Canted Angles: Political cinema

While not as well-acquainted with Claire Denis as I ought to be (The Intruder did not motivate an intrust in Jean-Luc Nancy, but 35 Shots of Rum was a warm and moving family study), White Material strikes me as a near-masterpiece. Isabelle Huppert is typically ferocious, but the film’s incendiary post-colonial politics provides a valuable focus to her rage (usually internalized in icy psychodramas). The final climatic moments arrive with the impact of shotgun blasts, with Huppert’s act of patricide undertaken in a burst of overlapping editing and violent disruption of the 180° rule. Such unexpected stylistic bravura is an inversion of the great burst of revolutionary fervour in The Battleship Potemkin – which initially explodes in the celebrated plate-smashing montage. Here, instead, the abrupt murder of the plantation’s patriarch provides no possibility for liberation, but instead seals Huppert within the vindictive cycle of violence rippling outwards throughout the country. A staggering exemplification of the psychology and politics of racial conflict.

Rating: * * * * *

Admittedly, it’s been some time since I’ve engaged with a work as explicitly didactic as Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006) – outside of my forays into activist documentary. For this reason (and never mind the fact that I’m hardly an expert an African cinema), I was somewhat nervous to feature it as my first meditation on the films I’ve recently been watching. And yet, the film refuses to leave me alone: its impassioned critique of globalization as neo-colonial enterprise cannot readily be ignored. So it seems an appropriate enough work with which to begin these entries.

In a small courtyard in Bamako belonging to Mélé – an incredibly beautiful nightclub singer – and her unemployed husband, Chaka, a conceptual trial of sorts is being held. The plaintiff is Africa itself, represented by numerous Malian representatives: a farmer, a schoolteacher, an economist, an unemployed worker, even Aminata Traoré – Mali’s former minister of culture. The defendants are the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – represented by real life defence lawyer, Roland Rappaport (who tries on a pair of sunglasses in one humorous scene, and demands that the street vendor prove that they are genuine Gucci). The G8’s liberalized economy is on trial here, and the defendants are called to account for the disastrous failures of the various economic restructuring programs initiated in Africa over the past twenty years. Surprisingly and often comically, however, the proceedings are often interrupted as various members of the community pass through the courtyard – oblivious to the solemnity of the occasion as they go about their daily business.

Sissako’s fifth feature is the most strident and allegorical of his work so far, but also the most intricately structured (despite its deceptively simple concept and plotting). At first, I must admit that I found its structure both hyperbolic and repetitive. In the spirit of Marxist-inflected third cinema, most of the film features heated debates between the bewigged magistrates and the various witnesses, as well as a number of lengthy monologues, lectures and personal testimonies. These exchanges are typically framed in medium close-up, with Sissako frequently holding on the speakers for extended durations. While this strategy respects the impassioned testimony of the various speakers and is an aesthetic that honours the film’s resistant subjects, it does not always make for compulsive cinema.

This is an old complaint about politicized filmmaking generally, and some of the less dynamic representatives of third cinema – those rooted in the stodginess of reductive, over-simplified Marx or Frantz Fanon – fall into the zero-sum territory of the illustrated lecture. However, I’m not advancing a superficially formalist argument here – that a successful film must be “cinematic.” Rather, I’m asserting that the most compelling representatives of radical, militant, or otherwise political cinema embraced an equally dynamic style to advance its argument. This was the genius of innovators like Solanas & Getino, Rocha, Sembene, Mambéty, etc. Moreover, it was not only that a tri-continental revolution never materialized that (arguably) lead to a diminishment of third cinema in the early 1990s. Not only did the category tend to homogenize class oppression in all three worlds and conflate varied experiences of colonialism, but it often didn’t account for ways that elements of commercial cinema can be used for political purposes – particularly music, humour, and sexuality. As Robert Stam has pointed out in his article on postcolonial filmmaking in The Cinema Book (p. 123), the greatest contemporary African filmmakers haven’t abandoned the militancy of classic third cinema; instead they have adopted an approach that leaves room for doubt, ambiguity, and multiplicity.

It was for this reason that I became an admirer of Sissako – particularly in his earlier works. Indeed, Bamako owes a great debt to his magnificent Life on Earth (1998). A semi-documentary and autobiographical love letter to Mali from a prodigal son, the film lingers on villagers in Sokolo on the eve of the new millennium. While villagers try to make international phone calls on hopelessly unreliable phones, and carry out their daily activities Sissako cuts to news images of other much more fevered millennial celebrations around the first world. Purposefully slow and meditative in its pacing (and featuring exquisite narration from the great Afro-Martinician poet, Aimé Césaire), Life on Earth depicts events that are hardly monumental but are of the utmost importance nonetheless.

This intermittent oscillation between the “important” and “ordinary,” or the “abstract” and the “concrete” is what gives Bamako its poetic force. Sissasko is hardly interested in representing the myth of a united African front: he cuts from the trial’s proceedings to shots of listless villagers outside the courtyard – many of whom become bored or annoyed by the lectures and testimonies broadcasted over shoddily wired loudspeakers and cheap radios. In between witnesses, we are also presented with instances of Chaka tending to his and Mélé’s sick child – real suffering and attempts at relief temporarily take precedence over philosophical disputes about the same subjects. The trial itself is interrupted by a funeral procession that passes through the courtyard (the judge himself suggests a recess, as he reminds us that “real life intrudes”). Finally, the film itself is disrupted by another one: a faux spaghetti Western entitled "Death in Timbuktu," which stars Palestinian filmmaker, Elia Suleiman and Danny Glover. A family gathers around the television to watch the spectacle of impoverished Malians being shot down by ruthless gunslingers, and its difficult to determine whether Sissako intends this parodic moment as an indictment of Hollywood-style entertainment, or canny political appropriation (Michael Sicinski sees it as a tongue-in-cheek poke at Rocha’s earlier radicalized Westerns and third cinema’s “aesthetics of poverty”).

The recurring trope of interruption is ingenious in its ambiguity. For one, it complicates the usual simplistic “West vs. the rest” discourse that reduces much that it is interesting in third cinema to stark dualities. Secondly, it avoids the temptation to make sweeping generalizations about economic circumstances in Africa, and to reduce represented peoples to noble victims – united in both suffering and resistance. Finally, it resists catering to the guilty conscience of privileged liberal viewers. Indeed, Bamako’s climatic moment occurs when an elderly witness addresses the court by singing his wrenching testimony in his native Bambara. It is a dramatic contrast to the silence of the schoolteacher who previously took the stand, and found he could not summon the words to express his anger with the G8’s contemptible 2005 debt relief package. By placing this chant at the film’s climax and refusing to translate the man’s songs for non-native viewers, Sissako resists the naïve inclinations of the social problem film and courtroom drama to provide easy solutions for near-insoluble dilemmas. But just as this strategy places the elder beyond the rhetorical reach of Rappaport, or other defenders of a liberalized global economy, and their ability to rationalize the continued exploitation of the third world, it also succinctly stresses the intractability of Africa’s plight. For despite the best intentions and efforts of a concerned West, the perpetual and enforced poverty of HIPC’s such as Mali is a calamity beyond the ability of privileged subjects to comprehend or appreciate. This is a sobering pessimism to which any would-be idealist should perhaps attend and respect whilst engaging in this remarkable work.