Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary African Cinema

The Politics of Beauty

James S. Williams

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350105065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Since the beginnings of African cinema, the realm of beauty on screen has been treated with suspicion by directors and critics alike. James S. Williams explores an exciting new generation of African directors, including Abderrahmane Sissako, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Fanta Régina Nacro, Alain Gomis, Newton I. Aduaka, Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Mati Diop, who have begun to reassess and embrace the concept of cinematic beauty by not reducing it to ideological critique or the old ideals of pan-Africanism.
Locating the aesthetic within a range of critical fields - the rupturing of narrative spectacle and violence by montage, the archives of the everyday in the 'afropolis', the plurivocal mysteries of sound and language, male intimacy and desire, the borderzones of migration and transcultural drift - this study reveals the possibility for new, non-conceptual kinds of beauty in African cinema: abstract, material, migrant, erotic, convulsive, queer. Through close readings of key works such as Life on Earth (1998), The Night of Truth (2004), Bamako (2006), Daratt (Dry Season) (2006), A Screaming Man (2010), Tey (Today) (2012), The Pirogue (2012), Mille soleils (2013) and Timbuktu (2014), Williams argues that contemporary African filmmakers are proposing propitious, ethical forms of relationality and intersubjectivity. These stimulate new modes of cultural resistance and transformation that serve to redefine the transnational and the cosmopolitan as well as the very notion of the political in postcolonial art cinema.

1 THE TROUBLE WITH BEAUTY: REIMAGINING AFRICAN FILM AESTHETICS

It is no longer sufficient that we keep on producing in order to waken people’s consciousness, etc.. We have to be humble enough to move the debate on to film as a form of artistic creation in itself rather than as a means to achieve progress for a cause.

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

Now with a camera I can see the world differently, I feel I exist when I film. I feel joy, I can see beauty.

Abou in Those Who Jump (Les Sauteurs, 2016)

In African cinema, beauty is trouble. This is due not simply to the long, complex, and deeply contested legacy of colonial ethnographic film with its dubious exoticist tendencies and racist pretensions of absolute knowledge and truth, namely of the black Other.¹ The first generation of black African filmmakers and critics in the 1960s considered the very idea of cinematic beauty highly suspect, and at best irrelevant, if it did not fall squarely within the bounds of ideological critique and postcolonial allegory. At the risk of gross simplification, beauty was a tainted marker of oppressive colonial ideology, at once false and reactionary, even deviant, because it interfered with the urgent, idealizing myths of nationhood, modernity and cultural revolution. Pioneering filmmakers like the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene, the so-called ‘Father of African cinema’, who regarded cinema’s primary function as an emancipatory tool for decolonizing the mind as well as for forging a national imaginary, defiantly eschewed all notions of beauty which he deemed Western and imported. Sembene even declared rhetorically that the word ‘art’ did not exist in African languages, deliberately choosing to ignore that the Igbo word ‘nka’, for instance, means ‘artistry’ or ‘of art’.

In such an ideologically charged context, beauty could only operate in excess of desired political aims and outside the prescribed parameters of national and working-class consciousness. Starting with Sembene’s groundbreaking, politically engaged fictions like Borom Sarret (The Wagoner) (1963) and Black Girl (La Noire de…, 1965), the aesthetic was forced to carry the burden of political aims and ideals. This process would be explicitly formalized in Sembene’s celebrated political allegory and satire, Xala (1974) (The Curse), where the sudden sexual impotency of the protagonist El Hadji (Thierno Leye) on his wedding night – related to, if not directly caused by, his role in neocolonialist corruption and aping the sterile structures of the former European colonizers – is also linked to his penchant for stylized black-and-white art images of exoticized young African women. One such is a photograph of his new, third wife Ngoné (Dieynaba Dieng), her face and naked upper torso shot in profile with one of her bare breasts just visible – an eroticized image of her commodification sealed, during her Western-style wedding, by the plastic model of a white bride and groom on the cake and the presents lavished upon her as part of her dowry. Such nefarious signs of European taste are powerfully contradicted by El Hadji’s proud, rebellious student daughter Rama (Marème Niang), who speaks in Wolof, often dresses in a Senegalese robe (the boubou), and is presented throughout as a progressive force for change.

