by Mark Cousins
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Satirizing the wealth and dress sense of colonizers: Djibril Diop Mambety’s playful Touki Bouki presented “fantasies of African modernity never before seen in film’. Senegal, 1973.
Also in Northern and Arab Africa, important documentary direc-tors started to make their mark, amongst them Abellatif Ben Ammar who studied in Paris and worked with Roberto Rossellini. His Tunisian film Sejnane (1974), about how poor people shouldered the brunt of the burden of the independence struggle, was very moving. The former French colony of Senegal began to emerge as a major filmmaking country in the 1970s. Ousmane Sembene had made the first black African feature The Black Girl (1965) there (see page 315) and despite a population of just eight million, several key figures followed in his footsteps. Djibril Diop Mambety was born in the country’s capital, Dakar, in 1945 and raised by a strict father who taught him to look beyond the material things in life. At the age of twenty-eight he released Touki Bouki/Journey of the Hyenas (Senegal, 1973), a kind of African Breathless or even Easy Rider, about two ironic young drop-outs who swank around and swindle money in order to try to go Paris to live the high life. The man, Mouri, works in a slaughterhouse but drives a motorbike with oxen horns on his handle-bars. Anta, his somewhat mystical partner, is a political worker. They ride around and meet villagers who say that the only things to come from France were “white women and the clap”, drifting between mystical scenes of ritual lovemaking intercut with the blood sacrifice of a goat, and open mockery of locals, village life and colonialism (276). They stitch up a rich fat man who fancies Mouri. Later he strips and rides naked in the fat man’s car, fist held high, making a mock political speech which is intercut with a cavalcade of black Citroëns, the car of choice of the colonialists. Celebrated dancer Josephine Baker’s song “Paris, Paris, Paris” plays ironically throughout.
Touki Bouki has the energy of Easy Rider, of Imamura, of all those films which say “fuck you” to the previous generation. The historian of African cinema Manthia Diawara wrote that it “tears up the screen with fantasies of African modernity never before seen in film or literature”.19 Its assertion of youthfulness and cinematic irreverence was a door opener for new African filmmakers. Its title means “journey of the hyenas” in Mambety’s local language Wolof, and throughout his career he would use hyenas to symbolize the viciousness of human beings, in one instance pulling out a stuffed one to illustrate his point. It would be twenty years before he made his next feature, itself called Hyènes/Hyenas (Switzerland–France–Senegal, 1993), by which time the vision of this innovative director had darkened considerably.
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Mambety’s creative energy seemed to inspire Senegalese directors: Africa’s first important female filmmaker Safi Faye made her landmark documentary about village life, Peasant Life, there in 1975.
Still in Senegal, Safi Faye, Africa’s first important female director, made Kaddu Beykat/Peasant Letter (1975) the first black African film to focus on the cultural details of village life. A documentary about the impact on farmers of the fall in the market value of their peanut crop, it is told in the form of a letter about a day in the life of villagers. At one point the letter writer says, “I have often wondered why we live and die without any pleasure.” European anthropologists like Jean Rouche had long made documentary films about Africa; Faye’s went further than any of these.
Nine years after The Black Girl, Ousmane Sembene made Impotence/Xala (Senegal, 1974), which was almost as caustic as Touki Bouki. The former Citroen factory worker and celebrated novelist chose as his next subject the temporary sexual impotence of a black business man in an unnamed African country who so co-operates with the colonizers that he washes his limousine with their expensive imported mineral water. Where Xala (pronounced “hala”) was funny and popular, Sembene’s next film Ceddo/The People (Senegal, 1976), used a simple style to tell a symbolic and controversial tale about the impact of Islam in Africa. Featuring horrific slave branding scenes, it argued that the future of Africa relies on its refusal to have imposed on it any monotheistic religion. Its ending, in which a princess slays a Muslim Imam, was considered scandalous, and the films was banned in its own country for eight years. Souleymane Cissé, another great African director emerged in the 1970s. Born in 1940 in Mali, Senegal’s Eastern neighbour, and trained in Moscow, he had his first success with Baara/Work (Mali, 1978). Finye/The Wind (Mali, 1982) and Yeelen/Brightness (Mali, 1987) would establish him as the most important African director of the 1980s.
