Two contradictory criteria here come into play:

1) the demand for exoticism: films must be limited to both a geographic area (it must be shot in Africa, a condition for a long time imposed by the French inter-ministerial Fonds Sud commission, one of the main sources of funding of African films) and ideological territory (a magical, immemorial, legendary, mythical Africa).

2) the demand for reality: films must document contemporary African problems, which, in general, are limited to those of the urban milieu. Fictions must be based on the experiences of a disintegrating Africa.African criticism, for its part, is often a distorted reflection of that of the North. It too can be liable to spurn “bush films” and very often focuses on the veracity of the film.

These two requirements have evolved over time: we have seen the turnaround in “mainstream” criticism (national newspapers and film journals) in the early Nineties, which favoured the second criteria over the first, rejecting new films after having lauded the authenticity of earlier works. These earlier films were invariably qualified as natural, contemplative, primitive, ingenuous, a “cinema of origins”, their charm, or even their delicious ‘naivety’ being celebrated.
Before this loaded gaze, filmmakers have developed survival strategies to help them exist without compromising their identities. In short, to help them affirm who they are beyond all the preconceptions. A difficult exercise.

A historical recap

Gaston Kaboré used to say that “reality is the heart and body of films” in African cinema. This had always been so, but, after a series of impasses, change became imperative.

At the time of Independence, film was about re-appropriating one’s own gaze, one’s own space, and one’s own modes of thought. The aim was to replace the ethnologist’s external or the colonialist’s propagandistic gaze with one’s own vision of the self. Like the African thinkers, filmmakers believed that Africa could resolve its contemporary problems by affirming its culture. Around the Seventies, the first films made by Africans in Africa formed a cinematic mirror, a denouncer of obsolete traditions, rife with anathemas against neo-colonialism and corrupt elites, and full of calls for values that would replace “civilisation” with “progress”…This radicalism and its didactic designs did not survive the invasion of television not the assaults of a Hollywood cinema that quickly imposed itself as much as the imaginative model as reassuring entertainment. It was confronted with the ambivalence of relationships with the West, which were experienced both as dream and nightmare.

This was the trap of the mirror: refusing a reductive view of the Other necessitated self-affirmation, which in turn lead to an idealisation of difference that soon became dogmatic. The illusionary dream of a world without the Other loomed behind the demand for authenticity. Asserting one’s specificity to escape the exclusion of being made to feel inferior led to the formulation of a territorial and racial discourse. Belief in a fixed identity proved to be xenophobic, negative, and stagnant.

Novelistic-type strategies offered a way out in the Eighties. By favouring events over action and the succession of occurrences over causality, “then” replaced “therefore”, as André Bazin put it when talking about Neo-Realism. Idrissa Ouedraogo applied these principals right from his first feature film, Yam Daabo (The Choice, Burkina Faso 1986): a rural family flees the drought and awaits international aid; misfortune befalls the family, but it manages to find coherence again. The children in Nyamanton, The Garbage Boys (Cheick Oumar Sissoko, Mali 1986) simply relate the daily trials and tribulations of a poverty that is however not devoid of humour. The message is less explicit in these films, the voice-overs absent and the screenplays follow life’s chance happenings, in natural settings, with actors who concentrate on being rather than on expression, whilst the narrative continues to respect the duration of things, the ellipses being no more than gaps in reality.

In a Europe that needed images of the South to cope with its own culture shocks, there was great enthusiasm for these films which broke the confines of the specialist festivals. Cannes showered praises on a cinema that it had just discovered, awarding the jury Grand Prix to Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (The Light) in 1987 and Burkinabè filmmaker Idrissa Ouedraogo’s Tilaï in 1990. These films were seen to bring “soul” to a cinema under attack from television, misappropriating their very raison d’être. People only remembered Yeelen’s magic (the film drew 340 000 viewers in France), whereas the film was in fact a vehicle for a political message against the appropriation of the power of knowledge by the elders.

This novelistic-type approach, unlike Brazil’s Cinema Novo, for example, developed the ontological rather than the aesthetic: these films, whose form is often linear and relatively academic, marked a rupture with the epic poetry developed in the first period, but gained in internal evidence.

However, this cinema found itself in an aesthetic impasse, that of fictionalised reporting whose realism soon became a cliché. Directing styles soon got the upper hand again, affirming a point of view on the degradation of living conditions in Africa. For simply testifying was not enough. They needed to help rebuild a reality that was under perpetual degradation – and fast.

