the cinematic spectacle offers the pleasure of plentitude, of visually consuming an unconcealed and fascinating attraction. Mulvey deploys the language of spectacle to theorize the eroticized and fetishistic portrayal of woman, which, she argues, represents the primary spectacular investment of classic Hollywood cinema. An image “displayed,” the woman as erotic object functions as the focal point where “the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined” (Mulvey 1989, 19). It is the female form, then, that assures “the active power of the erotic look” (20). I want to suggest that in The Boy Kumasenu, the suturing of the film’s spectator to the African male subject through the spectacle of Adobia is intended to humanize Kumasenu and demonstrate his coming into subjectivity. The film asserts his agency through the active and erotic look he casts on Adobia, so this articulation of masculine desire and subjectivity produces, as Mulvey (1989) first explained, a gendered division of labor. Adobia remains the passive object whose purpose is to demonstrate Kumasenu’s agency.
The most pronounced enunciation of gendered spectacle occurs in the film’s one musical number. In this segment, Kumasenu tags along when Adobia goes to a local dance club to meet Yeboah. There, Kumasenu watches Adobia and Yeboah as they slow dance and she sings a love song. Adobia’s song, seemingly meant for Yeboah alone, flows beyond the confines of narrative, crossing over into extra-diegetic space. Foregrounded on the soundtrack, it silences the film’s voice-over narration and directly engages the film’s theatrical audience. It becomes like a musical performance, incorporating and modifying aspects of the 1930s Hollywood musical number, which loosely follows the standard arrangement of the musical attraction as described by Pierre-Emmanuel Jaques (2006):
The camera is on the spectator’s side or backstage, making the theatrical location of the singing and dancing number quite clear. Having made us aware of this special demarcation, the camera makes its way into the space of the number itself, literally breaking apart the diegetic universe. The number area is specially organized and built for the film spectators only. (282)
Filmed on location, not on a stage or in a studio, and in the midst of club patrons, The Boy Kumasenu alters the spatial arrangement of this format, integrating Adobia’s musical number more smoothly into the space of the film’s narrative. The camera’s movement, furthermore, does not penetrate the closed-off world of the diegesis. Shot/reverse shot editing and eyeline matching focalize the spectator through Kumasenu’s gaze, which remains fixed on Adobia. Only the soundtrack, as I described previously, and, significantly, the display of Adobia as object of desire, “break[s] apart the diegetic universe.” Positioned as spectacle, her image, and the musical performance it is set within, disturb the trajectory of the narrative and invite a different engagement from the spectator. She is a thing to be looked at. Captured in close-up, Adobia’s image functions as a projection of Kumasenu’s desire, and it is this visualization of his desire that documents the presence of an interiority that reveals him as a subject. She is the surface on which his interiority, his subjectivity, and the “active power” of his gaze (Mulvey 1989, 20) are inscribed.
Having disavowed Agboh and Adobia and abandoned superstition and lineage ties, Kumasenu approaches the conclusion of his narrative, and the closing segment of the film returns to a pronouncement about work, emphasizing that work is as crucial to the modern nation as is absorption into the Westernized family. Kumasenu’s labor, to be legitimate, must be modernized, as demonstrated in the final scenes of the film. A shot of Kumasenu, lying on his back after his last tussle with Agboh, dissolves to a panoramic view of the village coast. A slow pan across the beach lands on a long shot of Faiwoo, sitting beneath a tree and mending a fishing-net. The narrator announces that “the story” of Agboh’s fate and his nephew’s role in it had “traveled far up the coast.” Thinking about his nephew’s future as a fisherman on a new boat called the Lydia, the narrator says that Faiwoo, who at that moment casts his glance out toward the sea, “spoke quietly to himself, making of his words a prayer.” The “prayer” is worth quoting in full:
Oh Father of the winds and seas, if it be thy wish that these new things come to pass, then let thy hand fall lightly on [those] on whom the dangerous burden of change must fall. Let them find strong hands among their people to help and guide them. Give them strength and fortitude, for their way into the new world is set about with snares and pitfalls, which can cause great, great suffering if they stray too far from the old ways, if they stray too far, too soon.
Faiwoo’s ventriloquized prayer erases the authoritative and exploitative hand of British colonialism, which is rewritten as change, inevitable and natural. An image of Kumasenu, sitting among a fishing crew on a motorized fishing boat, spools over Faiwoo’s prayer. Smiling broadly, his hand on the engine, Kumasenu waves to Dr. and Mrs. Tamakloe, who watch from the pier. “Thus the past uttered its wisdom and spoke to the future,” concludes the narrator, as on the image track, Kumasenu’s motorboat overtakes a group of traditional fishing boats, powered by groups of rowing men. This image narrates not only the passage of the old into the new, but the assimilation of the old and what is presented as modernized and new. This work as a fisherman, unlike the job he performed miserably in the store, guarantees Kumasenu’s modernity and declares that as a worker and a man, the modern city, a metonym for the liberal nation, has a place for him. The film ends by offering a paternalistic warning to the soon-to-be independent nation of Ghana and its guardians: “Sail boldly into the new, but let the wake of your craft be gentle. Let your past remain upright and proud until we build our ships of the same timber.” The only trace of Kumasenu’s village life allowed entry into the modern city is the work he has been assigned to do.
The Ghana Film Industry Corporation and the Challenges of Film Production in Ghana
At independence in 1957, film production was nationalized in Ghana. As Anne Mette Jørgensen notes, Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, “was highly aware of the potential role of the mass media in Nation building” (2001, 122). Nkrumah upgraded the country’s radio infrastructure, inaugurated, in 1965, the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), a noncommercial, state-controlled television station, and erected new facilities for the national film company. The state, understood as the protector of Ghanaian values and culture, exercised a great deal of control over film production. GFIC owned the filmmaking equipment and controlled the importation of film stock. It trained and employed many of the filmmakers working in the country and played a central role in the inauguration and staffing of the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI), a film and video training institute, founded in 1979. GFIC selected and supported those among its employees who would study at NAFTI or travel to the British Film Institute or the Film and Television Institute of India for training. It also censored all films exhibited in the country, and after purchasing West African Pictures in 1956, had significant control over film exhibition in Ghana.27 GFIC owned and operated six cinemas in Accra: the Rex, Royal, Regal, Roxy, Plaza, and the Film Theatre, located on the grounds of the film company. It also owned the Rex at Asamankese and the Dam at Akosombo.
At its founding, the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) was charged with using film to educate and modernize the masses, to define and celebrate traditional values, to develop a unifying national consciousness, and to counter stereotypical representations of Africa and Africans abroad.28 GFIC was a node on a network of artistic, media, and cultural institutions founded or enhanced by Nkrumah “to meet the demands of the new state of Ghana” (Agovi 1992, 4). Among these were the Institute of African Studies and the School of Music and Drama at the University of Ghana, and the film company worked collaboratively with both academic units in its formative years. It is worth emphasizing, too, that the first generation of Ghanaian filmmakers were, like the first African writers, “products of the institutions that colonialism had introduced and developed” (Gikandi 2004, 379). Among the first filmmakers and managing directors at GFIC were many former students of the Gold Coast Film Unit, including Sam Aryeetey. Others, such as Ernest Abbeyquaye and Bernard Odjidja, received instruction in filmmaking at the British Film Institute. Sean Graham remained at GFIC as managing director until 1965, when the Ghanaian novelist, Kofi Awoonor was appointed to administer the company from 1965 to 1967. No women were included among this group of filmmakers.
