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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611862454 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2017 |
| Series: | African Humanities and the Arts |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 314 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
African Filmmaking
Five Formations
By Kenneth W. Harrow
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2017 Michigan State UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-245-4
CHAPTER 1
African Francophone Cinema
Olivier Barlet and Kenneth W. Harrow
The question of influence and horizon of possibilities for Francophone filmmakers is similar to that of other independent filmmakers. The need to finance a film has meant that they have had to turn to government agencies or ministries, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or funding agencies or sources, each of which has had its own agenda. The degree of freedom any filmmaker might have is partly determined by his or her own autonomy or stature in the profession, and by his or her stubbornness as well as reputation. Thus Sembène Ousmane was largely able to determine the content and direction of his films, but could not finance his magnum opus, a historical film on El Hadj Umar, despite his long-expressed desire to do so. The most famous anecdote involving the constraints placed on his work concerns Mandabi (1968), which had been funded by the French Centre National de la Cinématographie and coproduced with his own company, Domirev, and Comptoir Français du film (Gadijgo 1993, 35). Having shot the film in Wolof, Sembène was told he had to produce a Francophone version, which required shooting the entire film in French (as Le Mandat) as well as Wolof (Mandabi). The decision to shoot a Wolof version, which has become the standard version today, attested to Sembène's commitment to respond to the needs of his Senegalese audience to understand a film without subtitles, a film in their language. However, his means were limited, and when the actor playing the postman left before the shooting of the film had been completed, Sembène was obliged to reconfigure an ending and produced the montage of earlier shots with voice-over, which is how the film now concludes.
These constraints are examples of the myriad limits placed upon directors who cannot finance projects with their own money. The speculation of what influence the sources of funding have on a director's choice of style and topic, and what audience to target (what implied audience to construct), has been heightened in the case of Francophone African cinema, which has long depended upon subventions from various French governmental or commercial agencies. We might adopt Raymond Williams's (1983) description of the relationship of the superstructure to the base as one of "relative autonomy" — following Gramsci, and later adopted by Althusser (1972). "Relative autonomy" might mean that an African filmmaker might have a vision of a project, and then would have to shop it around the various funding agencies, knowing the kinds of projects they had financed in the past, the weight his or her name might carry, the possibilities of arguing for the likely success of the project with African or European audiences, and so forth. This pattern is true for all filmmakers, but in the case of Francophone literature, its parameters were largely set by the willingness of the French Ministry of Cooperation, its Film Bureau, or of "la Francophonie," situated in one location or another over the years. Andrade-Watkins's conclusion in 1993 holds for today as well: "As black African cinema moves into its third decade, the obstacles to financial and technical self-sufficiency in production, distribution and exhibition have largely remained unresolved" (32). Ironically, as she was penning these words in the early 1990s, Nigerian and Ghanaian video filmmakers were beginning the revolution in African film by creating a cheap, commercial, popular form of cinema that eschewed the ideological commitments and aesthetic choices of what had been the dominant forms of African cinema — FESPACO films — that had been established since Vieyra's "L'Afrique sur Seine" (1955) and Sembène's La Noire de ... (1966).
Efforts to duplicate the new digital revolution have been made in Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, and Senegal, and throughout many other African countries, with a wide shift in the direction of films with high entertainment values, commercial priorities, and often emotional, melodramatic, personal storylines once considered inappropriate for newly independent African states (Boughedir 1976). The term "genre" films, which encompass telenovela-style series, action and crime dramas, as well as films focusing on magic, Evangelical Christian baselines, love potions, poisonings, and especially lush, luxurious settings, have reconfigured the horizon of possibilities, driving many of the Nigerian marketers to demand conformity to these selling points in the creation of quickly made, inexpensive films.
In what follows, a chronological structure of dominant paradigms, or phases, will be set out. This is not intended as teleological, but rather is closer to what Russian formalists understood by the dominant as a tendency that marked a period, even as simultaneously other paradigms and cultural approaches were deployed. Here we should understand that even as filmmakers set out to create an African cinema in the 1960s, their signature work continued during subsequent periods that developed new trends, and that those dominant trends never totally eclipsed earlier approaches and trends. During any decade, one might see different approaches continue, even as some emerged and dominated the screens for a time.
The naissance of African cinema from its earliest idealized version was inspired by Russian socialist values. African cinema of the 1960s and 1970s dealt with issues of social/political engagement, the need to confront the immediate problems of nationhood, the challenge of the new nations facing their future, and the dreams of creating the New Africa, the New African Man and Woman. Sembène's early films Borom Sarret (1963), Tauw (1970), and Xala (1975) contain shots that highlight the time since independence. This is the optic through which African cinema was viewed as serious, political, and, most of all, engagé, the key term for the 1960s–1970s.