It was not a question of dropping realism. If filmmakers had shown reality, they had charged it with meaning. Unlike naturalism, which simply records the real, realism made the visible readable. But, even though necessary, fiction was no less of an impasse. Wasn’t it still the fiction of the Other, of that West which, due to the state of Africa, remained both the financier and the market for the films? Of the Western demand for a ready-made discourse of invented tradition – that colonial library which kept rearing its ugly head, even in the very discourse that claimed to refute it, as Mudimbe analysed and denounced?

Although reality took on greater force in film, it was at the expense of the entertainment factor. Put extremely schematically, an opposition emerged in world cinema: Hollywood wielded illusion to rework modern fears, deploying means that created an unrivalled professionalism in entertainment, whilst the other cinemas raised the terrible challenge of affirming reality, with a contradiction into the bargain: the more you show reality, the more you manipulate it. The stake was to bank on the veracity of the characters rather than using them or turning them into symbols; it was to avoid didacticism by having confidence in the facts, and to encourage the audience to think by avoiding the habitual rut of representation.

Current strategies

Faced with the expectations of a nostalgic West, which tries to find its lost values in Africa, but which also constantly seeks a mirror for its own crises (which it now more often finds in East Asian cinema, thereby excluding Africa from “modernity”), faced with this vampirism that defines what it wants before looking and listening, Africa’s films are developing new strategies for survival:

Depict the complexities. The aim is not to dress a story in reality, but to grasp it in all its complexity, in short, to scramble the markers to depict Africa’s complexities and to move away from reductive simplifications. There are no ready-made answers: the mixed-race youth who goes looking for his father in Guinea in Immatriculation Temporaire (Gahité Fofana, 2001) will only manage to do so by accepting the complexities, the lack of clear logic, the dispossession. The narrative adopts the same uncertainty, the image flirting with curtains that partly mask the real. He can only find the paths, which we realise were never fixed, by adopting the young delinquents’ lifestyle, by taking risks.

Go beyond autochthonism. This presupposes letting one’s characters exist freely, for themselves, in all their singularities. It presupposes not making them the emblematic symbols of a cause. This is so with El Hadj in L’ Afrance (Alain Gomis, 2001): this Senegalese student builds his solidity in Paris on his project of returning home to serve the independence preached by the decolonisation heroes. But he is completely destabilised by the social exclusion with which he is confronted and, like Samba Diallo in Cheik Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure Ambiguë (Ambiguous Adventure), ends up on the brink of suicide. This deep and painful deconstruction, which takes the form of an identity quest in which he renounces his values, ultimately leads to a renewal that allows him to share what a woman in the immigrants’ hostel says to him: “Home is where both my feet are”. Becoming the subject thus presupposes going beyond autochthonism. Asserting one’s citizenship – a major theme in Jean Odoutan’s films (Djib, 2000; Mama Aloko, 2001) – is a self-affirmation in the society of adoption. A specifically physical presence is the alternative to the so-called visible minorities’ media invisibility. In Alain Gomis’s film, the camera hugs the black skin, creating a sensuality devoid of eroticism that demonstrates that unambiguously incarnates the belonging to a social body, to society.

Capture the present. Naturally, the filmmakers do not show pity, which would be a slight on dignity, but rather a deep tenderness for their characters, an affection born of respect. Their behaviour is never anecdotal: it is that of human reality. This presupposes taking risks, and one finds directors themselves playing contradictory characters who are quite simply human. The Zeka Laplaine of (Paris: xy) (2000) is your average type of guy: he works too much, cheats on his wife from time to time, spends his time at the bar, has his good and bad points. When he postpones his family holiday, it’s the last straw: his wife leaves him, plunging him into turmoil. The fact that he is mixed-race, that his mistress is black and his wife white is not central; it is simply the basis of some cultural differences, periphery data. His very run-of-the-mill chauvinism is widely shared around the world, and this humanity constitutes the force of a film that does not exist through what is ultimately its rather banal subject, but through the life it unveils – a man’s attitudes and behaviour. The directing pales before the convolutions of the actor, the filmic time is that of life’s uncertainties, which itself becomes a spectacle, thereby acquiring poetic strength. Here, film captures the human condition in no uncertain terms, in the present. It is not about memory or about forecasting. Being conscious of being human implies capturing the present.