To claim that Sembene was a revolutionary artist who simply had no time at all for beauty in his search for new African symbols is, however, potentially to miss the point. His allegorical mode of social realism advancing the new nationalist narratives of social progress and pan-African modernity was, after all, continually working through, as much as against, the dominant aesthetic codes of European cinema, resulting in the case of Xala in what Laura Mulvey has aptly called ‘a kind of poetics of politics’ (Mulvey 1993). And beauty as the index of a certain ‘false realism’ was also rechannelled and reconfigured in the radical modernist experimentation of arguably the most gifted filmmaker of this first generation of African cinema, who started five years after Sembene, his fellow-countryman Djibril Diop Mambety. In dazzlingly experimental films like Touki-Bouki (The Journey of the Hyena) (1973), which fulfilled even more dramatically the general desire of early African directors to escape any trace of colonial documentary naturalism with its descriptive visual reportage and ‘neutral’ mode of voice-over commentary,² Mambety mined material reality for poetic rather than political symbol. Yet while their styles and methods were poles apart, Mambety and Sembene shared an underlying aim to harness the external world for symbolic purposes.

Such pervasive, ingrained suspicion of ‘raw’ realism – and in Sembene’s case of any direct engagement with the material beauty of natural things – has withstood the major twists and turns in the evolution of African cinema, including the ‘return to the source’ or calabash tendency, the second decisive new phase of African cinema that came to the fore during the 1980s with Burkinabe director Gaston Kaboré’s rural film God’s Gift (Wênd Kûuni, 1982), and which included popular films of village life by his fellow-countryman Idrissa Ouedraogo such as Yaaba (1989), as well as more self-consciously poetic works like the Malian director Souleymane Cissé’s Brightness (Yeelen, 1987).³ Ouedraogo’s at once realist and poetic gaze on marginal peasant characters, intensified by long takes and depth of field, harboured clear political intentions. Yet although calabash cinema purported to be an authentically African approach and style, employing, for example, classic tropes of the rich, griot, oral storytelling heritage, it ultimately fed into the Western art cinema tradition and was immediately castigated as regressive by Third Cinema critics and filmmakers like Sembene who had more pressing and explicit political questions on their agenda. They regarded such films as Yaaba and Brightness, which for many viewers across the world still represent an artistic high point of African postcolonial cinema, as a misguided, apolitical project – a reactionary, universalist aesthetics of pseudo- or neo-négritude that conscripted nature and landscape to create a timeless Africa. Moreover, it fell into the trap, one that still exists today, of reproducing stereotypically ‘pure’ and ‘authentic’ images of Africa which Western producers, who continue largely to underwrite African cinema, invariably demand: scenic panoramas, pastoral innocence, untarnished tribal customs. In one influential essay, the American scholar of black cinema Clyde Taylor called for African film critics to abandon aesthetic considerations altogether, for such an approach was fatally compromised by the Western imperialist notions of universal value which underpin them (see Taylor 1989).

It is on and around the surface of the female body that the prohibition of beauty was most acutely played out in African cinema, because within predominantly patriarchal African societies the female form is viewed as the most conspicuous display of human beauty. Indeed, female beauty was often seen not just as counter to the serious political ideals of the national independence project – a form of political imposture and open provocation to bad faith – but also as a dangerous and potentially fatal influence tout court if not politically encoded and held allegorically in check. The films where the very idea of female beauty is devalorized within the narrative are too numerous to mention, but one in particular stands out: Flora Gomes’s The Blue Eyes of Yonta (Udju Azul di Yonta, 1992). Set in Guinea-Bissau, it features a stunningly attractive young woman called Yonta (Maysa Marta) who is first courted by the older Vicente (Antonìo Simâo Mendes), then later dismissed as ‘just a girl’, that is, as someone who has not lived like him through the glory days of revolution and independence. Vicente’s political background is presented as a poisoned chalice, however, since he finds life in present-day Guinea-Bissau perplexing and frustrating. He has become disillusioned and beset by demons, unlike the candid and confident Yonta who embodies the new generation of materialism and consumerism by embracing Western notions of beauty. Gomes establishes a clear formal opposition between female beauty linked to the contemporary world of youth and fashion and codified as naïve and shallow, and old-school revolutionary idealism regarded as fundamentally masculine and authentic. This highly loaded binary articulated in terms of surface and depth appears to be dismantled at the end when, the morning after a wedding party, Yonta leads the way by dancing past the swimming pool and out of the villa with her peers and young children, sweeping past their elders in a magisterial symbolic tracking shot. It suggests that the country’s youth will succeed if they do not let their dreams hold them back like Vicente and remain instead focused on the future. Yet the dynamism of the shot is not enough to dispel the key, structuring, misogynist idea of the film, and indeed much of African cinema, that visible beauty is intrinsically feminine and therefore unformed (notwithstanding the equally handsome mature beauty of Vicente), and that once it has been recognized as decorative, illusory, and inferior, it must be swiftly disavowed. The Blue Eyes of Yonta even includes a subplot where a young male student Zé sends Yonta anguished, florid love letters praising her beauty, the lines cribbed from a Swedish book and therefore precisely ‘un-African’ in origin and intent.⁴

