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Authorship and criticism in self-reflexive African cinema

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13696815.2011.637883

1469-9346

Yifen Beus,

African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues

Abstract Many theories and criticisms have been devoted to analysing various modes and themes of presentation in a postcolonial context in dealing with African cinema. Topics range from authenticity, cultural identity, decolonization, to the influence of oral tradition on cinema. However, little has been said about a type of criticism that comes from within cinema itself through a reflexive directorial intrusion. As a political tool to address continual cultural imperialism of the former colonial power and as a type of criticism on cinema as an art form, self-referentiality is often overlooked, and yet is capable of travelling freely between the filmmaker and the spectator like an organic agency that inherently resides within to manifest itself as criticism, to satirize, and to self-deconstruct in the Derridaian sense the very process of filmmaking. This article examines the self-critiquing nature of Abderrahmane Sissako's La Vie sur terre (Mali, Mauritania and France, 1998), Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Bye Bye Africa (Chad, 1999), and Fanta Régina Nacro's Un Certain matin (Burkina Faso, 1992) and argues that these directors, despite intra- and international differences in their creative circumstances, display a common mechanism in critiquing African cinema by laying bare in the Brechtian sense the process of filmmaking while retaining their aesthetic traits. Through reflexive cinema, they reaffirm the agenda to narrate in the voice of a griot (whose role is also to provide criticism and commentary in the oral tradition) and paradoxically display the realities of filmmaking in Africa today. Keywords: African cinemafilm criticoral traditionreflexive cinemareflexivity Notes David Murphy and Patrick Williams mentioned that under a unified charge of the Federation of African Filmmakers (FEPACI), African filmmakers and even policy makers had been very aware of the necessity to ‘decolonise’ themselves by advocating such means as ‘making films from an African point of view’ and ‘rejecting commercial, Western film codes’ since the mid 1907s (Murphy Citation2000, 239–40), but many have retreated from such a radical call in order to forge a viable popular African cinema industry. Murphy essentially argues against the notion of a unified, ‘authentic’ cinema of Africa, but uses the singular, collective term to advocate the centrality and significance of African cinema in world cinema scholarship (Murphy and Williams Citation2007, 5–6). While Dovey recognises the potency of a Pan-Africanist desire of a collective identity, she instead calls for the attention to the local, the ‘specific Africas’ in theorizing (2009, 2). As Bolgar-Smith explains, the term ‘griot’ is a post-contact conflation of similar cultural figures in different parts of Africa, in particular the former Mande empire. Therefore, one must understand that the griot has many roles (2010, 28–9). But it has become synonymous to the storyteller in African film scholarship largely due to Sembène's comments on this important cultural figure (Pfaff Citation1984). Other important critics discussing the relationship between the filmmaker and the griot include Malkus and Armes Citation(1991); Cham Citation(1993); Diawara Citation(1988, 1992); Ukadike Citation(1995); Tomaselli, Shepperson, and Eke Citation(1995); Tomaselli Citation(1993); Barlet (2004); and Bolgar-Smith Citation(2010). For example, Foucault's reading of modern language and literature as manifestation of nothing more than itself, Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the ‘nomadic model’ of knowledge and interpretation that functions like a ‘rhizome’, challenging the traditional practices of philosophy and history and suggesting an alternative for reading history, philosophy, art and literature coincide with Schlegel's assertion of Romantic irony as the essential marker of modernity. See Beus' work ‘Conclusion: The Modernity of Romantic Irony’ (2003, 145–50). Stuart Hall's link of the semiotic paradigm to a socio-cultural critique of mass media is highly applicable here as this essay will illustrate later that this self-rerefentiality is a crucial trope of a political cinema in order to subvert the historically dominant discourse of the Eurocentric paradigm. Bill Nichols also speaks of such a textual coding system, which has its fixated relationships between codes, but it does not deny ‘the possibility for reference to coordinates of meaning outside the film itself, especially since so many of the codes constituting it are themselves recruited from the con-text’ (1995, 71). Chidi Amuta analyzes the necessary aesthetics of artistic and literary production in modern Africa in a process of manifesting cultural autonomy and identity (1999, 158–63). Wayne describes this as the ‘unequivocal commitment to a position’ that Third Cinema has. However, without