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Authorship and criticism in self-reflexive African cinemaYifen Beus aa International Cultural Studies , Brigham Young UniversityHawaii , Laie , HI , USAPublished online: 09 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Yifen Beus (2011) Authorship and criticism in self-reflexive African cinema,Journal of African Cultural Studies, 23:2, 133-152, DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2011.637883

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Authorship and criticism in self-reflexive African cinema

Yifen Beus∗

International Cultural Studies, Brigham Young University Hawaii, Laie, HI, USA

Many theories and criticisms have been devoted to analysing various modes and themes ofpresentation in a postcolonial context in dealing with African cinema. Topics range fromauthenticity, 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 cinemaitself through a reflexive directorial intrusion. As a political tool to address continualcultural imperialism of the former colonial power and as a type of criticism on cinema asan art form, self-referentiality is often overlooked, and yet is capable of travelling freelybetween the filmmaker and the spectator like an organic agency that inherently resideswithin to manifest itself as criticism, to satirize, and to self-deconstruct in the Derridaiansense the very process of filmmaking. This article examines the self-critiquing nature ofAbderrahmane Sissako’s La Vie sur terre (Mali, Mauritania and France, 1998), Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Bye Bye Africa (Chad, 1999), and Fanta Regina Nacro’s Un Certain matin(Burkina Faso, 1992) and argues that these directors, despite intra- and internationaldifferences in their creative circumstances, display a common mechanism in critiquingAfrican cinema by laying bare in the Brechtian sense the process of filmmaking whileretaining their aesthetic traits. Through reflexive cinema, they reaffirm the agenda tonarrate in the voice of a griot (whose role is also to provide criticism and commentary inthe oral tradition) and paradoxically display the realities of filmmaking in Africa today.

Keywords: African cinema; film critic; oral tradition; reflexive cinema; reflexivity

Introduction

Due to this region’s past history and its current connections with former empires, issues stem-

ming from postcoloniality inevitably have dominated African cinema scholarship and critical

discourses. Nevertheless, as a modern invention and a mass medium of artistic expression,

cinema inherits certain fundamental characteristics that have developed throughout past eras

and movements as other art forms. Self-reflexivity is one key characteristic that significantly

marks modernity in literature and the arts and critically reflects the very nature of the art

form while serving as the medium for expression and communication by maintaining its artistic

attributes. Although the number of such African films is small, this characteristic occupies an

important critical space where intrinsic and extrinsic issues concerning cinema’s realities

(including form, author-/spectatorship, and industry) can be analyzed simultaneously; that is,

such an analysis concerns cinema itself as a product manufactured through a creative process

and as criticism in its own creation.

This article uses these three films to illustrate the workings and nuances of self-reflexivity

and its implications in the context of African cinema. In these films, self- reflexivity functions

mainly through the manipulation of the camera (as a visual motif and as a structural device)

and the films’ narrative patterns, whereby the relationships and spaces between the filmmaker,

the work, and its audience are mapped out. While many current studies on African cinema still

ISSN 1369-6815 print/ISSN 1469-9346 online

# 2011 Journal of African Cultural Studies

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2011.637883

http://www.tandfonline.com

∗Email: yifen.beus@byuh.edu

Journal of African Cultural Studies

Vol. 23, No. 2, December 2011, 133–152

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concern the critical issues of the filmmakers’ authenticity and subjectivity,1 I recognize the una-

voidable and significant influences of the West on contemporary African artistic output (litera-

ture and cinema alike) and on theoretical discourses. Thus I aim to analyze reflexivity, a creative

and critical aspect that is rarely explored in African cinema studies, as a conscious recognition

on the filmmaker’s part towards his/her own hybridized craftsmanship. Instead of singling out

an attitude of ‘return to the source’ (Bolgar-Smith 2010, 26–7), s/he sees her/himself as the

creator of cinema engage (Harrow 2007, Introduction). This reflexivity functions also as a rhe-

torical trope to affirm creativity and criticism by calling the audience’s attention to the nature of

cinema and its construction process in a contemporary glocalized context.

A revolutionary cinema

Although this article intends to move away from a typical postcolonial reading of these three

films, it is necessary to first of all address colonial modernity from which African cinema

emerged in order to understand the pivotal developmental stages where the maturity of the

medium allows self-reflexivity to critique cinema itself, a trait that is not uncommon in tra-

ditional African art. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon analyzes the cultural

productions of the natives by sketching out three distinct phases of cultural evolution among

the colonized during and after the colonial era: (1) assimilationist (identifying with the occupy-

ing power); (2) cultural nationalist (resisting attempts to assimilate); (3) nationalist (revolutio-

nizing the literature of the colonized (Fanon 1963, 178–9). This schema more or less suffices

to describe the different stages African cinema undergoes in terms of manifesting socio-political

realities and aesthetic concerns. Teshome Gabriel (1982) proposes similar phases. His categories

also include: (1) unqualified assimilation, which has a close relationship to the ‘Western Holly-

wood film industry’; (2) a combative phase in which the concerns are embedded in themes of

resistance; (3) the remembrance phase characterized by ‘indigenization’. This last stage of natio-

nalistic writing/shooting according to Fanon or Gabriel in fact gains another dimension and

layer of reflexivity as women’s work is added to the critical paradigm. However, a fourth

stage of globalization, a term not quite exhausted yet often over-generalized and simplified,

emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century and has drastically changed the dynamics

between the used-to-be centre/empire and periphery in postcolonial studies that used to focus on

various strategies of previously colonized countries in their process of decolonization.

The workings of this last, current stage have historical roots that necessitate certain strategies

on the artists’ part in responding to his/her colonial past. Postcolonial studies scholars com-

monly agreed upon the connection between the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s racialized

(and indeed racist) ideals and Europe’s colonial expansionism. Analyzing the historical con-

struct of the colonial intersections in Black France, Dominic Thomas appropriately situates

the studies of Francophone colonialist ideologies and postcolonial resistance in transcolonial

and transnational locations and undertakes such a project by weaving these relations on see-

mingly separate geo-political maps in a globalized context (2007, 7–8). Like literary pro-

ductions, African cinema similarly takes on a multifaceted outlook. Any thematic motif or

methodology can never be properly analyzed without being placed across the continent or the

Mediterranean Sea alone. As a result, global processes, though varied in different areas, have

turned this ‘shooting back’ into an ambiguous gesture, which involuntarily veers the seemingly

decentralized forces back to the metropole centre – a phenomenon seen most often in diasporic

cinemas and multi-national co-productions, as is the case with these three films. It is also during

this stage that self-reflexive cinema in the African context gains legitimacy and potency in that it

not only acknowledges its Euro-colonial legacies, but it also openly serves as its own criticism

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by revealing the principles of its own production. The hybrid nature manifests itself in the trans-

national identity as well as the multi-textuality of these films.

Since the majority of African studies scholars situate Africa’s modernity and ‘popular

culture’ along with her colonial and postcolonial experiences, cinema as an institution is

often grouped with other modern media of mass communication in these historical processes

(Shaka 2004, 19–26; Barber 2009, 3). Thus, such extrinsic changes as technological advance-

ment and socio-political development of a given region have regularly become the defining

factors of its modernity. However, cinema is also an art form with its intrinsic characteristics

that may not always ‘progress’ in the same ways as its external conditions. Friedrich Schlegel

(1967/1797) has argued that the Romantic irony’s self-reflexivity is one intrinsic characteristic

of modern art capable of reflecting its external surroundings. And among the various modes of

representing socio-economic struggles as well as artistic articulation in postcolonial Africa

during the last phase mentioned above, self-reflexive cinema serves as one of the most effective

albeit intentionally ambiguous forms of political cinema and also displays a self-conscious post-

modern sensibility. From it derives a resistance to fixed interpretations, permitting film texts to

remain in a state of perpetual becoming. By laying bare in the Brechtian sense the realities of

filmmaking in their respective nations, these directors, despite the intra- and international differ-

ences in their creative circumstances, display a common mode in these films that gradually shifts

from the resistance stage (Fanon’s cultural nationalist phase) to a self-writing stage (which rep-

resents the transnational phase) where filmmaking serves as a means to address contemporary

socio-political issues and stretches beyond the strategies of counter-cinema. It also challenges

the conventional boundaries in film criticism by utilizing its own intrinsic attributes as a

quasi-theoretical framework for self-referentiality.