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Still in Sengal, the father of black African cinema, Ousmane Sembene, addressed the theme of the arrival of Islam onto the continent in Ceddo. 1976.
In 1967 a young Ethiopian, Haile Gerima, left Africa to study in America. He returned in the early 1970s to make a film as stylistically bold as Touki Bouki, another step forward for Third Cinema and a drama with one of the longest time lines in movie history. Mirt sost shi amit/Harvest: 3,000 Years (Ethiopia, 1975) told the story of three millennia of colonization in East Africa. Shot in low-contrast black and white (279), it starts at dawn with the words “Almighty God, give us a nice day.” Throughout, Gerima uses the long lenses favoured by Robert Altman to create a distance from the situations in his film about which he feels so passionate: a family of farmers appallingly treated by a black, trilby hatted armchair tyrant. The farmer sings a song about a 3,000-year-old wedding dress as his wife walks endlessly across the fields until she is a pinprick in the landscape. The size and timelessness of the land is the first concern of the film but then Gerima weaves in details of the exploitation it is host to, and then a process of politicization begins. Where Sembene worked in parables, Gerima, who became a Harvard University film professor, is more intellectual in his approach to form. He rejects the reverse angles and establishing shots of Western cinema, using chanting and breathing on the sound track, always pointing his camera downward. Like Glauber Rocha in Black God, White Devil (Brazil, 1964), he introduces mythic characters like a mad political visionary, an old man called Kebebe whose land was stolen years before. The 3,000-year-old dress becomes a metaphor for the old ideas the locals clothe themselves in. They have been the same people for three millennia and now, with help from the mad man, they rebel. Kebebe tells how the farmers were herded into concentration camps because the Queen of England didn’t want to see them on a visit to the country. “If you’d witnessed that, you’d have lost your sanity like me”, he says. Two hours into the film, Kebebe calls the black trilby-hatted landlord a blood sucker and batters him with a stick. “Help, help, he killed the Lord”, the people shout. The farmer says, “The landlord is dead – the state might give us the harvest.” Voices begin to flood the sound track. People are beginning to talk to each other.
The rejection of the norms of Western cinema in Africa was echoed in the Middle East. Yasser Arafat becoming leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In Iran, Farough Farrokhzad’s landmark epilepsy documentary The House is Black (1963) inspired other filmmakers. Around ninety features were made in the country each year in the early 1970s, some supported by the Ministry of Culture. The best of these was Gav/The Cow (1969) by Daryush Mehrjui, who studied film at UCLA at what appears to have been the same time as Francis Coppola and who was very influenced by Farrokhzad. The Cow was the fictional bedrock of Iranian cinema, it “transform(ed) the very definition” of it.20 Told with great simplicity, it concerns Hassan, the devoted owner of the only cow in a village (280). When it dies the locals con-coct a story that it has wandered off. Hassan is inconsolable and slips into despair, then something closer to insanity. Like many subsequent Iranian films, a physical element in the real world – a cow – is gradually transformed into something poetic and metaphysical. Ambitious directors in other countries usually begin with a human problem which their film explores or, less often, a spatial situation. It is striking how often objects are at the centre of the poetics of filmmaking in Iran. The resulting balance between tangible and abstract elements is as sa
tisfying as the classic equilibrium in the work of Yasujiro Ozu.
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Haile Gerima’s long, symbolic account of exploitation of peasants, the stylistically rigorous Harvest: 3000 Years. Ethiopia, 1975.
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The rise of Irania cinema continued with Daryush Mehrjui’s The Cow. 1969.
