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), esp. pp.318-327. 17: See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981). 18: John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 142.

19: Forsome insightful remarks on syncretism, see Ella Shohatand Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multicultural Studies in the Media Age (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), (forthcoming). 20: See Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike, Toward the Decolonization of African Literature: Volume One (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1983).

21: For the most authoritative study of Du Bois to date, see David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868-1918 (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993). 22: John Gaffar LaGuerre, Enemies of Empire (Trinidad: University of the West Indies, 1984), p. 237. 23: C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary (Pantheon: New York, 1984) 24: Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 23.

Le film de Djibril Diop Membety, Hyénas, témoigne d’une oscillation dialectique entre l’anti-colonialisme et une critique de la modernité occidentale qui a inspiré une réévaluation de la tradition africaine. Basé sur la pièce de Friedrich Diirrenmatt, lefilm de Mambety transforme l’allégorie européenne du dramaturge suisse en critique sociale et économique de l'Afrique contemporaine. Correspondant à la conception de l’allégorie proposée par Walter Benjamin, selon qui l’allégorie serait une synthèse de l’utopisme avec un refus de fétichiser le progrès, Hyènas mélange le respect du passé avec une ferveur anti-colonialiste qui n'exclut pas la possibilité d’un avenir brillant.

Take a new look at the contemporary world of film in Screen. Internationally acclaimed as the media studies journal, Screen keeps pace with the changing world of film, from pop videos to art films, film noir to third world

cinema. The lively and provocative articles cover the latest developments in film, television and cultural theory. Founded over thirty years ago by the Society for Education in Film and Television (SEFT), since 1990 Screen has been edited by The John Logie Baird Centre (Glasgow), and published by Oxford University Press. Screen has recently been redesigned to include expanded sections on reviews, and on reports and debates.

eJon Stratton aid len Ang on ve Waters and the spectacular exploding family. e Jacqueline Maingard on New South African cinema: Mapantsula and Sarafina. eAva Rose and James Friedman on television sport as mas(s)culine cult of distraction. eAmit Rai on images of Elvis in Indian films.

J.R. Rayfield

Hyènes : comment trouver le message

Djibril Mambety est un cinéaste paradoxal. D’un cété, ses films apparaissent intensivement personnels et semblent inspirés de ses propres réves, de ses mémoires d’enfance, et de ses amitiés. Quant au style et à la structure, ses films apparaissent plus européens qu’africains. D’un autre côté, les mises en scène et les thèmes des films de Mambety sont complètement africains ; leurs messages sociaux et politiques à la fois, restent en effet directement liés aux questions de leurs époques et au pays à tout point de vue sous tous les rapports. Voir le deuxiéme long métrage, Hyénes, de Mambety tourné en 1990, constitue une expérience impressionnante. Le film marque la perfection de la technique, de |’ interprétation (des acteurs), et d’une intensité dramatique puissante. En fait, la distribution des rôles (le casting) Ami Diakhati et Mansour Diouf comme acteurs principaux relève du génie. Quand on se remet de cette expérience, de tous ses aspects fantastiques, des millions

de questions affluent. On se demande comment un réve, situé en Suisse pendant les années cinquante, pourrait étre transposé au Sénégal pendant les années quatre-vingtdix et reste d’actualité et plein de sens ; comment un film, si fortement personnel et unique en idiome pourrait faire toujours partie des grands films traditionnels africains ; quelle est la signification du titre ; et qui sont les hyénes. Malgré les incongruités et les écarts que la transposition d’une histoire européenne fait surgir à une société africaine, nous espérons montrer le message suivant et essentiellement africain et avec quelle force il est exprimé: la hyène a dîné. La pièce de Dürrenmatt, The Visit, a été mise en scène pour la première fois, en 1958, en Angleterre, avec Lynne Fontane et Alfred Lunt. Depuis, la pièce a souvent été représentée et, finalement adaptée au cinéma, en 1964, avec Ingrid Bergman et Anthony Quinn. The Visit se passe dans une petite ville qui tombe économiquement en ruine. Trente ans avant la scène d’ouverture, une fille ouvrière, devenue la maîtresse d’un

homme de bonne famille, tombe enceinte. Elle l’annonce à son amant qui refuse de l’épouser. Elle lui intente un procès. Pour se venger, il soudoie deux hommes afin qu’ils J. R. Rayfield, (1995), “Hyènes : comment trouver

le message,” iris, 18, pp. 105-112.

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disent qu’ils avaient couché avec elle et qu’elle couchait avec tout le monde. Par conséquent, la jeune fille, en disgrace, finit par se prostituer ; plus tard, cependant, après plusieurs mariages elle devient une riche veuve. La pièce commence à son retour dans cette petite ville et avec son offre d’investir beaucoup d’argent pour en restaurer la prospérité. Pour arriver à ses fins, son séducteur, maintenant un citoyen important et connu, en passe de devenir maire, doit mourir. Les citoyens de ce village se défendent d’être de bons chrétiens et à ce titre ne pourraient jamais accéder à la richesse à un tel prix. Pendant ce temps-là, le citoyen-séducteur, voyant les signes qu’il serait éventuellement assassiné, essaie en vain de quitter le village. Enfin, il se soumet à son destin et

dit qu’il acceptera la décision des bourgeois. Les citoyens se rassemblent: Schill hesitates a moment. He goes slowly into the lane of silent men. The Athlete stares at him from the opposite end. Schill looks in turn at the hard faces of those who surround him, and sinks slowly to his knees. The lane contracts silently into a knot as the men close in and crouch over. Complete silence. The knot of men pulls back slowly, coming downstage. Then it opens. Only the doctor is left in the center of the stage, kneeling by the corpse, over which the Teacher’s gown has been spread.!

Mambety a utilisé l’histoire originale sans véritables changements ; il l’a mise en scène dans une petite ville sénégalaise en 1990, trente ans après l’indépendance ; il y reste un chemin de fer et quelques entreprises industrielles et aussi une forme de gouvernement municipal européen. Comme nous l’avons vu dans le village suisse, la structure économique s’est écroulée. Mambety n’a changé que deux choses ; il a remplacé les métaphores suisses par celles de l’Afrique ; il a mis l’accent sur le social au lieu de l’individu. D'abord le titre. Le titre suisse était The Old Lady’s Visit, ce qui implique que le thème principal est un acte de vengeance personnelle. Le titre de Mambety, Hyènes, implique un thème global: celui du mal qui filtre une société entière. Ce thème de la hyène s’inscrit déjà dans le titre d’un film de Mambety qui date de 1973, Touki Bouki: The Hyena’s Journey. Françoise Pfaff écrit à propos de ce film: This scavenger with an unpleasant odor and repulsive physical characteristics also symbolizes trickery and social marginality, and it is accordingly that the animal is used by Mambety in his

story.?

La scène d’ouverture d’Hyènes n’a pas de pendant dans The Visit (nous y voyons un troupeau d’éléphants qui traversent le désert pour tenter d’échapperà la famine et rien

ne suggère qu’ils réussissent). La deuxième scène où un groupe de citoyens se na correspond au commencement de The Visit. Ici, Mambety nous montre une foule d’ hommes émaciés en haillons

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qui viennent d’une gare abandonnée et qui se dirigent en masse sur le bar et l’épicerie de Draman Drameh. Comme l’épicerie est vide de provisions et presque en faillite, les hommes s’assoient aux tables et demandent a boire. Draman a peur de les servir, et il sait bien qu’ils ne peuvent pas payer. Le reste du film suit la pièce, sans grands changements. La Linguére Ramatou de Mambety est méme plus magnifiquement accoutrée que la Claire de Diirrenmatt ; en plus de ses deux eunuques, elle est entourée de belles jeunes filles de toutes nationalités. Mambety remplace le bref incident des écoliers qui chantent par une longue scéne du rite de passage des filles. La substitution la plus spectaculaire est la scène de la mort de Draman Drameh. Comme nous voyons dans The Visit, Drameh avait accepté la décision de ses concitoyens. A propos de cette scéne qui contient le seul incident surnaturel du film, Angelo Fiombo écrit: Le cercle de ses concitoyens se resserre progressivement autour de lui en entonnant des chants de mort. Gaana observe du haut d’un rocher que tout se déroule suivant le scénario. Le petit bonhomme disparait de la vue du spectateur, englouti par la foule de «Hyénes». Sur le terrain, il ne reste plus que la veste de Drameh ... Son corps n’y est plus. Qu’ est-il devenu ? Déchiqueté par

les hyènes ? Peut-étre.*

Les incongruités de la transposition de l’histoire suisse à une mise en scène africaine sont évidentes: en effet l’incident qui constitue le moteur de l’action est, tout, simplement invraisembable dans une société africaine. Méme dans une société stratifiée, telle que le Wolof de Sénégal, le fait qu’un jeune

aristocrate rende enceinte une ouvrière n’ aurait jamais fait un tel drame. En fait, le jeune homme aurait avoué le fait qu’il était le père ; sa famille aurait indemnisé les parents de la jeune femme et ils auraient même adopté l’enfant. Aussi la femme n’aurait-elle pas été ruinée, même si elle avait eu d’autres amants. Certains diraient même qu’elle avait fait une bonne affaire. Pour son adaptation sénégalaise, Mambety aurait pu créer un autre scénario qui se serait mieux adapté à la société sénégalaise. Par exemple, Mambety aurait pu facilement inventer une raison plausible du désir de vengeance passionné de la jeune femme: les gens auraient pu accuser la jeune femme d’être une sorcière. La deuxième anomalie est le retour de Linguère Ramatou comme millionnaire internationale : cette notion n’existe pas dans la société africaine. Quelques marchandes africaines deviennent extrêmement riches mais ne deviennent pas multimillionnaires. A première vue, ces incongruités semblent d’abord nuire à l’authenticité du film de Mambety. Comme The Visit, Hyènes est une allégorie, «a narrative description of a subject under guise of another bearing similiarities to it» d’après la définition du Concise Oxford

Dictionary. L'histoire d’une allégorie devrait sauter aux yeux. Pourtant, située au

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Sénégal, l’histoire de Mambety sonne faux. Néanmoins, cela ne diminue ni les qualités du film, ni son impact pour deux raisons: la première, c’est l’excellence pure de ce film enchanteur, la beauté ensorcelante, l’interprétation et le décor. Ami Diakhate rend

parfaitement la beauté dévastée de Linguère Ramatou. Dans la version tournée en 1964, Ingrid Bergman a dû refuser de se faire filmer aussi dévastée dans son rôle de Claire. Les spectateurs et les critiques en ont tous chanté les louanges. Par exemple, Jay Scott qui écrit pour le Toronto Globe and Mail, dit que ce film est un des deux premiers films au festival de Cannes en 1992.4 La deuxième raison du succès de ce film tient au fait que les deux œuvres, The Visit et Hyènes sont fondées sur des thèmes

fondamentaux,

sinon universels, que l’on

retrouve de la Grèce Antique aux royaumes tribaux et africains. Le premier thème dont nous parlerons est les rapports entre le roi et son peuple. Tout ce que le roi fait ou subit arrive au pays tout entier. Tout le peuple est puni pour la culpabilité du roi. Nous pourrions conclure que le roi ne représente pas forcément son pays mais plutôt l’incarne. Les traitements médievaux de ce thème sont discutés dans le chapitre neuf, «The Fisher King», de From Ritual to Romance écrit par Jessie L.

Weston. Malgré la plénitude de ce thème, le plus fameux exemple est Oedipe dont la culpabilité avouée détruit presque sa propre ville. Ce n’est que quand il découvre son crime et quand il accepte sa punition que la ville est sauvée, bien que des désastres s’en suivent: les enfants d’Oedipe s’entretuent et sa descendance s’éteint. Ni Dürrenmatt ni Mambety ne mentionnent les rapports entre le chef et la ville. Cependant dans les drames, l’on suggère discrètement au chef qu’il pourrait résoudre le dilemne s’il se sacrifie volontairement. D’après cetexemple, il est clair que la vie d’un individu ne pèse pas lourd si la survie d’une communauté entière est en jeu. (Voir chez Ibsen An Enemy of the Peuple pour une version moderne intéressante de ce thème). Dans Oedipe, le vieux prêtre Tiresias, prévient son ami Oedipe que son désir de sauver Thèbes par la

découverte de l’identité du meurtrier de son père le détruira à la fin, mais même Tiresias doit ordonner avec le reste des citoyens à Oedipe de se sacrifier pour la ville, Oedipe étant seul coupable. Les habitants prennent pitié pour Oedipe, mais comprennent qu’il avait agi en roi, sans trahison ni corruption. Dans The Visit et Hyènes, cependant, il est

clair que les citoyens sont poussés par l’avidité et que leur décision de sacrifier Schill/ Draman reste le seul élément de culpabilité. Malgré tout, d’une certaine manière, Dürrenmatt et Mambety, absolvent les citoyens: ils ne les font pas assassiner Schill/ Draman. Le deuxième thème est la trahison d’amitié au profit de l’acquisition de biens, un thème connu et commun dans les contes folkloriques africains. En fait, le thème de la trahison, est le plus évident dans le chant et dans le film. La vengeance de Claire/ Linguère Ramatou demande non seulement la mort de Schill/Draman-elle aurait pu le faire assassiner discrètement. Il doit souffrir ce qu’elle avait souffert : la trahison des gens qu’il avait aimés et en qui il avait confiance. Et il paie cher sa faute. Claire/Linguère

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Ramatou avait été trahie par un seul homme ;jeune et forte, elle a pu refaire sa vie. Par contre, Schill/Draman, a été trahi par toute une ville et il est trop âgé et fatigué pour recommencer. C’est la raison pour laquelle il ne profite pas de l’occasion de s’ échapper ou de fuir quand il est abandonné à la gare. Dans The Visit, Schill meurt d’une crise cardiaque, littéralement, d’un cœur brisé

pendant que les citoyens l’encerclent. Quant à Hyènes, le corps de Draman disparaît et cela nous renvoie à la disparition du corps d’Oedipe quand les dieux lui permettent finalement de mourir. Mambety prend Draman en pitié et lui permet de disparaître avec un semblant de dignité. Ou bien peut-être les concitoyens, en tuant Schill/Draman, n’ont pas respecté leur accord avec Claire/Linguère Ramatou, ce qui les rend plus coupables et corrompus. Cela nous envoie au troisième thème le plus important de la pièce et du film: la corruption sans limite des humains. Les concitoyens de Schill et Draman Drameh commencent en jurant qu’ils ne transigeront jamais sur leurs principes en trahissant leur ami, mais sans hésiter, ils acceptent les premiers versements d’ argent en échange de leur trahison. La corruption sousentend plus que la trahison d’une amitié individuelle. Toute la morale fondamentale d’une société est impliquée. (Après tout, l’offense qui a commencé la situation, à savoir la trahison de Claire/Linguère Ramatou n’était pas que celle d’un individu, mais celle de la société tout entière). C’est à ce pointlà précis que le traitement de ce thème par Mambety transcende celui de Dürrenmatt. En effet, Mambety ne montre pas seulement la bourgeoisie suisse et sénégalaise mais toute l’humanité comme impuissante et inévitablement corrompue. The Visit souligne les actions individuelles des personnages: Calise est trompée par son amant, par certains de ses amis, et par le juge. Mais, si nous le lisons au deuxième degré, nous voyons que c’est par la faute de la société tout entière que justice est rendue à la jeune femme. Sous le système économique et social du capitalisme de |’ Ouest, il est impossible que justice soit rendue à la jeune femme, et ce n’est que par sa beauté, par son courage, son intelligence, et la chance exceptionnelle qu’elle échappe à la destruction. En outre, il faut qu’elle quitte la société pour le faire. Cependant, dans The Visit, la condamnation d’une société corrumpue n’est qu’implicite ; l’accent est mis sur la société dans son entier. Dans une interview récente Ousmane Sembène a expliqué: … je constate que l’Africain est un animal extrêmement social ... la responsabilité n’est pas une obligation individuelle, mais collective. Elle doit partir, bien sûr, de l’individu vers la collectivité,

vers un tout.® C’est, ici, que l’histoire suisse, telle qu’ elle est transposée en Afrique, sonne le plus

faux. Une société africaine n’aurait jamais permis à ce jeune homme de refuser sa responsabilité à la mère de son enfant.

En plus, dans Hyénes, la ruine de la société vient des actions de cette société méme et non d’un individu dont!’ offense, après tout, est plutôt commune. Il y a longtemps que

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toute la société avait pris.la décision, il est vrai, basée sur une information insuffisante

et trompeuse (une décision allant de pair avec le colonialisme) de dépendre de l’ancien pouvoir colonial même après l’indépendance, de choisir un mode de développement à l’occidental qui pouvait d’ailleurs vivre de ses propres ressources, et de rester pendant un temps indéfini dans un état de dépendance. C’est donc à cause de cette décision, et non pour l’offense insignifiante d’un jeune homme irresponsable, que toute la société est punie à jamais. Hyènes et The Visit finissent avec la mort d’un citoyen éminent et le départ de la femme vindicative. Mais, dans le village suisse Schill sera bientôt oublié et le village

profitera de sa prospérité. Dans le village sénégalais, quoique Draman soit aussi oublié, le village est totalement corrompu à vie. Ses gratte-ciel neufs et ses grandes autoroutes, que nous voyons construire à la fin du film, rappellent aux citoyens le prix payé, la perte de l’honneur et la fierté du Sénégal. Mambety, pendant son interview, a parlé des implications de son film: Nous sommes foutus... Nous sommes foutus... Je ne parle pas seulement de nous ici en Afrique, mais de l’être humain, de l’homme. Nous avons vendu notre âme à un prix trop bas. Moi la sensation que j’ai c’est que nous sommes foutus si nous avons troqué notre âme avec |’ argent. Et c’est pour cela que l’enfance est mon dernier refuge, moi tout ce que j’ai compris c’est que, définitivement, je ne suis pas achetable.’

Dans le même interview, à la question de savoir pourquoi il a adapté la pièce de Dürrenmatt, Mambety a répondu, comme toujours, d’une façon assez indirecte: Avec Friedrich [Dürrenmatt] nous nous sommes quittés, il y a un an. Lui est parti là-haut et moi je reste ici encore en train de méditer sur le sens de la justice. La rencontre entre l’auteur et le réalisateur existe. Si quelqu'un vous dit, je vous aime, même si ce quelqu’un n’est plus là pour vous le répéter, vous vous en souviendrez toujours. Il existe entre les hommes des rencontres qui sont au-delà des océans, au-delà de la couleur de la peau.

Nous pourrions donc voir Hyènes comme un hommage à Dürrenmatt. Ainsi donc, la réponse au premier paradoxe, c’est-à-dire de l’usage d’un drame européen comme allégorie africaine, est tout à fait simple: Dürrenmatt est mort au moment où Mambety décida de tourner un film sur la corruption des sociétés africaines

par le néocolonialisme. Bien que Mambety ait dit «I think that we, as African filmmakers, must not all embark on the same track ... By natureIdo not like to make revolutionary statements»’, ses deux longs métrages traitent des conséquences morales de la dépendance. Ces longs métrages sont maintenant disponibles aux Africains — le cinéma, la musique populaire de l’Ouest, la mode occidentale, les motos, toutes les couleurs et le bruit de la vie

urbaine. C’était le «Paris-Paradise syndrome» ce qui représente le théme de Touki

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Bouki. Les deux personnages principaux de ce film, Mory et Anta sont résolus à réunir l’argent nécessaire pour aller en France ; ils essaient de vivre à l’européenne: Anta s’habille comme un homme et Mory se déplace en moto ; mais Mory ne peut pas renier sa culture traditionnelle: sa moto est décorée avec les cornes d’un taureau et un masque cérémonial du Dogon, et il y a des flashbacks: l’enfance de Mory quand il montait fièrement un taureau à la tête d’un troupeau. À la fin, Anta, qui porte des vêtements volés à un Français, s’appuie contre la barre d’un bateau allant en France. Mais Mory décide de rester. Le message de Touki Bonki est que I’ Afrique a été corrompue par le colonialisme. Les Africains se voient refuser l’accès aux gloires de la civilisation européenne, mais ils ne peuvent pas retourner à leur propre culture parce qu’elle est irrévocablement corrompue. Mory et Anta acquièrent les biens, mais seulement par le crime, et ils en sont fortement admirés. Dans Jom de Samb-Makharam (1981), «Jom» pourrait être traduit comme la dignité, le courage, l’honneur. Ce film parle de trois histoires du peuple qui préfère mourir ou souffrir de la pauvreté que de faire face à l’humiliation. Assez récemment, nous avons vu ce thème dans Guelwaar (1992) d’Ousmane Sembène ; le

personnage principal de ce film est assassiné parce qu’il a fait un discours en refusant l’aide internationale qui fait de ces bénéficaires des esclaves. Quant à sa propre famille, elle n’avait pas honte d’accepter l’aide de sa fille, une riche prostituée. Sévère et simple, Guelwaar condamne une Afrique qui vénère les cadeaux de supposés bienfaiteurs étrangers. «Si vous voulez tuer un homme de grande dignité, offrez lui tous les jours ce dont il a besoin pour vivre. Bientôt il sera votre esclave»'®. Selon la tradition de grands penseurs, nous pouvons mieux comprendre le symbolisme de la hyéne dans les titres des deux films de Mambety, la hyène qui sent la maladie chez

les autres animaux"’. Qui sont les hyénes dans Hyénes ? Sont-elles les citoyens qui profitent de leurs concitoyens, qu’ ils n’ont pas, d’ailleurs, tués eux-mêmes. Sont-elles une tation de Mambety lui-même, observant la communauté qui se détruit par avidité et sa propre corruption ? Il est intéressant de noter que Mambety joue

la mort de représensa propre lui-même

le rôle de Gaane, le majordome de Ramatou qui, pendant que Draman meurt, «observe

du haut d’un rocher que tout se déroule suivant le scénario»'?. Mambety est profondément pessimiste. Il termine une interview avec une de ses anecdotes les plus bizarres : Un jour, j’ai rencontré Dieu … Je l’ai vu très fatigué, un peu paniqué. Je lui ai dit, je suis Djibril Al Islam, c’est-à-dire je suis le messager de Dieu, je suis Gabriel. Je lui ai demandé, mais qu’estce que tu as ? Il m’a dit : «Je cherche ma maman». Et je lui ai dit bonne nuit. Dors et demain tout

ira bien, et c’est ce qu’il a fait …."

Dieu est donc devenu un enfant que l’artiste console avec des mensonges. Que dire de plus ? Hyènes est-ce le dernier mot sur la destruction de l’Humanite ?

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Notes

1: Friedrich Diirrenmatt, The Visit (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 113.