The goal and tactics of self-reflexive cinema reaffirm the agenda to narrate in the voice of a

griot and at the same time display the paradoxical realities of filmmaking as both a tool devel-

oped by the colonial master then to erase the indigenous cultural memories and an instrument for

the natives now to redefine their ‘glocal’ identity2; that is, it would address the film’s local spe-

cifics in a global context. Just as the colonial project intended to establish a global, modern com-

munity based on the empire’s interests and patterned after the empire’s cultural specificities,

these independent states’ film industries today also work on a transnational model which gradu-

ally blurs the traditional nation-state boundaries and moves towards a global community that

unites regions with common interests in decentralizing the former empires’ continual domina-

tion and influence.

Irony and reflexivity as aesthetics

As literary and film criticisms share much of the modern and postmodern theoretical genealogy,

and the analysis of reflexivity also has been widely applied to the research of both media, it

would be useful to briefly trace the roots of self-reflexivity in modern literature and art and

point out that this self-reflexivity changes the traditional artist/spectator relationship and

turns the spectator into an active participant in meaning-making, which is absolutely essential

in Fanon’s last nationalistic phase – that is, to shake and to engage the reader/audience. Inspired

by the works of Aristophanes, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Diderot and Sterne, the German philo-

sopher Friedrich Schlegel in his Critical Fragments published in 1797 attempts to define

modern literature/art as ‘Romantic’ and points out one essential aspect of this art to be self-

reflexive, which he coined as Romantic irony. Schlegel observes that the evocation of rapturous

joy and the solemn social critique in Aristophanic comedy are often juxtaposed with ‘objective

presentation upon the stage’, which is characterized by the display of authorial intrusion and thus

the destruction of illusion which separates the realities between the stage and the spectator.

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Schlegel’s (1797, 116) Athenaum Fragment summarizes this definition of modern literature: it

should portray itself with each of the portrayals, everywhere and at the same time, it should

be ‘poetry’ (in its broadest sense) and ‘poetry of poetry’ – meta-poetry, that is.

The self-creative and self-critical paradox of Romantic irony has continued to play a signifi-

cant role in literary theory and criticism, from modern to postmodern philosophy and critical the-

ories for the arts.3 Self-reflexivity breaks down the boundaries between the audience and the

work and dismantles the dramatic illusion that typically prevents the audience from an objective

and intellectual engagement in reading the drama. It invites the audience to actively engage in

the work’s state of becoming and generate meanings based on the fluid dialectics between the

two. When translated into the cinematic structure, revealing the existence or even the presence

of the camera, the crew, or the director through direct or indirect references functions similarly to

tearing down the ‘fourth wall’ of modern drama. By breaking the artificially dramatized illusion,

the meta-cinema in fact draws an invisible line between reality and the artwork for the spectator.

At such a moment, the spectator is reminded of the fact that s/he is watching a film, and thus

consciously applies the principles of cinema’s encoding/decoding process to negotiate the

reading of the narrative.4 The spectator must give up the usual notion of ‘sit back and relax’

(typically through his/her immersion in the world of drama) and, instead, is forced to process

the meaning as s/he watches along. S/he then becomes an active agent in co-creating the

meaning and interpretation of the narrative, while knowing at the same time her/his reality is

clearly separated from the world of the drama.

Reflexivity in cinema

In Mike Wayne’s Political Film, he contends that the critical commitment of political cinema is

to ‘seek to bring cognitive and intellectual powers of the spectator into play’ (2001, 18), echoing

Fanon’s challenge. Thus, this goal is often achieved through consciously displaying the work-

ings of the film’s formal components. Soviet director Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie

Camera (1929) provides one of the earliest self-reflexive strategies through his kino-eye philo-

sophy by constantly revealing the camera lens. And indeed, this film is structured according to

the cameraman’s daily routines; it is a film about filmmaking itself. This authorial intrusion

allows the viewer to become aware of the at once manipulative and truth-telling nature of

cinema. The film narrates and critiques this very act of narration.

This storytelling characteristic is not unlike that of the griot in many African societies,

who sings praises to past and present heroes, tells the histories of a certain people, warns

of pitfalls and dangers, and critiques the subjects of his/her stories. The outcome of his/her tales can always be in the making due to the oral nature of such storytelling. He/she

allows the listeners to engage in the tales at an objective distance, while in cinema, the

griot/storyteller/voiceover is often a member of the narrative itself, consciously blurring

the dramatic illusion within the film’s narrative. This in turn creates another layer of the

filmic reality: the story world the griot relates, the listener of this story within the film’s nar-

rative, and the audience watching the film.

The con/interfusion of the multiple realities allows the story’s listener in the film as well as

the film’s audience to engage in an active meaning-making process by generating an awareness

of the spectator’s response and the nature of storytelling. As a result, the relationship between the

author, the work, and the spectator becomes an organic dialectic, ever evolving and becoming,

instead of remaining in a stable state of being, typical of mainstream cinemas in the invisible

style through which meanings are fixated due to the arbitrary fiction/reality binary. In reflexive

cinema, the spectator’s intellectual powers are closely connected with those of the author/film-

maker, and with contemporary social life, as critiqued by the griot and represented in the

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narrative. This intimate connection is an essential mandate of the aesthetics of national liberation

according to Fanon in (re)creating the national culture.5

Likewise, Ousmane Sembene describes his role as both a traditional storyteller and a modern

filmmaker, just as the traditional griot is the advocate and storyteller within the film’s narrative:

The artist must in many ways be the mouth and ears of his people. In the modern sense, this corre-sponds to the role of the griot in traditional African culture. The artist is like a mirror. His workreflects and synthesises the problems, the struggles, and the hopes of his people. Thus, accordingto this view, the artist must be a realist in reflecting socio-political problems, and at the sametime an idealist to project a better vision of life and living condition for whom he represents. TheAfrican filmmaker is the griot of modern times (quoted in Pfaff 1984, 40).

Thus, one can say that ideally the attributes of reflexivity are almost a requirement for all post-

colonial cinema. Although one may argue that self-reflexivity functions more at the aesthetic

than at the socio-political level, in fact, much socio-political critique is conveyed through this

aesthetic attribute. Postcolonial cinema would, by definition, be required to (re)appropriate

the theme of the active spectator from the avant-garde as well as from precolonial storytelling

and arts and aim to re-locate them back to social struggles, and synthesize its aesthetics with

its political agenda. In other words, self-reflexivity deconstructs the binary between art and poli-

tics by refusing to turn itself into propaganda.6 It is, rather, a commitment to revealing its own

nature and the system within which it functions.

Lyrical reflexivity in La Vie sur terre

La Vie sur terre iwa one of the European Arte-TV productions to commemorate the coming of

the millennium.7 The director’s main challenge in making this film is described as ‘to make a

film about the significance of the start of the twenty-first century for people still struggling to

enter the twentieth; in other words, to show Africa’s simultaneous connection to and isolation

from modernity, our so-called Information Age’ (California Newsreel). The end result is a ‘fic-

tional documentary’, which employs significant self-reflexivity typical of this hybrid genre.

In the opening sequence, the audience is told clearly through a voiceover that the purpose of

this film is simply to ‘film Mali’. When the film continues with the supermarket scene set in

France, the camera pans across rows of cheeses, then rows of shoes on display for Christmas

sale. As it cuts to a slow-motion sequence of the protagonist Dramane moving up the escalator

towards the cashier, the background music sieves through as if the scene is frozen in time. The

camera continues to operate at a steady, fluid speed, panning across the African continent, and

dissolves into a massive tree, a sacred symbol of spiritual sanctuary in many African societies. It

keeps on magnifying the tree until its branches and twigs are in sharp-focussed close-ups. As the

title of the film La Vie sur terre appears, we also hear clearly cows mooing, insects and birds

chirping to indicate the rural setting of the scene, connecting the audience with the tree/earth,

and the life of the village.

