by Mark Cousins
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Despite considerable financial hardships in the 1980s, black African directors made some of their best films yet. Jom used oral storytelling techniques to look at the themes of dignity and resistance. Director: Ababacar Samb-Makharam. Senegal, 1981.
In the same year as Jom, the Malian director Souleymane Cisse followed his Baara/Work with the award-winning Finyé/Wind (Mali, 1981). Where Jom elaborated the role of the griot in African cinema, Wind brought a new spiritual focus. Opening with the caption “the wind awakens the thought of man” it uses spare imagery to suggest that spiritual emptiness is the cause of a whole series of problems in west Africa – military and political corruption, disaffected youth and the uncertain position of women. In one scene, an elder talks to the spirit of an ancient gnarled tree, saying “the sky is getting darker … our knowledge and sense of divine has escaped us.” It was, claimed Ferid Boughedir in his documentary Caméra Afrique (Tunisia, 1983), “a key scene in Africa’s re-imagining of itself.”18 Cisse’s Yeelen/The Light of 1987 was a film of equal power and beauty.
What was becoming clear already was that where pioneers Ousmane Sembene and Djibril Diop Mambety had engaged directly with the immediate colonial and post-colonial realities of their countries, the second, 1980s, generation of black African filmmakers were looking more to pre-colonial times for their themes. Gaston Kabore’s Wend Kunni/The Gift from God, made in Burkina Faso in 1982, one of the country’s first films, was as auspicious a debut as Farrough Farrokhzad’s This House is Black in Iran twenty years earlier. Its depiction of pre-colonial times was even more influential than either Jom or Finyé. The story is of a speechless child driven away from his birth family and adopted by a whole village, its theme the value of pre-colonial solidarity. The boy, played by a non-professional actor, is jolted from his mute state when he finds the dead body of a man from the village hanging in a tree. Gradually he tells of the events which initiated his trauma. What struck many filmmakers at the time and what made it hugely influential was how Kabore employed a flashback and stories-within-stories structure to ask the question “what has been wiped from our memories?” using the format of a traditional tale and eschewing specific references to historical time, to do so.
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Gaston Kaboré’s Wend Kunni, like many African films of the 1980s, took pre-colonial times as its theme and used a complex time structure. Burkina Faso, 1982.
By the middle of the decade it was no surprise that a film as formally daring as Les Visages de femmes/Faces of Women (1985) could be produced on the Ivory Coast. Directed by Désiré Ecaré, it begins with a vivid song-and-dance scene lasting a full ten minutes, which introduces us to the people of Loupou, the setting for the film. Thereafter the film splits in two, telling first a story set on a farm in which the trendy Kouassi returns from the city, flirts with his brother’s wife N’Guessan, then has sex with her in a river in a forest. The second is a feminist tale about an entrepreneurial city woman’s attempt to secure a bank loan to advance her fish smoking business. The first was shot in 1973, the second in 1983, the first is dramatic and erotic, the second satirical. Ecare, who studied filmmaking in Paris, combined such diverse material into a unified whole, segueing between dialogue and musical narration in the first story, for example, when the wife and the brother talk of going somewhere quiet. After a few moments dialogue and the departure of each character, local women wryly sing:
So they left
Kouassi for his village
N’Guessan for her mother’s.
But the two villages were very close.
Less than a mile apart, they say.
So, it’s in Kouassi’s arms that she spent most of her time.
And her husband heard of it.