2: Francoise Pfaff, Twenty-Five Black African Filmmakers: A Critical Study with Filmography and BioBibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 220. 3: Angelo Fiombo, «L’ Afrique aux enchères», Ecrans d'Afrique 2 (1992), p. 22. 4: Jay Scott, The Globe and Mail, 14 May 1992, p. Cl. 5: Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1957). 6: Elie Castiel, «Ousmane Sembéne: le patriarche de la mémoire», Séquences 165 (1993), p. 40-41.

7: Jean Servais Bakyono, Baba Diop, Clement Tapsoba, «La parole à Djibril Diop Mambety», Ecrans d'Afrique 2 (1992), p. 10. 8: Ibid., p. 9. 9: Pfaff, p. 218. 10: Castiel, p. 40. 11: Fiombo, p. 24. 12 bidsp 22:

13: Bakyono, et al., p. 10.

(Traduit par M. Scatton et Laurence Joly)

Hyenas, one of the most remarkable films to come out of Africa recently, is as paradoxical as its legendary director, Djibril Mambety. Personal and African in its imagery (the elephants, the hyenas of the title) and its social and political themes, it is nevertheless highly faithful in its structure to The Visit, the Swiss play by Diirenmatt from which it derives. Obvious difficulties attend this transposition of a European allegory to Africa: moral conventions above all. Yet Hyenas engages audiences with the beauty of its production and with its universal themes, such as the relation of King to subjects, a theme we know from Oedipus. Mambety’s first film Touki-Bouki likewise referred to hyenas. The image of corruption and of neo-colonialism that Mambety addresses are felt in other great Senegaliees movies as well, Jom and Guelwaar above all. Hyenas is the most pessimist of all.

Dudley

Andrew

Falaises sacrées et espaces communs

Le pauvre metteur en scène, toujours entre l’imaginaire et la réalité, n'arrive pas à se réveiller de son rêve éveillé. Souleymane Cissé

Souleymane Cissé affirme que la production de Yeelen, qui se range parmi les films africains les plus acclamés, fut touchée sinon par le Sacré, du moins par le mystère. Comment comprendre ce que cela peut signifier dans le contexte des systèmes de croyances et des esthétiques africaines, sans commencer par douter sérieusement de notre propre entreprise ? La plupart des intellectuels et cinéastes occidentaux ne se tournent-ils pas vers |’ Afrique pour y trouver une fontaine et une source de spiritualité qu'ils ne peuvent pas trouver chez eux ? Yeelen semble être le type de films que le Frangais Jean-René Debrix avait en téte lorsqu’il créa en 1963 le «Bureau du Cinéma», destiné a assurer la production locale de films africains. Debrix était persuadé que les traditions africaines pouvaient revitaliser les intéréts et le langage défraichis du cinéma occidental en réintroduisant la «magie» et même la «sorcellerie» dans le médium.! Il fut sans aucun doute fort déçu quand la lumière la plus éclatante du cinéma africain, Ousmane Sembène, fit le pied de nez à cette mission et produisit à la place un cinéma lucide et critique vis-à-vis du mysticisme et de certaines traditions. En réalité, Debrix ne faisait que s’insérer dans une longue lignée de Français qui, en toute sincérité et avec le plus grand respect, espéraient exploiter les profondes richesses spirituelles du continent au-dessous d’eux. Léon Poirier donna le ton en 1924 lors du tournage de La Croisière noire. I] parle d’une rencontre mystique avec une lueur incandescente dans les montagnes du Hoggar, alors qu’il était perdu et totalement seul. Il prit ce rougeoiement pour une sorte de buisson ardent et en fit le centre du monde spirituel, aimant ou détritus phosphorescent qui, exposé toute la journée au soleil, était capable d’accumuler l’énergie puis d'émettre à la nuit tombée un champ-de-force auquel il lui était impossible de résister. Les occidentaux, disait-il, sont centrifuges par nature et fuient leur centre européen à l’occasion d’expéditions comme celle dans laquelle il était lui-même embarqué. Malgré ses prétentions scientifiques, La Croisière Dudley Andrew, (1995), «Falaises sacrées et

espaces communs», iris, 18, pp. 113-124.

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noire de Poirier peut étre considérée comme la version documentaire de fictions exotiques telles Les Mines du Roi Salomon ou L’Atlantide. ? Ne pouvons-nous pas dire la même chose à propos de Jean Rouch, qui, lors de sa série de films sur les rites dogons — les Sigis — dut quitter Paris pour se rendre dans les falaises de Bandiagara, les montagnes mêmes dans lesquelles Cissé fit l’expérience de cette zone crépusculaire entre la réalité et le rêve pendant le tournage de Yeelen ? Les remarques de Cissé préparent des spectateurs tels que moi à l’expérience de |’ inexplicable, lorsqu’après un parcours sans heurts dans la savane, le regard déployé à l’infini, on se retrouve face à ces falaises et à la lumière étrange qu’elles émettent ou qu’elles abritent. Yeelen fut salué par le monde occidental, mais des doutes furent exprimés. Ce rêve

éveillé ne flattait-il pas les goûts de cinéphiles occidentaux, tout en ignorant le rôle formateur et révolutionnaire qu’une situation post-coloniale exigeait de tout artiste possédant une conscience sociale ? Jean-Servais Bakyono a dit de Yeelen : Quand la critique européenne ne colle pas aux films africains des étiquettes fantaisistes, elle les enferme dans une pseudo-catégorie de chef-d’ oeuvre. De ce ghetto culturel est ainsi né récemment en Europe, |’afro-mode.... Nous constatons, depuis le succès de Yeelen, l'introduction de pratiques magiques dans les films des jeunes auteurs africains qui montrent une influence des décisions des jurés des festivals’.

Bakyono affirme que «[Yeelen] ne provoque pas, sur le continent [africain], leméme enthousiasme ... ni la même adhésion ... comme c’est le cas dans les pays européens où les cinéphiles crient au génie et au chef d’oeuvre». Alors que les premiers films de Sembéne furent également loués pour leur «fraîcheur» et leur adhérence aux rythmes et aux modes d’observation africains“, il ne fut jamais suggéré qu’il cherchait à introduire un style mystérieusement africain ou à retrouver des origines africaines. On ne précisa pas non plus si la question du génie artistique lui était jamais venue à l’esprit. S’opposant de façon explicite à l’exotisme recherché par Jean Rouch, Sembéne, lui, ne recherche rien — si on peut l’en croire, il ne recherche sûrement pas les accolades des critiques occidentaux. Il utilise plutôt le cinéma comme une machine didactique servant à illustrer, au moyen d’images fortes, une sagesse proverbiale qui exhorte ses compatriotes à un type particulier d’attitude et de compréhension commune. Dans un récent documentaire de Ngugi Thiong’o et Manthia Diawara à son sujet, Sembéne disserte sur le cinéma dans une salle de classe, à l’occasion d’un discours adressé à des étudiants visiblement envoûtés. «Aujourd’hui, la littérature est un luxe», dit-il, réaffirmant par là

une préférence qu’il a souvent défendue.* Dans une sociéte de masse, et tout particulièrement dans une culture semi-alphabète, on doit utiliser le cinéma pour éduquer la population en vue de la formation d’une société civile viable. Cette éthique fut institutionalisée dès 1975 dans la charte dela FEPACI qui «invokes the necessity for African film to play a formative role in bringing to consciousness

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African reality and problems».f Le metteur en scène est invité en tant que conteur à délivrer un message social drapé dans une histoire hautement embellie, une histoire parfois comique (Mandabi), parfois historique (Emitai). Même des films à caractère réaliste et social tel que Barra, réalisé par Cissé après son retour de Moscou, organisent leur dramaturgie pour produire une clarté et un impact maximum. Frank Ukadike a récemment examiné les conséquences de la directive FEPACI sur d’autres films-clés de la même période, comme Muna Moto, Harvest, 3000 Years, et West Indies. Iles qualifie d’ «examples of allegorical fictions completely based in oral traditions». Sembéne a luimême été fréquemment défini comme un «griot» qui utilise des paraboles enjolivées et fascinantes pour alerter ses compatriotes des dangers et des possibilités de l’organisation sociale et politique actuelle. L'interprétation hérétique de Brian Goldfarb’ fait cependant remonter ce mode allégorique à une source beaucoup moins prestigieuse que la tradition orale — une source, en fait, plutôt sinistre ; il repère en effet un projet semblable dans les films éducatifs des prêtres missionnaires de la période coloniale. Une récente compilation de ce cinéma prolifique, intitulée «La Position missionnaire», documente trente années d’enseignement cinématographique mené dans les domaines de l’hygiène, de l’éthique et du dogme à travers des contes simples et homéliques. On peut par exemple comparer Bal poussière, l’excitant film ivoirien d'Henri Duparc (l’histoire d’une jeune femme volontaire et entétée qui quitte sa famille traditionnelle pour aller découvrir les plaisirs et opportunités offertes par Abidjan) à un petit film missionnaire et fort douteux datant des années 1950, «Nicolai», dans lequel un jeune

homme innocent est incité à abandonner un patrimoine rural maigre mais honnête pour partir à la ville ; après sa déchéance morale, il trouve refuge dans une église et le bon père le guide sur la voie de la rectitude, du mariage chrétien, et finalement, du retour au

village. Trente ans plus tard et après la décolonisation, Duparc célèbre la rébellion et la modernité de son personnage qu’il utilise, certes, pour précher une nouvelle vision des choses en Afrique, mais de toute façon pour précher.* Je voudrais généraliser en disant que le cinéma socialement conscient fondé par Sembène perpétue cette fonction missionnaire tout en se mettant au service d’une vision radicale généralement sans rapport avec les enseignements du Christ.’ Quelle que soit leur origine, d'importants films africains, tel que Xala, ne peuvent être compris que sous la rubrique de l’allégorie et de sa parente, la satire. Les personnages de Xala ne délimitent-ils pas des options morales explicites ? Et la fiction nereprésente-t-elle pas dans un détail désopilant les conséquences de ces options ? Dans Xala, les religions traditionnelles et leurs fétiches ne sont pas importants pour leur signification religieuse, mais pour leur signification sociale. En général, l’allégorie demande un spectacle excessif capable de captiver son public par le faste d’une représentation dont l’autorité visuelle évidente garantira du même coup l’autorité pédagogique. A mon avis, Sembène se propose d’ouvrir tout grand les yeux de ses concitoyens pour y déverser ensuite des images qui leur montrent leurs habitudes, tout

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en leur suggérant des possibilités de changement. La scéne finale de Guelwaar, puissante et puissamment explicite, constitue le dernier exemple en date de ce procédé (dans cette scéne, la charette transportant le cadavre de Guelwaar chemine dans une

montagne de riz et de sucre offerts par la Banque Mondiale mais déversés sur les routes en signe de rejet et d’indépendance). En somme, la pédagogie — et ses modes favoris, le proverbe et 1’ allégorie— sont des caractéristiques endémiques dans le conte africain.'° Les dangers liés 4 ces modes ont plusieurs fois été soulignés. Quand, en 1991, Ta Donna arriva en grande fanfare sur les écrans, les comparaisons avec Yeelen (les deux films sont maliens et traitent de la magie située dans les falaises de Bandiagara) furent supplantées par des questions portant sur la tendance du film à sermonner. A cet égard, une critique fut explicite : «Si on n’y prend garde, la limite entre le cinéma engagé et le cinéma didactique se franchit aisément». Adama Drabo y est qualifié de «victime de l'erreur des créateurs africains qui imposent au message de faire oublier l’art».!! Même ceux qui adorèrent le film signalèrent l’importance de sa «morale profonde», estimant qu’à travers le véhicule du film, le directeur «nous propose une solution [à l’aliénation moderne] par un retour aux sources, par une réflexion».'? Le problème est que les pouvoirs magiques de la méditation n’ont rien à voir avec des proclamations ou des moralisations. On y accède de façon plutôt passive, à travers la recherche et non pas à travers le prêche. Si Ta Donna prêche la méditation, je voudrais proposer que Yeelen, en fait, constitue une méditation ou, du moins, qu’il aborde son sujet avec une sorte d’humilité et de crainte respectueuse. Y a-t-il place en Afrique pour un cinéma qui viserait non pas à expliquer mais, précisément, à produire l’inexplicable voire même le sacré ? Une étude sur le statut du sacré dans le cinéma africain, entreprise par le critique belge Jacques Binet (un chrétien autoproclamé) localise des références à la religion pour la plupart obligées et présentées comme faisant partie du paysage social ordinaire de films tout à fait laïques, comme par exemple Xala. Dans le monde occidental, le sacré se présente principalement à des individus isolés (le curé de campagne de Bresson, la Jeanne d’ Arc de Dreyer) alors que selon Binet, il apparaît dans le cinéma africain comme un esprit soufflant sur des communautés ou des groupes humains, que ce soit à l’écran (les scènes de foules en colère dans Finyé) ou dans la salle de cinéma elle-même, qui peut alors devenir le site d’un rituel. Binet ne tient cependant pas compte de cette perspective sociale dans son paragraphe final, où il souligne plutôt ce qu’il considère comme un gros plan du visage d’un vieillard se présente à la mémoire comme un moment des plus poignants: Safi Faye à la fin de son film Lettre paysanne a inséré un gigantesque portrait de son grand-père, mort, dit-elle, juste après le tournage. A ce moment-là, le cinéma nous fait une confidence douloureuse et, maîtrisant le temps, nous fait pénétrer dans le mystère de l’ Au-delà".

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DEF

A l'évidence, Lettre paysanne se distingue en autorisant son plan final à se présenter devant nous d’une manière non-consommée et non-consommable. Contrairement aux images utiles, à fonction illustrative, qui constituent la plupart des films africains, le très gros plan sur le grand-père n’illustre rien et sort complètement de l’ordinaire ; de ce fait, il introduit une temporalité différente qui vient baigner le film et les spectateurs suffisamment sensibles pour pénétrer dans cette temporalité. Détaché du reste du film, ilremplit la fonction d’un fétiche : il ne représente pas le grand-père ni son époque mais, de façon littérale — sacerdotale — il le rend présent. L’enthousiasme de Binet pour une exception comme ce gros plan est répété par André Gardies dans son livre important sur «l’espace-miroir» du cinéma d’ Afrique noire. Après avoir conclu que presque tous les films africains utilisent de façon redondante un espace de «monstration» qui renvoie aux publics l’image du monde social dans lequel ils vivent pour leur permettre de se le réapproprier après le colonialisme, Gardies identifie un corpus restreint de films ouvertement placés en opposition à cette règle majoritaire. Citons-le : Fad’jal, Touki-Bouki, Contrast-City, ou Yeelen, en particulier, ne tracent-ils pas une voie différente? En déplaçant les codes narratifs dominants, en produisant un véritable travail d'écriture, en jouant sur le pouvoir de l’ambivalence, non seulement ils se démarquent du désir didactique des lectures monosémiques, mais encore ils font entendre une voix singulière et authentique.

Gardies utilise des termes à forte connotation — singularité de voix et «authenticité» contre «didactisme» et «monosémie» — termes qui prirent une valeur talismanique pour les critiques français dès l’apparition des Cahiers du cinéma. Gardies ne cache d’ailleurs pas son allégeance à cette forme de cinéma : «Ne s’ouvrent-ils pas [Yeelen surtout] sur un imaginaire ancré dans la réalité culturelle africaine? Le futur, ne serait-il pas du côté de ces films-là ?» C’est en réalité Cissé lui-même qui a le plus fortement revendiqué la nature exceptionnelle de son film Yeelen et, en tant qu’artiste, son rôle sacerdotal. Le portrait documentaire de Cissé, tourné en 1990 pour la série francaise télévisée Les cinéastes de

nos jours, fait ressortir le caractère privé de la méditation sur le propos de son film, méditation accomplie avant le tournage. On le voit marcher dans une forêt (et non pas enseigner dans une salle de classe comme Sembène) et sa voix-off nous parle de l’inexplicable pouvoir transformatif du feu, un feu dont les images, film après film, deviennent de plus en plus fréquentes. Il parle des acteurs comme modèles, d’une façon presque similaire à celle de Bresson dans ses Notes sur le cinématographe. Pour trouver ses comédiens, il part à la recherche de visages ; pas de talents, mais de visages capables sous la pression de la caméra et du drame, de révéler quelque chose dont il sent la présence mais qui reste enfoui dans le mystère. Dans le cas de Yeelen, Cissé explora

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l’intérieur du Mali à la recherche de gens faisant preuve d’un instinct qu’ il pourrait aider à libérer. Si l’on cherchait à identifier des précédents européens pour les films des cinéastes africains, celui de Cissé pourrait très bien se trouver dans les films surréalistes

et ethnographiques de Jean Rouch. En tout cas, Rouch décrit son attitude envers ses sujets dans des termes similaires à ceux de Cissé. Tous deux veulent découvrir et explorer des êtres humains comme on le fait avec un ami. Au lieu d’utiliser les acteurs et les images pour illustrer un message pré-établi— le propre de la méthode pédagogique — Cissé se met à la merci de visages humains dont l’image l’a captivé ; la figure du grandpère de Lettre paysanne avait peut-être captivé Binet de la même façon. Quoiqu'il en soit, et comme nous l’apprend le documentaire sur Cissé, les personnages âgés de Yeelen sont joués par des gens qu’il a dû cajoler pour les convaincre de participer à ses films. Et le vieil homme sélectionné pour jouer Soma, le personnage qui possède les secrets les plus profonds de la société Komo, pratiquait lui-même régulièrement dans sa vie réelle des rites chantés. Ainsi, avant même qu’il n’assume le rôle de son personnage, le vieil homme avait fait preuve, devant Cissé, des pouvoirs qui devaient constituer la fiction du film. La nuit avant le tournage, ce vieil homme captiva l’équipe toute entière, qui s’était rassemblée autour d’un feu allumé sous les falaises de Bandiagara. Laissons

Souleymane Cissé le décrire pour nous :!° Parti loin des êtres, assis autour du feu, entouré de l’équipe de tournage, le vieux comédien qui joue le rôle du père dans Yeelen s’exprime avec beaucoup de sagesse comme tous les vieux de son âge. Nous l’écoutons avec beaucoup d’intérêt comme jamais nous ne l’avions fait. On ne savait pas réellement s’il disait la vérité sur les choses ou si c’était tout simplement del’ imaginaire, mais on l’écoutait quand même avec passion. I] nous parlait du fin fond du Mendinga, un soir, au seuil du tournage de Yeelen. C’ était sur les falaises de Bandiagara dans le pays des dogons. Le soma (son nom dans le film), a le secret du fer et du feu, le secret du visible et de l’invisible, c’est le poète et le philosophe. Et nous avions le feu du bivouac dans lequel luisaient les esprits du pays mandingue. Ces instants étaient pour nous des moments d’intense émotion, des pierres précieuses brutes de la communion avec la nature et les êtres visibles et invisibles qui la peuplent. Le vieux soma parle toujours. Nous étions 1a, réceptifs à tous ses propos... Perdu dans cette flopée d’idées, le metteur en scène, lui, allongé dans un coin, les pieds croisés, le regard vers le ciel, contemple les étoiles et la lune. Il est incapable de retenir le nombre d’étoiles qui filent sous ses yeux. Et pourtant, c’ était lui qui avait fait venir tout ce monde, y compris le vieux soma dans ce lieu si lointain et si secret qu’il demeurait à son tour lui-même mystérieux comme les masques senofos. Le vieux continuait toujours à chanter et tout le monde sait que dans le pays mandingue, le chant des somas est profond et son langage est mystérieux. Ils disent que les paroles remontent trop loin pour la mémoire des hommes, ils en connaissent le ton, ils en connaissent les effets et ils en connaissent la signification. Son chant profond s’éleva et s’amplifia dans la falaise et l’on sentait que tous se taisaient et tous écoutaient, y compris le metteur en scène.

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Cissé parle ensuite de l’apparition, sur le site, d’un esprit malinké, un grand boa descendu des cavernes de la falaise pour ramper en cercle autour du feu de camp. Tous, y compris les non-croyants, ressentirent la présence de cet esprit. Le grand boa était-il vraiment venu? Existait-il vraiment? Soma pouvait-il vraiment l’appeler partout où il se trouvait? Pour nous les mandingues, l'imagination était au rendez-vous. Cependant, s’il n’était pas passé dans notre camp, il est vrai qu’à un moment, quelque chose a plané sur la falaise, Sangha, un soir de tournage de Yeelen.

