Drawing on more than 1,500 articles, reviews, and interviews written over the past fifteen years, Olivier Barlet identifies the critical questions brought about by the evolution of African cinema. In the process, he offers us a personal and passionate vision, making this book an indispensable sum of thought that challenges preconceived ideas and enriches an approach to cinema as a critical art.
Drawing on more than 1,500 articles, reviews, and interviews written over the past fifteen years, Olivier Barlet identifies the critical questions brought about by the evolution of African cinema. In the process, he offers us a personal and passionate vision, making this book an indispensable sum of thought that challenges preconceived ideas and enriches an approach to cinema as a critical art.
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Drawing on more than 1,500 articles, reviews, and interviews written over the past fifteen years, Olivier Barlet identifies the critical questions brought about by the evolution of African cinema. In the process, he offers us a personal and passionate vision, making this book an indispensable sum of thought that challenges preconceived ideas and enriches an approach to cinema as a critical art.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628952704 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2016 |
| Series: | African Humanities and the Arts |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 466 |
| File size: | 899 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Contemporary African Cinema
By Olivier Barlet, Melissa Thackway
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2016 Olivier BarletAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62895-270-4
CHAPTER 1
The Question of Criticism
The work of art, from whichever side you approach it, is an act of confidence in the freedom of men.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?
1.1. Disarray
You know African cinema; it tends to be serious, not light.
— Dani Kouyaté, in joint interview of the Ouaga Saga production team, by Olivier Barlet (2004)
1.1.1. Crisis: A New Paradigm
I wish to ram into every word the pain of those living in the clutches of a century that messes up hopes and maintains a relationship of panic with the future.
— Sony Labou Tansi, Antoine m'a vendu son destin
What is the cause of Hami's death? Evil is eating away at the village community, which can only quell the scourge with the help of Calacado, the diviner, who determines everyone's place. Like the child Hami, Africa is burning from its inability to distinguish the living from the dead (9622 and 2188). Africa is the subject of Flora Gomes's Po di Sangui/Tree of Blood (Guinea-Bissau, 1996), but its theme is the world. The crisis that forces the entire village onto the road of exile, while the loggers destroy the forest that harbors everyone's tree of life, is at the same time cultural, ecological, and economic. Duality upsets the world's unity and ruins human lives. Flora Gomes expresses this through twinhood. Twins Hami and Dou are two facets of the same son, Hamidou, for whom his mother, in a trance, calls out in a striking scene in which the clay-covered women pass a twin pitcher through the dyed red drapes — the color of both blood and power in animist tradition.
"The ancestors declared that one of you had to die, but your father and the imam refused," exclaims the mother in her trance before giving birth to the pitcher of reconciliation. What sacrifice must be made, then? Dou emigrates, while Hami stays behind. Strengthened by his overseas experience, Dou leads the village, while Calacado remains on the sidelines; the village can confront its heritage, if it lets itself be guided, like Saly, by the sun.
Something has to be sacrificed to counter the disarray. What is the way out of the crisis that threatens human unity? The lines need to move. Is letting a part of oneself go necessarily a loss? Dou is also the name of the African character in Cheick Fantamady Camara's first short film, Konorofili (Guinea, 2000), whose title means "anxiety." His characters seek the strength to overcome despair through relationships (2299). But the film is still pessimistic. Before a world dominated by market forces, which threaten the fundamental balance of the planet and human survival, "the artist is paralyzed," to quote Patrick Chamoiseau (8067). "Why make images? For what future?" asks Raoul Peck at the start of his documentary Profit & Nothing But! (Haiti, 2001), set in the small Haitian village of Port-à-Piment, "a country where figures no longer mean a thing." How to continue making films in this wilderness that Taïeb Louhichi portrays in La Danse du vent/Belly Dance (Tunisia, 2003)? Before the formatting of access to dreams, the film makes a vital plea for a meaningful cinema, for meaning that draws on the imagination as a source of utopia (3474). "Your dreams are your salvation," Zazia the Bedouin says, during a dance, to the filmmaker played by the Algerian director Mohamed Chouikh. Today's flood of images paradoxically goes hand in hand with a deficit of representation. We have not finished eating dust, like this filmmaker who gradually runs out of steam chasing his dream in an arid world; but, in the ancient books and customs, a Zazia is there who cannot be reduced to a distant illusion.