This abrupt transposing from the French metropole, represented by the busy supermarket

around Christmas time, into the calm rural Malian village signifies a seeming disjuncture

between rural Africa and the outside world, which is much engaged in fast-paced global

inter-connectedness. The ambiguity, just like the identity of a diasporic filmmaker, guided by

the gliding camera movement, speaks of the very nature of the narrative and displays a sense

of uncertainty of the future as the new millennium approached. As the voiceover narrates the

content of a letter, Dramane ‘speaks’ in the first-person voice to his father, who is sitting delight-

fully on the bed reading the letter with a flashlight: ‘. . .a change in me makes me want to come

home to Sokolo. The desire to film Sokolo. The desire to leave, as Aime Cesaire said. Especially

because it is nearly the year 2000, which I’m sure will bring no improvements.’ The year 2000

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was a future much anticipated by the rest of the world, and yet for Sissako, he was not hopeful for

any ‘improvement’. As words of a modern griot, this pessimistic comment surfaces as the under-

current concern of the film: while much of the world celebrates the globalized economy and

becomes inter-connected in an age of information and technology, much of Africa remains

underdeveloped and poverty-stricken. Sissako’s respect for the land/earth is obvious through

many long shots of the landscape. The earthy and yet lyrical looks of the film befit the genre

as the film commences.

However, this disjuncture is then transformed into a self-contained, vibrant and yet at times

laidback poly-rhythm of the village’s everyday living as Sissako/Dramane journeys back home,

incorporating into this film mostly mundane, almost to a random degree, scenes of Radio Colon

broadcasting Aime Cesaire’s reading from his Discourse on Colonialism, a man and a woman

trying to connect to the outside world through the telephone, people sitting leisurely holding

radios in hand and listening to French news about the snow blocking roads in Europe, Nana

and Sissako biking around, and finally Sissako strolling with his father in the field. Just as

how the film begins, it also ends with a casual yet similar long shot with Nana biking off the

screen. Salif Keita’s gentle yet haunting voice sings as the scene is cut to an open space under-

scored by the director’s stream of narration of his personal thoughts running throughout the

whole film: ‘Leave. My heart was bursting with fire and ardour. Leave. I will arrive fresh and

young in my country. . .and tell this country whose dust has penetrated my flesh. I wondered

for a long time. I now return to your hideous open wounds.’

The beginning of Sissako/Dramane’s journey home against the dusty background in an

extreme long shot is then juxtaposed with another long shot with mostly cows and a few villagers

in the same open space. The audience then sees a clear reflection of a bicycle glide by the shallow

lake, followed by the director sitting with his bicycle in a banana-shaped canoe sailing across the

screen from the opposite direction: ‘Beware my body, beware my soul. Do not fold your arms in

the sterile stance of a spectator. For life is not a spectacle. For a screaming man is not a dancing

bear.’ This monologue seemingly addresses the director himself, but it speaks to the audience

directly as the film unfolds the daily life of an African village, portrayed as a spectacle in a

filmic narrative. The double layers of reality that life is not a spectacle yet disguised as one in

cinema functions as a self-reflexive irony directed at the spectator, who may be ‘folding his

arms’, watching the director film life in Mali, without the presence of the camera, in an apparently

passive stance. And due to the workings of this irony by calling on the audience to unfold their

arms and take an active stance, the passivity of the spectator is transformed into progressive par-

ticipation in the journey of filming and living simultaneously. This narration critiques the specta-

torship and thus reveals the nature of cinema by mobilizing the gaze and stance of the spectator.

‘I will try to film that desire. To be with you, to be at Sokolo. Far away from my life here and

its mad rush.’ As the scenes are situated back in the Malian village, the narration of the letter,

which is set in the past, continues. The temporality of the narrative operates on two axes

here: one with past events/voice through the narration and the other with present occurrences

on the screen. While Paris was at the present of the letter Dramane wrote, Sokolo is present

in the opening scene of the dramatic action as the letter is being read. Through editing and cine-

matography, the two temporal axes converge and share their ‘presence’ simultaneously on the

screen. Jonathan Crary (1995) argues that modernity challenges humans’ capacities of percep-

tion and cognitive faculties in processing meaning. Cinema as a field of audio-visual signs epit-

omizes the means for posing such challenges:

Since Kant, of course, part of the epistemological dilemma of modernity has been about the humancapacity for synthesis amid the fragmentation and atomization of a cognitive field. That dilemmabecame especially acute in the second half of the nineteenth century, along with the development

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of various techniques for imposing specific kinds of perceptual synthesis, from the mass diffusion ofthe stereoscope in the 1850s to early forms of cinema in the 1890s (1995, 47–8).

Man’s capacity to reconstruct the temporal order of these two narrative axes, whether in a fic-

tional or documentary format, is called to function at multiple levels in that cinema, like litera-

ture, must be able to arouse an inward interest in the spectator in seeing ‘semblance of truth

[represented on the silver screen in the case of cinema] sufficient to procure for these

shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment’.8 In addition, the

conflation of linearity in the two storylines also exposes clearly the workings of cinema’s

formal elements, namely the montage and audio manipulation, thus breaking the dramatic illu-

sion, while paradoxically the poetic disbelief is temporarily suspended.

The reference of filmmaking is, however, indirect through a voiceover of the main character

Dramane played by Sissako himself. The audience hears the recorded voice speaking in the first

person and in the present tense, which in fact refers to a past action in the narrative – the narra-

tion of the events during the writing of the letter. The insertion of a past moment into the present

screen space thus aims to undermine the spectator’s normal sense of linearity in processing the

meaning of the grammatical tense – the narration and filming took place in the past (the undis-

puted nature of filmmaking itself) presented as if it were in the present within the narrative, and

yet mediated through the visual/audio recording machinery, making it re-appear through a pro-

jection device.

As the film reel can be shown repeatedly at different times and locations, and as the spectator

is capable of replaying and processing this historical past moment, recorded in the present tense,

the spatial continuum then functions in a non-linear fashion. This is a major difference between

oral storytelling and filming when each present performance of the griot is situated in a specific

slot in time and space. The cinematic technology, on the other hand, breaks this convention by

recording the sight and sound only once and projecting them again and again. Sissako’s fluid

camera work assimilates the workings of cinematic storytelling through repeating the ‘same’

images and sounds, while the differences of the meaning of each coded and projected audio-

visual segment become subject to the spectator’s reception of each viewing. Just as meta-

poetry/art in the Romantic era strives for such paradoxical differences through repeating the

same object(s), the audience thereby conjures a wide variety of interpretations.

The man with a movie camera in Chad

The mobile dialectics between authorship, spectatorship, and art are the key narrative principle

in La Vie sur terre, Bye Bye Africa, and Un Certain matin – the camera is the witness of the

artist’s circumstances of filmmaking, while at the same time, it must also realistically reflect

the lives it sees and records. Like Fellini’s 8 1/2 (and similarly in the self-references of

Godard’s Le Mepris and Tout va bien), Bye Bye Africa is a film about the making of the film

with the same title, toying with reflexive irony as a consciously foregrounding element. Return-

ing from France to his native Chad alone to pay tribute to his deceased mother and feeling the

unbearable grief over his loss, filmmaker Haroun decides to make a film to commemorate his

mother but encounters the harsh reality of the near impossible filmmaking environment in his

country.

Embedded in this complex fictional documentary are themes of exile and cultural liminality,

the economic as well as technical challenges of Chad’s film industry, and a cinematic self-reflec-

tion. Although there are also significant issues concerning women that remain superficially rep-

resented or even seriously under-investigated, the director is most interested in a meta-cinema,

thus leaving these problems unresolved. The presence of the director’s digital, hand-held

camera, a recurring motif, functions as a rhetorical trope of reflexive irony and as a structural

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indicator. The key scenes in the narrative can be marked as follows: ‘taxi ride’, ‘walk with

father’, ‘memories of mother’, ‘Bye Bye Africa’, ‘stolen images’, and ‘woman with AIDS’.

They all can be linked with a common concern of the aesthetic nature of cinema and the film-

making conditions in Chad on the personal as well as the national level. Each scene presents a

dilemma, leaving the audience searching desperately for an answer.