Back in the hub of West African filmmaking, Burkina Faso, a former acting impresario and theatre producer Mohamed Abid (“Med”) Hondo became the most radical of the 1980s African directors. More than any of the others his comments revive the political language and ideas of Third Cinema (see pages 368–69): “For three centuries, due to historical circumstances…”, he wrote, “a whole people has been led to believe that it is superior to the people it had colonized … Such an ideology has not been eradicated in the last twenty years … I hope my films explain Africa and the crucial burning issues faced by black people in Africa and abroad.”19
The angriest African film of the decade certainly tried to do so. Ousmane Sembene’s Soleil O/“Oh Sun” (Mauritania, 1970) had followed on the heels of his first films as a ground-breaking and original howl of protest against racism and colonialism. Sarraounia (France–Burkina Faso, 1986) shared this rage and is, according to historian Frank Ukidike, “a landmark of African cinema, the most ambitious for its inventiveness, professionalism and dedication.”20 The film is named after a nineteenth-century Queen in the Niger region of Central Africa who was raised to be a warrior leader (323). Her story was kept alive through the early twentieth century by oral historians of the area. Hondo approached it as a consciousness-raising exem-plar. In a scene after the French have attacked her village, he has actress Ai Keita who plays Sarraounia deliver a call to counter-attack and films it is a single 360-degree tracking shot. Again echoing the stylistic strategies of Third Cinema, he argued that he wanted to dismantle “the narrative and psychological mechanisms” of what he wryly terms “traditional drama – turgy”. It is questionable whether he entirely achieves these oppositional aims, but this does not detract from his achievements.
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Aï Keïta (right) as the title character, a nineteenth-century Central African queen in Med Hondo’s inventive Sarraounia. France–Burkina Faso, 1968.
One of the youngest of the plethora of new African filmmakers was the Burkina Fasoan Idrissa Ouedraogo. Like Sembene and others he studied in Moscow, then débuted with Yam Daabo/The Choice (1987), then the acclaimed Yaaba/The Grandmother (1989) and Tilaï (1990). The second of these was story of an old woman who, when accused of having evil powers, is sent away from her village, but is befriended by two children who call her Grandmother. This was a rich and complex character piece along the lines of Wend kunni and very different from Sarraounia, which showed, if more proof was needed, that African films were amongst the most vibrant of the whole decade.
This was also the decade of Western yuppies, of testosterone cinema in America and India, of those temples of regression, the multiplexes, and it ended with what Hollywood refers to as its “blockbuster summer” of 1989. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Steven Spielberg), Batman (Tim Burton), Ghostbusters II (Ivan Reitman) and Lethal Weapon II (Richard Donner) together, for the first time in movie history, took over $1,000 million in the US alone. The provenance of one of these films alone signals the kind of changes the next decade would see. Batman was made by Warner Bros., one of the seven surviving Hollywood studios, out of the original eight founded sixty years earlier.21 But Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner would scarcely have recognized what their family business had become. In 1989, it merged with Time Inc, forming Time Warner. Time owned DC Comics, which originated and published the Batman strip. The film arm of the new conglomerate filmed a property from the publishing arm and the combined merchandising was worth over $1 billion, nearly four times what the film itself took in the American multiplexes. They called this synergy.
The corporatisation of film was not taking place everywhere, however. Cinema in some quarters was still a medium for philosophers and artists as well as showmen and women. The next chapter may tell of the advance of corporate film in the 1990s, but by the end of the decade, a new way of making movies had exploded on the scene and it ushered in revolutionary new schemas and ideas.
1. David Denby, “He’s Gotta Have It”, New Yorker magazine, 26 June 1989, pp. 52–54.
2. David Lynch, interview with the author, BBC Scene by Scene, 2000.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Such European horror cinema – made with style by filmmakers such as Dario Argento
, Mario Bava, Jean Rollin, Jesus Franco, and Jorg Buttgereit – seldom achieved mainstream success.
6. See for example Lyotard’s book L’Acinéma where he calls these categories “speeching cinema” and “figural cinema”.
7. “Dossier sur Beineix, Besson et Carax”, Revue du cinema/Image et Son, No. 449, May 1989.
8. Davies’ trilogy was pre-figured by Scottish director Bill Douglas’ sombre and brilliant autobiographical trilogy My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978). Using spare dialogue and almost still images, some of which had the power of Eisenstein, Douglas described the lacerations inflicted by life on a painfully shy boy, Jamie (Stephen Archibald). Like Davies’ trilogy and many other artistically ambitious British films of this era, they were funded by the British Film Institute.