To reflect the urgent issues of their communities, artists need to go forth, rooted in their sense of belonging — "stemming from their belonging, but well in advance of it," adds Patrick Chamoiseau (8067). "Henceforth," the artist is "ahead of the world." With the collapse of the nineteenth-century grand narratives, the local now more resolutely opposes the global, but we are all aware of inhabiting the same planet. That is what the concept of globality encapsulates, and it is within this new paradigm that the critical debates on the new forms of audiovisual production and distribution lie.
"There are positive and negative aspects in every culture," Flora Gomes declared during the Po di Sangui press conference when the film was presented in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival. A statement of the obvious? Not necessarily! His film shows that the price to pay for modernization goes beyond the age-old tradition versus modernity conflict: namely, a certain abnegation, a sacrificing of a part of oneself to accept what is of value in the Other. "The problem is not so much economic as mental," Ousmane Sembene said to Samba Gadjigo in 2004, concerned about the future of an Africa that is struggling to organize its economic exchanges. "The coming century is the most dangerous one" (3369). The main obstacle is the ruling classes, which he was planning, had death not struck him down, to focus on in the third part of his triptych after Faat Kine (2000) and Moolaade (2004): La Confrérie des rats/The Brotherhood of Rats.
"Authoritarian restoration here, administrative multiparty systems there, elsewhere feeble advances that, notwithstanding, remain reversible and, pretty much everywhere, high levels of social violence, or even festering situations, simmering conflicts, or open war, set to a backdrop of an economy of extraction that, true to the colonial mercantile logic, continues to encourage predation; this, with a few notable exceptions, is the overall landscape." Achille Mbembe's bleak portrait (9139) expresses the blockage experienced by the multitude of "have-nots," those who, abandoned to their own lot, have nothing left to lose. This imagery of permanent civil war fosters emigration, criminality, and illegality. Underpinned by an often criminal complicity, a minimalist state, and international indifference — not to mention what Mbembe calls the "logic of extraction and predation that characterize the political economy of resources in Africa" — it destroys the chances of inventing an alternative future.
Of course, the African continent aspires to freedom and well-being, but "this desire struggles to find a language, effective practices, and above all a translation in new institutions and a new political culture where political struggle is no longer a zero-sum game," Mbembe adds. Constructing this new imagination necessarily means reconsidering the question of this Other who traverses the whole of African history, which Chamoiseau expresses by proposing an "imagery of diversity to think the unthinkable."
When, for example, in the United States, whose cinema invades the entire planet, only 3 percent of literary publications are translations, it is urgent — yet not always easy — to discover the world, for it indeed confronts us with our ignorance of our own culture, encouraging us to develop it. At a time when our world is moving further and further away from the human, reducing the spirit to matter, desire to need, the subject to object in a greed orchestrated into an insatiable rapaciousness, there is a danger of restoring narcissism to guarantee order. It is necessary to return to the fundamentals. By calling his second film about the Pygmies L'Eau, la forêt, la terre/Water, Forest, Earth (2002) — the first, Le Dernier des Babingas/The Last Babingas (Congo, 1989), portrayed how industrial logging has radically altered their environment and ruined the forest — David-Pierre Fila uses these three elements to illustrate his fear for the future of the world (2795), already expressed in his short film Elle revient quand maman?/When Is Mamma Coming Back? (Congo, 2000). It is essential to return to the human, to our origins, to our destiny, to our inscription in nature and our finiteness to reflect on the crisis and to rediscover the meaning of our derisory passage on this planet. But given the runaway advances of science, technology, the economy, and profit that constitute our modern perils (crises, ecology, terrorism, war), it is crucial to remember "that you never kill a passion without substituting it with another, with a new paradigm," as Pascal Bruckner pointed out in Le Monde newspaper on February 28, 2009.