The film opens with a phone-call in the middle of the night when Haroun receives the news

of his mother’s death. Then his voiceover relates his lonely feeling about the news. He has

chosen to leave, to be in exile, away from home. Through his conversation with his young chil-

dren, the audience is told of the nostalgic and ambivalent sentiment Haroun bears about his life

in France with a French wife, who has no intention to go or let him take their children ‘home’ for

the funeral. This background information motivates his ‘return’ as a stranger, who has forgotten

what his country is like and is ignorant of the current situation in Chad. The journey home, like

that of Sissako, is as much for him as for the audience. After this brief introduction and the

opening credits, the film cuts to Haroun inside a taxicab holding a camera shooting street

scenes. The presence of the camera immediately sets up an irony for the narrative: Is the director

shooting the film we are watching, or is he working on a separate project? In either case, it

involves another camera, hidden from the spectator’s view, thus creating a second layer of

the filmic reality.

The window of the taxi also serves as a visual frame for the meta-cinematic implication of

the sequence. This framing technique – windows, doors, telescope, car’s windshield, TV screen,

for example – is also heavily used in Sissako’s 2002 Heremakono (Waiting for Happiness) to

depict themes of alienation and isolation. In Bye Bye Africa, the driver, the director, his

camera, and the city’s streets are parts of the hidden camera’s mise-en-scene, while the city

scene outside the cab’s window is the object of Haroun’s visible camera. The spectator

becomes the double audience of both cameras and the realities in which they reside respectively.

S/he takes up Haroun’s point of view, and at the same time works with the shifting perspectives

these two cameras warrant. As the workings of these two cameras orient the spectator’s position-

ings,9 the latter in turn interprets the meanings of the sequence accordingly. Not only does the

presence of the camera break the dramatic illusion, but Haroun also portrays his conversation

with the taxi driver in a ‘visible’, non-continuity shot/reverse-shot sequence by crossing the

axis of action, thus drawing attention to the scene’s editing and mobile framing. ‘Yes, film

me. Get me on the silver screen so people will see me in my cab. At the steering wheel’, the

driver urges excitedly. Indeed, the spectator, just as we are, is watching him on the silver

screen as the driver means for it to be shown in the future. The happening of temporal conflation

of the two worlds – that of the implied audience within the narrative and that of the spectator of

the film (we, that is) – through the presence of the camera as a motif is again brought to the fore-

front, as with the case in La Vie sur terre, whose director also cast himself as the protagonist/filmmaker in the fictional documentary.

After the camera as a cinematic apparatus and as a rhetorical trope is established in the

opening sequence, the film cuts to a segment of black-and-white footage of the streets in

N’Djamena with sounds of a motor running in the background, further confusing the audience

about the purpose and the identity of the film,10 and the film within the film. By inserting another

set of recorded images directly into the film itself, Haroun clearly manipulates the distance

between the spectator and the film work, travelling freely through two realities of the filmic nar-

rative. This digression from the film’s main storyline in a moment of self-reflection simulates the

director’s working process. He is at a juncture of contemplating making a film, but has not yet

determined how to approach it. A self-study seems most appropriate at this point of the narrative.

Various shots of passers-by purposefully attract their attention to his filming on the streets, while

alternating between long shots and close-ups allows Haroun to guide the spectator’s gaze. These

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passers-by no longer seem random, but they are intentionally positioned to foreground both of

the cameras.

As Haroun intends to transcend everyday seeing through his camera-eye, he is keenly aware

that he eventually needs to make films that would also transcend cultural boundaries and that

would speak to the collective human experience, not just as constituents in the superstructure

of the adopted French culture and its intellectual mainstream. In this significant scene of casually

walking with his father, Haroun references his Western training by highlighting Freud and in a

later scene Godard – one that theorized the human mind and psyche and the other who, as one of

the most influential figures of the Nouvelle Vague, inspired his work:

(Haroun walking with his camera in hand and with Father in a long shot)Father: Aren’t you ever tired of filming? (As Haroun begins filming, some youths appear playing

soccer in the background.)Haroun: Making film is my job and it’s vital to me.Father: Cinema! Cinema! We don’t understand what you do. You sent a tape. Didn’t understand. Just

bla bla. It was about a European.Haroun: Yes, Freud.Father: Is he your mate?

As both of them leave the frame, the soccer-playing youths become the centre of the open dusty

ground. Like soccer, a sport brought to today’s African life by the Europeans, cinema and Freu-

dian theories have also become common cultural landmarks in Western history. However, the

content and form of diasporic films are often too foreign for most Africans but essential to

these diasporic artists’ work, thus creating in them an inherently ambivalent, liminal sentiment

towards the newly adopted cultural traits. When speaking of the value of the white men’s culture,

his father sees no direct connection between it and Africa’s tangible need:

Your films are not made for us. They are for the whites (Haroun lifts up his camera and begins shoot-ing again). If only you’d become a doctor, and you could’ve helped your mum. Being a doctor isuseful. But what’s the use of cinema? The white people’s land is nice, but it is not yours andnever will be. The day you think you belong there, you’ll lose your soul.

His father’s comment here is the reflectionist attribute advocated by Fanon, which is lacking then

in Haroun’s work. If he makes films only for the consumption of white Europeans, he loses not

only the connection between an artist and his environment that created him, but also his legiti-

macy to position himself within his community and thus his cultural identity.

In analyzing the principles of the Brechtian epic theatre and its relation to the Russian revo-

lutions in the arts and literature, Walter Benjamin describes such a bond between the artist and

his people (the expert and the proletariat, in Benjaminian terms) as ‘mediated solidarity’, which

‘attaches him to his class, and still more attaches his class to him’ (2003, 102). Quite often the

diasporic artist is seen as he who betrays his cultural heritage at first, but returns to utilize the

apparatus inherited from the new host’s intellectual bourgeoisie for the purpose of revolution.

Fanon’s nationalist manifestation is achieved through similar strategies and processes by

ridding the habits of imitating the dominating formulas and discourses and thus (re)creating

the indigenous cultural memories. Taking up this premise, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam also

observe that many Third Worldist films are preoccupied with the relationship between intellec-

tuals and the periphery and have reflexively addressed their own positions in relation to the

masses they try to represent (2003, 279). After experiencing the loss of his mother, Haroun’s

filming, he decides at the personal level at least, is motivated by the sake of memory. Although

recording memories on film strips does not seem as practical and meaningful to Haroun’s people

as practising medicine, his commitment, as an intellectual, to the memories of his mother, who

gave him life, is likened to the desire to film Chad/Africa (like Sissako’s desire to film Mali) – a

commitment to the memories of his land.

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The metaphoric connection between the mother and the land is a common motif in cinema

and literature alike. Upon seeing the projected footage of his mother shot by Garba years ago,

Haroun’s father exclaims: ‘Good God! It’s your mother. I remember, it was on your sister’s

wedding day. I recall every moment of it.’ It appears that the recorded image of his wife conjures

memories of her. However, without photography or film, can one ‘remember’ the same photo-

graphic images? Haroun seems to suggest that it is filming that preserves human memories: ‘You

see, I make films for memory’s sake. A great man called Jean-Luc Godard said: Cinema creates

memories.’ As soon as he pronounces this reflection, he stops the projector, turns on the lights,

and asks his nephew Ali to remove the screen. This gesture to return to the present reality from

past memories signals some ambiguity in Haroun’s intention to use film as a medium to connect

himself with others in that the risk of pathological escapism is ever pervasive: ‘I feel so devas-

tated. I need to take refuge in something, in cinema probably. To forget my grief, I’ll make a film

in tribute to the one who gave me life.’