self-reflexivity, there always lies a risk of becoming self-indulgent and propagandistic (2001, 13). ‘Arte 2000 Vu Par’, consisting of 10 films from 10 different countries, attempted to capture fragmented moments in different parts of the world seen through the various perspectives of filmmakers of different nationalities: ‘Qu'est-ce qu'une date ? Un fragment de temps qui peut être un souvenir ou un moment à venir. Qu'est-ce l'an 2000? Plus qu'une date : la fin d'un siècle, le début d'un autre, le passage d'un millénaire à l'autre, l'aventure peut-être, vers un monde différent. Qu'est-ce que l'an 2000 à la télévision? ARTE a choisi: ce sera l'imaginaire’ (What is a date? A fragment of time which may be a memory or a moment to come. What is the year 2000? More than a date: the end of a century and the beginning of another, the passage of a millennium to another, the adventure perhaps, to a different world. What is the year 2000 on television? ARTE has chosen: it will be imaginary). For more details on the series, see http://archives.arte-tv.com/special/2000vupar/ftext/splash_f.html. Samuel Taylor Coleridge Citation(1817), Biographia Literaria, chapter xiv. I am referring to the shifting nature of the process of situating oneself, not the fixated positions per se. He begins filming after he gets in a van, and later in the film his friend Garba also drives him on his motorcycle around town shooting city scenes, a possible tribute to and conscious imitation of Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, in which the cinematographer rides in a car around Moscow with his camera making a ‘city symphony’. Here I am referring to Derrida's notion of a sign that awaits significance. Thus it emphasizes the mobility of the signifying process, not the fixed meaning itself. I am referring to the physical, economic circumstances under which filmmakers work. The ‘material condition’ according to Eileen Julien Citation(1992) will be discussed later. The list of funding agencies commonly supporting African filmmakers include Cinénomad (Paris), Fonds Sud Cinéma, ADC-Sud (both affiliated with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Fonds Européen de Développement (an EU agency), Agence Intergouvernementale de la Francophonie (an international non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Paris), and Arte France Cinéma. My critique derives from Laura Mulvey's Citation1975 seminal work ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. See also her 1989 Visual and Other Pleasures. The problematic treatment also stems from their intimate relationship during the filming. Numerous writers have devoted research and books on the empire's early and newer portrayals of its Other. Studies on such Orientalism are also many, thus there is no need to re-iterate these stereotypical images. This statement has appeared and been quoted numerous times in interviews and articles: Ulrich Gregor's Citation(1978) interview with Sembéne in Framework; 35–7 Françoise Pfaff's Citation(1982) ‘Three Faces of Africa: Women in Xala’, 27–31; and N. Frank Ukadike's Citation(1994) ‘Reclaiming Images of Women in Films from Africa and the Black Diaspora’, 106. Nacro also acknowledges in an interview with Bernard Verschueren from The Courier (2002, 2–5) that her decision to go into filmmaking stemmed from the ‘desire to tell stories’. She relates her childhood experiences in evening gatherings in the village where stories were told, and this was her traditional education via the stories, which ‘facilities learning and memory work’. These black filmmakers include America's Julie Dash, Australia's Tracey Moffatt, Gudeloupe's Sarah Maldoro, and Ethiopia's Salem Mekuria. For analysis of films that demystify black female images, see Ukadike Citation(1994). For Nacro's biographical information, see her official website: http://www.fanta-nacro.com/films/uncertainmatin.html. Sarah Elkaïm, ‘Fanta Régina Nacro, l'urgence de filmer’, Critikat.com, 20 September 2007. http://www.critikat.com/article.php3?id_article=186. In an interview on her first feature La Nuit de la verité, she was confronted with a question why she chose humour to deal with some of the toughest issues, and she replied: ‘j'ai choisi l'humour pour faire passer le message. Je me mets toujours en question quand je prépare un sujet…Pour ce film, j'avais envie de dire stop, regarde ce qu'il se passe autour de toi et vois ce que tu peux faire pour permettre un monde meilleur. Souvent dans les conflits, on laisse tout aux autorités, aux politiques, aux intellectuels. Il faut faire un travail personnel et pas obéir à des concepts abstraits, même s'il est important qu'il y ait une réflexion politique’ (I chose humour to get the message across. I always put in questions when I prepare a subject…For this film, I wanted to say stop, look what's happening around you and see what you can do to make a better world possible. Often in these conflicts, people leave everything to the authorities, politicians, intellectuals. You have to do personal work and not just obey abstract concepts, even though it is important that there be political reflection).