Use the intimate to disorient. The purpose of this quasi-documentary approach is to affirm the human. The filmmaker manages to reveal what reality beholds by opening him or herself up to the intimate, far from grand discourses. Far from offering a globalized vision of Africa, the filmmaker affirms a here and now, a place and a country, a relationship. The intimate crops up where it is least expected. In Bye Bye Africa (Mahamat Saleh Haroun, 1999), in an N’Djamena where “war has become a culture”, Africa’s problems, from Aids to police checks, from violence to the decline of the city’s movie theatres, are present. But the film is narrated in the first person: a filmmaker, who goes back home when his mother dies and who tries to make a film, gets tied up in an old amorous relationship again. Caught between the elsewhere of exile and feeling disoriented in his own country, this man, who happens to be African, shows himself to be displaced within, revealing the paths of his own disorientation, his own loses of identity, his own failings to the viewer.

Favour similitude not singularity. Why do I relate to a story like Daressalam (Issa Serge Coelo, 2000)? After all, the never-ending war, the mirage of revolution, the compromises of all sorts are the Chadians’ problem. These two rebel friends who share the same ideal and the same commitment end up taking opposite paths in the twists and turns of the war. The film does not judge them, nor pit one against the other in a Manichean way as the director is interested in what they have in common, not what divides them. Rather than confronting us with our singularities, he encourages us to treat one another as fellows, and it is this impression of belonging to humanity, this familiarity between alter egos that enables people peacefully to find their place in the world.

Examining memory. This does not rule out the fact that slavery, colonialism, and apartheid still cast their shadow on thought and dignity. Rather than focusing on the torturers’ guilt and repentance, however, these films carry out a salutary examination of memory. Asientos (François Woukoache, Cameroon, 1995) forces us to look our own History in the face, Adanggaman (Roger Gnoan Mbala, Côte d’Ivoire, 2000) depicts African involvement in the slave trade, and Fools (Ramadan Suleman, South Africa, 1997) speaks of black people’s integration of violence under apartheid… This cinema thereby decentres the victimised position of slave that precludes all self-criticism. It takes the past by the horns, not endlessly to denounce a fatal castration, but to explore what caused it and what so much suffering means for the subconscious. The Rwandan genocide proved that the West does not have a monopoly on barbarity and filmmakers have not finished exploring man’s fratricidal penchant, for example in La Genèse (Cheick Oumar Sissoko, Mali, 1999).

Back to orality. To avoid being reduced to their difference, which turned them into caged monkeys and their films into a genre, filmmakers insisted that they were simply “filmmakers full stop”: an illusory fantasy that supposedly put aside their determining characteristics, their own specificity. A new impasse. So, as it is precisely here that the crux of the problem lies, directors realised that they might as well use their cultural foundations as a way of transporting spectators elsewhere, to where they want to take them. Balufu Bakupa Kanyinda told me that in Dix Mille Ans De Cinema (Ten Thousand Years Of Cinema, 1991), he drew on the oral forms of the Congolese kasalas, which function in intertwined patterns. The similarity between the way in which Ahmadou Kourouma’s writing and that of Mahamat Saleh Haroun in Bye Bye Africa use oral techniques is striking: the deliberate narrative approximations which connote the sought-after incertitude, the precisions and digressions that form parentheses in the narrative they serve to illuminate, the direct addressing of the reader or the viewer in the full-face shots of people looking into the camera, the maintaining of the illusion of the presence of an audience evoked by the double gaze of the video camera in Haroun’s film, etc. The outcome is a veritable blues piece, a musical form characteristic of many films, one of the finest examples of which is a docu-fiction about Senegalese immigrants in Milan, Waalo Fendo (There Where The Earth Freezes, 1998), by the Algerian Mohamed Soudani. Here too, testimonies addressed directly to the camera, a rhythm-like rather than linear narrative, sensitive images of the urban environment interspersed with shots of Africa, etc., help punctuate the film with visual interrogations in a splintering of discourse that expresses a plural self as much as it does the linguistic multiplicity characteristic of the exile’s experience.

But is all this specifically African? No. The recurrences or constants observed do not constitute an African identity. These strategies are found in other films from elsewhere. Far from being characteristics, they are paths which these filmmakers choose today in order to bear witness to their multiracial, multicultural Africas, to the Africas in the making, those here and there, those they experience and try to interpret in their art. Only one thing does not change: their art is more real than reality, as it was for their elders.

Olivier Barlet is a journalist and the author of a collection of essays on African films entitled Cinemas d’Afrique. He is also the editor-in-chief of the cultural revue Africultures. See www.africultures.com