Ameena Matthews in "The Interrupters"
My best film experiences of 2011 (in no particular order):
10-Jan-2010
"SIA: The Dream of the Python (2001)
Honor means different things in different languages and different cultures. For some, it could mean sacrificing their happiness. For others, it could mean sacrificing their lives. For Sia, it meant sacrificing her sanity, among other things.
In Sia: The Dream of the Python, a film by Dani Kouyate, the character the title invokes is the most beautiful virgin in the village. As such, she is the logical choice to serve as a sacrificial lamb. In order to bring back prosperity to their village, a group of priests who’s faces are never seen, and are always dressed in black hoods, recommend that a human offering be sent to the mystical snake god. They already look like reapers, and death does indeed follow these priests wherever they go. The emperor decrees that their proposal must be followed, and problems ensue. Sia flees, and takes refuge with the village madman, Kerfu. She doesn’t want to die. Kerfu asks her who does, and tells her that everyone must. Besides, as is spoken later in the film, whether you’re afraid or not, death must come to all men. The movie plays like a new brand of African existentialism. The distinct possibility of death hangs over this film like a specter. The possibility of death, or something worse.
09-Jan-2010
OUSMANE SEMBENE 1923-2007
Category : African Cinema, Cinematic Arts
Ousmane Sembene
Sembene’s chief importance in the international cinematic landscape is that he’s the first film artist from sub-Saharan Africa (Senegal, to be exact). His La Noire De… (1966) appeared at a time when cinema was virtually non-existent there, and it remains the first feature-length film to originate from this part of the “dark” continent.
As a filmmaker of color, Sembene more or less bridged the gap between Oscar Micheaux and Melvin Van Peebles (and a little bit later, Spike Lee). There were no other black filmmakers of importance coming of age at the same time. But the cinema wasn’t Sembene’s first artistic love, literature was. He was an accomplished novelist who published Le Docker Noir, his first work, in 1956. However, Sembene found faults with the written word. They often betrayed him, mainly because all of his early writing was in French; the native tongue of the Senegalese colonizers. For an author who liked to call into question the acts of assimilation and the social strata of his environment, among other things, this linguistic hegemony was unacceptable.
06-Jan-2010
KARMEN GEI
Category : African Cinema, Cinematic Arts
Labeling a film dealing with African societies as a musical is somewhat redundant. After all, what is a musical? Radical stylization. An impossibility in western civilizations. Stories in which, at any given moment, a character can break into song and dance in place of speech. It’s the absolute antithesis of the way we live out our everyday lives. How many times have you told your boss that you were going on your lunch break, but in a rhythmic song and dance that soon has the whole workplace jumping and singing in unison? Musicals have no relation whatsoever to the way we function in society. But in our society. Not entirely so in those of Africa.
In many of them, the spoken word is easily replaced by musical chants. African cultures tend to be oral, their histories passed down from generation to generation through a tradition that relies on human interaction, not always the written word. This oral tradition easily encompasses song and dance, or the performative. It’s a mode of expression that approaches the spectacle. And what a beautiful spectacle we have on display in Karmen Gei.
24-Dec-2009
Dear Mr. Kiarostami:
The title of your freewheeling documentary almost reflects the approach to cinema that is exhibited. A, B, C. An effort at simplicity. A reduction of cinema to its most basic and original component: the actuality (documentary-styled slices of real life, often taking the form of rough footage, which were the first attempts at filmed entertainment over a century ago). The actuality, presented as a sort of stitched-together diary. The result of what happens when you turned on your digital camera much in the same way that you would open your eyes on a morning like any other morning. But Mr. Kiarostami, the documentary form doesn’t offer so simple an out as to say, “What are you looking at?” The documentary form should, and sometimes does, ask, “Why?”