In 1972 the Arab neighbours of Iranians like Mehrjui published a New Arab Cinema manifesto at the Damascus film festival in Syria. This called for a new political commitment in Middle-Eastern film and led to several landmark films. The first of these was by the most talented Lebanese director of the 1970s, Borhan Alawiye, who trained in Belgium and who, in 1974, released the outstanding documentary Kafr Kassem (Lebanon, 1974) about an Israeli massacre of Palestinians in the years 1947–51. Omar Amiralay’s Al-hayat al-yawmiyya fi qaria suriyya/Daily Life in a Syrian Village (Syria, 1974) received even better reviews.
The most notorious Middle-Eastern filmmaker of the period was the Kurd Yilmaz Güney. Born into a peasant family in southern Turkey 1937, he became a writer and actor in the late 1950s. Thereafter, Güney’s career was unique. He was jailed in 1960 for writing communist fiction, the first of many imprisonments. By the end of that decade he had become a star in Turkey, a scruffy, gruff hero figure, sometimes called the “Ugly King” (281), in wildly commercial movies mixing Holly-wood with neo-realism. His stardom prefigured Amitabh Bachchan’s in India in that he was less an object of sexual desire and romantic fantasy as are celebrities in the Western star system, than an on-screen spokesman for ordinary people. The authorities disliked him not only for his leftism but exactly because of this closeness to the people.
In 1968, he started directing his own movies but in 1975, during a fight with an anti-communist judge in a restaurant, a gun was pulled – by Güney’s nephew, it seems – the judge was killed, and the director was imprisoned for eighteen years. During this time he scripted his most important films Suru/The Herd (Zeki Otken, Turkey, 1978), Dusman/The Enemy (Zeki Otken, Turkey, 1979) and Yol/The Way (Serif Goren, 1982), each of which was filmed by other directors under his precise instructions. The first was his history of the Kurdish people told through the metaphor of a flock of sheep taken by train to Turkey’s capital Ankara. “I could not use the Kurdish language in it,” he explained, “or all my actors would be arrested.” Ironically, given that Yol was about five prisoners released from prison for a week to see their families, Güney himself escaped from prison in 1981 to complete its post-production. He died of cancer in France in 1984.
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Kurdish actor-writer director Yilmaz Güney who became a huge star in Turkey and who, while in prison, wrote his most important films.
Across the border from Turkey a near-contemporary of Güney became Greece’s most significant filmmaker to date. Theo Angelopoulos was born in Athens in 1935, studied at Paris’ famous film school, IDHEC, in the 1960s, and debuted as a feature director in 1970. O Thiassos/The Travelling Players (Greece, 1975) brought him to international attention and exemplifies the themes and style of his body of work. Some 230 minutes long and composed of around 80 shots — 1,500 would be more typical for a film at the time — it used the journey of group of intinerant actors staging Golfo and the Shepherdess in bleak, wintry villages as the means to explore the politics of Greece in the years 1939–52. The performers are like refugees in their own country, their work reflecting some of the iniquities of the Nazi invasion as well as the ensuing civil war between communists and royalists. Angelopoulos’ grand tracking shots are in the spirit of Mizoguchi, their complexity capturing the country’s complicated history. Most of his subsequent films would also be allegorical journeys modelled on Homer’s Odyssey, redolent in particular of that work’s oar and winnowing fan sequence, in which a borderline between cultures is found when locals stop recognizing an oar as a maritime instrument and start identifying it as an agricultural one. Greece’s borderline position between Europe, Asia and the Balkans seems to have made the idea of contested space a central political and historical one in Angelopoulos’ great films — for example Topio stiu omichli/Landscape of the Mist (1988), To Vlemma tou Odyssea/Ulysses’ Gaze (1997) and Mia anioniotita kai mia mera/Eternity and a Day (1998). His consistent use of the sequence shot has made the nature of time a parallel concern.