9. “I worked as a doctor for two years, six months were in big city emergency wards, where you see people die in a pretty extreme state … I know this is reflected in the two Mad Max films which are fairly pre-occupied with extreme situations.” George Miller, quoted in Ultra Violent Movies, Bouzereau, Laurent. Citadel Press, 1996, p. 178.
10. David Cronenberg, quoted in Nightmare Movies, Kim Newman. Harmony Books, New York, 1988.
11. Quoted in a detailed essay on Hou’s aesthetics on the website www.cinemaspace.berkeley.edu
12. Ibid.
13. Hou did, however, abandon this style in his film Qianxi manbo/Millenium Mambo (Taiwan, 2001).
14. Tenguiz Abuladze interviewed by David Remnick in Lenin’s Tomb, Random House, New York, 1993.
15. Kieslowski on Kieslowski, Faber and Faber. D. Stock, ed. 1993.
16. Ibid.
17. Jom’s Production Notes
18. An Argos Films/BFI Production, released by Connoisseur/Academy Video.
19. Quoted on the website of the Harvard Film Archive, www.harvardfilmarchive.org
20. Black African Cinema by Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, University of California Press, p. 290.
21. Only one of the eight, RKO, collapsed.
DIGITAL
The techniques of digital filmmaking changed cinema even more fundamentally than the introduction of sound. The possibility of shooting on videotape with a camera the same size as or smaller than a loaf of bread, using crews of two people rather than ten or more, editing on home computers and dubbing in the simplest of sound suites meant that the world of film production was no longer a charmed one into which only the lucky few could enter. The walls around the citadel appeared to crumble in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but they actually did so during the course of the 1990s. The third epoch of cinema, which is still properly beginning, is the first meritocratic one.
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Films like Fernando Meirelles’ and Katia Lund’s Brazilian City of God – a high octane account of young people in a Rio de Janeiro housing project – have dynamized international cinema since 1990, making it one of the more diverse periods in movie history.
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Victor Erice’s documentary portrait of artist Antonio Lopez painting a tree in his garden, The Quince Tree Sun. The grain in this image, its sepia-ness and scratches, its ghostly shadow of a traditional camera carrying old film magazines and mounted on a wooden tripod – all these things capture the delicate pleasures of photographic cinema. This chapter describes what happened when cinema started to go beyond photography. Spain, 1992.
CAN SEE (1994–PRESENT)
Computerization takes cinema beyond photography
10
By the end of the 1980s the target audience of much of Western commercial cinema was teenage, male and hooked on MTV. Other parts of global film culture were reviving but the multiplexes changed the pace and conditions of film consumption in the West seriously reducing the diversity of cinematic voices which had existed a decade before. It was a gloomy time for those who cared for the breadth and ambitions of cinema and only the most quixotic cultural commentator would have predicted a cinematic renaissance.
Yet that is exactly what happened. The 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium were the single most interesting period yet for international cinema, the centres of innovation constantly moving. It has not been understood that the vibrancy of filmmaking around the globe in the last fifteen years has become a more significant phenomenon than the world expansion of style in the 1920s, or the succession of energetic new waves of the 1960s. This is not an argument about which periods in world film history have produced the greatest number of outstanding films, merely a statement of the simple fact that only in the 1990s did every continent undergo a revival of cinematic confidence. Iranian directors made astonishingly original films, the Australians and New Zealanders had a heyday; Eastern and Northern Europe produced great new work and, in Dogme, an important new aesthetic movement; in Western Europe, French-language movies at least explored new philosophical ideas; South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam made the most distinctive films in the later part of the decade; African and particularly Northern African filmmakers continued to innovate; Central and Latin America came to the fore with work like Amores perros/Love’s a Bitch (Mexico, 2000) and Y tu mama tambien/And Your Mother Too (Mexico, 2002); and the increasing postmodernization of American cinema began to be rethought in the light of the possibilities opened up by digital production.