The first films by African directors, including Paulin Vieyra, Sembène Ousmane, and Oumarou Ganda, occurred at the time of the struggle for the end of colonialism and for independence — a time that defined its values around the works of Fanon, Memmi, Cabral; around the war in Algeria, whence the great importance that came to be attached to The Battle of Algiers (1966) as the signature piece of revolutionary filmmaking; around Marxist belief in class struggle and Engel's analysis of imperialism; around the solidarity of the black struggle, whence the embrace of C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins (1938). It was a period that laid the foundation for the soon-to-develop struggle against neocolonialism, and with the compromised new leadership that introduced one-party states or corruption, and rule by force, and that collaborated with the former colonial master. Thus, whereas Senghor ascended to the presidency of Senegal, and other African leaders espoused a rhetoric of negritude or black authenticity, such leaders following in the wake of Nkrumah, Lumumba, Azikiwe, or Ben Bella, came to be regarded as tyrants. Mobutu in Zaire, Idi Amin in Uganda, Ahidjo in Cameroon, or the Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Empire, all deployed versions of this rhetoric while instigating severely repressive regimes.
The project of the early filmmakers was to expose the failures of an abusive authoritarianism. By the 1970s, when Sembène attacked neocolonialism, most famously in Xala, others like Jean-Pierre Dikongue-Pipa challenged a patriarchy associated with traditional society, as in Muna Moto (1975) or Le Prix de la liberté (1978). By then, Negritude was viewed as passé or worse, as heard in the mocking, dismissive words of Mphahlele or especially Soyinka. Civil rights rhetoric, likewise, belonged to the past, especially as militant liberationist struggles continued and intensified in Portuguese Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique. During that period, Mandela and Mbeki languished on Robbin Island, while the armed wing of the ANC, and especially the Black Consciousness movement and the PAC, carried on the fight. National independence was determined by a path whose foundations were laid on the concept of the modern nation-state that colonialism had denied to its African subjects.
In retrospect, that project of a committed cinema can be seen as a subset of modernist thinking: progressivist in nature and ameliorist in ambition. Modernism's binary of modern versus traditional, as seen in Touki Bouki (1973) or Xala (1974), dominates all the films of the period, providing a frame for casting the narratives and characters into a familiar world, a territory inhabited by claims of oppression, exploitation, and evil neocolonialist antagonists, as well as authenticity with authentic African figures and truths. The inauthentic figure takes the form of the assimilated capitalist; the authentic speaks Wolof to her father, participates in the publication of a Wolof journal, and, more broadly, participates in the embrace of African culture over Europeanized, imitative culture. Modernism gave definition to the New that stood in relation to a notion of the Old Africa that had to be discarded.
Old Africa was associated with rural ways (Tauw 1970) or paternal/patriarchal figures who oppress women — with issues of forced marriages and husbands silencing, beating, and confining their wives and oppressing their sons. This vision appeared frequently in Dikongue-Pipa's films (Muna Moto 1975; Le Prix de la liberté 1978) — with young women forced into marriages with old, unsympathetic patriarchal figures, and the love between younger couples complicated by the fathers' desires to marry off their daughters. Similarly, marabouts as charlatans who exploited children, exposing them to danger, represented the Old Africa, tied to the past, to rural values, and to Muslim religious orders (Sembène, Traore). Religion was associated with charlatanism or marabouts, either foreign, Moors, or simply exploiters. In Senegal, Old Africa was rural, dominated by a stagnant version of Islam — as in Sembène's novella Vehi Ciosane (1966), where old men, old imams or muezzins, countenanced the incestuous acts of a father who impregnated his young daughter. For her, liberty came with flight to the city.
Other versions of these tropes can be seen in the opening of Touki Bouki, with the passage of the rural pastoral setting into the urban abattoir, or in Xala, with El Hadj crawling toward a new young wife with a gris gris in his mouth. Though these were two radically different movies, they still thematized the Old Africa facing the New, beyond issues simply cast as engagement.
The New Africa was located in cities, in the younger generation, in revolutionary youth (Xala), modeled historically after the Originaires in Senegalese communes. The idea of being modern can be traced to figures like the youthful Rama in So Long a Letter (1980), to the figures of intellectuals, closer to European intellectuals or leftists than to Muslim or African intellectuals or oral traditions. This model of the "New" is not located in Europe, but grounded in a notion of Europe, of France, generating mixed messages. It is seen as both liberating from debilitating conventions or rituals, as represented repeatedly in Sembène's or Traore's work; yet this New African figure can also often be seen as emasculating, with men rendered ridiculous in their submission or subordination to women, to their wives who ought to be obeying or admiring their husbands (we get a whiff of that still in as late a film as Faat Kine [2000], as well as in Mambéty's earlier work Touki Bouki [1973]). The image of the New "modern" African often denotes young men and women seeking to create a New Africa, free from both the past country ways and colonial European forms of oppression. There is a shift in the 1970s and later when this New African begins to feel the burdensome weight of the older revolutionary class that took control on independence and who abused their prerogatives. We see this not only in the members of the Chamber of Commerce in Xala (1974) or in the fathers in Faat Kine but also in the revolutionary old guard in The Blue Eyes of Yonta (1991), the latter to be seen in contrast with the earlier revolutionary Sambizanga (1972) — both set in Lusophone Africa, and therefore at the final edge of revolutionary cinema.