Que ce mystère ait été le fruit de leur imagination ou l’émanation d’un monde spirituel réel qui planait autour d’eux du fait de leur localisation (les falaises de Bandiagara) et du projet dans lequel ils étaient engagés (un conte mythique de l’empire malien d’autrefois), leur impuissance à décider les plongea dans une concentration qui transforma I’ ordinaire en quelque chose de tout à fait extraordinaire. Cissé conclut ses réflexions en ces termes : «Après le tournage, la falaise de Sangha continue de recevoir les êtres et les esprits. Et les étoiles affluent chaque soir du ciel, et la lune et le soleil sont toujours au rendez-vous à l’heure qu’ils se fixent eux-mêmes». En d’autres termes, ce rendez-vous de l’imagination avec la nature produit quelque chose de tout à fait réel : à savoir, le sentiment concret et immédiat que la nature et les êtres extraordinaires recèlent des possibilités insondées et que le monde ordinaire devient de la sorte aussi mystérieux qu’un monde spirituel. Et n’est-ce pas cela, la fonction la plus profonde du cinéma ? Cissé rapporta cette anecdote en réponse à une invitation des rédacteurs des Cahiers du cinéma qui lui avaient demandé, ainsi qu’à beaucoup d’autres, de publier un souvenir personnel marqué par le cinéma. Et justement, ce dont il se souvint, c’ était de s’étre assis les jambes croisées dans un coin du camp et d’avoir regardé un vieux dogon chanter et raconter des histoires toute la nuit en invoquant l’esprit d’un grand Serpent Boa. Ce fut le cinéma qui les rapprocha, le cinéma et Cissé lui-même qui les avait convoqués sous la lune et les étoiles, sous les falaises de Bandiagara où ils furent séduits par des mots destinés également à séduire le serpent et à le faire sortir de sa caverne pour qu’il passe parmi eux et vienne consacrer leur entreprise. Et il est vrai que le tournage fut béni : quelques heures plus tard, en effet, le soleil se levait avec sa lumière promise, une lumière nécessaire pour laisser une empreinte sur le celluloid et faire en sorte que ce film, dont le titre signifie «la lumière», puisse voir le jour. Les circonstances extraordinaires de la genèse de Yeelen affectent-elles la façon dont le film s’adresse à son public, ainsi que les déférences et plaisirs pris à le regarder ? Yeelen suit son héros Niancooro selon un scénario prédestiné qui le mène du petit village malinké de sa mère jusqu’au Sahel et à sa rencontre avec les Peuls où il prend épouse. Finalement, il aboutit aux falaises de Bandiagara, dans lesquelles les peuples les plus traditionnels du Mali sont aujourd’hui encore enterrés avec leurs fétiches. Essentielle-

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ment un retour à la matrice culturelle, Yeelen procède par épisodes autonomes — peu d’ épisodes anticipent ceux qui leur succédent— pour produire finalement une saisissante confrontation oedipienne. De ce fait, le spectateur doit tirer la signification de ce qui est montré non pas du propos ou de la structure narrative que les images ont pour but de constituer, mais, précisément, de ce qui peut être vu et entendu à chaque instant. Un avant-propos nous informe que ce film concerne les Komos, c’est-à-dire la septième et dernière société à laquelle un Malinké mâle peut aspirer. C’est dans les secrets de leurs rites et incantations que les Komos préservent les pouvoirs de l’aile koro et du pilon magique, qui tirent eux-mémes leur force du fer et du feu, éléments sur lesquels les initiés maintiennent certaines prérogatives. Ainsi, quand le soleil se léve sur le film, un «code secret» d’apprentissage est déjà en place, un code que le héros doit maîtriser et que le public lui-même est sommé de reconnaître. Au cinéma, le secret entourant le sacré pose des problèmes esthétiques et éthiques particuliers. Jean Rouch s’en rendit compte il y a plusieurs années pendant le tournage de ses films sur les Sigis dans cette même région dogon. La cérémonie des Sigis a lieu tous les soixante ans et ce depuis des temps immémoriaux (on présume que sa forme est restée inchangée). En la filmant, Rouch permit à ses participants d’avoir accès pour la première fois à une vision nouvelle de leurs propres rites, très souvent une perspective aérienne dans laquelle les structures de leurs formations et de leurs danses apparaissaient sous une forme géométrique que personne jusque-là n’avait encore pu voir. Qui plus est, ces rites, forcément transmis jusque-là par les membres les plus âgés de la communauté aux membres chargés de réorganiser la cérémonie tous les soixante ans, existent maintenant sur pellicule, ce qui peut désormais remplir la fonction des instructions orales et des récits de la cérémonie donnés pendant les intervalles prolongés entre les périodes cérémoniales elles-mêmes. Rouch fut forcé de se demander comment faire pour préserver le caractère sacré des rites et celui de leur souvenir, tout en continuant à les filmer. Cissé dut faire face à un problème similaire lorsqu’ il décida de révéler certaines des cérémonies secrètes des Komos. Un long rituel, soigneusement analysé!? par Phillip Gentile, fut rendu visible à tout un chacun. Selon certains dires, l’acte de filmer,

sacrilège par essence, causa le malheur et même la mort de certains membres de la communauté Komo. Cissé comprenait qu’il prenait un risque en représentant des rites et des images très puissantes. Il prenait un risque pour ceux qui s’en occupent traditionnellement en secret, et il prenait le risque de trivialiser ces images en les exposant à la lumière ordinaire du cinéma. Dans son avant-propos, dans ses épisodes saisissants mais autonomes, dans sa documentation de rites, et plus spécialement dans sa présentation frontale d’icônes (poulet incendié, sphère dans la dune,) Yeelen invoque directement les propriétés «magiques» de l’image possédées par les masques et par d’autres talismans. Alors que l’allégorie est par définition une forme «lisible» dont le spectacle est excessif, la magie,

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elle, n’est jamais entièrement lisible. Elle suppose que les images ont un pouvoir qui va au-dela de leur imbrication dans un quelconque systéme signifiant, puisqu’elle revendique une participation dans l'existence plutôt que dans le sens. Ce n’est pas de manière signifiante mais de manière littérale que le fétiche est attaché aux ancêtres, qui font euxmêmes partie d’une force responsable de la façon dont les choses sont, non pas de la façon dont elles signifient. Les Africains familiers avec ce conte (ou le genre auquel il appartient) et les spectateurs ignorants (principalement les Européens et les admirateurs du cinéma américain) passent sans aucun doute par des expériences différentes ;'* cependant, tous se retrouvent impliqués dans l'initiation du héros d’une manière telle qu’ils sont euxmêmes initiés à ce type précis d’expérience cinématographique. A travers un processus d’identification, le besoin du spectateur de connaître les vérités cachées vient s’attacher

à la mission que le jeune héros du film, Niananleora, a reçue de sa mère : une quête visant à arracher le pouvoir au père décadent. Le film intercale des scènes du périple intérieur de Niananleora à d’autres scènes dans lesquelles on voit son père le suivre. Tous deux finissent éventuellement par rejoindre le même espace au moment culminant du film, lorsque les objets qu’ils portent se consument en irradiant une lumière causée par leur conjonction spatiale. Les agents de cette fiction surnaturelle, Niananleora y compris, sentent qu’ils sont les véhicules de forces qui les dépassent. En ce sens, Yeelen emprunte les structures du roman de formation sans en adopter le but, qui est de représenter la maturation morale du héros. Niananleora, sa mère, son père et son épouse, tous se préparent pour le rôle qu’ils sont appelés à jouer, mais aucun d’entre eux ne traite ce rôle comme une chose personnelle. Ainsi, leurs ablutions (la mère dans la rivière se versant des bols de lait sur

elle-même, Niananleora se baignant sous une cascade sacrée avec son épouse) ont pour fonction de préparer leurs corps à recevoir les substances à ingérer. Le Soma boit du dolo (de la bière de millet) pendant la cérémonie Komo, et Niananleora soigne l’infertilité de son épouse avec un médicament hallucinogène. Cependant, l’ingestion la plus importante passe par les yeux et se produit lorsque Niananleora reçoit la lumière au moment culminant du film. Dans ses derniers instants sur terre, Niananleora regarde fixement son père, après s’étre préparé à accepter la force dévastatrice de la lumière émise par la conjonction des verres sacrés. Absorbant une image qui le détruit, il s’offre à nous comme le modèle que nous sommes priés de suivre en «recevant» ce film. Certes, Yeelen, après tout, n’est qu’un film ; cependant, le cinéma y est sommé de mettre sa propre technologie, quelquefois risible, au service d’un pouvoir que ce conte a exercé sur les Malinkés pendant des siècles. Cissé s’adjoint les techniques cinématographiques usuelles et en fait les expressions contemporaines de la magie des histoires africaines traditionnelles : parexemple, un chien et un albinos, que l’oncle de Niananleora a fait sortir de leur forêt pour qu’ils viennent près d’un feu, se déplacent en arrière ; dans la scène culminante, un pilon est «aéroporté», «animé» par le cinéma pour s’envoler des

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mains qui le détenaient ; des membres agressifs de la tribu peule sur le point de frapper des personnages malinkés, sont stoppés à deux reprises par le pouvoir de l’arrêt-surimage, qui vient alors s’ ajouter à la magie traditionnelle que les personnages filmiques prétendent posséder ; l’épouse de Niananleora, transformée par un hallucinogène, s’illumine dans une surexposition cinématographique qui constitue l’équivalent proprement cinématographique de la puissance du remède contre l’infertilité. Ces moments souvent pleins d’humour nous préparent pour le magnifique point culminant de l’histoire. Le jeune Niananleora, errant tel un nomade, y assemble les éléments nécessaires à produire un pouvoir dévastateur. Cet assemblage se compose d’un mélange de science (concentration de lumière à travers des prismes pyramidaux), d’ histoire (l’épouse peule, mère de son fils), de connaissance des fétiches (la conjonction des ailes de Kore), et de patrimoine ancestral (l’oncle débonnaire, gardien du secret). Le site ancestral des falaises dogons est le théâtre d’une bataille élémentale de volontés qui produit des images magnifiques de lion, de taureau et d’éléphant. Le pilon se met à parler, et le soleil déclenche alors la lumière primale et le rayon de lumière qui

annihile l’ordre secret des mots.!° Reconnaissons, dans la conjonction puissante des verres sacrés, le rapprochement de deux tiges de carbone qui produit le jaillissement d’une étincelle brillante et, présent dans cette étincelle, un nouvel univers, un univers de cinéma. Avant de figurer la mort

des pouvoirs anciens et la renaissance de l’immaculée, avant de représenter la recherche d’un avenir africain situé dans le passé, recherche menée dans une compréhension. cyclique du temps et de l’histoire, cette scène ne représente-t-elle pas directement la naissance d’un jeune cinéma ambitieux qui arracherait l’autorité des mains des gardiens du mot, protecteurs ancestraux d’une tradition orale qui n’ont pas su mettre leur pouvoir au service de la terre et du peuple. Il est possible que Yeelen nous ait séduits, moi et tous ceux qui n’arrivons jamais totalement à sortir de l’aura des Cahiers du cinéma, parce qu’à travers son théâtre et ses traditions locales, le film rejoue la guerre qui donna naissance au cinéma ; un cinéma qui trouva ses sources non seulement dans d’autres médias, mais aussi dans des idéologies esthétiques de domination liées à des situations et des exigences antérieures. Plus spécifiquement, Yeelen rejoue la conquête d’une tradition «du papa» par une nouvelle vague. Il constitue l’allégorie de la fin de la suprématie d’un cinéma allégorique et exemplaire. Et la lumière qui se lève à la fin du film promet l’illumination d’un futur ouvert à des pouvoirs expressifs insoupçonnés. Yeelen est le jeune enfant qui amène la chèvre blanche au sacrifice à la source de la société Komo. Les images nues (poulet violemment incendié, sphère émergeant du sable) ne sont-elles pas d’autant plus puissantes qu’elles sont reçues dans leur nudité, détachées de leur sens putatif dans un système allégorique ? Ne sont-elles pas suffisamment puissantes pour nous faire accéder à un autre domaine, un domaine que nous choisirons d’appeler le mythique, le

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sacré, ou tout simplement, le cinématographique ? A cet égard, Yeelen fut comparé à 2001, l’odyssée de l’espace. Comme l'enfant qui déterre la sphère du sable, ce film, son réalisateur et ses spectateurs se tiennent en attente à l’orée d’un avenir rempli du passé. Considérons cela comme le futur du cinéma que nous pensions avoir dépassé. Il ne fait aucun doute qu’à l'instar des contes maliens redécouverts par Cissé, le cinéma semble désespérément

démodé. Cependant, parce qu’il nous en donne une expérience concrète, Yeelen nous rappelle que les objets et techniques anciens conservent un pouvoir, un pouvoir que nous pouvons aujourd’hui utiliser dans les circonstances complexes de l’histoire contemporaine. Tous les spectateurs, Malinkés, Africains de l’ouest ou autres, peuvent partager

ce triomphe, qui est celui de la vieille magie du cinéma.

Notes

1: Manthia Diawara, African Cinema (Bloomington : University of Indiana Press, 1992), p. 26. 2: Léon Poirier, 24 images par seconde (Paris, 1952). Je parle de Poirier et de sa lignée dans ma contribution à East of Suez : Orientalism in Film, édité par M. Bernstein et G. Studlar (New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, à paraître). 3: Jean-Servais Bakyono, “La génération de la rupture,” Ecrans d'Afrique 1 (Mai 1992), p. 66-67. 4: Jay Leyda, cité dans Frank Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkeley : University of California Press,

1994), p. 87. 5: “Ousmane Sembéne and the Making of African Cinema,” film de Manthia Diawara et Ngugi Thiong’o, distribué par la Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. En 16mm et cassette VHS, 60 minutes. 6: Frank Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1994), p. 186.

7: Voir Brian Goldfarb, “A Pedagogical Cinema: Development Theory, Colonialism and Post-Liberation African Film,” /ris 18 (1995). 8: Le récent film de compilation réalisé pour la télévision, “La Position missionnaire,” offre de nombreux exemples de telles allégories et homélies cinématographiques. Je voudrais remercier Frédérique Moreau pour avoir attiré mon attention sur ces films. 9: Cependant, il est certain que des allégories du Christ existent, comme le souligne par exemple le titre du film Black Christ (Cameroun, 1982), et Au nom de Christ (Côte d’ Ivoire, 1992).

10: Juste avant la scène finale de Guelwaar, |’ Imam prononce un proverbe classique (“Quand le vautour attaque le cadavre de ton ennemi, chasse l’en, car cela aurait pu être toi.”’) 11: Moussa Konaté, “Cinéma engagé ou cinéma didactique,” Ecrans d'Afrique | (mai 1992), p. 18.

12: Ecrans d'Afrique 1 (mai 1992), p. 14, 17. 13: Jacques Binet, “Le Sacré,” Camera nigra (Paris : L'Harmattan, 1984), p. 75. 14: André Gardies, Cinéma d'Afrique noire francophone: l'Espace miroir (Paris : l’Harmattan, 1989), D 175:

15: Ibid. 16: Souleymane Cissé, “Le Chant de Soma,” Cahiers du cinéma (mai 1991), p. 23. 17: Voir Phillip Gentile, “In the Midst of Secrets: Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen,” Iris 18 (1995). 18: Ibid. 19: Voir l’analyse deleuzienne de Christophe Cognet, “Le chant du soma,” Theoréme 3 (1994), p. 169-177.

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Souleymane Cissé has suggested that the production of Yeelen was touched by mystery ifnot by the Sacred. He chose a magician to play the role of the Soma, keeper of ancient secrets. He filmed in the sacred cliffs of Mali. He risked filming Malinke rites that had never been witnessed by women and non-initiates. He aimed to conjure up the power that images once claimed over the people and might claim again. In this Yeelen stands opposed to the didactic use of images that constitutes the majority of African films, including those of Sembéne, a use of cinema that was introduced by the missionaries with their instructional and homilitic movies. Cissé perhaps takes Jean Rouch’s view that cinema should edge up to powerful scenes. Cissé’s images share with fetishes the power of that which they represent. Not only does Yeelen display haunting pictures and symbols, it tries to add to the ancient power of image the specific powers of the cinematographe which the film shows off: stop motion, reverse action, and the magic of projection and of light itself.

Philip Gentile

In the Midst of Secrets: Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen

The Bambara sculptor and smith Sedu Traore once stated that although the Komo mask is made to look like an animal, “it is not an animal, it is a secret.”! In Yeelen

Souleymane Cissé invites the Malian viewer to venture deeper into the midst of secrets while permitting the “uninitiated,” and, by implication, western, audiences to content themselves with a universalized and ultimately impoverished meaning.” Writing as a “non-initiate” I hope to parlay my “outsider” status into a way to examine the tension between Cissé’s dual role as director and its relation to the functioning of Yeelen’s cinematic tropes. Symbol, Trope, Difficulty

Most discussions identify Yeelen as an exemplary instance of the trend in SubSaharan African film to “return to the source,” and place particular emphasis on the film’s symbolic and mythical underpinnings.’ Bordwell and Thompson note how the film’s “elemental symbolism” creates a “filmic equivalent” of African oral myth.* Malkmus and Armes emphasize the film’s explanation of Komo, Kore wing, sacred vulture, and magic pylon as “elements of the underlying myth.”* For Manthia Diawara the film thematizes the classic conflict between old and new through dialectical oppositions of Kore wing and Komo pestle, milk and water, father and son.° For Victor Bachy, Yeelen’s cosmic symbols (water, the “origin of all fecundity”; fire, the “first tool

of human evolution”) reaffirm the universal repercussions of the quest for knowledge.’ Each of these accounts seems to suggest a connection between Yeelen’s symbolic and mythical underpinnings and an unspoken opaqueness or point of resistance within the film. For Paul Ricoeur the symbol expresses a double meaning “wherein a primary meaning refers beyond itself to a second meaning whichis never given directly.” Yvette Biro attributes to the symbol the specificity of an object marked by a priori content brought in from “material alien” to the cinema.” Symbols in the traditional sense are not discursive phenomena and suggest a natural connection between themselves and that which they symbolize.! Such a view, by focusing on fixed elements rather than the Philip Gentile, (1995), “In the Midst of Secrets:

Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen,” iris, 18, pp. 125-135.

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relations between elements, encourages the viewer to “crack the code” and relegates the Bambaran symbol to the realm of the inaccessible, the exotic, and the foreign.

Most discussions of Yeelen’s symbols and mythical underpinnings tend to overlook their relationship to the film’s “difficulty,” and its tendency to remain “perpetually ‘insubmissive’.”!! A comparison with the relationship between author and spectator in art cinema is instructive. Unlike standard cinema, in which novelty is regulated to

maintain the spectators’ sense of intelligibility and authority, art cinema trades on our respect for the creator’s vision in order to disrupt such a cohesiveness and encourage a temporary acceptance of the director’s values.!? It is perhaps this very willingness to adopt the superior “otherness” of the director’s values in an art cinema context, that

encourages a reading of Yeelen which universalizes the culturally specific. The awareness of such a willingness to trust the “other” superior values of the director, in addition to political pressures, may have motivated Cissé to submerge his thesis and resort to a double-articulation based on a literal-codic opposition.

“Looking, interpreting, exploring”

In an interview with Manthia Diawara, Cissé described how the value of Yeelen to African audiences was due in part to film’s portrayal of the Komo ritual, the reception and interpretation of which turns on a literal-codic axis: For the first time a film decodes the secret ritual described by the song that they usually hear on the radio. [...] Thus it invites the spectator to go deeper in imagining the significance of the “Komo” beyond the literal meaning of the song, beyond the film. One looks for the codic meanings of the song, which are most important because it contains the secrets of the universe. My film positions the spectator in the midst of these secrets and keeps him/her busy looking, interpreting, exploring. It is this level of the film that is incredibly exciting for the Malian spectator. For the spectator who is not initiated, Imean the American, French or British, I am sure that the film is perceived literally. I mean that this spectator hears the ritualistic song, reads its translation; but, this direct translation is not what is expressed in the film. The sentences are

codified and refer to other objects which obey the rules of a specific knowledge. The rules of this knowledge can only be decoded by initiates of the “Komo.”!

Cissé suggests that the very act of representing the Komo serves both to decode the ritual and to function as a lure, inviting the spectator to venture beyond the representation itself: “the film interprets this ritualistic song one is used to hearing. Thus, it invites the spectator to go deeper in imagining the significance of the ‘Komo’” beyond the literal meaning of song and film (emphasis mine).'* In addition to counterposing the literal to the “codic,” Cissé hints at concentric textual spaces, concentric spheres of

interpretive difficulty and activity. It is here we encounter a possible slippage between the universal “spectator” and “Malian spectator,”! Cissé, even as he consigns the

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universal meaning of the film to the “uninitiated” Western viewer, seems, however unintentionally, to preserve a sense of ambiguity in his use of the term “spectator.” For even as he invites the Malian spectator to keep busy “looking, interpreting, discovering,” the object of such a quest is bound by “the rules of a specific knowledge” which can only be decoded by initiates of the “Komo”.!® The notion of an interpretive difficulty specific to the Malian spectator recalls Evan Zeusse’s description of the Bambara “World Tree,” which, in Kore society initiation

rites, symbolically weds earth to sky and serves as source of regeneration for initiates. After experiencing a symbolic entombment and gestation, the initiates receive rigorous instruction in some 240 symbols suspended from the tree. The symbols, consisting of common objects such as a spoon, carved figures, and pieces of cloth, are associated with

proverbs that attune the initiate to the symbolic meaning behind appearances. Since the symbols, thus configured, are merely the outward forms of the “cosmic Word,” wisdom, according to Zuesse, “consists in knowing the Word under all its varying outer forms. Deeper meanings are appended to this instruction. Even initiated youths do not attain to a full understanding of them until much later.”!? Zeusse’s account of the Kore ritual seems to confirm a level of meaning withheld even from the “initiated” spectator. Such a level of meaning calls into question the idea of an unproblematized textual unity in Yeelen that counterposes a codic/culturally specific meaning to a literal/generalizable meaning, and correspondingly, an “initiated” to an “uninitiated audience.” A potential level of meaning inaccessible to even the Malian spectator offers the possibility of a space within which “initiate” and “noninitiate” may keep busy “looking, interpreting, discovering” with separate, conflicting, and perhaps overlapping spectatorial needs, interests, intentions, but in a way that does not necessarily affirm a textual unity based on simple codic-literal oppositions.'® At the risk of appearing to replace one binary system with another, I want to reframe Cissé’s codic-literal distinction in terms of the relationship between the griot and historiantranscriber, and ultimately between histoire and discours. Such a discussion will hopefully open a space for a consideration of diverse interpretive approaches to Yeelen which will may encourage both Western and African viewers to respond to what Nwachuwu Frank Ukadike characterized as Cissé’ s contentious stance of “transforming spectator intractability ... into docility” through an active process of exploration and discovery.'® Orality/History/Power In light of the many claims that have been made about the role of the griot, I shall limit my discussion to the relationship between the griot and the historian-transcriber and to the relationship of both to tradition. Among the Mandinka-speaking peoples the griot was traditionally a court poet working in the service of the royal family. In his

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service to anobleman the griot was entrusted with a simple phrase which, through tropes and embellishment,

he beautified and enhanced in value. The spoken word, in its

capacity to release nyama , or utilizable but potentially dangerous energy, is considered by the Mande to be a possible source of danger and disorder.”

The dilemma of the historian-transcriber is inseparable from the problematic function of speech as both revelatory and capable of betrayal, for, according to Christopher Williams in his discussion of Mande oral tradition, “writing is to speech as speech is to silence: in both cases there is amovement from authenticity to alterity, from truth to tropes.””?! Each phase, then, constitutes a fall from the prelapsarian silent word, for to speak — and then to write — is not only to concretize, fix, devitalize, but to deform,

all at the risk of releasing nyama. In light of the overvaluation of Yeelen’s “insubmissive” symbolic network and the universalizing of Soma and Nianakoro’s father-son relationship, the dilemma of the transcriber-historian, viewed in light of both his affinity and his potential antagonism to the griot, offers the possibility of mapping the problematic relationship between Cissé and traditional Bambara culture. The discussion that follows considers the possibility of at least two organizing currents residing within Yeelen. The first is “content’-oriented in the sense of attempting to maintain a representation of Bambara culture under specific material conditions. My frame of reference in this context is Cissé’s statement that “there are contents that often force us to select forms that are appropriate.” Such a current aligns Cissé with the historian-transcriber and is most clearly exemplified in his attitude toward the filming of the “Komo” ritual. As such it is identified with what Emile Benveniste has described as histoire, or the enunciative mode which suppresses salient enunciative marks. The second organizing current is bound up with the director’s deployment of the cinematic trope with all of its “deformative” implications. Cissé’s use of the trope calls to mind the necessary but suspect talents of the griot and serves, as an enunciative trace, to both undermine and support a vital reinterpretation of tradition. As such it is identified with the oft-discussed notion of discours, the enunciative mode which conveys the presence of a speaker, listener, and speech context.