So persistent has been the ideological suspicion of female-encoded beauty within postcolonial African cinema that even the Senegalese director Safi Faye’s Mossane (1996), hailed as the first feminist film by the first African woman filmmaker, presents beauty as both a blessing and a curse and constant cause for alarm. Based on a Wolof legend, Mossane concerns a fourteen-year-old girl, the eponymous Mossane, who brings disaster to her family by refusing to submit to an arranged marriage with a man who works abroad for a French conglomerate. Despite the fact that the film is shot in exquisite colour set off against desolate expanses of coastline and grassland, Mossane is fated to die simply because she is too pretty, a victim of the Pangool (ancestral spirits of the Serer) who keep returning like ghostly, menacing presences. As Vicente with Yonta, Mossane’s mother complains that the young generation are forsaking tradition and becoming hopelessly attracted to contemporary ‘exotic’ styles of dress and behaviour. In another strikingly similar example of the fatal attractions of haunted female beauty within Senegalese cinema, Mansour Sora Wade’s The Price of Forgiveness (Ndeysaan, 2001), set in a mythical, precolonial period, the most charming girl in the village, Maxoye, finds herself the impossible object of murderous envy between two male rivals. Once she discovers she is pregnant with the child of her murdered lover Mbagnick, she sets the price of forgiveness: his killer Yatma must bring up her child as his own. Such firm resolution is not enough, however, to appease the ghost of the victim.

It is not only female beauty that is put under erasure in postcolonial African cinema. In the opening credit sequence of Mandabi (1968) (The Money Order), a key founding text of African cinema and the first film by Sembene in his native Wolof, Sembene effectively established a template and set of stylistic terms and conditions for representing all forms of beauty, whether feminine or masculine, human or non-human. We start with an aerial medium shot of the large crown of a baobab tree. The camera then moves swiftly down to ground level where two men are pictured in long shot being shaved at an outside barbershop under the tree’s shade. There is no time here to contemplate the tangled canopy of the baobab, a remarkable deciduous tree (Adansonia digitata) native to the African sahel and savannah with distinctive swollen stems and huge, smooth, shiny trunks that can grow like pillars up to twenty metres high (without leaves a baobab appears like a set of roots sticking up into the air, as if planted upside down, giving rise to the alternative name of ‘upside-down tree’).⁵ Hollow inside, a baobab can serve many human purposes in African societies (as food, shelter, medicine, a site of ceremony). However, because it can store massive amounts of water in its large roots, allowing it to cope with seasonal drought and live indestructibly for hundreds, even thousands, of years, it is revered above all as a sacred ‘tree of life’ and eternal source of wisdom.

Yet just as there is no opportunity in the highly elliptical prologue of Mandabi to capture the grandeur and wonder of this extraordinary tree, so, too, there is no chance for human beauty to impose itself and delay the film’s critique of corruption (the treachery of petty officials) driven forwards by the rhythms of a West African marching song. Attention moves quickly to an extreme close-up of the face of an older customer at the very moment the barber’s steel blade enters his nostrils with expert touch. The close-up is purely functional, however, and the viewer is kept at a respectful distance from the men’s bodies – we are not invited to linger on the warm eyes and gentle smile of the barber for more than a brief second. The same w ith the glisten of the knife on exposed male flesh. Moreover, none of the six men gathered, whether barber or customer, looks each other in the eye. The return of the male gaze appears strictly prohibited, and, since the entire sequence is shot objectively, there is no possibility of a mutual shot/counter shot formation. It is as if merely to look at the male body and open it up subjectively to aesthetic or erotic interest were potentially to hinder its agency and tamper with the master narratives of African manhood and nationhood. His shave completed and paid for, the older customer (shortly to be revealed as the protagonist, Ibrahima Dieng (Makhouredia Gueye)) stands up and exits the frame which swiftly expands into a wide shot of a communal space into which four women now enter – the beginnings of the film’s heterosexually arranged plot. Social exchange and masculinity are thus dutifully maintained as vehicles of the social and cultural order, achieved under the aegis of the iconic baobab tree as symbolic ‘head’ of African culture.