This first paradigm of Francophone African cinema is often defined in relation to colonialism or neocolonialism, as well as to the rural countryside viewed as old and stagnant, or as collaborative with colonialists. The relation to an oppressive French or foreign dominant order is to be opposed, resisted, fought. Resistance often turns on the figure of an oppressed woman, or less often a youth, with patriarchy seen as corrupted (Muna Moto 1975, Tauw 1970, Finye 1982). Ultimately this phase engendered a cinematic ideology understood as anticolonial or revolutionary, with heroic examples in the cinema of Sembène Ousmane, Med Hondo, Sara Maldoror, and subsequently Malian, Burkinabe, and Senegalese filmmakers, including Souleyman Cissé, Idrissa Ouédraogo, Mahama Johnson Traore, Cheick Oumar Cissoko, Gaston Kaboré, and Safi Faye. Frequently their works trade on a binary that sets the old, traditional, authentic version of Africa over against urban modernity. Engagement is situated within these parameters, without acknowledgment of the debt to the colonialist discourses of modernism.
Exemplary Case of First Paradigm: Sembène Ousmane
Sembène's films lent themselves to this first paradigm, and were so successful that they provided models for much of what followed with other Sahelian directors. The narrative structure of most of Sembène's films followed a similar pattern. The films begin with the presentation of a problem, usually involving a crisis that crystallizes around some opposition to the film's protagonist. This is usually followed by a false solution in which the prospects of the removal of the obstacle are shown to be inadequate. Eventually a true solution is found, with the issues related to the film's underlying rhetoric resolved and explicated. This is the threefold or dialectical path to truth, following a trajectory at the end of which the audience is enjoined to see and appreciate the truth uncovered by Sembène, and, ideally, be motivated to act.
Each film constructed according to this model must silence some figures, must occlude contrary or alternative perspectives that might have led to an alternative direction, and this is the small term in the price to be paid for accepting the underlying system of values. Finally, the question of the larger system of values may also be seen as leading us to conclusions that are equally limiting in the interpellations of the viewer. We can see these questions of larger systems of value as having pertinence to the field of postcolonial studies as it passed from its earlier years of struggle for national independence to the more recent period of globalization, with the concomitant postcolonial crises of the African nation. Sembène has been there throughout this entire period, and his films continue to have a huge impact, if not on other younger filmmakers then on Africanists in general, as well as on that narrowly specialized audience for African film.
Sembène's career begins with short- or medium-length films, Borom Sarret (1963), La Noire de ... (1966), and Tauw (1970), where the basic pattern is established. Borom Sarret concerns a cartman who hauls goods or people for a living. The initial problem is that he doesn't earn enough money to make a decent living. The implied solution for him is better pay, a problem related to the fact that his clientele is generally drawn from the relatively impoverished class of ordinary Senegalese. Eventually the cartman is convinced to take a wealthy client to the Plateau, the expensive, formerly European quartier of Dakar, as the apparent solution to his need for cash. There he is in infraction of the rules forbidding charrettes (or horse-drawn carts) from going to the Plateau, and despite the rich client's promise to help, his cart is confiscated. He returns home on foot, as his personal dilemma is now portrayed as the consequence of an unjust economic and social system based on class division. The implied solution lies in working through the injustices of class difference, a solution in harmony with the general acceptance of the socialism widely embraced by African intellectuals in the 1960s. In the final scene, the cartman's wife leaves him with their child, telling him she will find money for the food they need. The false solution of the cartman trying to extend his income by daring to go onto the Plateau for a higher fare, and trusting the nouveau bourgeois client to protect him, is replaced by the determination of the no-nonsense wife, who might be seen to represent a more idealized proletariat figure. There are other small elements in the film that relate to this, but the gist of the film lies in its presentation of class values along the lines of a revolutionary socialist point of view.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from African Filmmaking by Kenneth W. Harrow. Copyright © 2017 Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface Kenneth W. Harrow ix
Introduction Kenneth W. Harrow 1
African Francophone Cinema Olivier Barlet Kenneth W. Harrow 31
Anglophone West Africa: Commercial Video Jonathan Haynes 81
Egypt: Cinema and Society Viola Shafik 117
The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of the Cinemas of the Maghreb: From the 1960s to the New Millennium Valérie K. Orlando 175
Film Production in South Africa: Histories, Practices, Policies Jacqueline Maingard 241
About the Authors 281
Index 285