When questioned about the technical problems encountered during the filming of the Komo ritual, Cissé recalls forging a “convenient and realistic” mise-en-scène to

accommodate the inadequate technical facilities on location.”* Such adjustments follow from the director’s belief that content dictates appropriate forms as well as an attitude of “mindfulness” to the surrounding spaces and environments of filming. In adapting the script to the ritual, the Komo members were provided with a rudimentary story outline and a specific context for the appropriate ritual. Although Diawara maintains the ritual was shot in long, uninterrupted takes emphasizing the “right image” rather than a specific point of view, the treatment of both the performative aspects of the ritual and the ritual space proves to be, on closer inspection, much more complex than is suggested by either Diawara or Cissé.#* The director claims to have limited himself to filming

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within ten to fifteen meters of the actors, yet there are emphatic shifts in shot scale within the five segments that comprise the Komo ritual. The scene proper is preceded by a brief tracking shot of the trees, which, as Nwachuku Frank Ukadike observes, counteract, in their multivalence and interpretive possibilities, the connotations of opacity and impenetrability associated with the Hollywood notion of “‘jungle”.” In the following shot the Master of the Komo enters from screen right in a medium long shot, followed by a tracking shot that links all ten Komo members within a unified space. The ladling and drinking of the millet beer is framed in a MS/MCU with the duration of each shot encompassing the individual reactions of four Komo members. During the next sequence, in which the goddess Niale is invoked, the shot scale opens out briefly to a LS. Three MCU’s follow: the first consists of an initiate smoking a pipe; the second of Komo member Cena, who looks right; the third of the Master, who questions Soma about the nature of his visit. His question and leftward glance appears to motivate a pan left to Soma, who then voices his complaint. An exchange among Soma, the Master, and Cena follows, with each member individually shot in CU. In the last segment Soma, framed in a MS, “cries” like the sacred beasts and initiates a call-and-response benediction, the culmination of which

is filmed in a plan americain. The scene is followed by two ambiguous “mismatched” shots of the Komo statue shown at the film’s beginning. The first frames the statue in isolation; the second locates the statue in front of the tree covered with Bambara ideographs. On first appearance Cissé’s representation of the Komo ritual — shaped, in part, by technical limitations, and by the instructions given to Komo members — would seem to exemplify what Benveniste has characterized as the “historical” utterance which refers to events that transpired at a certain specified time without the intervention of the

speaker in the narration.* Insofar as the Komo members perform authentic ritual functions in a specific narrative context, they seem to be located in a histoire in which the enunciative marks are suppressed. In this respect they partake of what John Caughie, has described as a masquerade of discours in the form of histoire which permits the historically specific to appear in the guise of the natural and everlasting.”’ But judging from the ritual’s impact on director and crew,

and Cissé’s comment

that “it is

extraordinary to discover ritual scenes in which one has not taken part” (emphasis added), the sequence also possesses the documentary immediacy of a recovered historical moment.” In light of Benveniste’s qualification that histoire must “belong to the past,” the representation of the ritual seems to wrest itself from the universalizing masquerade of discours-in-the-form-of-histoire through the force of its “specific temporality.””” Thus, the representation of the Komo ritual, viewed in light of both production conditions and narrative context, serves to emphasize the double meaning of histoire (as both history and story) which distinguishes between the “presentness” of discourse and the “pastness” of story.

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Rather than simply preserving the spatiotemporal unity of the ritual through wider shots of extended duration, Cissé’s camera placement, mise-en-scéne, and editing strategy suggest a vital relationship between Komo members and their immediate physical environment, as well as hierarchized ranking within the group itself. The Master emerges from the surrounding brush dressed in colors that harmonize with the earth tones of his natural surroundings. It is not until the following shot that he is shown meeting the already assembled members of the Komo. The leftward movement of the Master motivates the tracking shot that unifies the space of the seated members. The Master then orders the serving of the millet beer. At the onset of the ritual imbibing, both the Master and Soma are shown being served. Two unnamed members are then shown drinking, but not being served, after which the remaining participants are framed in a LS. From this shot order an implicit hierarchy may be inferred from the duration and framing specific to each member or group of participants. An examination of the shot scale in relation to the pressing “business” of the Komo would seem to indicate that Soma’s complaint and appeal to fellow members, as well as statements concerning power and retribution, are framed in CU’s, MCU’s, and MS’s which tend to isolate the

members of the Komo and fragment the unified space. Songs of praise and benediction are framed in wider shots which tend to unify the space. While it is not my intention to posit an intrinsic value that distinguishes a two-shot (which unifies a space) from a shot/reverse shot (which fragments a space), Teshome Gabriel has suggested that the influence of oral tradition in an environment dominated by unaltered natural forms has encouraged an emphasis of space over time in African cinema.* He also speculates that, just as the preponderance of wide angle shots and long takes imparts both a sense of human community and a harmonious relationship between man and nature, the panning shot, inasmuch as it maintains the integrity of space, conveys a coexisting, as opposed to a linear/chronological, concept of time.*! In light of Gabriel’s observations, Cissé’s shift from wider shots depicting a collective gesture of praise, to tighter, spatially fragmenting and isolating shots that seem to emphasize a selfwilled commitment to retribution, undermines the sense of spatial unity suggested by the initial leftward tracking shot of the Master. The spatial fragmentation may be read as suggesting a disintegrating sense of community which foreshadows Soma’s eventual desertion by his gods. The hierarchizing of authority suggested by framing specific members in relation to the ritual consumption of millet beer may also be interpreted as an allusion to what Dominique Zahan has described as a valorization of the notions of subjugation and domination in Bambara secret societies. Such an ethos allows for a concept of heroism borne of self-mastery in which the initiate has little reason to envy God, for, in Zahan’s words, “can one speak of a courage and fearlessness greater than the courage to conquer oneself??? In both cases what appears to be a transparent, “mindful” rendering of a revered cultural ritual is undercut by framing and editing strategies which suggest a deeper cultural fragmentation born of insularity, and which

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mark Soma’s moral arrogance as inseparable from the rigidity and collective presumption of the Komo society. | In his essay “Popular Culture and Oral Traditions in African Film” Manthia Diawara notes that popular practices such as song and dance, the performance of the griot, and the representation of African social systems are often used to create the effect of the real and serve as a vehicle for social criticism. The “real” here is open to multiple interpretations and serves to subvert accepted notions of the exotic. In Ousmane Sembéne’s Xala, for example, the representation of song and dance is used to criticize the politicians’ superficial use of tradition and comment ironically on the portrayal of Africans in European and American cinema. In Yeelen Cissé’s portrayal of the Komo ritual points up the heterogeneity and flexibility of a Third World film style that encompasses narrative and oral forms, folk music, silences, elisions, as well as the

movement from fictional representation to reality, and reality to fiction.* It is precisely this hybridity which undercuts the move to merely transcribe and preserve elements of oral culture embodied in the Komo ritual.* Such an approach discourages easy formcontent distinctions. Cissé’s treatment the Komo ritual is a case in point. Cissé claims technological limitations dictated a physical distance from, and by implication, relative ideological neutrality in relation to, the ritual. Yet the very heterogeneity of Cissé’s approach permitted both the incorporation of the relatively untampered ritual within a fictional context and an implicit critique of that ritual through what Gabriel has aptly described as the “stain” of conventional film style.* To trace the enunciative marks in Yeelen so as to better respond to the film’s textual specificity and cultural context, let us look at Cissé’s treatment of metaphor and metonymy, which constitute the marks of discours and call to mind certain affinities with the deformative implications of the griot’s power to elaborate and embellish. Tracking the Figure in Yeelen

Yeelen begins with an articulation of the Bambara symbolic system. The opening segment consists of a succession of four Bambara ideographs which roughly translate: “Brightness: Heat makes fire, and the two worlds (earth and sky) exist through the light.” The intertitles, then, by way of exposition, distinguish between the Kore initiation

society and the Komo as a privileged corpus of knowledge, and map out their symbolic and heraldic configurations. The Kore society is symbolized by the holy vulture; its emblem is the wooden horse; its scepter, the Kore wing. The Kolanni Kolinno, the “magic pylon,” is then described in utilitarian rather than symbolic terms: it is used to find “what has been lost” and to punish thieves, liars, and traitors.

The fixed status of the symbol, thus presented, exists in tension with the idea of process, for the symbol for brightness is not merely shown, it is configured, line by line. Yeelen, even as it offers a brief lexicon of symbols, also provides a description of the

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relationship between those symbols, as well as the cosmic process that produces the film’s central trope. “Brightness” is no mere sign, but is borne of a dialectical relationship between earth and sky. The Kore “wing” is not a symbol so much as a metonymical extension which further requires an “eye” to be completed. This brief exposition is followed by a complex metonymical strategy that both foreshadows and informs the confrontation between Soma and Nianakoro. A LS of what appears to be a rising sun is followed by a shock cut to a sacrificial bird engulfed by flames, which is in turn followed by another shot of the sun indicating a temporal ellipsis and marking the passage of time. A shot follows depicting a young boy leading a goat to a sacred shrine/statue. After the boy tethers the goat to the statue, the film cuts to a diagonal panning shot that first traverses the Kore “eye” and “wing” leaning against the arms of the statue and eventually frames the jewel embedded in the statue’ s forehead and the dew that drips from the statue’s face. The next shot frames blood dripping on the nodal jewel of the pylon. The source of the blood is then revealed to be that of the bleeding sacrificial bird through a vertical tilt downward to the jewel. The subsequent LS first depicts Soma circling the pestle, invoking the power of the god Mari, then the immolation of the bird. The segment concludes with a shot of Soma carefully placing a cover over the pestle in preparation for his pursuit of Nianankoro. The symbolic import of kore wing, holy shrine, magic pestle, and the imagery summoned in Soma’s prayers are bound up in a complex figural chain extending from the configuring of the ideograph for “Brightness” to the final enshrouding of the pylon. Although a metaphorical connection seems to be emphasized in the formal similarity between the dripping traces on the Bambara shrine, the trickle of blood on the pestle, the streams of milk that shape Nianaleora’s supplicant form, and the rivulets of sacred water when Nianakoro and Attu bathe, the tenor of the implied comparisons is not made clear until much later in the confrontation between Soma and Nianankoro. When father and son eventually face each other the film cuts again to the extradiegetic shot of the Bambara statue/shrine. Although the framing once again reveals the dripping traces of what might be dew or sacrificial libations, the next shot, recalling the earlier cut to the blood on the pestle, is followed by aclose up of Nianankoro that reveals the trace of tears. Instead of a leap from a diegetic to a figural register, the formal similarity between blood and dripping traces is made visible even as the fuller meaning remains latent, i.e., until the confrontation between father and son. Such metaphorical associations are bound up with even more complex metonymical operations, spatial disjunctures, and temporal reversals. In the film’s first segment the shot of the partially risen/setting sun (the film’s temporal reversals render this aspect ambiguous) can be read in the syntagmatic chain as the physical embodiment of the sign of brightness. In the next shot we see what might be described as the “elemental” contiguity of sun and fire in the immolation of the chicken. It is only later, after we hear

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Soma’s prayers, that we realize that the immolation of the chicken reveals fire as a manifestation of divine power. In Yeelen psychological displacements are created through the counterposing of temporal and spatial reversals which comprise more than mere flashbacks or temporal ellipses. They juxtapose profane duration with what Mircea Eliade refers to as sacred time, for according to Eliade’s definition, sacred time by its very nature is reversible in the sense that it is mythical time made present. Sacred time, through religious festivals, liturgical practice, is endlessly recoverable and repeatable.*” This would account for the mythical temporality invoked in the shots of the Bambara shrine and the extradiegetic representations of the water buffalo, elephant, and lion inserted during the confrontation between Nianankoro and Soma. The invocation of mythical time is bound up with a complex of visual motifs that draw on the principle of metaphoric similarity. What distinguishes the deployment of these metaphoric vehicles in Yeelen is a delayed metaphoric “payoff” in the context of a metaphoric tenor extended throughout the film. I am thinking specifically of the, for lack of a more precise term, “collision/bumping” motif shown first in close up of the floating wooden bowls which collide briefly when Nianankoro’s mother offers her prayers of supplication. Later in the film we witness two warriors, one of whom is a Peul, square off and touch foreheads in a type of cranial wrestling contest. The Peul is defeated and duly falls on his weapon. The warriors function in a literal/narrative context, but acquire a tropic resonance only when considered in light (pun intended) of the confrontation between Soma and Nianankoro. Only retroactively do the bowls call to mind the opposition of milk to millet beer as contrasting ceremonial libations associated with opposing notions of divine intervention. Only retroactively, in light of the final confrontation between father and son, do the colliding bowls summon up the images of Soma and Nianakoro as receptacles of nyama, thus reframing the intervening ritual contest between the warriors, not so muchas a test of physical strength, but as the figural extensions of the opposing wills of father and son. When Nianankoro finally confronts his father, it is not a “showdown” in the Western sense, but a necessary link in the nexus of cosmic transformation that informs the film’s entire figural economy. In this context the bowls, warriors, and confrontations of cosmic import are not so much metaphoric

vehicles in a master trope. Rather they might be conceived as resembling the associative chains in an organizing process similar to that of dream condensation, in which the central idea and point of intersection is Yeelen or “brightness.” It seems appropriate, then, that the cosmic process of change be not symbolized, but figured through operations of metaphor and metonymy that most forcefully mark Yeelen as discours and aligns Cissé with the role of the griot. I would go so far as to say that in Yeelen the presence of the griot functions as a structuring absence through these very marks of enunciation. Yet, paradoxically, it is Cissé’s faithfulness to the role of

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historian, in his meticulous fidelity to the language of worship and the performance of ritual that underwrites his tropes. In Yeelen the contradictory copresence of griot and historian-transcriber manifests itself as a continuum of enunciative markings that appear and recede in the continual jostling of histoire and discours. The implicit commentary, via editing and framing, which undercuts the seemingly transparent, “content”-oriented approach to the Komo ritual and the underscoring of the double meaning of histoire as both “history” and “story” confirms Cissé’s role as historian-transcriber and alludes to the historian’s implicit betrayal of orality. His use of the cinematic trope, which can be interpreted as the most salient mark of “style,” provides ameans to transcend astatic culturally specific symbolism. Yet in the character of Soma we witness not only the embodiment of the inflexible self-willed morality of the Komo, but a cautionary correlative to the deformative powers of the trope. Itseems fitting that a film which uses the trope to reflect the tension between critiquing and bearing witness to traditional culture, should do so within a narrative framework so preoccupied with the use and misuse. of nyama. By both enacting and questioning the paradoxical function of griot and historian-transcriber, Yeelen confirms the Bambaran proverb, “the sorcery has been done, we have a means

of preserving ourselves.”

Notes

1: Robert McNaughton, Secret Sculptures of the Komo (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1979), p. vi. 2: Manthia Diawara, “Souleymane Cissé’s Light on Africa,” Black Film Review 4(4), (1988), p. 15. 3: Manthia Diawara, African Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 159. 4: David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film History: an Introduction (New York: MacGraw-Hill, Inc., 1994), p. 793. 5: Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes, Arab and African Filmmaking (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1991), p. 183. 6: Diawara, African Cinema, p. 161. 7: Victor Bachy, p. 10.

8: Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 33. 9: Yvette Biro, Profane Mythology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 35. 10: Ibid., p. 30. 11: Dudley Andrew, “The Primacy of the Figure in Cinematic Signification,” Cinema and Language, eds., Steven Heath and Patricia Mellencamp (Los Angeles: University Publications of America, 1983), p. 4. 12: Ibid., p. 12. 13: Diawara, “Souleymane Cissé’s Light on Africa,” p. 15.

14: Ibid. 15: Ibid.

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16: Ibid. 17: Evan M. Zeusse, Ritual Cosmos (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979), D'1S5:

18: 19: 20: 21:

Diawara, “Souleymane Cissé’s Light on Africa,” p. 15. N. Frank Ukadike, Black African Cinema (California University Press, 1994), p. 259. McNaughton, p. 24. Christopher Miller, “Orality Through Literacy: Mande Verbal Art After the Letter,” The Southern

Review 23(1) (Fall 1987), p. 100.

22: 23: 24: 25:

Diawara, “Souleymane Cissé’s Light on Africa,” p. 15. Ibid., p. 14. Diawara, African Cinema, p. 161. Ukadike, p. 261.

26: Emile Benveniste, “Correlations of Tense in the French Verb,” Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables: Miami University Press, 1971), p. 206.

27: John Caughie, “Introduction: ‘Fiction of the Author/Author of the Fiction,’” Theories of Authorship: a Reader, ed., John Caughie (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 202. 28: Diawara, “Souleymane Cissé’s Light on Africa,” p. 13. 29: Benveniste, p. 208. 30: Teshome Gabriel, “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films,” Questions of Third Cinema, eds., Jim Pines and Paul Willeman (London: BFI Publishing, 1989), p. 44.

31: Ibid., p. 45. 32: Dominique Zahan, The Religion, Spirituality, and Thought of Traditional Africa (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970), p. 120. 33: Ibid. 34: Gabriel, p. 39. 35: Ibid., p. 36. 36: Ibid. 37: Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt, Brace,

Jovanovich, 1957), pp. 68,

70.

Cet article traite de plusieurs problèmes théoriques soulevés par le film Yeelende Souleymane Cissé, en particulier ceux de l'interprétation et du rôle du spectateur. Il propose de structurer le film à travers une opposition histoire/discours. D'une part Cissé peut être considéré comme historien/griot : le film serait donc organisé autour d’un courant historique, où la culture Bambara est représentée dans ses conditions matérielles spécifiques. D'autre part on peut voir Cissé comme metteur-en-scéne de tropes cinématiques, les figures cinématiques du film offrant de ce pointde vue une série de traces énonciatrices. Plutôt que de préserver l'unité spatio-temporelle du rite Komo, Cissé suggère à travers sa technique cinématographique (placement de la caméra, mise-en-scène, montage), une fragmentation de cette unité, annonçant ainsi la perte de soutien divin. Les stratégies figurales, les disjonctions spatiales et les renversements temporels du film constituent un style particulier capable de transcender le symbolisme culturellement spécifique de Yeelen.

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Sheila Petty

Miseria: Towards an African Feminist

Framework of Analysis

One of the most contentious debates taking place within contemporary feminist dialogue revolves around the use of the notion of a common experience of gender — inflected oppression for defining women’s identities, and whether or not this notion should be revised, rejected, or upheld. What is at stake here for feminists is the fact that this notion, predicated on sexual difference, works to exclude other differences (race/

class/ethnic/historic/geographic) among women. Within the debate, many white feminists have attempted to come to terms with the notion’s ethnocentrism and heterosexism. For example, Judith Butler has written that the term woman: ...1S a site in which various kinds of power relations converge, intersect, antagonize one another, and sometimes coexist. That class and color and ethnicity and geopolitical location within international capitalist structures come to bear problematically at this site makes it impossible to affirm that one is first awoman and then South Asian, or first Indian and then lesbian. Which term functions as the substantive, and which as the subordinated, modifying adjective?!

Butler is arguing that to expect women to become sites of competition for their experiences of oppression is to subject women to yet another form of oppression. The writings of black and third world feminists/womanists increasingly point to the need to rethink women’s histories of oppression by giving consideration to specific sites or locations. Chandra Talpade Mohanty argues that: ..black, white, and other third world women have very different histories with respect to the particular inheritance of post-fifteenth-century Euro-American hegemony: the inheritance of slavery, enforced migration, plantation and indentured labor, colonialism, imperial conquest, and genocide. Thus, third world feminists have argued for the rewriting of history based on the specific locations and histories of struggle of people of color and postcolonial peoples, and on the day-today strategies of survival utilized by such peoples.”

Clearly, any meaningful study of third world women must necessarily consider the social, cultural, and historical realities of these very women’s lives. And the failure of Sheila Petty, (1995), “Miseria: Towards an African Feminist

Framework of Analysis,” iris, 18, pp. 137-145.

