Manthia Diawara’s , African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics
(Munich: Prestel, 2010. 319 pp.).
reviewed by Ken Harrow
This summer I had the pleasure of reading a new book on African cinema by Manthia Diawara. Diawara has made himself into a public intellectual with his columns on various websites and journals, and especially with the publications of his memoirs, including In Search of Africa and We Won’t Budge, wonderful accounts of this diasporan Malian-Guinean returning home to both countries, across the time and space of his journey to America where he obtained a doctorate and ultimately became director of African Studies at NYU.
In one of the most unusual and successful career moves, this student and scholar of African cinema, after having published his influential African Cinema: Politics and Culture (in which he lays out genre categories still being cited widely today), and his important edition of African American cinema (Black American Cinema), turned to filmmaking himself. His first film, Rouch in Reverse, set the cinema of diaspora studies on its ear when he turned the camera’s lens on the “papa” of African cinéma vérité, the filmmaker whose Les Maîtres fous outraged African audiences in Paris when it was first shown. More significantly, Diawara turned to the camera himself to expand his range of memoir and personal essays by creating moving and intellectually challenging films of his return, his focus on globalization, his memories of growing up in Bamako, and finally of his friendship with Ngugi.
He is unique in having thus created not only an oeuvre that addresses the central issues of our times, in New York where he works, in Paris where he passes much of his time, and in Mali to which he returns, narrating these encounters in his rich, deep nasal tones as though addressing a friend who is as familiar with these places and acquaintances of his as he is. He invites us in, not through any polemic, but through the personal encounter and thought.
And he is a rich thinker. When he chooses to write analytically about film, he is among the best critics. His new book, African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics, begins with that personal touch as he recounts his return to Ouaga for the most recent Fespaco. He recalls the hotel frequented by the directors, and especially Sembène to whom he pays homage. He describes the room where Sembène used to hold court, the pool, the Europeans lounging about, the African film enthusiasts, directors, friends, journalists, setting the stage. And then, after a preliminary account of La noire de…, he turns to, of all things, Mandabi, a film generally eclipsed by the resurgence of interest in La Noire de . . . by film scholars, and by Xala, surely Sembène’s early masterpiece, not to mention the major films that appeared in the last decade of Sembène’s life, Faat Kine and Moolaade. Why Mandabi? Because it was there that Sembène found his voice and eye, where he deliberately framed an African cinematic aesthetic tied inextricably to that African language that shaped his life, Wolof, and where Sembène demarcated the space for an African cinema that established its distance from French or European new wave cinema. From mise-en-scène to editing to the shots employed, a new approach was born, and Diawara dissects it brilliantly, explaining how it spoke to an African audience “organically,” away from the “metafilmic spectatorship” of the postmodern order, and returning the committed values of “imperfect” cinema to its underlying engagement, as a political narrative that spoke to the audience’s most compelling concerns—life in the African city at a time of the crisis over modernism’s “unfinished business.”
Diawara turns us to the politics of a postcolonialism thoroughly grounded in an African context, delimited by a horizon of expectations generated in the quartier, and embodied in the comic, pathetic, naïve Dieng, and by his two more pragmatic and sophisticated wives.
Much has been said about Sembène’s insistence on using Wolof, despite the opposition of his backers. But no one has explored so fully the consequences of that choice, both for the cinematic image and for the culture in Dakar. More importantly Diawara draws meaningful conclusions about Sembène’s style of “linearization” as maturing in Mandabi through the deployment of both Wolof and French as linguistic markers of colonial and postcolonial constructions of subjectivity. It is wonderful to see how the Third Cinema ideals of imperfect filmmaking are realized in Sembène’s ability to put to his advantage the very limitations of mainstream commercial filmmaking. And by celebrating the innovations of Sembène in Mandabi, Diawara paves the way for the subsequent generation of new African cinema, the Bekolos and Gamboas , the Tenos and Bakupa-Kanyindas who are reshaping our understandings of African cinema.
This project cannot be completed without turning to the most successful conjunction in African film history, the advent of Nollywood, along with the current generation of “Fespaco” filmmakers like those mentioned above, as well as Maseko, Sene Absa, and Sissako. Diawara rightly devotes an entire chapter to Sissako under the heading of Arte Wave, presenting perhaps the most powerful of contemporary African filmmakers, giving him his due.
Diawara treats Nollywood films with considerable seriousness, addressing another chapter to the narratological approaches taken in the videos. He opens his analysis to Bourdieuian approaches to popular culture, sustaining a focus on the spectator’s response, and celebrating the “African” turn, not simply because of its economic successes, but more importantly because of the adherence to an aesthetic that speaks to the African audience’s horizons of expectations and tastes. In that resistance to the impress of “world cinema’s” dominant position, he sees Nollywood as more than merely copying industrial patterns of the west, but as turning them against the western monopolies on consumption.
This study-memoir-academic-personal text also, and above all, works to establish Diawara’s position on the context of globalized neoliberal domination itself. In his earlier works he strenuously defended the market, the locus of spaces where women in Ghana, innovators in Mali, Senegal, Guinea, turned the art scene, the fabric scene, the film scene into that magical location of exchange where buyem-sellem could work to extricate African buyers from their subordinate place in the world economy. Commodity capitalism? No problem. But in this, his latest work, that concern seems to have yielded to a much greater insistence that the African filmmaker meet the African spectator on grounds where each responds to the other directly, so as to create an original and even authentic African aesthetic, and in so doing, to enable the African cinematic industry to establish itself as an autonomous institution. He sheds much of the weight of the didacticism of the past political approaches to cinema in so doing, while lending new accents to the project of political analysis. He thus joins the projects of Karin Barber, James Ferguson, Onookome Okome and Jonathan Haynes, and others who have labored to celebrate African popular cultures across the continent. A sophisticated and engaging study, African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics really celebrates African desire itself as it is manifested in the intellectual as well as the popular cinemas that are driving African film production today. And it should be stated, that the quality of images reproduced in the book are absolutely extraordinary, by far the most beautiful ever presented in an African film text.
-- kenneth w. harrow distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english east lansing, mi 48824-1036 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu
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