Playwright Luigi Pirandello raises similar questions about illusion and reality in his meta-

drama Six Characters in Search of an Author. Towards the end of the play, in an argument

with the Father about fiction and reality, the Director screams ‘Lights! Lights! Lights!’ to

resolve the problem. The lights bring the audience and the characters in the play (and those

in the play within the play) back to reality from the world of drama. When Haroun has the

screen taken down, the images of his mother disappear, returning the spectator (in this case

we, Haroun, his father and nephew) from past memories back to the present. Like the lights

on the stage for Pirandello, the silver screen for Haroun and other filmmakers represents the

line between fiction and reality. However, this ‘fiction’ is also a reality from the past preserved

by filming and can be projected into a present moment at any time and in any location. It can also

be turned off immediately with a switch of the button or by taking down the screen. The director

sets up a framing device in the meta-cinema, reminding the spectator, through a moment of self-

reflection, of the power and the obligation an ‘expert’ possesses to preserve his cultural mem-

ories. Ironically this is accomplished through such a modern technology as cinema, a tool

invented by the whites and now appropriated by the diasporic artist, which can attach him to

his community and his community to him, as Benjamin argued.

To engender this mutual attachment, Haroun uses his camera to document all walks of life in

N’Djamena, accompanied by Garba, who now serves as his local guide to re-familiarize himself

with the country. As ‘a man with the movie camera’, Haroun is seen on the back of Garba’s motor-

cycle – a direct reflexive reference to his filming – followed by another segment of black-and-

white footage of street shots, merging into the screen as a continuation of the reflexive shot of

him holding the camera. The transition is done with a simple jump cut, conflating the two temporal

lines into a single location, the very same street, thus dissolving the line between reality and

fiction. ‘What are you making, your next film?’ asks Garba. ‘Next year I hope. It’s Bye Bye

Africa’, Haroun replies. ‘What is it about?’ ‘It’s like a set a Russian dolls. It deals with cinema,

exile, friendly love. It’s about life.’ ‘How can you film life? That’s the question.’ The Russian

dolls simile refers to the layers of filmic reality this film creates, a mise-en-abıme device that ques-

tions artistic (re)presentation and critiques the often arbitrary definitions of fiction and reality, for

in cinema they intersect and can be manipulated through such formal elements as editing, cinema-

tography, and narrative structures. As another near identical doll resides inside each doll, they

mirror certain visual motifs and reflect each other’s existence while their other attributes (such

as size and the actual design patterns) are in fact quite different. Gilles Deleuze points out in Differ-

ence and Repetition that such reflexivity is indeed the best kind of criticism:

‘Ideal commentaries’ should represent a kind of slow motion, a congelation or immobilization of thetext: not only of the text to which they relate, but also of the text in which they are inserted – so much

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so that they have a double existence and a corresponding ideal: the pure repetition of the former textand the present text in one another (1994, xxii).

Such double existence re-configures the traditional triangle relationship of the artist, art, and the

spectator. The relationship shifts according to the mirroring images located in time and space,

which in turn mobilizes the location of significance and the spectator’s image processing in

relation to their own positionings mapped out in the narrative.11

By giving the same name to the ‘future film’ within the film, Haroun bids symbolic farewell

to Africa after witnessing the impossible environment for filmmaking in Chad; he will have to

continue to rely on the French metropole’s material conditions in order to make films.12 Roy

Armes reiterates the clear shaping influence of France, visible from the credits of numerous dia-

sporic films in terms of funding sources and from the filmmakers’ situation of living in France

for the subject matter of their work (2006, 145–6).13 In addition, as with many African

countries, most notably Nigeria and Ghana, Chad also saw a video boom in the past decade,

which has significantly impacted the country’s film industry. Impacted by Hollywood and Bolly-

wood, fewer and fewer films are being produced by native filmmakers in country; theatres have

been closed, losing battles to video clubs, television sets, tape recorders and cassettes. Haroun

weaves in and out of the colour film stock, intermittently inserting black-and-white ruins of

old theatres, more street scenes, and interviews with theatre owners, archivists and film industry

administrators as witnesses of the failure of Chad’s native cinema. However, the true material

condition that causes Chad’s crumbling film industry is the country’s long history of civil con-

flicts: ‘How can I believe in cinema in a land where war has become a culture? War has been so

devastating that N’Djamena seems to flee all memories.’ As the end credits reveal, the post-pro-

duction work of the film was done in France. He strives to recapture the lost memories, but the

means to this end ironically betray his desire to return. Only through an explicit self-reflection

can he reconcile intrinsically the land that bore and raised him with the extrinsic conditions that

afford the realization of his desire to document life back home.

Even if Haroun possessed the tools and favourable conditions to revive the industry, there

exists a constant issue about the distrust of the modern facing all developing nations. He uses

a cliched stereotype to depict the incompatibility between his native culture and Western mod-

ernity. As he attempts to shoot a man in front of an old theatre, this man frantically grabs his

camera and punches him in the eye, screaming: ‘He’s stealing our image! Thief. Why film

us? He is a stranger’, refusing to give back the camera. This accusation raises the question of

legitimacy, ownership, and authenticity in storytelling. Now seen as a ‘stranger’, can Haroun

reclaim the rights to tell his land’s story? While having this mad man look straight into the

hidden camera in a close-up and speak angrily to Haroun (and indeed to us, the other spectator)

‘I give it [the camera] back to you. But you’re lucky. You know what it means to steal someone’s

image? Don’t do it again.’ Haroun already answers the question. In Benjaminian terms, the

artist/expert must first betray his community to acquire the necessary skills and capacities to

advocate revolution and change for the marginalized masses. Haroun must ‘steal’ his people’s

images before they can reclaim subjectivity of their positioning and ownership of their (lost)

memories. We, the other spectator, know quite well that the actor willingly assumes the perso-

nage of a mad man and performs in front of the camera. It is a process of mechanical reproduc-

tion. The image that is ‘stolen’ is but a dramatized illusion, and yet, this image mediated by the

cinematic machinery critiques this very process as it is happening.

In the almost comic sequence mentioned above, Haroun addresses this very issue of photo-

graphic realism through the documentary genre while critiquing the instability of such images as

permanent manifestations of human existence: a man refuses to let him shoot due to a cliched

fear of having his soul captured and trapped inside the camera. The question is not whether

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such a fear is a caricature of ignorance of a modern technology often perceived in ‘uncivilized’

societies. In fact, it is this very nature and definition of photographic realism cinema affords that

is at issue. In commenting on Wim Wender’s allusion to cinema’s key features as a medium of

signification in Die Bruder Skladanowsky, Rey Chow argues:

Whether what is captured is a human face, a body, an object, or a place, the illusion of presence gen-erated is such that a new kind of realism, one that vies with life itself, aggressively asserts itself. Ifcultural identity is something that always finds an anchor in specific media of representation, it iseasy to see why the modes of illusory presence made possible by film have become such strong con-tenders in the controversial negotiations for cultural identity. (2000, 167–73).

Thus it is also through cinema’s capability of self-display that a director is able to represent his/her cultural identity without concealing the filmic reality surrounding the issues of aesthetics and

production circumstances. The following characteristics that exist in the very nature of cinema

explain how the paradox of illusion and photographic realism function simultaneously: cinema

possesses a sense of permanence of the images captured on filmstrips, while they are also

manipulated through cinematography before, during, and after shooting and through editing.

This manufactured realism also depends on the consensus between the filmmaker and the audi-

ences in the signifying process in order for images to produce meanings. Thus the camera as a

piece of technological equipment possesses the power to conjure double meanings when it is

present within the frame; that is, it creates and at once destroys the filmic illusions. This is the

‘Romantic irony’ in the Schlegelian sense that defines modernity in the late eighteenth century.

Likewise, the filmic modernity also depends on this self-critiquing quality to represent reality.

The arbitrariness of the conventional division between fiction and reality is further exacer-

bated by the formula of linearity, cause-effect narrative construction, and a predominantly male

perspective in mainstream commercial films. Haroun seeks to deconstruct this assumption of

history/story as the logical, chronological order of events and happenings. In this film’s last

major segment, also the most problematic one, he tackles this very issue:

(Garba describing what happened to the actress Isabelle in Haroun’s film about AIDS)People distrust the camera. There is a problem with images. They can’t see drama and reality aredifferent. For instance, the actress who played in your film on AIDS. After the film was shown onTV, they all thought she was actually HIV positive. . ..You must consider your responsibilities.

Haroun in the end is never able to unravel the dilemma with Isabelle, who has become a social

outcast because of the reception of the movie and eventually commits suicide due to Haroun’s

inability to resolve their relationship.