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much western feminist theory to deal with issues that directly affect third world women demonstrates the need for these women to define and develop their own critical and theoretical methodologies for self analysis. Indeed, when a certain system of language is used to analyze another cultural product, the meaning and agenda inherent in the system will be projected on to the product. As Trinh T. Minh-ha has written, “Stolen language will always remain that other’s language.” The language of western feminist film theory, especially that variant inspired by psychoanalysis, is problematic when applied to non-Eurocentric film and television texts. To begin with, it is dependent upon binary logic (male/active, female/passive) in its description and analysis of text and spectator. Furthermore, it isolates sexual difference as the sole factor in the intersection of textual and spectatorial processes. Finally, by targeting certain cinematic codes and mechanisms through which classical Hollywood cinema has reinforced sexual difference, psychoanalytic feminist film theory attempts to determine the effects these codes will have on the spectatorial experiences of gendered individuals. Although women’s place in this psychoanalytic framework has been one of absence, it is often assumed that the model, with its

privileging of sexual difference in order to explain women’s exclusion from the political, economic, and cultural life of western society, will apply equally across all time periods, cinematic practices and cultural groups. To be fair, recent feminist analysis and production are beginning to challenge the model’s Eurocentrism. For example, Ellen Seiter has claimed that “psychoanalytic theory has blinded feminist film studies to the significance of race and class difference.’* And Jacqueline Bobo has called for the expansion of scholarship on the female spectator beyond the white, middle-class woman.’ Clearly, these critics are suggesting that critical/theoretical models in feminist film studies be established which allow women to be considered as historically, socially, and culturally constituted subjects within cinema. Readings that privilege gender analysis could work ultimately to obscure the larger realities in non-Eurocentric texts. To a certain extent, this privileging represents an intervention in the meaning-making process because it presupposes that certain outside political concerns (such as those of the critic) are more important than those of the text. This idea of feminist intervention is certainly not new. Such recent work as Jackie Byars’ All That Hollywood Allows: Re-Reading Gender in 1950s Melodrama’ both reflects on and builds on the ways feminists intervene in the meaning-making process as they strive for change. One of the dangers that this sort of intervention poses when applied to non-Eurocentric texts is aco-optation or skewing of meaning. Feminist critics should be sensitive to the specificities of the cultural contexts in which media texts are created. If the only point of reference is the text itself, then the critic must be careful not

to obfuscate its meaning by projecting onto it her or his own cultural, societal, and political concerns. A case in point is the effect on the female-authored television text,

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Miseria, when certain Eurocentric feminist expectations are brought to the meaningmaking process. Is it possible, ultimately, to apply a non-Eurocentric methodology of analysis? The 1960s and 1970s witnessed the transfer of western technology and ideology to new nations in Africa. In some cases, the medium of television was introduced with the

intention, in part, of promoting cultural and national self-expression but, due to economic constraints, quickly digressed to transmitting programs such as Kojak, I Love Lucy, and eventually, Dallas and Dynasty. The authors of Broadcasting in the Third World: Promise and Performance,’ discuss this process from the moment that television is announced as coming to the nation to the realization that most of the promised hours must be purchased abroad and that the only programs available are mass-produced, long-running American series and serials. These are purchased, by the way, because they are cheap and because it is assumed that their formats, though conceived in the West, should be understood equally well in Africa. Indeed, because television is so new and because these are among the first programs African audiences have experienced, the formats themselves build up certain expectations. Meaning is produced, therefore, on the basis of the reality (or impression of reality) expressed in an image/text, and of the relationship between the image/text and others that audiences have seen. Dallas and Dynasty are two of the most popular television programs in Cameroon. Both programs involve the undisguised stories of wealth, power, and corruption within the family structure. Both have serialized soap-opera formats. It is these factors that Blandine Ngono Ambassa, a writer/director for CRTV, Cameroon’s national television station, capitalized on in 1990, only five years after the introduction of television in Cameroon. Following these examples, she decided that local initiative to create national programs should extend beyond the production of programs themselves to the area of program formats. Accordingly, she decided to create Miseria, a family melodrama in a five-part mini-series format — a format already familiar to television audiences in Cameroon. Ngono Ambassa responded to the colonization of African television screens. Her approach to processes of domination does not simply denounce the apparatus of power, but identifies an alternative model of resistance to such structures. Thus, rather than

rejecting the serial form as imperialist, Ngono Ambassa looked to see how she could contribute to the advancement of the model. Breaking hegemonic codes is not her grand project; Miseria would then constitute a counter product, a mini-series produced by western oppression though in opposition to it. Instead, Miseria charts a complete alternative to Eurocentric thought and its implied “Other” as its author strives to ensure that unique televisual content and form are generated to probe African realities. Miseria’s narrative focuses on the life of a very poor family, consisting of a single mother, her daughter, and son, all of whom live in Yaounde, Cameroon. The mother

works as a fruit vendor at the local market, the son hauls merchandise in a push-cart, and

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the daughter is a high-school student. In the face of misery, the mother encourages her daughter to prostitute herself. She contracts a serious venereal disease and is saved by a young engineer who has fallen hopelessly in love with her. The temptation exists at this point to read Assoko’s situation as an experience of gender oppression: In traditional feminist terms, she is a female victim of a patriarchal society. But to concentrate solely on her gender oppression is to ignore the specifics of her situation within the larger neocolonial and cultural contexts. Furthermore, this type of analysis not only assumes a universal patriarchal system, it assumes that all women are victims or objects of male control. Power, therefore, is defined in binary terms whereby women are victims/powerless and men are victimizers/powerful. Thus, gender difference is targeted to describe the origin of oppression of an assumed unified group. And statements such as “all African women are politically and economically dependent’® feed this belief without locating the specifics of women’s positions within systems of power and exploitation. For example, what importance should one place on Assoko’s brother’s oppression at the hands of another woman? Episode one begins with him struggling to push his loaded cart up a steep hill only to be fleeced at the end of the day by the obviously wealthy woman who has employed him. He later explains to his mother that he was so angry that he felt he could have strangled the dishonest woman. The placement of this corrupt act as part of the narrative “set-up” not only underscores its importance to Ngono Ambassa, it lays the ground for the brother’s eventual reversal of character. But unlike Assoko, he has already lost the privilege of education. Certainly, as both Assoko and her brother end up using their bodies for labor it becomes quite clear that economic privilege is not gender specific in the society that Miseria portrays. Assoko’s situation could also be read in recuperative terms whereby a strong, resisting, female voice would arise from the text in order to do battle with patriarchal dominance. In these terms, Miseria would not be about the consequences of prostitution

since society does not destroy Assoko for her “anti-social” behavior. Further, the fact that she finds happiness in marriage at the end of the mini-series could be read as an internal contradiction in the text, for even though Assoko decides to give up prostitution for marriage, she won’t give up education. In recuperative terms, therefore, Miseria is about the importance of education and the choices one woman makes in order to ensure that she can have it. Here, Assoko’s choice would represent one response to a situation,

not a reflection of its morality. What this type of reading refuses to acknowledge, however, is that while prostitution begins in desperation, it continues in calculation as Assoko and her family strive to maintain the material wealth to which they have become accustomed. If a desperate first choice is made whereby Assoko must prostitute herself, a calculated later choice is taken whereby both mother and daughter practice the profession. It is this consumerism and the resultant consequences that accompany it that are central to Ngono Ambassa’s concerns.

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A recuperative reading assumes that Assoko has no choice but to fight patriarchy because she is a victim of male control. She must fight within the male system and turn it to her advantage to gain her ends. Although the system doesn’t change, her position within it does and she becomes one of the powerful. How then is she a victim of male control? And how, in this case, could patriarchy mean male dominance? Clearly, recuperation describes how women can thrive in patriarchy rather than how they can dismantle existing power relations. Furthermore, their accession to power does not necessarily mean that they will be interested in overthrowing oppressive systems. C. T. Mohanty writes that, ..if the struggle for a just society is seen in terms of the move from powerless to powerful for women as a group, and this is the implication in feminist discourse which structures sexual difference in terms of the division between the sexes, then the new society would be structurally identical to the existing organization of power relations, constituting itself as a simple inversion

of what exists.°

Of what use, ultimately, is the application of a feminist discourse whichis predicated on oppressive binary structures, to an analysis of women’s positions in non-western societies? If the methodology of Euro-American feminist film theory is problematic for the analysis of representations of women in African film and television, what model should be used? In Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, Carol Boyce Davies outlines an African feminist theoretical framework for analyzing African literature. For Davies, a true African feminism is a hybrid in which African concerns are combined

with feminist concerns. She maintains that African feminism recognizes certain affinities with international feminism, but cannot overlook specific issues arising out of the concrete realities of women’s lives in African societies.'° This African point of view is overlooked by psychoanalytic feminist film theory when it places emphasis on gender alone. For example, although certain gender inequities may have existed in traditional societies, some societal structures may have given women equality and/or power. With the advent of colonialism, however, already existing inequities were reinforced and others introduced. This is not to say that African women must not participate with African men in acommon struggle against foreign imperialism. It simply means that just as the gender-specific aspects of their oppression should not be automatically subsumed by the generalized oppression of all Africans, nor should they be removed from their racial, class, and cultural inflections. For example, the sexual division of labor should

not be used to provide explanations of women’s oppression without considering how this division changes from one society or context to another. Finally, African feminism advocates choice for women, who, as subjects, possess critical perspectives on theirown situations. In the following analysis I want to demonstrate that it is more appropriate to

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apply an African feminist framework to Miseria than one based solely on psychoanalySiS. The first episode of the mini-series works to expose the family’s poverty and misery and to lay the foundation for later change. We learn that the brother has already had to leave school to work because the mother could no longer afford his tuition. We also learn that things are going poorly at the mother’s fruit stand. Toward the end of the episode a major plot point is introduced around which the rest of the mini-series will revolve. Having witnessed a wealthy man’s desire for Assoko, a neighbor suggests to Assoko’s mother than she “use” her daughter to escape from poverty. The arrival, at the end of the episode, of a letter stating that Assoko’s school fees are due creates the cliff-hanger. Thus, a problem and a possible desperate solution are introduced. Although Miseria follows a serialized form, it does not adopt all the conventions of

American television melodrama. Jane Feuer has argued that “on Dallas and Dynasty, as on daytime soaps, the majority of scenes consist of intense emotional confrontations between individuals closely related either by blood or by marriage.”!! Feuer describes at length how certain conventions of narrative structure and mise-en-scéne work to create psychoanalytically laden representations. These same conventions are subverted in Miseria to create social or issue-oriented representations. Each episode ends not with an interpersonal relationship to be resolved, but with a very concrete problem to be solved: episode 1 — the problem of poverty and continuing education; episode 2 — the material implications of prostitution; episode 3 — the problem of maintaining a certain standard of living; episode 4 —the medical implications of prostitution. Clearly, in terms of narrative structure, Ngono Ambassa has created a product that encourages spectator identification with issues rather than the characters themselves, and an analysis of Miseria’s visual presentation will further support this. Feminist and psychoanalytic readings that problematize questions of gender and spectatorship in melodramatic texts are dependent upon recognizable, repeated camera and editing conventions constructed within personal space in the texts. But what happens when, as in the case of Miseria, these conventions are not contained in the text’s

cinematic or televisual grammar? How appropriate then are these reader-response based systems of analysis? Feuer explains that, in Dallas and Dynasty “most scenes are filmed in medium close-up to give full reign to emotionality without obscuring the decor. The hyper-intensity of each confrontation is accentuated by a use of underscoring not found in any other television genre, and by conventions of exchanged glances, shot duration and the zoom lens.” According to Feuer, the conventional manner of closing a scene in these programs is a combination of shot-reverse shot cuts between actors’ locked

gazes so that the emotion is intensified prior to a scene change or commercial break." In Miseria, the scenes and episodes themselves do not end with shot-reverse shot structures of exchanged glances, freeze frames or zooms. Most scenes are filmed in medium to long shot, and there are no commercial breaks. Arguably, this type of

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presentation is influenced by cinematic codes found in African cinema. Traditionally, African filmmakers have placed a great importance on the social group, thus creating a collective heroism in their films. Long shots, therefore, are imbued with the function

of story-line advancement since they alone can cover the social space necessary to depict the group or community life. In Miseria, this similar use of social space is significant because it works in conjunction with the “witness” aesthetic predominant in the text. Indeed, the camera makes limited subjective or emotional value-judgements about the narrative and is often placed as if it were just recording the scene. For example, a series of shot-reverse shot cuts is used in a scene in the second episode to render aconfrontation between Assoko and her mother who tries to impress upon her daughter that she should be nice to the wealthy man who is interested in her. As Assoko protests, her mother admits that it is misery that has forced her to take this position. In conventional Hollywood melodrama, Assoko, about to be oppressed by her mother, would be shot

from a high angle. However, both women are framed in low angle medium shots from the point of view of the camera and, most importantly, not each other. A look is being constructed at the spectator, not from character point of view, but from that of a one-

camera set-up. Consider the role that Miseria’s shoestring budget could have played in the mise-enscéne. The sheer practical dynamics of constructing a Hollywood gaze requires a threecamera set-up lasting the entire length of the scene. Miseria’s single-camera set-up throughout the serial indicates that cost-saving measures probably outweighed artistic concerns. And, if the looks are constructed out of practical rather than emotional necessity, is the gaze necessarily built upon culturally defined notions of sexual

difference? The dependence upon consistent, recognized conventions of film grammar is central to the expectation in western feminist film theory that women are objects of a male gaze. But what happens when these conventions are not included in the grammar of the shots? For example, in a scene in episode two, the wealthy man decides to use his own daughter in order to get closer to Assoko. He promises her post-secondary education in France if she will study with Assoko at their home. The experience of looking at Hollywood film from a politicized viewpoint builds up the expectation that the cinematic grammar will visually foreground the man’s desire to oppress Assoko via his daughter. But this oppression is not integrated into the politics of the shots. The wealthy man occupies the weak position in the lower right-hand corner of the frame while his daughter is shot from alow angle and occupies the dominant portion of the frame. Thus, the shot-reverse shot structure does not work to suture the viewer into the emotions of the characters. Rather, it provides the viewer, as witness, both sides of the debate.

Toread spectacle as paramount in Miseria would be to confuse visual spectacle with visual narrative imagery. The fact that what is said is more important than the cinematic content, derives from an oral tradition which is still very much a part of a collective

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custom in African societies. In African oral storytelling, the audience is called upon to ponder the results of such behavior as greed, waste, and selfishness, rather than the psychology of the characters who exhibit these traits. Similarly, in Miseria, narrative content is played against the televisual grammar, not to create psychological excess, but to privilege thematic content. The audience is called upon, therefore, to weigh the consequences of Assoko’s choices, not to participate in the evolution of her character’s psychology. Clearly, the text is issue-oriented, not psychology-oriented, as Ngono Ambassa attempts to portray the broader African reality of neocolonialism rather than psychoanalytic feminism’ s narrower project of gender oppression. The consequences of Assoko’s choices not only serve to push the narrative forward, they revolve around certain issues the author views as paramount in present day Africa: economic poverty, the AIDS crisis, determination to succeed in the face of corruption. Assoko, for example, chooses to become a prostitute to eliminate her situation of poverty. Her contraction of a sexuallytransmitted disease becomes a springboard for dissemination of information regarding AIDS. In the end, she decides to give up prostitution, despite its economic advantages, for marriage and a new career as a hairdresser. The issues are tough but the message is upbeat. Its address not to a gendered (woman’s) audience, but to a wider African audience, is underscored by the fact that Assoko’s whole family is affected by consumerism in the narrative. Ngono Ambassa’s intention is to target all Africans and include them in the project to reconstruct Africa. If the viewer begins with the assumption that Assoko is a female victim of a patriarchal society, then her specific gender oppression will be foregrounded in the reading. However, Sub-Saharan cinematic and televisual storytelling techniques work to place a greater importance on the social group, and thus a reality larger than individual experience. To focus, therefore, on Assoko’s individual gender oppression at the expense of all other aspects of her identity, would mean not only glossing over the larger issue of neocolonial oppression, it would mean remaining heedless when Miseria asks, “at what cost, all this, to African societies?” This, however, is precisely what an

African feminist framework is concerned with: not the cost of women’s oppression as a global phenomenon, but the cost of African women’s oppression within specific historical, social, and cultural contexts.

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Notes

1: Judith Butler, “Disorderly Woman,” Transition 53 (1991), p. 90. 2: Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, eds., Chandra T. Mohanty, Ann

Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 10. 3: Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 20. 4: Ellen Seiter, “Individual Response,” Camera Obscura 20-21 (May-September 1989), p. 283. 5: Jacqueline Bobo, “Individual Response,” Camera Obscura 20-21 (May-September 1989): p. 100-103. 6: Jackie Byars, All That Hollywood Allows: Re-Reading Gender in 1950s Melodrama (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

7: Elihu Katz and George Wedell, eds., Broadcasting in the Third World: Promise and Performance (London: Macmillan, 1977).

8: Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Women of Africa: Roots of Oppression (London: Zed Press, 1983), p. 13. 9: Chandra Talpade Mohanty, p. 71. 10: Carol Boyce Davies, “Introduction: Feminist Consciousness and African Literary Criticism,” in Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, eds., Carol Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1986), p. 1-23. 11: Jane Feuer, “Melodrama, Serial Form and Television Today,” in The Media Reader, eds., Manuel Alvarado and John O. Thompson (London: British Film Institute, 1990), p. 259.

12: Ibid. 13: Ibid.

L'analyse se centre sur les problèmes que pose l’application universelle d'une méthodologie basée sur le féminisme de l’ouest, aux textes quine sont pas produits occidental. Par exemple, Miseria, un téléroman camerounais en cing épisodes, a été crée par Blandine Ngono Ambassa, et diffusé par |’Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Camerounaise (CRTV) en 1990. En examinant la structure narrative et les techniques spécifiques à la politique de l’image visuelle de Miseria, l’auteur démontre qu'une lecture qui privilégie le problème de l'oppression sexuelle dissimule la réalité globale de l'oppression néocoloniale en Afrique que Ngono Ambassa tente de dépeindre.

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Kenneth W. Harrow

Camp de T hiaroye: Who’s That Hiding in those Tanks, and How Come We Can’t See Their Faces?

In late 1989, when I was teaching at the University Cheikh Anta Diop, Camp de Thiaroye opened in Dakar. I was living in PointE,and was in the habit of taking the bus in front of the stationary store where a group of older men would frequently be sitting and chatting. Eventually, Ifound myself letting the bus go so that I could join them in conversation. When I spoke of my enthusiasm for the new Ousmane Sembéne film, they indicated that they were familiar not only with the film, but with the events that had occurred at Thiaroye. Then, perhaps to shock me, one of the men asked ifI knew who was in the tanks that leveled the camp. I replied thatIdid not, but that it had to have been the French. He told me that it was Senegalese tirailleurs ....

Introduction

At the end of Camp de Thiaroye a squadron of tanks levels the camp and slaughters the protesters. We don’t see the faces of those inside the tanks, and infer that they are either French, or tools of the French general who went back on his word. The fact that

the soldiers in the tanks were themselves Senegalese tirailleurs is not an insignificant detail, nor is Sembéne’s decision not to identify them. To have shown them as Africans

would have muddied the water of the film in which the opposition is set up between an oppressive French officer corps, and a nascent unified African body of ordinary soldiers. Further, the film sets up a dialectical opposition between oppressed blacks and oppressive whites, that would have been vitiated by showing the identities of the soldiers in the tanks. This leads to the larger questions concerning Sembéne’s representation of political issues, for here Sembéne represents Africans as victims, as easily manipulated or as pawns of colonialists, rather than as agents of their own oppression. Looking further, to what extent does Sembéne’s dialectic shape all his films, producing oppressive figures such as the imam in Ceddo, various bourgeois figures, like Dejean in Les Bouts de bois de dieu, Mbarka, the Moorish shopowner in Mandabi, the white advisors and the black Kenneth W. Harrow, (1995), “Camp de Thiaroye: Who’s That Hiding in those Tanks, and How Come We Can’t See Their Faces?” iris, 18, pp. 147-152.

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bourgeois members of the Chamber of Commerce in Xala, and even the westernized

women like Oumi N’Doye, El Hadji’s second wife in Xala. May we judge Sembéne by the skeptical standards of the latest developments in Western critical theory, even though he is acommitted African writer, a writer moreover whose works are a product of the literature of commitment of the 1950s, and whose films

reflect the early doctrines of socialist realism that guided his Russian teachers and that dated back to the 1920s? Sembéne’s works have always foregrounded the issues of social change, of class oppression, and increasingly of neocolonialism. He has called religious institutions and even beliefs into question; he has portrayed women and children as victims of an oppressive patriarchal order, and has seen a complicity between the ruling classes of Europe and those of Africa, both “modern” and “traditional.” At the same time Sembéne portrays joint thievery, joint hostility to African culture and languages, in short, joint villainy, he does so in view of figures of heroism linked to movements of opposition and revolt. And he has done this from Bakayoko and the brave women in Les Bouts de bois de dieu to the title character of Guelwaar. Given this impeccable record of straightforward, not to say simple resistance to the outrageous social situation in Senegal, who are we to question Sembéne’s methods and intentions? And yet, knowingly or not, Sembéne, despite his opposition to the West, has never opposed its either/or dialectical epistemology. Typically, he has accepted the notion that for every term an opposite is to be found — and that the métis is compelled to choose. This is the burden of Sembéne’s social realism. It is a cinematic burden that places the implied cinematic narrator in a position of knowledge and puts the cinema in a position of carrier of that knowledge, one which the spectator accepts because of its apparent transparency conveyed through the well-known techniques associated with the genre. In Camp de Thiaroye, when Sergeant Diatta’s relatives give Captain Raymond acold greeting at the outset, we are led to expect an explanation for their behavior. When Sergeant Diatta is told of the massacre of his family and fellow villagers, we are led to expect him to be faced with a subsequent conflict based on that information. When we are shown his attachment to Western culture and his accomplishments as measured in French terms — accomplishments in his army career, in his studies, in his mastery of French texts, in his mastery of European languages, in his “culture” as understood by the colonizers — we are led to expect him to be faced with a choice of some difficulty. As we learn of his family attachments, of his marriage to and love for a French woman, and of their child,

we are led to expect him to face a choice over identities, a choice between Africa and Europe. A black and white choice. The dilemma is created for us by the film’s narration. Sembéne’s pan-Africanist stance in Camp de Thiaroye may mark a new stage in his work. In Camp the true cultural markers are found in Black American jazzmen like Charlie Parker; the true identity is shared by the community of the diaspora with its native sons. In every detail, from the clothing to the food, we are presented with choices — good food and bad, whiteman’s uniforms and African dress, classical music and

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African drumming, African infantrymen and French officers. The métisse prostitute in the brothel, no less than her white madame, must be placed in the appropriate camp: at the brothel Sergeant Diatta learns he is a “bougnoul,” and at the camp that he is an African. Sembène thematizes this series of oppositions repeatedly. In one of the more dramatic scenes Pays is placed face to face with the French general whom he is guarding. They perform a vaudevillian hat routine, comically reenacting their own dialectical struggle, until Sergeant Diatta settles the dispute by indicating to Pays that the general should be allowed to wear his own hat. The scene ends as Sergeant Diatta strides down the aisle separating them — physically indicating his determination to make his way between the two, and not to remain trapped in a position of ambivalence. There are no chauve-souris, no halfway houses, in a war between truth and lies. And

especially when Falsity puts on the mask of Truth, or Truth the mask of lies, especially when the choice is between being oneself or being another, does the reality of essential being impose itself. Thus itis all the more important that we know whose face lies behind the mask — whose finger pulls the trigger, and whose skin is seen to be that of the oppressors and whose the victims. Where every moment of unfolding meaning in Camp de Thiaroye leads us to the moment of choice, the moment of truth, in cinema truth is

ultimately presented to the eye. Seeing is being. And the camera’s eye stops at the exterior of the tanks, at their hard metallic skin. We are never led to penetrate within them. Instead, the guns level the camp, ending Sergeant Diatta’s life, along with that of many others, before he is given the chance to resolve the conflicting allegiances between wife and child, and home village and family. The truth about the French general’s lies eventually comes out, as does the falsity of the notion that Pays is foutu. In short, events prove the French to be perfidious, the Africans brave as well as martyred, Pays intuitively right, and Sergeant Diatta faithful to his African heritage, even when trapped between two incompatible worlds. The evil doctrines of Nazism, moderated somewhat with the Vichy French, and still at home in the milder garden varieties of the Gaullist army command, prepare us for the narrative attack on contemporary neocolonialism, while the message of pan-Africanism is proffered as a solution. Closure is thus achieved. According to Colin MacCabe, in his “Realism and the Cinema,” a classic realist text

may be defined as “one in which there is a hierarchy amongst the discourses which compose the text and this hierarchy is defined in terms of an empirical notion of truth.” He goes on to characterize the narrator’ s vehicle for stating the truth as the metalanguage, that is, the narrative portion of the text that explains the relation of the characters’ actions

and words to reality. The presence and reliability of the metalanguage itself is never called into question, is never intended to be noticeable, never in the foreground. Even when it is couched in the form of “dear reader,” that is, speaks to us with a well defined

voice, the hidden operator that addresses us from behind the mask of that narrator remains an invisible, and yet by implication a reliable, source of truth. With the classic