FIGURE 1.1 Tracking down the baobab in the opening credit sequence of Mandabi (1968).

Sembene is evoking in Mandabi an organic object not as a manifestation of environmental beauty, but rather as a privileged and defining symbol of pan-African influence and continuity in the march for new political self-empowerment (the baobab is also the national emblem of Senegal and features on the country’s coat of arms with the words: ‘Un peuple, Un but, Une foi’ (One people, one aim, one faith)). In other words, the tree is not seen here for what it is, namely an instance of material being, for in the very moment of calling up the baobab Sembene consigns it to a rigid frame, holds it down, and covers it over with the opening credits in Wolof. It is thus enlisted as a tool and agent of nationalist thought in a postcolonial politics of language and representation. Put differently, natural beauty, like the human body, cannot be left alone ‘naked’ in black African cinema and must be politically framed and inscribed – otherwise it poses a potential threat to the body politic.

Baobab thinking: Deep, invisible, underneath

Let us be completely clear about what we have just witnessed in Mandabi: the baobab tree, a unique and lofty pillar of African continuity, truth and tradition, remade by Sembene as a symbol of change and progress in the continuum of black African society and history, is operating as a model of conceptual thinking, at once fixed, unitary and universal because based on objective certainties rather than subjective feeling or speculation. We may call it for short ‘Baobab thinking’, the capital letter denoting its symbolic weight. This avowedly anti-aesthetic, political form of cinematic thinking provided the new, ‘sacred’ roots of first-generation African cinema. As film theorist Dudley Andrew puts it, Sembene named, identified and recorded the agents, institutions and practices of Africa while offering proverbial wisdom through shaming and praising, his work thereby reconstituting a moral and geographic landscape (Andrew 2000: 229). Such a soaring social, political project would later literally be brought down to earth by calabash cinema, where the revered genealogical baobab reaches down with its roots into the pure water of heritage and, because made of memory, ‘stands as a living marker of the debt the present owes the past’ (Andrew 2000: 232). Indeed, as Andrew states of calabash filmmakers of the 1980s and since: ‘Invariably it seems they encounter a baobab, the great tree whose stature arrests the free movement of thought and cinema, turning to a past represented by its roots. Ultimately, African cinema would yoke the dual impulses of identity and liberty, represented, respectively, by the sahel and the rooted baobab’ (Andrew 2000: 230) (my emphasis). The traditional figure of the griot, who serves to promote the stability of the family, heritage, paternity and territory, is pivotal here, often as a matter of life and death, for, as Andrew notes, the past in calabash cinema ‘is both a tree of knowledge to which the griot is bound (literally indebted), and a family tree to which he is bound by fortune of birth … the past he calls upon exacts its own demands and is inescapable as fate. … The tree may very well root the culture to terrain; outside its shade, however, one dies of exposure’ (Andrew 2000: 237). Calabash filmmakers thus project images of a rooted past, an ancestral tree ‘so vast as to interrelate distant branches and roots’ (Andrew 2000: 234), in order to secure an identity they can proudly proclaim iteratively (Andrew 2000: 238).⁶ The elaborate, pre-credit sequence of Djeli (Djeli, conte d’aujourd’hui, 1981), a modern tale about forbidden love by Ivorian director Fadika Kramo-Lanciné, epitomizes this crucial constellation of defining elements. Here, a griot (Kramoko Kouyaté), accompanied by musicians, sings the legend of two brothers who, after wandering the sahel to the point of starvation, sit beside a baobab tree. One of the brothers cuts flesh from his own body in order that the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustration credits
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The trouble with beauty: Reimagining African film aesthetics
• 2 On the front line: In/visible violence, formations of style, and aesthetic resistance
• 3 Screening Dakar: Locating beauty in the afropolis
• 4 Voice, language, mystery: From ideological struggle to aesthetic shudder
• 5 Queering the Baobab: Male Intimacy, the Erotics of Abstraction, and the Right to Beauty
• 6 On the border, becoming world: Migrant beauty, migratory narratives, and the transmigration of cinematic form
• 7 The afropolitan present
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index
• Copyright