Haroun’s tendency towards a male gaze is clearly manifested in an earlier part of the film

when he makes a comment that cinema and pretty women are what you lived for, a life philo-

sophy he materializes in this segment of the film. In a flashback, Isabelle is seen in her bikini

emerging from a swimming pool, shot in fragments of her body parts and framed by an obviously

male gaze. With such a visual pleasure, Haroun authors this footage, and the camera assumes his

point of view, as does the spectator without any choice. Isabelle is not only subject to the pro-

blematic treatment in his earlier film on AIDS, but she is also the object of this highly voyeuristic

footage.14 As a result, Haroun ostensibly became responsible for risking exploiting Isabelle’s

body and images and for failing to recognize the audience’s lack of cultural reference to the dis-

tinction between life and drama generated through cinematic manipulation. Unfortunately, the

gender issue is left unexplored. Instead, he foregrounds cinematic criticism through the film’s

prominent self-reflexivity and the rhizome-like structure of the narrative and suggests a possible

alternative to rescue the crumbling film industry in many African nations – digital video, the

very equipment used in this film. As a postcolonial filmmaker living in France, he must con-

stantly ask himself about identity, authorship in relation to his viewers, about memories,

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practicality and tradition, about cinema, love, exile, and about life. ‘How can one film life? That

is the question.’ By exposing the camera in the film, the filmmaker partially answers the question

– through a camera lens however difficult and paradoxical it might be, and at the same time cri-

tiques this very process as it proceeds.

Woman behind the camera: Fanta Regina Nacro

As with Sissako and Haroun, who worked under circumstances subject to limited resources in

their countries, the industry practices dominated by male practitioners and audience’s demand

while striving to follow the aesthetic principles of an expressive art form, Fanta Regina

Nacro’s making of Un Certain matin was bold and yet fitting. Nacro also has been widely recog-

nized as the very first female Burkinabe to direct a fiction film. Un Certain matin, her first film

and a 13-minute short, won the golden medal award for short films at the 1993 Carthage Film

Festival among other international distinctions. This film tells of a tragedy in a near comic

tone: when drama becomes too real, it kills. One morning, a village peasant named Tiga acci-

dentally steps on a chickling, which signals a bad omen, then he goes off feeling unsettled. In

an open field near the village he encounters a film crew filming a scene where a woman,

being pursued by a man, runs frantically calling for help. As the (female) director in the film

asks the actors to re-do the scene several times, Tiga becomes puzzled at the repetition of the

happening and eventually picks up his rifle and shoots the actor who is pursuing the actress.

As the police pursue him, he runs back home into hiding, realizing that he has committed a

crime by unwittingly stepping into a filmic world and reacting to the scene as if it was a real

life situation. The film simply ends with a close-up of Tiga’s frightened yet still puzzled face.

The film’s reflexivity works on three levels of intention: (1) as film criticism on the nature of

cinema; (2) as an allegory of cinema’s social impact on traditional village life; (3) as a critique

of women’s roles in this modern form of artistic expression and mass communication.

Cinema as a modern invention was introduced to Africa through Western colonization. Many

negative and Orientalist depictions of African peoples and life became the stock images spread

among the empire and its colonies through cinema.15 The impact is not the images created by

this medium alone; it is also the way of seeing and storytelling that completely change the indi-

genous communities. The camera as a machine that captures moments of reality as they are hap-

pening or being performed/staged simply undermines these communities’ sense of perceiving

truth, a mediated truth. Eileen Julien (1992) points out a crucial argument in seeing the

former colony’s linguistic and discursive circumstance as a ‘material condition’ since the colo-

nial language was taught to the Africans as the only means for mediation between the empire and

its colonies. Thus Africa’s filmic historiography also inherits these material conditions: first, the

communicative medium of the production, reception and theorizing process often relies on the

inherited colonial languages (French and English); second, the filming process of simply using

the camera, an apparatus for communication and expression just like the colonial languages, also

displays in their photographic writings a ‘disjunctive and alien’ expression for themselves

(Julien 1992, 8).

The photographic realism breaks the continuity of the traditional orality through the griot’s

voice and impersonal narration. The worlds of the story and of the audience are clearly separate

yet metaphorically connected in order for the moral of the stories to function. From a socio-

anthropological perspective, the griot’s presence in a storytelling setting is essential to the nar-

rative. It is not necessarily the knowledge or the privileged status of the griot that commands the

power of the narrative. In the controversial ‘The Griot’s Craft’, Dutch anthropologist Jan Jansen

(2000), after his long fieldwork on the griot’s speech in Mali, argues that the griot creates phys-

ical as well as metaphorical spaces to work in his narrative while resolving conflicts and

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manifesting historicity of the very text at the same time. It is not only through the orality but also

the presence of the mediator, the storyteller in this case, that historical texts come into existence.

The elimination of the camera in mainstream cinema’s continuity, invisible style simply violates

this convention in storytelling and in conveying historicity of the narrative. By bringing the pres-

ence of the camera crew as well as the camera back into the scene, this sense of presence is re-

created albeit mediated through a different medium. The very presence of the griot in a narrative

reminds the audience of their respective roles, while placing the camera back into the cinematic

set restores the discursive spaces of the author (as the griot’s impersonator in the Sembenian

sense) and the narrative itself.

Nacro’s insertion of the camera motif in the film appears quite subtly. As the film opens with

an impersonal, objective perspective through the camera’s impartial distance and positioning,

the spectator anticipates a typical narrative, given unrestricted story information. However,

the narrative takes a turn as the film crew appears in the field in a long shot when Tiga unknow-

ingly runs into the film set, after which the film’s cinematography as a formal element and the

filming sequence within the film become visible. It is at this moment that the spectator assumes

the griot’s position in generating commentary on the effects of cinema’s intrusion into a remote

village. From immersing himself in the dramatic illusion to consciously gauging the impact of

modernity on Tiga and his village, the spectator’s passive position also undergoes a transform-

ation into an active intellectual engagement and social critique. Fanon’s notion of political par-

ticipation on the reader’s part thus takes place. The Brechtian concept of a ‘theatre of education’

also comes alive through such a reflexive irony in a meta-cinema.

The visible crew, which consists of mostly female members, in addition to this reflexive

intention, has also its political agenda. In a society privileging men, whose patriarchy was

reinforced during colonial rule through imposed foreign cultural values – first Islamic cosmol-

ogy and later the European patriarchal practices, Nacro simply made a firm statement about her

own positioning as a female director and about the potentials female filmmakers possess in post-

independence Burkina Faso. In an interview she claims: ‘Often in film schools, there is a ten-

dency to steer women in the areas of make-up artist, scriptwriter, editor, etc. Yet, women are

just as competent with the camera, the Nagra, the boom and fish pole. It is for this reason that

I gave the key positions to women’ (quoted in Ellerson, n.d.). Since this first film, she has

assigned women to many key roles in advocating education, social change, and public health

in both her fiction and documentary works.

Many other major male African filmmakers such as Senegal’s Ousmane Sembene and Dji-

brill Diop Mambety, Ivory Coast’s Desire Ecare and Mauritania’s Med Hondo have also recog-

nized the role women play in reclaiming female subjectivity in all aspects of life. As Sembene

says in this famous statement ‘Africa can’t develop without the participation of women’,16

Africa likewise cannot reclaim her history and stories without the actual participation of

female filmmakers as storytellers. The efforts of modern male ‘griots’ alone can never be

fully validated in reclaiming all the voices of the narrative. The black diaspora has also contrib-

uted to this decolonization process by supplying counter-Orientalist images of black women. But

it was not until black women also began to join in as ‘griots’ with their cameras that Fanon’s last

stage of artistic production could truly be named ‘revolutionizing’.17 That the theme of Nacro’s

first fiction work that rests upon the demystification of filmmaking and upon its the tragic impact

on traditional village life through the very medium of cinema was by no means accidental; it was

intentionally political (Verschueren 2002, 3). Nacro’s training in film studies is significant in

positioning herself as a diasporic director with the intention and a political agenda: she had

studied at the national film school of Burkina Faso (Institut Africain d’Education Cinematogra-

phique, or INAFEC) and thereafter earned a Master’s degree in Film and Audiovisual Studies at

the Sorbonne (Paris IV).18 The film curricula in Burkina Faso and in France must have made

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various references to such auteurs and pioneers as Godard and Vertov. She also would have

acquired through academic training the knowledge that meta-cinema has often served as the

most direct criticism among all forms of political cinema:

The idea of the film arose from my experience as a continuity girl on film sets. . .it’s more than just aveiled reference, it’s a cry of rebellion – rebellion against the fact that directors arrive in villages anddon’t take time to do things, and therefore completely disrupt the daily life of the communities thatlive and have their homes there (Verschueren 2002, 3).