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realist text, or its filmic equivalent, the mimetic realism of social or historical cinema,

that metalanguage conveys implied meanings by editing, the juxtaposition of different shots, even apparently unconnected shots — what Eisenstein referred to as the montage. Where Achebe sought to achieve his pedagogical goals through a transparent prose, Sembéne has sought the same through the devices of a realistic cinema that rely upon the techniques of continuity editing and occasionally montage. The problematic status of transparent prose, what Barthes referred to as writing degree zero, has its equivalent in that strategy of cinematic narration that results in the audience coming to an understanding of who the various characters are and what meaning is to be attached to their actions.? That strategy presents us with words and actions — framed within a naturalized mise-en-scéne — whose visibility demands that we interpret it, and that nonetheless hides from us the very fact of being staged, hides the fact that words, acts, and scene are all constructs. As MacCabe puts it, “Whereas other discourses within the

text are considered as material which are open to reinterpretation, the narrative discourse simply allows reality to appear and denies its own status as articulation.”’ This leaves us with a reassured sense of our understanding of the characters and events: we can state with certainty the truth about a given character or what occurred, and we can measure the truth in terms of the reliability of the discourse that conveys it to us. In the classic realist system, as Dudley Andrew has pointed out, “the audience is merely a relay in a process that finds the text essentially reading itself. Our collusion is demanded as we put together the logic of the narrative, identify with the proper characters, invest the text with conventional values, and appreciate the clever twists and turns it makes en route to a satisfying conclusion in which all questions are carefully put to rest.”* And the popular leftist film that uses this approach is no less complicit in its reinforcement of the dominant ideology than texts of any other genre. Ideology meets us in its approach to representation, in which truths are drawn as obvious, self-evident. It avoids the complications of relations that do not admit of simple reductive statements: “Ideology ... is a set of omissions, gaps rather than lies, smoothing over contradictions, appearing to provide answers to questions which in reality it evades.”® Surely Sembéne did not aim to present “partial truths” in leaving the camera outside the tanks; still, this omission of information helped him elaborate a ready made truth that relies upon binarism, an existing western mode of the production of knowledge, a mode western critics today have a right to question. The elision of complexity and mixed cases makes Camp de Thiaroye too easy to digest. Take the tenet of Negritude that joins Sergeant Diatta to the African-American soldier. Sembéne lets us assume that their single point of identity, their race, sufficed to join them in an uncomplicated fashion. Yet for this to be so Sergeant Diatta has to have completely understood his American guest, including his culture and concerns. Sembéne presents such understanding as unproblematic. Or take another complex situation simplified by the film: the hard edge of contestation with the French military authorities, with French social

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snobbery or racism, is eliminated when it comes to inter-ethnic or inter-religious relations among the African soldiers. The miscalculations and gaps that slip between speakers of different languages, the shifting space occupied by people of different cultures, and the tension involved in reaching across historical space, back from one set of assumptions about the real to those of another period, are glossed over. Pidgin French provides the path of harmony for the soldiers, so that when the leaders of the revolt discuss its adequacy as a means to convey their position to the white officers, the only issue that is considered is that of its status as an inferior instrument of communication, and not whether its foundations might be grounded in some particular culture or identity. The refusal to adopt Wolof or Bambara or any other African tongue as the language of official presentation is clearly based in the notion that French is free from the limitations of ethnic particularism. French, albeit a pidgin French, emerges as what Sembéne had for so long resisted, an ideal, universal means of communication — the goal of la francophonie. Ironically, the resistance to the notion that western cultural values or practices are universal is here forgotten in the haste to construct a new universal, panAfricanist identity. The language of pan-Africanism is the extension of this politics of pan-identity, and one can see it in the mini OAU-style meeting with the universal “African speech” of the palaver that results in the decision to hold the general hostage, and in the dance that follows his announcement that he has agreed to the soldiers’ demands. Despite the differences in speech and styles of dance, a newly formed notion of African sameness prevails, veering dangerously closely to the old politics of Negritude.

Conclusion

It is important to challenge Sembéne’s assumptions and assurances in Camp de Thiaroye because he does not leave the viewer or reader in a state of indeterminacy; he relies upon a series of binary opposites to construct his representations; he does not leave the text open, but closes it with clearly given meanings. One must question any notion that history can be so summed up. One must also question how the dominant Western forces that have exerted control over Africans across the centuries can be challenged using the narrative practices with which history has always been constructed in Western texts. As for the tanks, we can fill them in with the same soldiers who were forced to descend from the towers and, rewriting the historical script, resurrect the bullet-ridden corpse of Sergeant Diatta in the form of our griot-cinéaste himself. We can reinscribe Camp de Thiaroye not into history but as historical allegory in recognition of the fact

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that a text cannot close itself without our complicity, and that the closed truths of the past may be reopened. The contemporary Western critic must refuse all forms of dominant discourse, even those employed so brilliantly and with such anti-colonial passion, by Ousmane Sembène.

Notes

1: Colin MacCabe, “Realism and the Cinema,” in Contemporary Film Theory, ed. Anthony Easthope (New York: Longman, 1993), p. 54. 2: Roland Barthes. Writing Degree Zero, trans., Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).

3: MacCabe, p. 55. 4: Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 121-122. 5: Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 58-59.

A la fin du film d’Ousmane Sembéne, Camp de Thiaroye, une escadrille de chars massacre des soldats africains de retour de la Deuxiéme Guerre et qui attendent la démobilisation. Suite à une dispute de salaire, ils avaient pris en 6tage un général français, action qui a provoqué le massacre en question. Mais le film cache le fait que les soldats dans les chars sont eux-mêmes africains. Reconnaître la présence d’Africains dans les chars aurait compromis le but apparent de Sembéne de représenter les Africains comme victimes, pions des colons, plutôt que comme les agents de leur propre oppression. Malgré les efforts de la part de Sembène de construire une idéologie anticolonialiste, Sembène a tout de même recours à une structure binaire. Dans ses films le narrateur filmique tient donc toujours le savoir, quele spectateur ne peut qu’accepter à cause de sa transparence apparente épaulée par les techniques bien connues du cinéma.

NOTES DE LECTURE ET DE COLLOQUE/ REVIEWS OF BOOKS AND CONFERENCES

Manthia Diawara, ed. Black American Cinema. New York, Routledge, 1993,

324 pp. Given the emerging popularity of films by black directors and the growing centrality of black film to the contemporary discourse on black culture, we can expect

to see many new books that will augment the pioneering works of scholars like Donald Bogle and Thomas Cripps by raising new questions and setting forth alternative paradigms for the study of black film. One recent effort in this direction is Manthia Diawara’s Black American Cinema, in which the editor has gathered a

collection of essays that seeks to introduce the reader to the state-of-the-art in black cinematic studies. The contributors to the volume represent a cross-section of important film scholars and African-American cultural critics better known for their work in other disciplines. The result is a book that is both engaging and sophisticated as it explores a variety of interesting issues around black film. Black American Cinema is thus destined to become a standard in university classrooms and on scholars’ bookshelves. Diawara organizes these essays into two sections defined by the themes “Black Aesthetics” and “Black Spectatorship.” Although issues pertaining to aesthetics and spectatorship have been central to

African-American artistic production and criticism from the beginning, today these categories are re-emerging as important critical tools as black cultural studies scholars from various disciplines complicate debates over representation and ideology. Although theses terms could use further definition within the text of Black American Cinema, they do provide a meaningful framework within which the authors provide their analyses. The section on “Black Aesthetics” comprises the first two thirds of the text. This part of the book is devoted to analyzing a black independent filmic tradition and its relationship to the “mainstream” film industry. Diawara states that “contributors to the first part derive a black film aesthetic by focusing on the black artist, his or her representation of the black imaginary, and his or her place within broader communities” (ix). He opens this section and sets out its conceptualization with an essay entitled “Black American Cinema: The New Realism.” Here Diawara attempts to define a set of alternative aesthetics that challenge Hollywood’s cinematic convention and are central to an historically evolving black independent cinema. At present, he argues, we can break black independent cinema into two primary paradigms: the time-based “new realism” of films like Boyz in the Hood and the reflective,

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space-based narratives of films like Daughters of the Dust. Although this categorization througha separation of space and time seems rather arbitrary — it’s difficult to imagine space and time being anything other than inextricably linked in narrative film — Diawara argues that black artists have been able to create a distinct set of aesthetics which are historically based upon the social position of the artist and his or her ability and desire to engage with and move outside of the dominant ideology inherent in Hollywood filmic convention. The remaining eleven contributions to this section engage similar issues in their discussions of several significant artists and their films. Essays by J. Ronald Green,

Jane Gaines, and Thomas Cripps recuperate Oscar Micheaux as an important African-American filmmaker, while they debate the significance of his use of melodramatic forms, the relationship of his class position to his cinematic style, and the

importance of his legacy to current independent films. Ntognela Masilela and Toni Cade Bambara discuss the birthand growth of the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers, with Bambara providing a much needed focus on films made by black women. And what would a collection on black film be without a vigorous debate about Spike Lee: here represented by Amiri Baraka’s fiery polemic criticizing Lee’s “petit bourgeois” sensibility and a verbose rejoinder by Houston Baker, Jr., who sug-

gests that Lee is an important social critic who is adept at “breaking the quiet silences of Black, middle-class respectability” (164). Rounding out this section are

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essays by Phyllis Klotman on Wallace Thurman’s short-lived Hollywood career; Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on Isaac Julien’s

Looking for Langston; Richard Dyer on the use and function of music in black films; and Clyde Taylor, who champions

the use of rhetorical analysis to evaluate black films, arguing that using the category of aesthetics as a critical tool is likely to reproduce hierarchy. Several of the contributors to this section question whether we can analyze the aesthetics of cultural production separately from audiences’ responses to them. Thus,

it is to the implications of film for a black viewing audience that the second section of the book, “Black Spectatorship,” is devoted. Diawara once again introduces this group of essays with one of his own. “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance” familiarizes the reader with the interchangeable concepts of the “resisting spectator” and the “Black spectator” as a challenge to “colorblind [sic] theories of spectatorship” that are rooted in a psychoanalytic perspective. He makes a strong case for understanding “blackness” as a category of lived experience that generates different readings for black subjects than those ascribed to the commonly-theorized, deracinated specta-

tor. Diawara supports his case by showing how the transparent ideology ofa film like Birth of a Nation is and always has been open to resistant readings by black audi-

ences. Similar issues are explored in essays by other authors in this section, which is the richer of two.

Michelle

Wallace,

Jacqueline Bobo and bell hooks take on

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the question of how black women engage in alternative readings of films from different genres. hooks provides a theoretical piece which is derived from her own experiences watching films and her conversations with other black women. She challenges theories of the gaze that do not consider race, concluding that black women spectators have developed a way of looking that is based upon the “pleasure of interrogation.” Wallace and Bobo also theorize Black women’s alternative ways of looking in essays that give readings of several films from the 1940s and Steven Spielberg’s version of The Color Purple respectively. Essays by Ed Guerrero and Jacquie Jones focus on the implications for a black viewing audience of “dominant ideology” in Hollywood films with black characters. Guerrero’s analysis of “bi-racial buddy films” suggests that such films exhibit Hollywood’s strategy of containment in which blacks are confined, isolated and

repressed in order to reaffirm a dominant conception of the status quo. Jones examines the social implications of the construction of black sexuality in film. An interesting addition to the section on

spectatorship is Dan Streible’s socio-historical study of a black movie-house in Austin, Texas, which provides insights

into the social functions of movie-going and viewing patterns of black audiences. Despite the insight of the essays in this section, one comes away with questions about the identity and existence of the spectators whose lived experience has given them the perspective to engage in alternative readings. Guerrero’s and

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Jones’s essays are more about the ideological implications for spectators as opposed to assessments of how black viewers might actually experience the films in question. Even hooks’s and Wallace’s contributions, which more directly explore the role of the spectator, rely on anecdotal evidence of black women’s responses to films. Even Bobo’s essay, which draws upon evidence she gathered from interviewing black women movie-goers and which she discusses in detail in essays published elsewhere, does not analyze particular reactions to Spielberg’s film in the essay included here. These are all fine essays, and clearly theorizing spectatorship through textual readings is standard practice, but the section on the whole might have been improved by the inclusion of essays more firmly committed to “reader response criticism,” in which questions of the heterogeneity of black audiences and varying levels of oppositional readings might have been explored. Turning back to the section on aesthetics, one also wonders about some of its

omissions. With a few exceptions — most notably Diawara’s opening piece, Bambara’s exegesis of Daughters of the Dust and Dyer’s analysis of the music in Carwash — the discussions of aesthetics are rooted in questions of genre, narrative, representations, and their relationship to the ideological struggle between black artists and white hegemony. Obviously, politics is a large part of the story, but what’s missing is a more technical discussion of lighting, sound, camera angles, and

other elements that would enable us to better understand black American

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cinematic aesthetics and_ their relationship to various black cultural practices. To this end, greater inclusions of essays by or interviews with black filmmakers might have been a welcome addition, which would have supplemented the contributions of creative artists like Bambara and Baraka, whose work lies in other genres. As it stands, Ntognela Masilela, who has been a member of the

Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers is the lone voice from the inside. Finally, this collection might have been improved with stronger introductory work by the editor. There is only a two page “Preface” at the beginning of the book to familiarize the reader with the issues at hand. Moreover, in the essays that begin each section, Diawara seems torn between

dutifully introducing the reader to the critical questions at hand and wanting to show what he can do with textual analysis. Black American Cinema might have worked better if Diawara included a brief introduction at the beginning of each section that defined terms, staked out the issues that

Ecrans d'Afrique. Published quarterly by the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

accompany the categories of aesthetics and spectatorship, briefly summarized the essays in the text, and talked specifically about how he envisioned the works in each section fitting together. This could have then been supplemented by additional essays in which he discussed specific films. But these are just a few small complaints about omissions in the face of what is truly an impressive collection of essays. One book cannot explore every issue that pertains to black film, and the apparent shortcomings are in part a function of how provocative its essays are. Many different issues are raised, and it only follows that

readers will have varying expectations about the particulars on which the writers should focus their attention. Moreover,

given the anticipated reception of this as an important book that will help define the terrain of black American cinematic studies, we can expect subsequent works to explore those issues not covered in great detail here. As it stands, Black American

Cinema is a necessary read for students and teachers of black film. — Eric Porter is published four times a year in French and in English. The journal’s mandate, according to Editor Gaston Kaboré (also the Secretary

Ecrans d’Afrique, the first pan-Afri-

General of FEPACI), “is to be a channel of

can review of cinema, television, and video

news circulation, and to serve as a stepping stone to African audiovisual expression, an interpenetration-setting of every

was founded in 1991 by the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACD) in collaboration with the Centro Orientamento Educativo (COE), an Italian non-governmental organization, and

kind of artistic creation.”’ The journal attempts to serve as a support tool and information base for filmmakers, produc-

book reviews

ers, distributors, researchers, government officials, and artists and, therefore, targets a wide audience. It is geared to and focuses on successes and problems in a film industry on a continent “that must restore its culture, its history and its imaginary in order to build its destiny.”? What is at stake here is the prevention of the dispossession of one’s own means of communication. A continent that does not produce its own images is at risk culturally and could, according to Kaboré, “lose ipso facto its

specific aptitude for development.” Such stakes are at the heart of Ecrans da’Afrique. If the African audio-visual industry is to flourish, the continent as a whole must concentrate its efforts whole-

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does not contribute to conferring upon African cinema a commercial value that it would have the right to expect vis-a-vis distributors and TV program buyers. The minor festivals that are springing up here and there like mushrooms maintain and confirm the idea that African cinema is a minor cinema and it’s only a short step from there to a condescending attitude.”° Sakbollé’s proposed solution is “less dispersion and amateurism, more coherence and festival-distribution integration.”® Sambolgo Bangré addresses the same issues in his article, “African Cinema in the Tempest of Minor Festivals,” summa-

rizing the place of African cinema in international festivals since the 1960s. Bangré

heartedly on issues of production, distri-

states, “All African filmmakers are unani-

bution, training and research, audio-visual management and information. Future strategies must include filmmakers’ efforts to help promote African film events on the continent to ensure that African cinema does not become culturally successful abroad while remaining “desperately absent from its own territory’. Ecrans d’Afrique has responded by focussing on the cultural and economic evolution of African cinema and the difficulties involved in sustaining a cinema that requires more and more “outside” financing. Demonstrating the journal’s position on the cutting edge of the industry, Ecrans d’Afrique’s first quarter 1994 issue devotes its “Dossier” section to an analysis of the financial and cultural impact of the proliferation of African film festivals around the world. In his short

mous in recognizing that festivals are useful. But not just any festivals.’ Indeed, the large audiences at international festivals have warmly welcomed African films, but this reception does not always lead to distribution in cinemas or sales to television networks. The increasing frequency and birth of new festivals has produced some pretty serious economic consequences for African filmmakers, including the over-exploitation of the films and non-payment of screening fees by festivals with insufficient budgets. Bangré concludes his article by outlining FEPACI’s initiatives to address filmmakers’ cultural and economic expectations. For example, FEPACTI’s recognition of the fact that the organization of a film market based on South-South cooperation is necessary to conquer the market of the North is an encouraging step in the right direction. This has led the festivals of “Ouagadougou,

article, Sakbollé declares that “the exces-

sive multiplication of festivals certainly

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Carthage and Harare to organize the film market respectively through Mica, the project market and Input Africa.”* The remainder of this particular issue of Ecrans d’Afrique is comprised of a multitude of short pieces that are thematic in nature, focus on a particular film, profile directors, producers, actors, technicians, etc., or provide information on upcoming festivals, seminars, competitions,

or other pertinent events. Interestingly, many of the articles refer explicitly or implicitly to the fact that the African film industry is undergoing profound change in terms of funding strategies and thematic/ aesthetic thrust. This is illustrated in the section, “Focus: Speaking to” which includes interviews with internationally acclaimed filmmakers Souleymane Cissé of Mali and John Akomfrah of Ghana/Great Britain. Clément Tapsoba’s interview with Souleymane Cissé centers on his experiences during the shooting of his latest feature film, Waati (Time). The production of this film represents a sort of microcosm of what may well become a trend in African cinema. According to Cissé, the

production budget was exceeded but his producer would not release the necessary funds to continue the project. Cissé finally managed to secure additional loans as well as aid from the EEC in order to complete the filming. Indeed, African cinema is increasingly finding itself in a very complex financial context in which co-productions are founded on extremely varied partnerships. What is intriguing here, however, is

the fact that Cissé has stepped outside Malian culture to create a story about

South Africa. His observation that “the

cinema has no frontiers,” parallels in many ways, a concern expressed by Idrissa Ouédraogo whose new feature is profiled in the issue. Ouédraogo has also chosen to make Cry From the Heart in a context outside his native Burkina Faso because “our cinema is having to open up more and more because it will be harder and harder for it to continue to exist. We have to look for other types of spaces and other points of reference with audiences.”!° This notion is further developed by Pierre Haffner in “The hypothesis of Suspense.” He suggests that there is a price for opening up new spaces: the West offers greater financial resources to African filmmakers on the condition that their films meet Western expectations. He ponders whether the cultural aesthetic of African film might ultimately be compromised. An interesting feature of Ecrans d’Afrique is its decision to profile lesser known people in the film and television industry. There has been a paucity of documentation of this nature in African film criticism which has traditionally privileged the coverage of more established filmmakers.

In this issue,

for example,

Alessandra Speciale’s “Portrait” article “A Threefold Trial: African, Female and Actress” profiles actresses Naky Sy Savané of Ivory Coast and Félicité Wouassi of Cameroon/France. In their discussion of the relationship between professional African actors and filmmakers, both women agree that despite the myriad obstacles (lack of recognition by African governments and society in general, lack of an artists’ union, etc.), African cinema can

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contribute greatly to their formation as actresses. African actors in Europe are still confined to stereotyped roles whereas African cinema has the potential of affording the opportunity for roles “that valorize the African woman as such, whether she is

traditional or modern.”!! Another main objective of Ecrans d’Afrique is to keep readers informed about the latest film and television trends. In “The Video Boom,” Nii Laryea Korley sets out to explain why video production now reigns supreme in Ghana. Increasing cost factors and the absence of a color film laboratory have forced Ghanaian filmmakers to find a unique solution to the creation of local audiovisual products: the production of video features. The possibility of shooting and marketing a feature on video at reasonable cost has led to non-professionals directing a whole string of productions, many of which have receptive story lines but are poor in technical and artistic execution. But, if Ghanaians, starved of images of themselves, were quick to em-

brace “the genesis of the video phenomenon as the birth of a system to enhance the way they perceived themselves,”!* they are becoming much more discerning by demanding quality video in their own image. Ecrans d’Afrique is a useful guide to all areas of interest in the development of the audiovisual industry in Africa and the African diaspora. Its “pan-African” mandate allows for many points of view and

159

because of this, a greater sense of comparison in terms of the overall African film industry. In this, Ecrans d’Afrique is refreshingly non-parochial because it provides an appreciation of the African audiovisual industry not just within itself, but in a much wider arena.

Notes

1: Gaston Kaboré, “Interpenetration Setting,” Ecrans d’ Afrique 0 (February 1991), p. 2. 2: Ibid. 3: Gaston Kaboré, “Taking Root in Our Own

Soil,” Ecrans d’ Afrique 3 (First Quarter 1993), p. il 4: Sakbollé, “A Single Slogan: Less Amateurism and a Greater Festival-Distribution Integration,” Ecrans d’Afrique 7 (First Quarter 1994), p. 48. 5: Ibid., p. 49. 6: Ibid. 7: Sambolgo Bangré, “African Cinema in the Tempest of Minor Festivals,” Ecrans d'Afrique 7 (First Quarter 1994), p. 54. 8: Ibid., p. 58.

9: Clément Tapsoba, “Waati: a Journey Towards the Africa of Tomorrow,” Ecrans

d'Afrique 7 (First Quarter 1994), p. 11. 10: Idrissa Ouédraogo, “Idrissa’s Cry From the Heart,” Ecrans d'Afrique 7 (First Quarter 1994), p. 45. 11: Alessandra Speciale, “A Threefold Trial: African, Female and Actress,” Ecrans d'Afrique 7 (First Quarter 1994), p. 29.

12: Nii Laryea Korley, “The Video Boom,” Ecrans d'Afrique 7 (First Quarter 1994), p. 70.

