DOCUMENTARY DREAMS, CINEMATIC TRANSFORMATION

The stories told in the two documentaries in tonight’s program could not be more different, and yet THEY are similar in many ways. They both have to do with idealistic dreams (and ultimately fantasies) of the ways that movies could change African countries newly independent. The first film, Al’lèèsi . . . An African Actress brings us a group of young filmmakers intoxicated with the West, and particularly with its spiritual home—Hollywood. Kuxa Kanema, on the other hand, tells the story of the efforts of the Mozambican National Cinema Institute to create an early-Soviet style of cinema, a cinema that could effectively create a new people and liberate them from the cultural and psychological shackles of centuries of colonial rule. After intoxicating, dynamic beginnings, both ultimately failed: the film industries of both countries are today in ruins. The reasons for their respective failures are both unique to their own situations and similar—in ways that are emblematic in many ways of larger forces that we can see at work throughout the African continent.

AL’LÈÈSSI…AN AFRICAN ACTRESS (Niger, 2004, 69 min.), written and directed by Rahmatou Keita; cinematography by Philippe Radoux-Bazzini, sound by Manuel Gasquetand Roger Dupuis, edited by Omar Ba, Yero Maïga, and Sabastien Garcia. In French and with English subtitles.

This film opens with a graphic telling us that aside from Egypt, Niger was the first African country to produce movies. Well, this isn’t quite true, but it is true that something happened in that country in the mid-1960s to create a sense that this was going to be a special time and place for African cinema. The story of this exciting trajectory is told in this film through the vehicle of the woman who would become identified with the cinema of Niger, and indeed among the best-known actresses of Francophone Africa: Zelika Souley. We meet the Zelika of today, nearly 60, a good, pious, Muslim mother. We hear her story through her own lips, along with those of the directors and other actors from that period, as well as clips from some of the films that are rarely seen today.

In 1966 Zelika was just an ordinary 19-year-old in Niamey, the capital city of Niger, though probably more ambitious, outgoing, and beautiful than most. She happened to live in the same compound as Moustapha Boubacar (alias “James Kelly”) a young projectionist who longed to get into filmmaking. He got his chance when a budding cineaste, Moustapha Alassan, decided that he wanted to make a Western in Niger. Why? If the Italians could make “Spaghetti Westerns,” why couldn’t West Africans make Peanut-Sauce Westerns? He wanted to show to the Africans that even Africans could be cowboys.

For these young people, Westerns meant America, and America was a land where anyone could become anything (where even a cowboy—Ronald Reagan--could become President!). America meant success, wealth, and power. So, they were going to make a Western featuring an all-African cast, the film that was to be Le Retour d’un Aventurier/Return of an Adventurer. The premise of the story is that a young man from Niger returns to his village in the savannah from a period in the U.S. and brings with him cowboy outfits, Colt 45s and all. He gives the outfits to his closest friends, so that they can become true cowboys and tame the West—the western savannah, that is. Instead of racing cattle on horseback to stem a stampede, we will see them trying to herd giraffes. The film clips that we see in the documentary suggest that this was a very remarkable (if strange) film.

In true Hollywood fashion, the young actors all took on “normal” American names:

Yakuba became Steve McQueen, Djingarey became Jimmy; Zikka became Reagan, Boubacar became James Kelly. We also had Black Cooper, Calamity John, and Billy Walter. And Zelika became Queen Christine.

Excitedly throwing herself into the role of a tough young cowgirl in the film, this young woman from a profoundly Muslim family and society caused quite a stir. She of course had to kiss the leading man, which actually turned out to be harder for young Djingarey than it was for her. As a result, she was labeled a prostitute and a renegade. She looked men in the eye, addressed them directly, and in subsequent films played liberated wives and even prostitutes. Needless to say, this caused her no end of trouble in her traditional country, but we sense that even while she resents this criticism, she also revels in it. For a decade or so, she was a real star, enjoying all the fruits of her notoriety.