LEADING LIGHTS IN IRAN
Iran became a centre of cinematic innovation in these years. The pioneer poet and filmmaker Farough Farrokhzad had died in 1967, Daryush Mehrjui who made The Cow in 1970, was still working, the influential Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanun-e Parveresh-e Fekri Kudakan va Noja-vanan), known as Kunan, began in the 1970s to fund films about young people, oil revenues greatly increased as a result of OPEC price rises in the same decade, and Abbas Kiarostami, a Tehrani born in 1940, started making short Kunan-funded films. One of the first indicators of his greatness was a modest-sounding work about a boy called Ahmad (326) who by mistake takes home his friend Nematzadeh’s school homework book. Ahmad knows that Nematzadeh has been threatened by his teacher that if he fails to do his homework this time he will be expelled from school, so he sets out to try to find Nematzadeh’s house to return the book.
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Babek Ahmed Poor as Ahmed, the boy who mistakenly takes his friend’s homework book home, then spends the rest of the film trying to return it. Where is My Friend’s House? Director: Abbas Kiarostami. Iran, 1987.
As the outline suggests, Doost kojast/Where is My Friend’s House? (1987) was about the decency of a strong-willed little boy. Its approach would be Kiarostami’s hallmark thereafter. Together with the simplicity of the stories in his films there was usually a focus on apparently trivial events – here the mistake about a school book – the story would be told in a patient, unrushed manner, there would be no attempt to create fear, panic or excitement in the viewer; moral and emotional clichés would be rejected so that, for example, in Where is My Friend’s House?, Ahmad is never cute and often quite stubborn; a child’s logic would often represent the main point of view. Most importantly, individual scenes would strive for the kind of originality of tone that the poets who Kiarostami read as a young man achieved through looking for an unspoken layer of meaning between two self-evident ones.
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In Kiarostami’s conceptually stimulating sequel, an earthquake has taken place near the village where Ahmed lived, so an actor playing the filmmaker who made Where is My Friend’s House? goes to see if Babek Ahmed Poor is still alive. This shot, like many in the film, is photographed from the car of the director as he drives through destroyed villages. And Life Goes On. Abbas Kiarostami. Iran, 1992.
Commercial Western cinema by the 1990s frequently remade and added sequels to successful films but could never have conceived of one of the next turn of events in Kiarostami’s career. Three years after he completed Where is My Friend’s House?, the village in the Rostam-abad region where he filmed it was hit by a terrible earthquake. Kiarostami went back with his crew an
d made Zendegi Va Digar Hich/And Life Goes On (1992), a glorious film about the unstoppability of the everyday, and the rapturous disorder of human life. In it, people from the first film plan weddings, talk about sport and rebuild as best they can (327). Kids play in the streets. The delicate questions of life – like the importance of returning a friend’s school book – remain entirely undamaged by the disruptive force of a natural disaster.
In the light of the second film – sometimes called a “paradocumentary” – the simplicity and focus of the first seemed like a premonition. Together they were reminders of the timelessness that Pasolini aimed for in his films and established Kiarostami as one of the great directors of his age. But he had not finished. Two years after And Life Goes On, the director returned for a third time to Rostam-abad to complete what has become known as the Rostam-abad trilogy. Zir-e darakhtan-e zeytun/Through the Olive Trees (1994) is about the making of And Life Goes On. A crew is in a village devastated by an earthquake. People are living in temporary housing. The director finds two young people to act in the story of a couple who are to be married – an incident from the second film (328). He is a bricklayer; she comes from a wealthier family which disapproves of him. In real life, just as in the director’s story, he has been pursuing her. The film ends in a series of long-held shots of the two of them walking through olive trees, talking about the possibility of their relationship, him trying to convince her of its worth.