— Sheila Petty

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Paul Gilroy. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press, 1993, 261 pp. Too often discourses on black culture(s) fail to account for the philosophical and epistemological profundity of those discourses. This, however, is not the case in Paul Gilroy’s latest book, The Black At-

lantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. In this book, as the subtitle indicates,

Gilroy conflates the issues of modernity and double consciousness so that we might rethink, simultaneously, those features constitutive of modernity and black (double) consciousness. The concept of double consciousness is, of course, based

upon the early writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, and is often invoked by black American scholars to articulate the psychological ambiguity structuring black relations to the dominant culture. Gilroy’s project, no doubt, represents the most thorough interrogation of the Du Boisian construct to date. Integral to this relationship between modernity and black structures of feeling engendered through double consciousness is the Hegelian dialectic between the master and the slave. In Gilroy’s account, the

slave’s double consciousness is structured inadialogical relationship to the master(‘s) narrative of modernity. Gilroy’s reading of the master/slave dialectic occurs in the second chapter of the book. This is a crucial chapter for readers interested in oppositional theoretical projects. What Gilroy attempts in this chapter is nothing less than a re(de)constructive reading of

modernity from the slave’s point of view the point of view of double consciousness, no doubt. According to Gilroy, this point of view is predicated upon the slave’s encounter with “racial terror.” Gilroy’s perspective on how racial terror informs the creative responses of blacks is not unique. Such cultural workers as Amiri Baraka (Systems ofDante’s Hell), Hortense Spillers (“Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe”) and Houston Baker (Workings of the Spirit), have similarly engaged the problematic of racial terror. Nonetheless, Gilroy offers some astute observations. For instance, he argues that the vernacular forms engendered through encounters with and negotiations of racial terrorrepresent “specific modes of expression ... that are absolutely antagonistic to the enlightenment assumptions with which they have had to compete for the attention of the black public.” (198)

While many critics and scholars evoke the term double consciousness to explicate aspects of black identity formation this is most often done as a means of explicating the ambiguity or confusion that often results from such self division. That is to say, double consciousness has been popularly interpreted more as ameans of gauging problems of the black psyche, and less as a historical problematic that requires a reassessment of those features shaping historical processes. While Gilroy throughout the book is clearly making an intervention into historiographical debates,

his overall objective suggests more than a “corrective inclusion” of absent black voices; he more so wishes to show how his

“reconstructive intellectual labour ... has a

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great bearing on ideas of what the West was and is today.” (45) Nonetheless, double consciousness for Gilroy is an important theoretical construct useful for explaining how blacks in the Diaspora have confronted and negotiated modernity. Gilroy parts company with those writers who have, almost hegemonically, interpreted double consciousness as a problem of the psyche (see forinstance Lure and Loathing, edited by Gerald Early); for Gilroy, double consciousness signifies a transnational (diasporic) structure of feeling. However,

there are autobiographical impulses guiding Gilroy’s work. Gilroy admits to this in the opening lines of the book when he says: “Striving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness.” (1) The word striv-

ing clearly reveals the influence of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk; in that text the word is used with great rhetorical force by Du Bois to capture the emerging potential of black men and women. The autobiographical gestures are again manifested when Gilroy admits to the “special stress that grows with the effort involved in trying to face (at least) two ways at once” (3). Gilroy, borrowing terms from cultural critic Ian Chambers, describes this attempt to face two cultural ways at once as a dialectic between roots and routes. In order to capture this complexity, Gilroy asks cultural historians and critics to use his construct of a black Atlantic as “one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world [in order to]

produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective” (15). This approach, according to Gilroy, is necessary

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to check narratives which problematically promote nationalist ideologies and ethnic absolutist discourses. Gilroy’s objective to delineate the decentered and inescapably plural nature of modern subjectivity (46) involves a running critique against overt and covert ethnic absolutist impulses which frame left cultural theory in Britain and in United States. However, a disproportionate amount of space is devoted to a critique of black American particularity. This decentering of black American particularity pivots on three consecutive chapters, which deal respectively with the transnational

impulses

of black music,

Richard Wright, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Gilroy makes a convincing argument concerning how black American critics in the U.S. need to seriously consider how the ideologies of many black writers were shaped from these writer’s experiences in Europe. Beyond chapters on Du Bois and Wright, Gilroy provides an amazing reconceptualization of such important figures in black intellectual history as Martin Delaney and Frederick Douglass, who have been principally interpreted, unproblematically, according to Gilroy, as a nationalist and an integrationist, respectively. Delaney is a key figure in Gilroy’s narrative. The trajectory of his intellectual career and the variety of his travels conforms nicely to what Gilroy calls “the dialectics of diaspora identification” (23). That the logic of much black cultural production is transnational in its impulses is a valid perspective, but Gilroy’s critique of ethnic absolutism(s) hinges on an inability to acknowledge possible complex formations

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his interpretation of a black popular song how its production history traverses the

hip hop culture. This is not to de-emphasize the relevance of theories of hybridity in regard to hip hop; but we must as well acknowledge the significance of the terrain (specific space) upon which a cultural form develops. I mention this neglect of rap for another reason: Gilroy seems more concerned withrepresentations of vernacular cultures made by intellectuals like himself, than with the ideas articulated by the artists. This calls to mind the vexing problem that Hazel Carby has commented on in another context - the contentious issue of black intellectuals representing subaltern groups.’ Admittedly, it is possible to say that Gilroy is more invested in the way intellectuals read black popular cuiture and vernacular forms than in the rhetorical strategies of vernacular forms themselves. This exclusive focus on black intellectual

boundaries of the nation-state, revealing

readings of culture, however, betrays the

the triangular influences

elitism reminiscent of what James Clifford calls salvage ethnography.’ That is, Gilroy as ethnographer attempts to represent the vernacular but does not allow the vernacu-

within the boundaries of the nation-state. This inability to see the pluralism within the nationalist logic of much black American cultural production is most evident in his discussion of the vernacular form of hip hop. For instance, while it is indisputable

that the logic of hip hop pivots on a negotiation between Caribbean toasting and DJ traditions and black American rhetorical and disc jockeying practices, thus making clear rap’s hybrid character, itis important to remember that rappers are continually valorizing the specificity of place. Gilroy’s notion of a black Atlantic, is, of course,

oppositional to the viability of specific geographies. In an interesting but problematic move, Gilroy attempts to show in

of London,

Kingston, and the South Bronx. Ultimately,

Gilroy’s objective is to shift the epistemological status of blackness from what he considers hegemonic African-American perspectives towards the indeterminately diffuse space of a black Atlantic. Regarding Gilroy’s reading of hip hop, we can acknowledge rap’s hybrid status due, of course, to technology and Caribbean influences, but the specific terrain of

the South Bronx and other specific and marginal locales must be seen as important mediating influences. While the relocation of DJ Herc from Jamaica to the South Bronx is important, what needs more

emphasis is how the deteriorating culturescape of the South Bronx has contributed to the poetics of rap music/and or

lar to speak for itself. This is not, of course,

to deny that intellectuals always already participate in the construction of vernacular and popular cultures; but as Carby suggests, this participation is often contentious and ideologically charged. To not problematize one’s relationship to popular and vernacular cultures, as Gilroy does

not, is to not problematize the space of cultural production. It would appear that Gilroy is basically more interested in the space of (intellectual) representation than in the relatively autonomous social space necessary for working out an aesthetic. Concomitant,

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then, with the decentering of subject posi-

tions as inaugurated by poststructuralist theories and methodologies, and in the valorization of the multiplicity of those subject positions, is a decentering of space in the black imaginary. Actually, Gilroy’s own bias against specific geographies of blackness possibly reveals his own absolutist, if not elitist,

impulses - impulses which valorize travel when most working class black people are often delegated spaces with little opportunity for travel or mobility. It would appear that there is a direct correlation between Gilroy’s failure to consider that most black people cannot and do not travel beyond national borders - as black intellectuals can - and his inability to acknowledge the importance of specific geographies or terrains of struggle. This brings to mind the possible effects that might issue from Gilroy’s theoretical endeavors. Although we might have a better conceptualization of aconstruct called the black Atlantic, we are, of course, left to consider the implica-

tions of such thinking. While the nation may indeed be an outmoded political construct - for radical political projects, no doubt - it is obvious that most people are not able to leave, definitely for extended periods, the confines of the nation-state. It is important to understand how subjects are negotiating the space of the nation. As E. San Juan Jr. has stated, we have to ask what is truly at stake in anti-foundationalist (anti-nationalist) discourses. San Juan Jr. argues that

“To be genuinely internationalist is to begin from the bedrock of popular memory and indigenous institutions”? Is it pos-

163

sible that it is Gilroy’s sense of a lack of indigenous institutions for British blacks that informs his critique of black American exceptionalism? While I do not wish nor intend to valorize the site of the U.S. as ideal for writing black culture, I think it imperative to reveal that my identity as a black American places constraints around what I can say and see. Instead of valorizing Herculean efforts to transcend these constraints I think it important to begin understanding the different claims made for blackness within the United States, among other locales. What is also troubling about Gilroy’s book is that he appears not to have considered the creative work of black British filmmakers (who I am sure he is aware of) among other cultural workers in the Diaspora. Had Gilroy engaged the work of such figures as George Lamming, Paule Marshall, Edgar White, Vincent O. Carter,

among other black writers whose themes seem consistent with a black Atlantic epistemology, there would not be so much a breach between theory and practice. Is it possible that Gilroy, by focusing so exclusively on the work of black American writers, exhibits to some degree an anxiety of influence? While he does provide some remarkable readings of the “neglected” novels of Richard Wright (The Outsider and Lawd Today) and Du Bois (Dark Princess), the absence of black British voices

in his narrative leaves one with the impression that there is little black cultural work being produced in England. While itis true that he mentions the emergence of a black. arts movementin Britain, he gives noclear

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164

indication of what comprises this movement and its participants. The constraints or boundaries engendered through geographic location, family, and class background, become for Gilroy vestigial traits of projects that would enshrine nationalist perspectives. Directly related to Gilroy’s critique of nationalism is his critique of what he calls the trope of the family, which for him are too easily affiliated with ideas of hermetically sealed ethnic communities and policed national borders. Ultimately, Gilroy’s way of dealing with space and boundaries is to label black diasporic cultures communities of sentiment and interpretation, not communities with specific sizes, shapes, and colors. But if we are talking about challenging the viability of such interpretive filters as the nation and the family, Gilroy seems to be asking us to imagine spaces without borders and lives without frames. If we

follow this logic blindly, we are expected to accept a world without difference and perspectives, thereby fetishizing our conceptions of space. This would truly be out of bounds.

David Bordwell. The Cinema of Eisenstein, Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press, 1993, 316 pp., ill.

Eisenstein. D’où aussi le choix de ne pas engager un débat avec d’ autres chercheurs

Pour apprécier à sa juste valeur le travail que David Bordwell a consacré a

être, va être révélé dans les décades à venir” (p.xiii). Autrement dit, sa recher-

Eisenstein, il faut tenir compte de deux

che ne tient pas compte de la masse de documents qui restent encore inédits dans les archives en Russie, qui commence à faire surface et dont témoignent quelques publications ou interventions récentes

partis pris que l’auteur annonce ouvertement= d’entrée. de, -jeu. Premièrement, son étude est conçue comme unlivred’ introduction, visant avant tout à présenter |’ oeuvre à la fois artistique et théorique de l’un des grands classiques du cinéma à un public d’étudiants et d’autres lecteurs désirant mieux connaître

Notes

1: Hazel Carby, “The Politics Of Fiction,

Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neal Hurston,” New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God, ed., Michael Awkward (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

2: James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds., James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

3: E. San Juan, Jr., Reading the West/Writing The East: Studies in Comparative Literature And Fiction (New York: P. Lang, 1992).

— Lee Freeman

de maniére

frontale.

Deuxiémement,

Bordwell veut présenter “l’ Eisenstein que nous avons connu, non pas celui qui, peut-

venant, bien naturellement, des pays de

l’Est'. Dernière remarque introductive: en ce qui concerne la position politique d’Eisenstein, Bordwell se garde bien de se

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faire inquisiteur. Il essaie de mesurer l’impact du contexte historico-idéologique, il fait état de telle ou telle opinion sur le rôle et la place d’Eisenstein, mais il ne prononce pas de jugement. Le souci didactique qui a déterminé pour une large part la stratégie d’écriture adoptée par Bordwell apparaît déjà clairement dans la structure, voire la composition du livre. Le premier chapitre offre un portrait biographique d’Eisenstein et sert, pour ainsi dire, de repère qui permet au lecteur de mieux situer les analyses et les discussions détaillées dans les autres parties de l’étude. Bordwell trace son chemin à travers la vie et l’oeuvre d’Eisenstein de manière chronologique. Les chapitres 2 et 3 traitentrespectivement des films muets et des propos théoriques du cinéaste pendant cette période. Le quatrième chapitre est consacré au travail pédagogique d’Eisenstein à |’ Académie du cinéma de Moscou. Bordwell enchaîne sur les écrits théoriques des années 1930 à 1948 (ch.5) avant d’en arriver aux films

parlants (ch.6). Le dernier chapitre parle des “vies multiples” d’Eisenstein, des différentes images du cinéaste soviétique, créées par les contemporains, les critiques, les historiens, les théoriciens. Cette structure symétrique où l’on trouve littéralement au centre la réflexion sur le travail pédagogique d’Eisenstein, et puis les chapitres arrangés par couples sur ses théories, ses films et sa vie/ses vies, en

dit long sur l’effort que fait Bordwell de tenir compte de chacun des trois grands domaines d’activité eisensteiniens. En effet, ilréserve à l’enseignement une place qu’on lui reconnaît rarement dans la vaste

165

littérature sur le cinéaste. Loin d’y voir une simple annexe de la réflexion théorique, Bordwell considère les cours

d’Eisenstein comme à la fois le lieu de passage entre la théorie et la pratique et le point de transition entre ses deux périodes théoriques (muet/parlant). Avant d’en arriver aux partis pris théoriques de Bordwell, notons encore une fois la limpidité didactique de l’ouvrage

dans

son

ensemble,

et tout

particulièrement la très bonne qualité des illustrations dont l’auteur fait un emploi à la fois intelligent et efficace. Les analyses d’exemples cherchent à présenter et àclarifier les procédés centraux utilisés par Eisenstein en marquant également les différences et les modifications d’ approche d’un film à l’autre. En effet, la tâche que

Bordwell s’est donnée n’est pas mince : articuler

les

films,

la

théorie

et

l’enseignement d’Eisenstein afin de pouvoir faire ressortir la richesse et la diversité de cette oeuvre, mais en même

temps aussi sa logique interne. Pour Bordwell, le travail d’Eisenstein

se laisse utilement diviser en deux grandes périodes, celle du muet et celle du parlant.

Ceci vaut aussi bien pour les films que pour la réflexion théorique. Déjà dans un article datant de 1975, Bordwell avait constaté une “dérive epistémologique” dans la théorie eisensteinienne en ce qui concerne les modèles psychologiques sousjacents?. Dans le présent livre il précise les conséquences de ce partage : la vue en termes machiniques de l’oeuvre d’art est supplantée par une conception organique, le polyphone vient à la place du conflit, la dialectique matérialiste cède à une

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dialectique de type idéaliste. A la place de son modernisme éclectique Eisenstein adopte les grands principes du Réalisme Socialiste qu’il enrichit d’un pluralisme technique faisant du cinéma une véritable synthése des arts. Malgré ces différences entre les deux périodes, Bordwell insiste

également sur l’intérêt continuel qu’Eisenstein porte aux questions du “faire”. L’Eisenstein que Bordwell peint est avant tout un “experimentalist and poetician who soughta unity of theory and practice’ «(p.212).,D' on..encore l’importance de l’enseignement qui jette le pont non pas seulement entre les deux parties du livre, mais qui sert aussi de

tuyau pour faire communiquer les vases.? L’Eisenstein-poéticien qui intéresse Bordwell est celui d’une théorisation sur un “niveau intermédiaire” (p.269) qui est àrattacher à toute une tradition caractérisée ici avec bonheur comme “centrée sur la techné”. On reconnaît aisément les grands thèmes qui traversent les recherches et théoriques et historiques de David Bordwell : la prédilection pour des concepts simples mais efficaces à fonction à la fois descriptive et explicative, l'intérêt porté aux aspects systématiques de l’objet d’étude, la pensée cherchant à résoudre des problèmes bien définis et concrets sans recourir trop à l’abstraction (et en se méfiant carrément des théories spéculatives), une attention particulière à la “structure des choses”, aux procédés et

à leurs fonctions. On a envie de dire qu’Eisenstein est en quelque sorte un objet idéal pour Bordwell, car les qualités que le chercheur fait ressortir chez son

“expérimentateur-poéticien” correspondent pour une large part aux principes qui gouvernent sa propre étude. Tout ceci est au grand bénéfice de la clarté didactique du livre, et les choix nécessaires dans ce genre d’entreprise se justifient largement par le résultat. Il y a, cependant, quelques moments où la conception générale de l’ouvrage risque de limiter sa portée. C’est surtout le cas quand ils’ agit du travail conceptuel eisensteinien. Car Bordwell n’ interroge pas à proprement parler l’appareil de termes et de notions qu’ emploie Eisenstein (ou seulement dans la mesure ot ceci fait partie de l’argumentation générale). Il n’y a pas vraiment d’analyse détaillée et en profondeur des concepts, ce qui aurait pu complexifier un peu plus l’image que Bordwell dessine du cinéaste et théoricien. Certes, les objectifs du livre sont autres et

une discussion de concepts théoriques avec le degré d’abstraction qu’elle amène forcément ne serait pas facile à insérer dans la structure d’ensemble. Toutefois,

une partie des lecteurs risque de rester quelque peu sur sa faim. Mais même dans le cadre d’analyse que Bordwell s’est fixé lui-même il y a au moins un point sur lequel on aurait souhaité un peu plus de clarté. C’est le rapport entre la théorie eisensteinienne et le formalisme. Bordwell constate d’abord une préoccupation commune quant aux problèmes de “poétique”, de techné, du

“faire”, l’emploi de certains concepts comme

celui de “dominante”,

mais un

manque d’égard total pour d’autres, etc. Ailleurs il remarque que pour un “formaliste” Eisenstein ne s’intéresse que

book reviews

peu aux problémes compositionnels d’ensemble (les guillemets sont de Bordwell et du coup on n’est méme plus tout à fait sûr de l’acception dans laquelle le terme est utilisé). Certes, cela s'accorde

assez bien avec l’éclectisme théorique qu’on peut observer chez Eisenstein et on pourrait en rester là. Et de toute manière il serait assez naïf d’ attendre une déclaration du type : “Eisenstein était / n’était pas un formaliste.” Le probléme est ailleurs : le formalisme étant l’un des courants intellectuels et théoriques les plus importants de l’époque et compte tenu des points de rencontre avec les réflexions eisensteiniennes, il aurait été pour le moins intéressant de creuser un peu plus cette question. Au niveau théorique ceci aurait permis de clarifier la généalogie de la pensée d’Eisenstein et de mieux cerner certains concepts, au niveau didactique on aurait pu utiliser avec plus de rigueur le terme de “formalisme”. Les contraintes du cadre institutionnel dans lequel Bordwell place son étude deviennent malheureusement un peu pesantes dans le dernier chapitre. Ici l’auteur passe en revue les différentes manières dont une image d’Eisenstein a été forgée par et pour l’histoire et la théorie du cinéma. L'intérêt et la nécessité didactiques de ce chapitre sont évidents, et il paraît d’autant plus utile que dans les autres parties de son texte Bordwell limite les renvois à des sources secondaires au strict minimum.‘ En outre, cela permet de se rendre compte une fois de plus de l’historicité de toute entreprise de ce genre. Le grand inconvénient, cependant, c’est

allure d’un survol rapide (trop rapide)

167

que prend ce chapitre final. Par ce catalogue de noms et de propos condensés en quelques mots, Bordwell essaie de donner au moins une idée de la grande diversité de la littérature sur Eisenstein ainsi que des grandes étapes de la réception de son oeuvre filmique et théorique, mais les indications données restent, par la nature des choses,

trés superficielles. La démarche devient carrément agaçante quand elle produit des impressions fausses. Ainsi le lecteur découvre à sa surprise Christian Metz rattaché aux rangs de ceux exprimant une “opposition schématique” au montage (p.260), la citation que donne Bordwell étant par-dessus le marché inexacte! Tout cela n’enlève cependant rien aux grandes qualités que l’on trouve par ailleurs dans ce livre. David Bordwell a écrit une introduction à l’oeuvre d’Eisenstein qui est à la fois riche et stimulante. Son étude donneenvie de revoiret derelire Eisenstein. N'est-ce pas le meilleur compliment qu’ on puisse lui faire?

Notes

1: Cf. par exemple l’article que Naoum Kleiman a consacré aux lions du Potemkine, publié récemment en traduction allemande sous le titre “Der Aufbriillende Lowe. Zur Entstehung, Bedeutung und Funktion einer MontageMetapher,” montage/av, 2(2) (1993), pp. 5-34 ou

l’intervention de Iouri Tsiviane sur Ivan le Terrible au colloque d’ Urbino en 1991. 2: Cf. David Bordwell, “Eisenstein’s Epistemological Shift,” Screen 15(4) (1975), pp. 32-46; pour une critique de cette conception cf. Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein (Paris: Albatros, 1979), pp. 157 et sq.

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3: Bordwell parle, pour le chapitre 4 qui présente les “practical aesthetics” que sont pour lui les cours d’ Eisenstein, d’un “chapitre-pivot” (p. xii).

4: Dans une annexe Bordwell suggère, par chapitre, des lectures supplémentaires. La bibliographie générale en fin de volume est trés riche.

— Frank Kessler

Sabine Hake. The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907-

Hake discusses the role of the press in the birth of film criticism and the formation of

1933.

standards of evaluation, as well as the

University

of Nebraska

Press,

1993, 353 pp.

