African films, alhamdulilay!! part trois

I thought this was a nifty once-and-for-all concerning Africa in American film. I'm not saying Blood Diamond wasn't a fantastic movie, and Leonardo's South African accent impeccable ... I'm saying he called Sierra Leone "Africa" one too many times for me. (Before falling back on an old favorite, the other title I toyed with was Africa: More Than A Country Overrun With Poverty, Famine, Draught, Desertification, Poltical Instability, Ethnic Strife, Landmines, Machetes, AIDS, Shrunken Skulls, Mr. Kurtz, Robert Mugabe, and Killer Bees)


(excerpted from Gerise Herndon's essay, "The Antenna and the Mosque: Liberatory Mass Media in Moolaadé")

Manohla Dargis (2007) confesses “tragedy fatigue” when viewing films about Africa, though not, she clarifies, “the real deal,” such as Sembène’s films, among which, she argues, “Moolaadé manages to tackle the issue of female gential mutilation and critique patriarchal Islam in one entertaining package (really). My problem,” Dargis goes on to specify, “rather, is all those films filled with suffering, struggling black Africans who, for the most part, seem to be on camera to make me feel bad.” Tired, clichéd images that fit with US mass media’s frequently recycled and undifferentiated representations of an imagined “Africa” are trotted out again with the effect of making the public feel pity for the beleaguered continent or relief at residing in the US. Popular movies from the US such as Hotel Rwanda, The Last King of Scotland or Blood Diamond, in contrast to Sembène’s creations, do not fundamentally attempt to liberate or transform; their purpose is to turn a profit. They may produce strong emotional response to an individual character’s noble action, but they do not ultimately hope to shift power relations. The most recent issue of Sight and Sound juxtaposes these films with what Dave Calhoun (2007) calls “Africa’s invisible classics.” Classics by Sembène, Djibril Diop Mambety and Cheick Oumar Sissoko are invisible both to multiplex US audiences and to many African viewers purely because of the power of the profit motive driving mammoth production studios. Hollywood and Bollywood exports have dominated screens and styles, at least until the recent abundance of Nollywood productions [out of Nigeria] available on video. But US audiences won’t find easy access to Nollywood anytime soon. Hollywood needs to give US audiences “white guides” to lead them through “black pain” (Calhoun 2007, 34) to make historical and cultural realities easily digestible in less than two hours.

Not only do popular US productions depend on white narrators for credibility: they also rely on men to tell important stories. Hollywood representations of dramatic acts of heroism have been notably masculine. Sembène, on the other hand, provides rich, multi-faceted and diverse images of women’s various means of taking, expressing and enacting power [...] Sembène’s feminism offers a stark contrast to US studios’ contemporary adventures into what might as well be the 19th century’s “heart of darkness.” Manohla Dargis (2004) notes that recent Hollywood endeavors have depicted little to dispel age-old stereotypes of the dark continent in need of light [...] This sense of immutability, that the violence and the hunger are persistent, almost eternal and natural, infects too many films about Africa."





You know, this reminds me of something I used to think was so funny. The first time I was in Senegal, we used to spend countless and not ever enough nights at this bar around the corner from the language school in Dakar. Sweet little place, thatched roof, looow orange lights, a constant 100 cigarettes burning at any given time, dibite, and these bats that would fly in and out of the surrounding trees in tune to live jazz on Friday nights. But anyways, they always had the TV on, and it was always Hotel Rwanda playing over and over and over again. Yea I know, right? beats me too. Not that the place needed a background movie to set the mood in the first place. On the other hand fairly consistent with my theory that Africa might just be the Land of the Arbitrary .....