and African Postmodernisms
Just as African literature has frequently had to contend with questions of authenticity, African cinema has sparked rich discussions of what it means to work as an African filmmaker in an industry dominated by Europe and the West. African filmmakers have generated discussion around their work through innovations of content and form, making statements that are simultaneously aesthetic and political. Associated since its birth with notions of modernity and progress, cinema has provided a fruitful terrain for exploring the continent’s place within that modernity. The medium comes necessarily with its own demands and restrictions, especially given the budgetary requirements involved in shooting and distributing a film. The prohibitive costs of mounting a shoot, along with the shifting tastes of audiences, have been a persistent hindrance to aspiring African filmmakers of recent decades. In his writing on Cameroonian cinema, Alexie Tcheuyap explores some of the reasons why African cinema, defined as films made by directors from the continent, and not films made on the continent by western filmmakers, cannot be considered a “popular” art in the same way popular literature exists in African languages and for a local readership.6 The market of African filmgoers is insufficient to sustain a local art‐house cinema industry, a fact that has frustrated many filmmakers seeking to reach a local audience but limited to international festival circuits and small‐scale distributions abroad. Moreover, Tcheuyap points out how state control over artistic production has frequently stifled creative liberties to speak freely about local politics and power dynamics. State governments may no longer exercise the sweeping nationalist cultural policies once common in the period immediately following widespread African independence. However, even in the absence of such governmental policy, censorship remains a useful tool at the state’s disposal, as in the case of Jean‐Pierre Bekolo’s film Le Président (2013), which was banned for offering a commentary on the trend of African patriarchal heads of state holding on to power, transforming democracies into de facto dictatorships.
Yet, an agonistic relationship with state governments is not the only, or even the primary factor characterizing African cinema of recent decades. As Tcheuyap points out, filmmakers such as the Cameroonian Bekolo also engage in deeper interrogations of the form itself, negotiating influences from an earlier generation of politically engaged African cinema with global cinematic reference points. In his first feature film, Quartier Mozart (1992), Bekolo employs a style more reminiscent of an American urban narrative, with clear influences from Spike Lee and a certain MTV‐like approach to editing that highlights the importance of American hip‐hop culture and the global appropriations thereof. Full of scenes that show young characters hanging out and engaged in lively conversation about everyday topics, mostly the opposite sex, Bekolo’s film depicts a vibrant urban life far removed from the stereotypical images of a chaotic, war‐torn African continent. Quartier Mozart instead uses a touch of magical realism to explore gender relations among Cameroonian youth, as the film’s protagonist, a beautiful young woman named Samedi (Saturday), is transformed by her grandmother into a young Casanova named Montype (Myguy) so that she may experience the game of seduction from the other side of the gender divide. Full of playful moments of discovery and mischief, including the male incarnation of the grandmother, whose mystical powers allow her/him to shrink men’s penises simply by shaking their hands, the film also contains a clear‐eyed critique of the male authoritative figure in the character of a despotic chief of police, named Chien Méchant (Mean Dog).
Bekolo departs even further from typical approaches to politically engaged African cinema in Le Complot d’Aristote (Aristotle’s Plot, 1996), a film commissioned by the British Film Institute as part of an initiative commemorating the centenary of the birth of cinema alongside contributions by such household names as Martin Scorsese, Stephen Frears, and Jean‐Luc Godard. Bekolo responded to the commission by creating a dream‐like allegory interrogating African filmmakers’ often troubled relationship with film criticism in general, but also, and above all, with their African audiences. His hero‐protagonist, “Cineaste,” reflects the figure of the intellectual, politically engaged filmmaker of earlier generations of African cinema and walks in the shadow of such tall figures as Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty. The foil to this is the character of “Cinema,” whose motley gang feeds on low‐brow Hollywood action fodder, curses African cinema as “shit,” and mocks Cineaste throughout the film, calling him “Silly‐ass.” Meanwhile, a voice‐over narrative, that of Bekolo himself, threads its way throughout the film, offering a reflection on the classical structure of dramatic plot laid out in Aristotle’s Poetics, which focuses on the importance of having a beginning, middle, and end, and on the characteristics of action, empathy, and catharsis. Drawing an analogy with African ritual, Bekolo posits, toward the end of the film, that the medium is in fact an inherently African one: “My grandfather’s words started to fill my mind: what is an initiation ceremony? Crisis, confrontation, climax, and resolution; sound, stories, images, narration. Is there anything in this, in cinema, that is not African?”
Bekolo’s film highlights the alienation African filmmakers experience from the very audiences they wish to reach. In fact, his approach contributes to this same gap by refusing to serve up the shoot‐’em‐up action today’s audiences seem to crave. Similar themes are addressed in the documentary work of Bekolo’s compatriot, Jean‐Marie Teno, a filmmaker whose best known work, Afrique, je te plumerai (Africa, I Will Fleece You, 1992), begins from the standpoint of the present day to reflect on the longstanding and troubled relationship between Cameroonian culture and a colonial heritage of usurpation and violence that is often hidden. In Lieux Saints (Sacred Places, 2009), a poetic essay film shot in Ouagadougou, the site of FESPACO, West Africa’s premiere international film festival, Teno documents the affairs of a local cinéclub located in the backyard of the renowned film festival but light‐years away from its high‐culture vision of art‐house African cinema. Teno remarks on his subjects’ fascination with the action films of Hollywood or Hong Kong, but also notes the movie club manager’s difficulty in obtaining DVDs of African films to screen for his audience. Like Bekolo, Teno marks, through another’s voice, the notion that cinema is in itself a profoundly African medium, this time through the testimony and commanding screen presence of a djembe player named César, who argues that the djembe is the big brother of cinema.
In the case of these two filmmakers, it becomes difficult to locate the relevance, if any exists, of the Francophone label to contemporary African creators. Both Bekolo and Teno use their medium to push the limits of cinematic form, while exploring social issues from a largely transnational or global perspective. Theirs is a cinema belonging to a specifically African postmodernism, one that questions the categories and narratives tied to modern notions of progress as well as any simplistic framings of culture in terms of African nationalisms, third‐world cinema or francophonie. However, in terms of distribution, their experimental approaches, limited to the rarefied cultural spheres of art‐house cinemas and international film festivals, also alienate them from their African public. Moreover, with Teno’s attack on the influence of colonial powers and Francophone culture in Cameroon, and Bekolo’s choice to film Le Complot d’Aristote in Zimbabwe with South African actors performing in English, the notion of a discernible Francophone identity among African authors and filmmakers of the Francophone world can begin to appear somewhat implausible at best, disingenuous or plainly neocolonial at worst.
Writing Without France: Defining New Approaches
It is precisely this point of tension between African creators who work in French and a Francophone cultural industry eager to claim them as its own that has solicited renewed debate and discussion around francophonie’s usefulness as a category. Many writers continue to embrace French, declaring it a global language that is no longer tied primarily to the former colonial métropole. The 2007 literary manifesto entitled “Pour une littérature‐monde en français” (“For a World Literature in French”), signed by forty‐four “Francophone” authors, takes aim at the very use of that term. Following what they call the “Copernican revolution” of 2006, when five of France’s prestigious literary