To orient its reflection, criticism may, then, reference a poetics of the global, far from identity-based essentialism, "not the anguish-ridden solitude of economic globalization, but individuation as a negotiation between one's self and Others, which builds a grouping of solidarities," as Chamoiseau puts it (8067). This can help it identify and encourage new imaginary forms, symbolic reorganizations, and the new demands for humanization in artworks.
1.1.2. A Terrifying Crossing
No frontier exists that cannot be crossed.
— Patrick Chamoiseau and Edouard Glissant, "Les Murs"
On August 2, 1999, two young Guineans, Yaguine Koïta and Fodé Tounkara, were found in Brussels, frozen to death in the undercarriage of a plane. They left behind a letter, addressed to "the members and heads of Europe": "It is our honorable pleasure and in confidence that we write you this letter to inform you of the objective of our voyage and our suffering, we the children and youth of Africa." They continued with this plea: "Help us, we are greatly suffering in Africa, we have problems and suffer abuses of child rights." Gahité Fofana based his film Un matin bonne heure/Early in the Morning (Guinea, 2005) on this anything but innocuous incident (4460).
Sixty percent of the African population is under eighteen. Just like the European metropolises' inner-city or suburban housing projects, Africa's cities have become sites of relegation where young people suffer, as is clear from the opening voice-over of Merzak Allouache's Harragas (Algeria, 2009), decrying the cramped housing conditions, unemployment, and lack of prospects (9206). This loss of power over one's territory, life, and future turns these places into launch pads to an elsewhere. Leaving becomes a survival mechanism, even if Allouache's film opens on a suicide and a suicide note: "If I stay, I die. If I leave, I die" — a terrible indictment on the country of departure.
Africa's youth are trapped, and the experience is as violent as slavery in the past. Meanwhile, the elites import socially frivolous goods (SUVs, alcohol, arms). The youth are caught between leaving and resignation, as Laïla Marrakchi's short metaphor 200 dirhams (Morocco, 2002) (2323) portrays, in which a young herder dreams of crossing the freeway. As the late documentary filmmaker Samba Félix Ndiaye said: "When I see the young taking boats, preferring suicide because they don't have the answers to their fears and their future, we have a duty to find a response, we can't be silent. Once again, Africa is being won over by a sort of fatalistic resignation!" (7956). Discussing this question as he presented his last film, Questions à la terre natale/Questions to the Native Land (Senegal, 2007), at the Apt Film Festival, he left the full movie theater a moment, overcome with emotion, unable to hold back his tears. I also remember Abderrahmane Sissako's tears at his Q&A on the same subject during the Cannes Film Festival's Social Visions selection. In his film Bamako (Mauritania, 2006), the few shots of immigrants crossing the desert — more mobilizing than they are damning — sum up the outrageous inhumanity of how they are treated. No words are needed. As Oumou Sangare's melancholic voice resounds, the cloths that the women are dyeing redden the water, and the freshly dyed cloth fills the screen (4429).
Before the horror of watching its youth go to their likely deaths, should or can the cinema be sounding the alarm?
A far cry from Sissako's minimalist metaphors, is social cinema, which seeks to engage people's emotions and understand the mechanisms at work, the answer? The success of Philippe Lioret's Welcome (France, 2008) would suggest so. But pedagogical intent and heavy-handed messages conveyed through melodrama that wear their good intentions on their sleeves tend to undermine the genre. This can be said of Et après ..., by Mohamed Ismaël (Morocco, 2002), which closes with the words "Populations do not die of hunger, they die of humiliation" (2687). The film focuses on the lure of the world of money. Even if they tragically recall the divide between deprivation and abundance, it is reductive to believe that the harraga, "those who burn" their ID papers or "burn" borders — in other words, clandestine migrants — are attracted only by a Western Eldorado; they know its limits only too well. "The West's lights aren't lights, they're just electricity," as Djibril Diop Mambety put it (4690). The term used to describe them — "burners" — incarnates a dream of another kind. That is what Tanger, le rêve des brûleurs/Tangiers, the Burners' Dream (Morocco, 2002) captures. In the film, Leïla Kilani films the geography of little streets, walls, containers, and puddles in impressionistic images and sounds. Every image vibrates with solitude, austerity, despair, and incertitude. The "burners" do anything to leave: they burn their papers, their identity. Willing to force their destinies, they have the makings of those cowboy heroes whose independence and grit we admire. Tangiers is a physical, corporal, sensual frontier vibrating with these men and women who dream of a mythical elsewhere that they can only find on the other side of this barrier (see interview with Leïla Kilani, 3043).