Of course, she was a big fish in a relatively tiny pond, a pond which eventually dried up. In the end, the film uses her story to show us the demise of all those dreams and ambitions. Today, there are almost no movie theaters left in Niger, and very little film production. Zelika eventually needed to supplement her film work with work as a receptionist and then as a teacher in a youth center. The film’s final graphic tells us where she is today, and it is an astonishing outcome for someone who just a few years ago was named a member of Niger’s Legion of Honor. It is a reminder of the difficulty of making it in the world of African film. While the actors and directors in this film are certainly proud of what they were able to accomplish, they cannot help but feel let down by a culture and set of illusions that seemed to promise them so much, yet really was never going to give them the time of day.

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Born in Niamey, Rahmatou Keita studied Philosophy and Linguistics in Paris and began working as a journalist for French newspapers, magazines, then radio and television. From 1987 to 1993 she worked for international television networks and was the first African journalist to appear regularly on French television. Her work on the television series L’Assiette Anglaise for French Antenne 2 won her the coveted “Golden 7” awards in 1988 and 1989. In 1993 she wrote SDF, Sans Domiciles Fixes, a book about homelessness in France and then went on to make documentary films. She has the following to say about Al’lèèsi . . . An African Actress:

When I was a little girl, cinema was like magic in Niamey. In lakuruusu, my neighborhood, the Queen of Sheba and Cleopatra that we thought were African queens, were definitely White women. They looked like Gina Lolobrigida and Liz Taylor. We were wrong. We didn’t know anything about our history before cinema came. On certain nights, we were close to riots because Ramses II, alias Yul Brenner, had resuscitated in The Magnificent Seven or Charlton Heston was seen on the eve as Moses had become El Cid . . . One should say that in those days cinema was a White men’s concern and White men in films were somewhat of a divine nature. Images had such power that we did not doubt one second what we saw on screen. Until the day our actors appeared. The women were not vamps and the men were unlike any of the Hollywood stars we were used to watching. They were ordinary people, with a normal color and normal features. People were shocked.

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KUXA KANEMA (Mozambique, 2003, 52 min.), written and directed by Margarida Cardoso, cinematography by Lisa Hagstrand; edited by Isabelle Rathery and Timothy Miller. In Portuguese with English subtitles.

What happened in that building is exactly the image of the country: In the end, the walls are there, the building is there, the films are there, good and bad, kept in the same cans, with the same labels, in the same storeroom, etc., and it’s something that exists without existing. And then this gives a sensation, a strange sort of anguish, everything that was made was not destroyed, but also does not exist.

Today, throughout the country various TV channels broadcast the image of a dream, which people will never be able to attain. Deprived of an image of themselves, the people gradually forget their past and their present. (In the background, we see a broadcast from CNN World.) Of the other dream, the dream of a different country, no-one speaks . . . Not anymore.

In 1975 the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) successfully liberated the colony of Mozambique from centuries of Portuguese rule. Simultaneous with the creation of the a new government under the leadership of the charismatic Samora Machel, a film industry was born. Actually, “industry” is not the proper term for would would be a bureau run by the National Cinema Institute (INC), releasing films under the name “Kuxa Kanema.” It was a cinema fueled by idealism, youthful passion, and ideological fervor, by a faith in the ability of cultural work to transform Mozambicans from the identity of a fragmented, colonized people to the identity of a confident people in charge of their own destiny.

For many reasons, it ultimately failed.

Director Margarida Cardoso, a veteran of Mozambican filmmaking, has chosen in this film to tell the story of this experiment in revolutionary filmmaking, an experiment whose fortunes were tied inextricably to the fate of the Frelimo government itself, and particularly that of Samora Machel. Using interviews with former Kuxa Kanema directors, writers, producers, and technicians, together with excellent archival footage (which she apparently found in an abandoned, burnt-out building). She tells the story of Kuxa Kanema (and of FRELIMO) for the fifteen or so years of its ascendancy, until the system moved to a new form in the early 1990s.