Finally, it comes as no surprise to discover that the continent of Torre Nilsson, of Glauber Rocha and Santiago Alvarez itself contributed much to Third Cinema in the 1970s. In the first year of the decade a former doctor called Salvador Allende won an election in Chile on a socialist ticket. His government gave Miguel Littin, a twenty-eight-year-old TV director, the job of running its new national film body, Chile Films. In 1973, Littin made The Promised Land/La Tierra prometida (Chile). Just as he was about to release it, Allende’s government with overthrown in a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet and supported by the US government. Littin was forced to leave the country but returned in disguise, risking his life to attempt to make a filmic account of the history of his country from the stock market crash to the coup. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez documented Littin’s experiences in Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin. The months leading up to the coup itself were brilliantly documented in Patricio Guzmán’s four-and-three-quarter-hour non-fiction film The Battle of Chile/La Batalla de Chile (Cuba–Chile, 1975–79) which was edited in Cuba over a period of nearly four years. Guzmán presented in detail a heated debate at a trade union rally about whether or not the new leftist government should expropriate factories, incorporated newsreel of the aerial bombing of La Moneda palace where Allende was killed and used footage filmed by an Argentine cameraman as he was shot dead. The latter was a troubling first in non-fiction cinema. The Battle for Chile was one of the most influential of Third Cinema films.
WANT SEE AND THE SEISMIC CHANGE IN AMERICAN CINEMA
Looking back on the fourteen years between the release of Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout de souffle (France, 1959) and the anti-Allende coup in Chile, it is difficult not to be astonished by the ambitions of filmmakers around the world. The European directors put their own lives on screen with such passion that they made us care. They rethought cinema as a modern art, took it seriously and drew moral conclusions about its form. Americans followed suit, looting their own cinematic traditions for situations that they could modernise and problematize. South Americans used film as a political tool, Australians, Africans and Middle-Easterners began to picture themselves on screen with originality and imagination.
But all was not well. The artistic renewal of cinema charted in this chapter and the previous one may have played well in cinemas in Paris, London, Rome, New York, Berlin, Sydney, Dakar, Tehran, Beirut, Bombay and Santiago, but beyond the modern cities, it did not capture the imagination of moviegoers. Then something happened. In the year of the Chilean coup, an American horror film about demonic possession was the first film ever to take more than $200 million in the US. Two years later, a movie about a shark topped it by $60 million. Both, like The Godfather, were adaptations of bestselling novels. Two years after that, a sci-fi movie about the battle between good and evil forces in space demolished all records by taking over $500 million. There had never been figures like these, even in the days of Gone with the Wind (1939). Some kind of seismic change was taking place. The industry didn’t understand it and had to run to catch up, but catch up it did. The success of The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) changed American and then world cinema. The reason for making a film became that the audience would want to see it, not that a director wanted to make it. The interests of young people became more prioritized. To make things exciting, to conjure new escapist worlds, more and flashier special effects were used. As a result, the typical cost of a film increased by a factor of five. Because of this, far fewer were made. Since that meant that more was riding on the success of each, more money was spent on selling them to the public. In order to streamline this process, rough cuts were shown to ave
rage movie-goers whose responses were used to modify the film before its final release. Test screenings had been used before in Hollywood, but not on this scale. This system worked because by the end of the decade three out of seven films were making money. New movie theatres called multiplexes were built with a suite of small screens rather than one big one. In 1973, Columbia pictures was worth $6 million and carried $223 million of debts. Five years later it was worth $140 million and was just $35m in the red. The era of the blockbuster had begun.
How did The Exorcist, Jaws and Star Wars revive the fortunes of the dying American industry? Some argue that they were just brilliantly crafted stories, astutely marketed, but this is not the whole truth. Each built itself around something buried deep in the minds of audiences, something apparently unfilmable that they wanted to see – the devil, a monstrous shark, space ships. For nearly sixty years, from about 1915 to 1973, with exceptions like King Kong and the 1950s sci-fi pictures, American movies had been about people and what they do – fall in love, explore the mid-west, commit crimes, drive cars, dance, sing, etc. Many of the new blockbuster films also had strong characters but they drew more from comic books, the ideas of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and from myth. Like very early, pre-psychological cinema, they used the promise of sensation, thrill and fear to lure people back to the cinema. These films were like Roger Corman B-movies but produced on a massive scale. One of the many ironies of the period is that unlike those making the more artistically ambitious films of the time, none of the men behind these three films had actually started out with Corman.