Sabine Hake has a knack for knowing what needs to be done, for spotting and filling gaps in film scholarship. Her first book, which examined Ernst Lubitsch’s

early films, shed some light on a nagging blind spot. Her latest book explores an area known to non-German-speaking film scholars only through Siegfried Kracauer or the occasional article in New German Critique. A fast-paced survey of film criticism and theory, it is, essentially, a very good travel guide to the discursive landscape of German cinema before the Third Reich. As such, it has all the advantages

and pitfalls of its genre. It maps out the terrain quite well, in that the highlights and personalities of these relatively remote regions are represented accurately and fairly. With twenty-five years and dozens of articles and books to account for in 350 pages, names and arguments whiz by rather quickly. Weekend tourists will certainly find the trip educational, but may experience some slight dizziness. The first third of the book focuses on writings from Imperial Germany, combining historical description with thematic, rhetorical analysis. In the first chapter,

importance of scenario-writing manuals and other instructional books for establishing critical norms. She also devotes a chapter to the rhetoric of the Kinoreformers and their efforts to influence the shape of cinema through censorship and other legislation. Her discussion of the famous Kinodebatte — the debate among literary intellectuals over cinema’s social status and worth — examines the comparisons made between film and the other arts. The final two chapters in this section concentrate on the masses and spectatorship, both of which are central to her argument that film writing in this period focused on the audience and apparatus rather than on individual films. Only when cinema could be considered apart from its technological basis and integrated into middle-class culture could its status as an art form be confirmed. Hake maintains that this shift of status occurred after World War I, during the Weimar era. This period occupies the middle third of The Cinema’s Third Machine, in which she examines the different

forms and functions of critical discourse. This section begins like the first, with a

review of the forum within which the conversion of cinema-took place. Her discussion of the trade press, the illustrated

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169

press, and the cultural magazines — all of which participated in sustained debates about the cinema — is the foundation for an examination of the changed role of the critic in the public sphere. Hake then turns her attention to anti-modernist, academic

critics who hoped to establish — and thus control — cinema’s claim to art through normative aesthetics based on broad philosophical categories. She ultimately contrasts their agendas to those of such avantgarde critics as Hans Richter. Hake includes film novels, gossip columns, and films about film under the category of “fiction” and discusses the relationship of narrative to the critical discourse. Finally, film criticism as political intervention warrants a chapter of its own as she describes the continuities, discontinuities,

and ambivalences of leftist and rightist discussions of cinema. The last third of the book focuses on the writings of the three major working film critics/theorists of the Weimar era: Béla

Balazs,

Siegfried

Kracauer,

and

Rudolf Arnheim. Close readings of the untranslated early writings of these theorists build upon the issues and approaches explored in the rest of the book as well as illuminate their later, canonical

works.

Hake is careful to situate the authors in their social context and their respective philosophical traditions, e.g. Balazs’ and Kracauer’s phenomenology, Arnheim’s interest in Gestalt psychology, and their relationship to the intellectual circles surrounding the leftist journal Die Weltbiihne. She reevaluates these theorists in light of their earlier works by restoring a sense of history to the discussion and demonstrat-

ing their contribution to theories of mass culture and modernity. Hake concludes that early German film criticism and theory divides itself into two defining paradigms: cinema as a public sphere and film as an aesthetic experience. These last chapters are the most compelling, perhaps because they are the most clearly focused. Exegesis seems to be Hake’s strength; she consistently and fruitfully returns to the texture and shape of the language of criticism, finding there signs of some larger significance. In an early chapter, for example,

she traces meta-

phors used to describe the early viewing experience (“verbs like flickering, flashing, and flaring suggest a situation in which the viewing subject is under fire” [p. 30]); later she analyzes Arnheim’s tropes in one of his essays (“that rich metaphor ... links this ordinary review ... to the more farreaching project of mapping a future for film” [p. 226]). Her basic assumption — that “language is a good indicator of change” (p. 107)—allows her to conclude at one point that a terminological shift occurred after World War I: the German word for “cinema” changed from Kino, which connotes both the place and the apparatus, to Film, which came to signify the medium and its representational possibilities. Hake finds that this linguistic turn signals and represents cinema’s change in cultural status and its acceptance as an artistic medium This type of interpretation is the dominant approach of her book, the title of which points to the source of this method in film studies. Hake’s “third machine” refers to Christian Metz’s comments on

170

film theory and criticism: “Discourse about the cinema is … its third machine: after the one that manufactures the films, and the one that consumes them, the one that vaunts them, that valorises [sic] the product.”! Metz is discussing the extent to which “writings on film become another form of cinema advertising and at the same time a linguistic appendage of the institution itself.” Hake therefore intends to write a history of German film theory that pays special attention to its language and rhetoric. Indeed, insofar as the discourse on cinema is, according to Metz again, “a dream: an uninterpreted dream,” then

“knowledge of the cinema is obtained via a reprise of the native discourse, in two senses of the word: taking it into consideration and re-establishing it.” This is exactly what Hake has in mind: to interpret the signs of filmic discourse, cinema’s “unconscious,” so to speak, for evidence

of deeper, structural stress. But she also wants to write an “institutional” history of film criticism, and this points to another

tradition in film studies as well as to some of the problems with her book. The Cinema’s Third Machine comes at atime when film scholarship is beginning to turn on itself, when film discourse is becoming a worthy object of historical — not just theoretical — study. Richard Abel’s volumes on the beginnings of French film theory and criticism set the standard, of

course, while Janet Staiger’s more recent Interpreting Films shows renewed attention to the historical validity of criticism. Until now, however, no one has tackled the interesting sociological problem of the role of criticism in the negotiation and

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maintenance of standards of evaluation. In this respect, a study of early German discourse is particularly appropriate. In Germany, the boundaries between social classes and even those between Art and Not-Art (Kunst and Unkunst) have always

been heavily patrolled. The debates and negotiations over these boundaries have also been very public, owing to a longheld faith in the power of writing to effect change. Imperial and Weimar Germany therefore serve as prime examples for the investigation of the social mechanisms of cultural legitimacy. This is not to say that German film criticism and theory are uncharted territory. The native scholarship on the topic is really quite impressive, considering that American film historians have almost ignored their own tradition. On Imperial German criticism alone, there are numerous anthologies and monographs, not to mention many dissertations and articles.” The same is true for studies of Weimar-era discourse.® Many modern film scholars working on this topic have followed the framework set out by Jiirgen Habermas,

focusing on the role of the critic in the changing public sphere.‘ Briefly, Habermas argues that in the (admittedly ideal) classical public sphere of eighteenthand nineteenth-century

western Europe,

the polite discourse of the revolutionary bourgeoisie was an expression of its own social relations. That is, the possibility of an equal and democratic society presented itself through the practice of literary discussion in the:salons and criticism in the various cultural journals. The critic was not really considered an expert; the critic

book reviews

acted more as a representative of his class, in that his judgments indicated not so

much individual, idiosyncratic pronouncements as a shared capacity for rational discourse. Criticism and the critic acted as instruments of ideological and class solidarity. The breakdown of the classical public sphere — brought about by the industrial revolution, mass education, and the democratization and increased literacy of the lower classes — meant that the critic could no longer speak so confidently as representative or judge. The critic’s position was increasingly threatened and criticism reflected this. Critics relinquished their claims to authority and began to write more subjective, eccentric criticism designed to entertain rather than inform; the impressionist feuilleton reviews of, say,

literary critic Alfred Kerr are a good example.‘ The case of Germany is interesting because the heightened tensions between the classes and the strong trust in the power and propriety of discourse put the crisis of criticism in especially profound relief. Film scholars have embraced the Habermasian model because it provides an explanation for the strong reaction of critics to the class implications of cinema and modernity. Habermas also offers a model of criticism as an institution. That is, his hypothesis allows us to consider the social impact of discourse, rather than thinking of it simply as a passive reaction

171

influence on or purpose in society, retreated to subjective interpretation. Likewise, historians unable to find evidence of criticism’s impact have turned traditionally to interpretation of the individual texts. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, in Hake’s case, it is absolutely

necessary, considering that her primary goal is to introduce her audience to unfamiliar texts and to put them in some kind of context. On this level, she does a very

good job. But she wants very much to write an institutional history, one that is interdisciplinary and gives discourse an active role. Sometimes this urge leads to some unfortunate formulations, such as

when she discusses the terminological shift from Kino to Film mentioned earlier: “It was only after 1918-19 that Film would be used more frequently, making possible the cinema’s gradual integration into middleclass culture. The replacement of Kino by Film brought with it a number of changes in the critical paradigm ...” (pp. 107-108). The power of language should not be underestimated, but this may be a case of

putting the cart before the horse. Yet, when the events suggest that discourse did have an active, important role,

cism itself. Critics, like Kerr, who were

the book fails to give it its due. For example, the first chapter describes the reaction of film critics to charges that they were simply mouthpieces for their magazines’ advertisers: “In light of the growing trend [in magazines and motion pictures] toward quality and value, they had to improve their reputations and introduce standards of professional ethics that justified their role as arbiters of taste” (p. 14).

unable to find evidence of their continued

Critics did indeed react in this way, but

to historical events. Very often, however,

the difficulties faced by histories of criticism are analogous to the crisis in criti-

172

despite acknowledgment just a few pages later that “the normative power of writing ... imposes standards on the cinema that originate in the bourgeois perception of popular culture” (p. 20), the chapter does not recognize that these critics had a very large role in creating that very “trend toward quality and value.” True, it is very difficult to establish a direct causal link between film criticism and film produc-

comptes rendus de lecture

man writings on film, with plenty of insightful and important interpretations of key texts. But in trying to be an institutional history of film criticism as well, the

book overreaches and falters. Habermas and Metz may indeed be good models, but limitations of space prevent this book from capturing the subtleties of the relationship between history and discourse.

tion, but there should be some indication

that producers were considering the mood created by the discourse. Instead, when-

Notes

ever the book reviews the history of film production, discourse immediately takes a

passive, secondary role. In spite of her claims that the book focuses on “institutionalized discourse and the power structures behind them: the film industry, the educational system, the liter-

ary establishment, the academy, the publishing industry, and the political parties” (p.212), Hake never strays too far from the film-related texts that are the real focus. Very little attention is given to sources outside the discourse on film proper. She

realizes that she will not be able to “trace specific key concepts back to their origins in idealist philosophy” or engage previous scholarship on the subject (p. xvii). But if she hopes to “develop an interdisciplinary approach that combines political, economic, pedagogical, literary, aesthetic, and theoretical perspectives” more than any standard history, she will have to engage with many more outside sources than this survey allows. As a result, discourse runs

parallel to historical events without ever touching them. The Cinema’s Third Machine is a very good survey of early Ger-

1 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p. 14.

2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., pp. 14-15. 4 Essays from this period are collected in F. Giittinger, ed., (1984), Kein Tag ohne Kino, Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum, and J. Schweinitz, ed., (1992), Prolog vor dem Film

(Leipzig: Reclam). Among the numerous commentaries, see T. Koebner (1977),“Der Film

als neue Kunst: Reaktionen der literarischen Intelligenz,” in H. Kreuzer,

ed.,Literaturwissenschaft- Medienwissenschaft, (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer), pp. 1-31; H. Diederichs (1986), Anfänge deutscher Filmkritik (Stuttgart: Robert Fischer); H. Schliipmann (1990),

Unheimlichkeit des Blicks: Das Drama des frühen deutschen Kinos (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld/ Roter Stern); T. Schorr (1990), “Die Film- und

Kinoreformbewegung und die Deutsche Filmwirtschaft. Eine Analyse des Fachblatts Der Kinematograph (1907-1935) unter Pädagogischen und Publizistischen Aspekten,” Ph.D. diss., Universitat der Bundeswehr, Munich. 5 See A. Kaes, ed., (1978), Kino-Debatte:

Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film 19091929 (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer); for commentary, see H. B. Heller (1985), Literarische Intelligenz

und Film. Zu Veränderungen der äesthetischen Theorie und Praxis unter dem Eindruck des Films

book reviews

1910-1930 in Deutschland (Tiibingen: Niemayer)

173

,

or H. B. Heller (1990), “Massenkultur und ästhetische Urteilskraft. Zur Geschichte und Funktion der deutschen Filmkritik vor 1933” in N.

MIT Press), esp. pp. 43-56. 7 See R. Berman, (1988), “Literary Criticism

from Empire to Dictatorship, 1870-1933,” in P. U. Hohendahl, ed.,, A History of German Literary

Grob and K. Priimm, eds., Die Macht der

Criticism, 1730-1980 (Lincoln and London:

Filmkritik: Positionen und Kontroversen (Munich:

University of Nebraska Press), pp. 277-357.

text + kritik), pp. 25-45. 6 J. Habermas, (1989), The Structural

— Scott Curtis

Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge:

Library of African Cinema, California Newsreel/Resolution Inc. 1994, 31 pp.

dent distributors acquire only a few African films for distribution—usually screened

Library of African Cinema is a brochure announcing the collection of African films (also known by the same title) for distribution and exhibition in the A fri-

cinematheques. These independent distributors, however, do not have access to the chain of theaters monopolized by Hol-

can Division of California Newsreel,

possible to accommodate the “other” films that would bring awareness to the cinema and issues relating to other worlds, i.e. the African world. One of the best things that has happened in the U.S. concerning the promotion of African cinema is the creation of the Library of African Cinema. But California Newsreel cannot pretend to have solved the perennial problem of exhibition and distribution — after all, it distributes only fifteen feature films out of the numerous feature films produced in Africa — but its contribution to the promotion of African cinema is unprecedented. Its pioneering status is marked by the release of African films on half-inch videos for general distribution to schools and colleges, hitherto unseen in the U.S. and in the history of African cinema. It is from this perspective that California Newsreel’s agenda becomes exemplary. In its Library of African Cinema,

at

a

non-profit organization based in San Francisco. The films in The Library of African Cinema are made by black people, and the stories they tell reflect true African history, culture and politics. Independence ushered in the proliferation of texts (literary and cinematic) providing alternative and genuine information about Africa. However, as Ousmane

Sembéne learned many years ago — himself being arenowned novelist before turning to filmmaking — cinema cuts across ethnic and territorial barriers to reach wider audiences more than does the written text. Unfortunately, African films have not been

inundated with promotional infrastructures that will enhance distribution and exhibition, either locally nor internationally. In

Africa where there are no organized channels of distribution, filmmakers are responsible for the exhibition of their films,

while in Europe and in the U.S., indepen-

film

festivals,

museums,

and

lywood distributors, which makes it im-

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this agenda prioritizes the introduction of African feature films to American classrooms. These films challenge students to embrace the “authentic multicultural instructions” proffered in them about a “new Africa ... emerging not through the eyes of Western experts but of the Africans who are changing it” (p. 2). Newsreel’s aim is to target “colleges, public libraries and high schools to build more culturally inclusive video libraries” (p. 3). It hopes that these films will be integrated “into standard African Studies, Cinema

Studies,

French,

International

Studies, and Development Education courses” (p. 3). In aspiring to reach this goal, it also recognizes the paucity of teachers who can help students to synthesize the full range of signification and meaning of African cinema. Given the unique nature of this culturally, politically, and historically inspired cinematic art form, the brochure provides a useful resource guide divided into several features. The features include: a) Viewing Notes, which provide short and well-pre-

pared essays about each film; b) Core Concepts, which follow each essay designating subject categorizations or core curricular areas best suited for each film (e.g., democratization, urban and rural Africa,

popular culture); c) Classroom Resources, which gives a selected bibliography that deals with the core concepts of individual films (it also provides insight into some of the “organizations offering resources, and

advocacy and outreach around Africa” p.3); and d) Economic and Political Overview, an essay written by Julius Ihonvbere (pp. 26-27), that introduces students to

contemporary African politics and economics. In this regard, the resource guide is designed to help teachers and students gain guided access not only to the films, but also to cultural and historical specificities. According to the Library of African Cinema, the features in

Newsreel’s collec-

tion “pioneer an innovative approach to international education” or the experiencing of the “developing” new “visions” — what it refers to as the “encountering of a changing Africa through its changing cinema” (p. 2). The Library first started with acollection of eight films, namely, Finzan (A Dance for the Heroes, Mali, 1990) by

Cheick Oumar Sissoko. The film deals with the status of women in society, though itis widely (mis)interpreted as a film about circumcision. Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (Brightness, Mali, 1987) is an astonishing work which weaves the tapestry of culture and oral art into a refurbished personal cinematographic style that renders vivid aspects of the Bambara culture it depicts. Cesar Paes and Marie-Clemence BlancPaes’ Angano...Angano...Tales from Madagascar (Madagascar, 1980) repostulates the notion of ethnographic film. Here, oral tradition in its social context is assigned a culturally distinctive role. In delineating the myths and folk tales that predicates the Malagacy culture and life, active and participatory camera coupled with in-depth composition make the witnessing of actual exhumation — the unique practice of Famadihana, or “turning the dead”— extremely inviting as a normal engagement. Ngangura Mweze and Benoit Lamy’s La vie est belle (Life is

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175

Rosy, Zaire, 1987) is semi-musical, and uses mild comedy to entertain as well as to comment on aspects of dispossession and want in contemporary life. In this first acquisition are also such films as Zan Boko (The Placenta, 1988), and Wend Kuuni (God’s Gift, 1982) by Burkina Faso’s Gaston Kaboré. Both films are inundated with filmic poetry; the style of realization might as well be termed ethnographic — the African, not Eurocentric notion of the term —linked with the sincerity and the coordinate fundamentals of pan-Africanist/socially committed artistic forms. Whereas Amadou Seck’s Saaraba (Utopia, Senegal, 1988), focuses

on unrealized independence promises and abysmal socioeconomic disintegration, Thomas Mogotlane and Oliver Schmitz’s Mapantsula (South Africa, 1988) is more conventional than any other, more com-

mercially oriented farce about anti-apartheid activism. The introduction of seven new acquisitions further demonstrates Newsreel’s progressive agenda toward the expansion of knowledge of Africa’s pluralistic cinematic initiative. There are two powerful and politically charged documentaries, Afrique, je te plumeria (Africa, I Will Fleece You, Cameroon,

1992) by Jean-Marie

Teno, and Lumumba: La Mortdu Prophete (Lumumba: Death of a Prophet, France,

1992) by Haiti’s Raoul Peck; and the docudrama Allah Tantou (God’s Will, Guinea,

1991). The vitriolic indictment of colonialism and neocolonialism apparent in these three films is as incisive as the acerbity with which films of the pioneering decades of African cinema used to de-

nounce crimes against the continent. In Afrique, French imperialism, Paul Biya’s repressive regime, and the ongoing subjugation of the continent is called into question. Lumumba chronicles the life of Africa’s political legend, the former Prime Minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, and shows how the country disintegrated due to an externally-fueled political inferno that terminated his life. As in Afrique and Lumumba, Allah Tantou recalls memory and history to evoke consciousness. The film foregrounds human rights violation in Guinea. It is interesting how all three films, coming at the same period, use mixed modes of address for specific effects. The bottom line is, they make powerful arguments why “Africans must reclaim their intellectual and [cultural] life, if they are to build vigorous, participative societies” (p. 4). The other titles in the Library of African Cinema include, Adama Drabo’s Tadona (Fire! Mali, 1991), a unique film about the environment, which suggests strategies for Africa’s development; Quartier Mozart (Cameroon, 1992) by

Jean-Pierre Bekolo, which uses popular culture to amuse and entertain; and Touki

Bouki (Hyena’s Journey, Senegal 1973) by Djibril Diop Mambety, which uses “fantasy and reality,” unconventional film style —jump cuts, discontinuity, and juxtaposition of opposite events — to impugn materialist and dependent culture. The films listed in this collection emphasize that African cinema is an oppositional film practice antithetical to the cinema of Hollywood. Many of these films are very innovative through an aesthetics

comptes rendus de lecture

176

deriving from certain dynamics traceable to conventions originating from the dominant cinematic practices and the signifying practices of African cultural arts. Similarly, some of the films are replete with

cultural symbols that are not easily accessible to western viewers and, therefore,

notimmune to aberrant readings in contradistinction to the uncovering of the cultural symbols and what is signified. The inclusion of citations of relevant writings or analyses pertaining to each film is one way of furthering the understanding of these films. For example, Touki Bouki, Finzan, Yeelen and Zan Boko are beauti-

fully photographed, highly innovative — the first shattering aesthetic norms (dominant or African). But for the viewer (Africans especially in Yeelen, and non-Africans), the inherent cultural symbolism

demands

mechanisms

for deciphering

them. In this case, both the teacher and the

student may find themselves in a confused state, making relentless efforts or futile

attempts to uncover the meanings, and thereby are likely to miss or ignore the social, cultural, political, and ideological

imperatives advocated. All the films in the Library of African Cinema are great discussion generators. They are made in various African countries, and although their varying themes and treatments may reflect the histories and cultures of the producing nations, the

result is pan-African. Reminiscent of that pan-African body called the OAU (Orga-

nization of African Unity) where differences abound but are implicated by acommon agenda — whether realized or not — propagation of African developmental initiative is always the driving force. For this reason, it is hoped that the Library of African Cinema will continue to expand upon its mission of “developing visions”, toward the use of cinema as an instrument of enlightenment

and discovery, of the

transformations occurring in Africa. For theatrical exhibition,

California

Newsreel also has selected titles of thiscollection in the 16mm and 35mm formats, and rental information is available

on request. But it is the VHS cassette format that is offered to schools and colleges at a relatively reduced rate made possible by subsidized funds. The 1994 catalogue, for example, offers for sale any five or more half-inch videocassettes for only $99.00 — less than the cost of renting single titles from other independent film distributors for classroom use. This is in consonance with Newsreel’s prerogative —the desire to expand the dissemination of African culture and history through the African lens. It is the right step in the right direction (via the courtesy of funds provided by the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National

Endowment for the Arts), especially coming at a time when departments in various American universities are suffering from cutbacks in funding. — N. Frank Ukadike

LC 1507

00079021

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J. R. Rayfield is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at York University, Canada. She has written extensively on African cinema and culture. Michel Serceau directs audio-visual activities at the Ecole normale of Casablanca in Morocco. He previously taught African cinema at the University of Paris X-Nanterre. Bruno Tackels works at the Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique de Paris. Keyan Tomaselli directs the Center for Cultural and Media Studies, University of

Natal, Durban. He is author of The Cinema of Apartheid (1988). N. Frank Ukadike teaches film and cultural studies at the University of Michigan. He is author of Black African Cinema and is at work on a book tentatively titled A Questioning Cinema: Conversations With African Filmmakers.

LIBRARY

=~

SOMMAIRE/TABLE OF CONTENTS

=

IRIS N° 18

PET

NEW DISCOURSES OF AFRICAN CINEMA NOUVEAUX DISCOURS DU CINEMA AFRICAIN

Introduction N: Frank URGGIRC ssssmessnserssseasenensersresseeeerenssee ee RE

Bi

Articles Brian Goldfarb A Pedagogical Cinema: Development Theory, Colonialism, and Post-Liberation. African Fm seen er 7 Jude Akudinobi Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African Cinema ........0...:.::cseeeeeeee 25 Michel Serceau Le cinéma d’Afrique noire francophone face au modèle occidental : la rançon du refus 39 Bruno Tackels Où Va le métis 7... RS 47 Keyan Tomaselli and Maureen Eke Secondary Orality in South African Film ee 61 Onookome Okome Cinema and Social Change in Nigeria: the Political Imperative 71 N. Frank Ukadike The Other Voices of Documentary: Allah Tantou and Afrique, je te DUUMETOR Lunettes a 81 Richard Porton Hyenas: Between Anti-Colonialism and the Critique of Modernity 95 JR. Rayfield Hyenes : comment trouver le message? ....