From its early days, FRELIMO looked to the Soviet and Cuban models of an “engaged,” “committed” film movement as part of its effort to give people a sense of purpose and to build a nation. It sent filmmaking crews out to the countryside to make 16mm newsreels that helped to explain what the new government was trying to do, then projected those newsreels in makeshift open-air theaters. We see reel after reel of the dynamic, ecstatic Samora Machel, exhorting people to join him on this journey of transformation. As one of the interviewees puts it, “He taught people through cinema, step by step, what it was to be living in an independent country, to be a nation. And all of this was done through cinema.” For a new nation, marked by illiteracy and other aspects of the colonial legacy, no one doubted the cinema’s ability to reach out, make contact, and move the masses. Yes, it was “ideological,” yes it was “propaganda”; but at the time it also was exciting and it was necessary.

If this all sounds like a far cry from Hollywood, that’s because it was. The U.S. of course had little to do with this revolution. The equipment, projection vans, and training came from the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. The filmmakers were trained on the job, and their early efforts were marked more by enthusiasm than by technical competence. “We were going to tame animals, build roads, change the world”; they were going to combat social inequity and racial hegemony. And Kuxa Kanema naively filmed it all.

Unfortunately, though, Mozambique did not exist in a vacuum. The government of Samora Machel was fervently opposed to the apartheid policies of its near neighbors, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, and it supported the rebel movements there. To have such a government in place at their doorsteps was intolerable to these two countries, and they soon began active campaigns to destroy the Machel government through front organizations and mercenaries. The role of Kuxa Kanema became increasingly focused on building the nation’s resolve in the face of these challenges (compounded by drought, famine, and lack of support from the West). Battle scenes, and particularly the terrible tribulations of the victims of enemy attacks, soon dominated the newsreels.

Also unfortunately, the government reacted by turning inward, as happens in such situations, freezing the creativity and self-interrogation of the revolutionary moment. There was no room for spontaneous, independent analysis; Kuxa Kanema and other aspects of cultural life needed to be fully mobilized in support of the policies of the ruling government. When the eminent French film director Jean-Luc Godard came to Mozambique to work with FRELIMO in creating a kind of experimental “TV Anti-Service,” the government saw it as a distraction and did not approve. Faced with the impossible task of holding the country together in the face of these impossible odds, it did not want to give up control of the image. They preferred to put resources into a cinematic co-production with the Yugoslavians, which was an ill-disguised fantasy of revolutionary good and evil. One begins to get a sense of a cinema losing its soul. One one interviewee put it, “The speeches became increasingly repetititve, increasingly the same, increasingly meaningless.”

With the government increasingly under attack—by the mid-80s the “imperialist war” had become a civil war—the ability of Kuxa Kanema to show its films in the rural areas faded away, and along with it, cinema’s nation-building role. By the time Samora Machel was killed (assassinated?) in 1986 in a plane crash after appealing to the international community for help, it was a locus of growing disillusionment. The new government that came into place six years after Machel’s death only put a final end to a dream that had long been dying (the new regime preferred television and had little use for the public screenings for the masses that marked the Kuxa Kanema era.

So, the saga of Kuxa Kanema is a story of despair and lost opportunities. The current regime would rather forget that it ever existed, just as many in those countries that formerly experimented with socialism seem embarrassed by the memory of their nations’ wrong-headed embrace of socialist ideals. But director Margarida Cardoso wants us to think a little more deeply about that. Yes, Kuxa Kanema was ultimately a “failure”; but something very important has been lost, something not to be forgotten.

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Margarida Cardoso was born in Portugal in 1963, then raised in Mozambique, to which she remains attached. She received her diploma in Image and Audiovisual Communication from the Antonio Arroio School in Portugal. She has worked in various capacities on over 40 films, and has directed seven films of her own, both fiction films and documentaries. Her first feature film, The Murmuring Coast, was made in Portugal in 2004 and has been very well received internationally.

--Notes by Michael Dembrow

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