Therefore, her intention to rebel addresses not only the larger filmmaking practice, but it also

directly attacks the insensitive filmmakers’ habits that exploit the natives’ habitat.

This socio-reflectionist tendency clearly marked the path of her film career. Although Nacro

has studied in both Burkina Faso and France and now travels and works between Europe and

Africa, she is largely committed to her homeland when it comes to choosing the subject. At

1997’s FESPACO (Festival Panafricain du Cinema de Ouagadougou) press conference, Nacro

was asked about the possibility of making films about the black diaspora in Europe, and she

responded:

To be quite honest, no, not yet. My imaginary in terms of cinema is based in Burkina. When I lookfor an idea for a film, I base it on Burkina, the capital, or my village. My reference has not yet gonebeyond the limits of my borders. On the other hand, perhaps that will happen when I am ready to gobeyond those limits. I did do a film on video recently for the black community living in Paris. It wasa film for the Soninke, called L’Ecole au coeur de la vie. It was a film to teach families how to betterhelp in the education of their children (italics in original, Ellerson 2000).

This commitment, however, has not prevented her from discussing larger political issues as

reflected in her first feature La Nuit de la verite (The Night of Truth) of 2004. In the end, as a

filmmaker, she is interested in the kind of storytelling universally applicable to human experi-

ences: ‘I became a filmmaker to tell stories, to share things with people, and not necessarily

to use film as a weapon’ (Barlet 2001, Interview). Similarly, this universal tendency in orienting

the audience to decipher the meaning of the film is deconstructed in Un Certain matin: ‘There is

nothing “African” or “European” in this; no history to guide its meaning to give the events a

sense of unfolding or moving toward a goal’ (Harrow 2007, 210). How the film is put together

is symbolically connected to Tiga’s weaving of wicker sticks, Harrow analyzes. The audience’s

gaze thus is guided by the film’s editing, tying all the pieces together, as Nacro embeds the

threads in the narrative. The actor’s action motivates the audience’s agency to participate in

the narrative: ‘. . .as Tiga is moved from the position of the passive viewer to one that is

taking an active role, intervening, participating in the scene. He has crossed into that other

world, and so do we [the viewers]’ (Harrow 2007, 210). Nacro skillfully manipulates the audi-

ence’s viewing positions as she does with her camera and the actor’s performance, while wit-

tingly laying bare the architecture of her storytelling. This is when the postmodern experience

begins (Harrow 2007, 212). In the end, the audience is left to wonder, ‘Is the filmic reality

not real?’ Or, ‘it is too real to tell the boundaries of the two worlds?’ With the rise of such ques-

tions, Nacro has succeeded in her design of a paradoxical didactism that is humourous and

serious at the same time.

Despite Nacro’s strong commitment to socio-political causes, like any expressive art form, to

teach and to delight stays at the core of her work’s raison d’etre. ‘Film can help establish real

exchange and communication. . .as film is the best means of educating the masses’, Nacro

believes (Thackway 2003, 160). With this intention in mind, she does not, however, see didacti-

cism as the goal of her cinema, but only as a means to an end. She is well aware of the entertain-

ing function cinema has, and often defies conventional genre divisions by inserting humour into

serious discussions of such socio-political issues as AIDS, war, and female circumcision. This

mixture of the tragic with the comic and the serious with the light-hearted is also an essential

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characteristic of Romantic irony, which often accompanies self-reflection. Nacro chooses

humour as a way to get the message across and to forward political reflection.19

When such political reflection is assumed through a feminine perspective, it furthers the

urgency of such a critical position, using cinema as criticism. It also addresses the pivotal

issue, which Haroun fails to resolve, concerning women’s involvement in reclaiming their sub-

jectivity in storytelling, forming a collective force and finding some kind of ‘machisme’, in

Nacro’s own words, to face the obstacles, economic and aesthetic alike, that hamper African

filmmaking. As ‘it is difficult enough for a postcolonial woman to become a writer, how

much more so to become a filmmaker, not least because of the additional male prejudice. . .how

could they cope with the artistic, technical and technological demands of directing a film?’

(Murphy and Williams 2007, 169). Thus, the feminine touch to her is a necessity despite the

equally challenging battle fought by both male and female African filmmakers. Self-reflexivity

allows her to navigate in and out of the conventional gender constraints and to transcend

mainstream cinema’s stylistic boundaries and be political at the same time without being type-

cast into a director who makes films only concerning women. As a matter of fact, she did make

this first film ‘against a problematic background of revolution’ due to the shortage of female film

technicians in Burkina (Verschueren 2002, 3), and the ‘behind-the-scenes’ structure of the film’s

narrative paradoxically challenges the reality of a male-dominant industry. After all, films are

constituted by their social life and are not isolated from context; they are cultural artifacts

emerging out of ‘a constellation of simultaneous social, institutional, technological, aesthetic

and discourse forms’ (Born 2004, 96; quoted in Dovey 2009, xiii). Nacro merges aesthetics

of filmmaking with politics of storytelling through an intrinsic trope of self-referentiality,

while the contextual references within the mise-en-scene will aid the extrinsic signification to

take place.

Conclusion

Both Bye Bye Africa and Un Certain matin use the camera as part of the mise-en-scene to under-

line its presence amongst their countrymen with an apparent sense of uncertainty, while La Vie

sur terre’s invisible camera and audible narrator/griot undercuts the linearity of the narrative,

calling attention to the film’s lyrical style and poeticism. As these face-to-face re-encounters

with the filmmakers’ homelands after years of self-exile (in the case of Haroun and Sissako)

and studies/working in Europe (in the case of all three directors) bring reality to the audience

through an artificial means – the camera, are the filmmakers seen by their countrymen as stran-

gers who steal the natives’ image? Or do they attempt to create their own cultural memories for

their mother/nation as the latter has given them life? These questions concerning the nature of

film as an art form and an industry are essential to orient the filmmakers’ desires and practice.

Nacro acknowledged that there has been a kind of African cinema that looked to the outside for

its audience and that only 10% of the continent’s population sees their films (Ellerson 2000). It is

thus an imperative for them to use film as a reflexive means to answer the ontological question:

What is cinema for the Africans? As these filmmakers often sojourn between the two continents,

their transnational identity and work inevitably complicate the dialects between them and their

audience, domestic or abroad.

As Stuart Hall points out, the postcolonial artist’s identity lies in his positioning at a certain

given time or space (1994, 392–403). And through a self-reflexive schema, the director/griot

can best represent a reality at both socio-political and personal levels. When discussing

modern life and the transition of his discourse on modernity, Siegfried Kracauer observes that

‘mass cultural forms, as the specimen of modernity, gave viewers the potential to understand

the conditions in which they were living and thereby to acquire the capacity for self-reflection

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(at least) or enlightened emancipation (at best)’ (quoted in Charney and Schwartz 1995, 4). Simi-

larly, Walter Benjamin’s projection of modernity also points to a tendency for the spectator to

examine characteristics of cinema and the manner ‘in which man presents himself to mechanical

equipment [acting in front of the camera] but also. . .by means of this apparatus, man can rep-

resent his environment’ (1968, 235). As an industry involving audiences and an art form convey-

ing meaning and commentary between the artist(s) (including performers) and the spectator,

cinema serves multiple purposes and travels between locations and times during filming as

well as projection. During these processes, the manifold nature of its form and functions

becomes visible through self-reflection, which can even foreground the socio-political critique

and revolutionize the traditional triangular relationship between the artist, the work, and the

spectator. African cinema, despite the urgency to carry on its decolonization trajectory and

the desire for a self-determining discourse, cannot forego the potentials and force such reflexiv-

ity can afford. Criticism must be at the centre of all cinemas that seek to shake, to engage, to

teach, and to entertain. ‘It is time for a revolution in African film criticism’, writes Harrow

(2007, xi), and reflexivity as a concept as well as a strategy will continue to aid the revolutionary

process through this self-critiquing attribute in filmmaking and in criticism.