Yasmine Kassari's documentary Quand les hommes pleurent/When Men Cry (Morocco, 2000) portrays the sad outcome, voicing the words of exploited and uprooted immigrants in Spain, who no longer burn at all (0039). The tragedy of those who have managed to cross is no longer the same tragedy of those who are trying to cross, as testified by the young Africans who are turned back, and who also speak directly to the camera, relating their traumatic experiences in Victimes de nos richesses, pays pillés très endettés/Victims of Our Riches (Mali, 2007), by Kal Touré (8950).
As the worlds imagined by these "burners" that no borders can hold back are not rational, appealing to reality is pointless. Cinema thus turns to fiction, restoring these characters' psychological depth, which is often neglected in social films in favor of social relations and mores. Dedicated to the anonymous casualties of the Gibraltar Straits, Mostéfa Djadjam's Frontières/Frontiers (Morocco, 2002) surpasses the sociological to broaden understanding of these characters by following the relationship between six men and one woman, whose solidarity wanes when each individually faces the crossing (2131). One character in Hassan Legzouli's Tenja/Testament (Morocco, 2004) offers an unclichéd representation of the prospective illegal migrant: Mimoun, the head of the morgue, whose name and "Morocco" T-shirt are so evocative. He too burns with the desire to leave, despite the bodies that pile up in his morgue. He has the folly that the project takes, the detachment of dreams, and the tragedy of humanity: he burns. As such, he is a guide for the main character, Nordine, who is also seeking some form of structure, without wanting to become attached (3580).
That is the crux of the question: how, today, to nurture an imagination of globalization in a world where most people cannot circulate without risking their lives. Mati Diop faithfully captures the "burners'" dreams and imagination in Atlantiques (Senegal, 2009) through the character Serigne. He states that Africa only offers him the dust in his pockets, but his reasons to leave lie elsewhere: in the initiatory myth of travel, in the unknown, the unspeakable. This imaginary realm, which transcends death for want of being able to live life, proves to be an illusory, tragic beacon, however, that plunges them into the sea — not the Mediterranean, but the Atlantic, the sea that hitherto swallowed the enchained slaves (9405).
Indeed, people smugglers rob migrants before turning them in or throwing them into the sea. This is common knowledge, so why show it again on the screen? Some, like Abderrahmane Sissako in Heremakono/Waiting for Happiness (Mauritania, 2002), set in Nouadibou, try instead to understand the perversity that the frontier has now become. Daoud Aoulad-Syad frees himself from the shackles of narrative to capture the suspended state of awaiting departure in the merciless hole that is Tarfaya, after which the film is named (Morocco, 2004). Eschewing a sociological approach too, Daoud Aoulad-Syad focuses less on migration itself than on the obsession it provokes in us all — a tragic expression of the thirst for freedom. Frontiers should be a passage, a link, a relation between cultures, yet they have become a terrible impermeability between nation-states. As a result, people wait, seek. These are uncertain bodies who carry their past while the future remains closed to them. Focusing on this circular in-betweenness between people and places, Tarfaya is a meditation on the state of our divided world, one part of which dreams only of reaching the mirage of the Other, even though, as the kid wants to tell his father who has emigrated, "things are good here too" (4689).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Contemporary African Cinema by Olivier Barlet, Melissa Thackway. Copyright © 2016 Olivier Barlet. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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