Notes

1. David Murphy and Patrick Williams mentioned that under a unified charge of the Federation of AfricanFilmmakers (FEPACI), African filmmakers and even policy makers had been very aware of the neces-sity to ‘decolonise’ themselves by advocating such means as ‘making films from an African point ofview’ and ‘rejecting commercial, Western film codes’ since the mid 1907s (Murphy 2000, 239–40),but many have retreated from such a radical call in order to forge a viable popular African cinemaindustry. Murphy essentially argues against the notion of a unified, ‘authentic’ cinema of Africa, butuses the singular, collective term to advocate the centrality and significance of African cinema inworld cinema scholarship (Murphy and Williams 2007, 5–6). While Dovey recognises the potencyof a Pan-Africanist desire of a collective identity, she instead calls for the attention to the local, the‘specific Africas’ in theorizing (2009, 2).

2. As Bolgar-Smith explains, the term ‘griot’ is a post-contact conflation of similar cultural figures indifferent parts of Africa, in particular the former Mande empire. Therefore, one must understandthat the griot has many roles (2010, 28–9). But it has become synonymous to the storyteller inAfrican film scholarship largely due to Sembene’s comments on this important cultural figure (Pfaff1984). Other important critics discussing the relationship between the filmmaker and the griotinclude Malkus and Armes (1991); Cham (1993); Diawara (1988, 1992); Ukadike (1995); Tomaselli,Shepperson, and Eke (1995); Tomaselli (1993); Barlet (2004); and Bolgar-Smith (2010).

3. For example, Foucault’s reading of modern language and literature as manifestation of nothing morethan itself, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘nomadic model’ of knowledge and interpretation thatfunctions like a ‘rhizome’, challenging the traditional practices of philosophy and history andsuggesting an alternative for reading history, philosophy, art and literature coincide with Schlegel’sassertion of Romantic irony as the essential marker of modernity. See Beus’ work ‘Conclusion: TheModernity of Romantic Irony’ (2003, 145–50).

4. Stuart Hall’s link of the semiotic paradigm to a socio-cultural critique of mass media is highly appli-cable here as this essay will illustrate later that this self-rerefentiality is a crucial trope of a politicalcinema in order to subvert the historically dominant discourse of the Eurocentric paradigm. BillNichols also speaks of such a textual coding system, which has its fixated relationships betweencodes, but it does not deny ‘the possibility for reference to coordinates of meaning outside the filmitself, especially since so many of the codes constituting it are themselves recruited from the con-text’ (1995, 71).

5. Chidi Amuta analyzes the necessary aesthetics of artistic and literary production in modern Africa in aprocess of manifesting cultural autonomy and identity (1999, 158–63).

6. 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).

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7. ‘Arte 2000 Vu Par’, consisting of 10 films from 10 different countries, attempted to capture fragmentedmoments in different parts of the world seen through the various perspectives of filmmakers of differentnationalities: ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une date ? Un fragment de temps qui peut etre un souvenir ou un moment avenir. Qu’est-ce l’an 2000? Plus qu’une date : la fin d’un siecle, le debut d’un autre, le passage d’unmillenaire a l’autre, l’aventure peut-etre, vers un monde different. Qu’est-ce que l’an 2000 a la televi-sion? ARTE a choisi: ce sera l’imaginaire’ (What is a date? A fragment of time which may be amemory or a moment to come. What is the year 2000? More than a date: the end of a century andthe beginning of another, the passage of a millennium to another, the adventure perhaps, to a differentworld. What is the year 2000 on television? ARTE has chosen: it will be imaginary). For more detailson the series, see http://archives.arte-tv.com/special/2000vupar/ftext/splash_f.html.

8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1817), Biographia Literaria, chapter xiv.9. I am referring to the shifting nature of the process of situating oneself, not the fixated positions per se.

10. He begins filming after he gets in a van, and later in the film his friend Garba also drives him on hismotorcycle around town shooting city scenes, a possible tribute to and conscious imitation of Vertov’sMan with a Movie Camera, in which the cinematographer rides in a car around Moscow with hiscamera making a ‘city symphony’.

11. Here I am referring to Derrida’s notion of a sign that awaits significance. Thus it emphasizes the mobi-lity of the signifying process, not the fixed meaning itself.

12. I am referring to the physical, economic circumstances under which filmmakers work. The ‘materialcondition’ according to Eileen Julien (1992) will be discussed later.

13. The list of funding agencies commonly supporting African filmmakers include Cinenomad (Paris),Fonds Sud Cinema, ADC-Sud (both affiliated with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Fonds Eur-opeen de Developpement (an EU agency), Agence Intergouvernementale de la Francophonie (an inter-national non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Paris), and Arte France Cinema.

14. My critique derives from Laura Mulvey’s 1975 seminal work ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’.See also her 1989 Visual and Other Pleasures. The problematic treatment also stems from their inti-mate relationship during the filming.

15. Numerous writers have devoted research and books on the empire’s early and newer portrayals of itsOther. Studies on such Orientalism are also many, thus there is no need to re-iterate these stereotypicalimages.

16. This statement has appeared and been quoted numerous times in interviews and articles: UlrichGregor’s (1978) interview with Sembene in Framework; 35–7 Francoise Pfaff’s (1982) ‘ThreeFaces of Africa: Women in Xala’, 27–31; and N. Frank Ukadike’s (1994) ‘Reclaiming Images ofWomen in Films from Africa and the Black Diaspora’, 106. Nacro also acknowledges in an interviewwith Bernard Verschueren from The Courier (2002, 2–5) that her decision to go into filmmakingstemmed from the ‘desire to tell stories’. She relates her childhood experiences in evening gatheringsin the village where stories were told, and this was her traditional education via the stories, which‘facilities learning and memory work’.

17. These black filmmakers include America’s Julie Dash, Australia’s Tracey Moffatt, Gudeloupe’s SarahMaldoro, and Ethiopia’s Salem Mekuria. For analysis of films that demystify black female images, seeUkadike (1994).

18. For Nacro’s biographical information, see her official website: http://www.fanta-nacro.com/films/uncertainmatin.html.

19. Sarah Elkaım, ‘Fanta Regina 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 laverite, she was confronted with a question why she chose humour to deal with some of the toughestissues, and she replied: ‘j’ai choisi l’humour pour faire passer le message. Je me mets toujours en ques-tion quand je prepare un sujet. . .Pour ce film, j’avais envie de dire stop, regarde ce qu’il se passe autourde toi et vois ce que tu peux faire pour permettre un monde meilleur. Souvent dans les conflits, on laissetout aux autorites, aux politiques, aux intellectuels. Il faut faire un travail personnel et pas obeir a desconcepts abstraits, meme s’il est important qu’il y ait une reflexion politique’ (I chose humour to get themessage 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 inthese conflicts, people leave everything to the authorities, politicians, intellectuals. You have to do per-sonal work and not just obey abstract concepts, even though it is important that there be politicalreflection).

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(b) Films.

Bye bye Africa. Dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Images Plus, 1999.Un certain matin. Dir. Fanta Regina Nacro. Films du Defi, 1992.8 1

2. Dir. Federico Fellini. Cineriz, 1963.

Heremakono (Waiting for happiness). Dir. Abderrahmane Sissako. Duo Films, 2002.Man with a movie camera. Dir. Dziga Vertov. VUFKU, 1929.Le mepris. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Compagnia cinematografica champion, 1963.La nuit de la verite (The night of truth). Dir. Fanta Regina Nacro. Acrobates Films, Films du Defi, 2004.Tout va bien. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Anouchaka Films, 1972.La vie sur terre. Dir. Abderrahmane Sissako. Haut et Court, 1998.

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