A classic of African cinema gets big-screen release in SA for the first time this week. Director Djibril Diop Mambety speaks to ANDREW WORSDALE
THE celebrated rebel of African cinema, Djibril Diop Mambety (see pic) says it’s the mission of film to make people think — through laughter. He is an eccentric visionary, a poet and essayist who never panders to the commercial but rather explores the fantastic, always embroidering his sombre stories with a sense of irony, fantasy and wickedly low-key humour.
He was born in 1945 in Colobane, the suburb of Dakar, Senegal, which provides the setting for his second feature film, Hyenas, released at Ster-Moribo cinemas this week as part of a new commitment to screening films from Africa. In some ways, Hyenas is a curious choice to kick off the programme — it’s an audacious, stylised film that might be hard for South African cinema-goers to identify with. But on meeting Mambety, one is left with little doubt that the director will prove an inspiration to local film-makers.
Speaking over a cup of coffee in a Johannesburg hotel, the lanky Mambety exudes the air of a shaman or a Zen master, his gravelly voice tinged with kindness. He is clearly an artist, and the symbolism and poetry of his films suggest that his stories emanate from deep within his soul.
Hyenas, released here in conjunction with the Film Resource Unit, is based on Frederich Durrenmatt’s play Der Besuch der Alten Dame — a bitter tale of a wealthy, aged prostitute’s revenge against the man who betrayed her. But, in Mambety’s hands, the bleak and ominous tones of the original are tempered by wit, irony and a striking satire of neo-colonial Africa and the moral decay at the heart of consumer capitalism.
In the film, Linguere Ramatou, the prostitute who returns to her village to exact her revenge, has miraculously become the richest woman in the world, “as rich as the World Bank”. She offers the impoverished village a trillion dollars if they will destroy Dramaan Drameh, the man who betrayed her and denied fathering their child. She says: “The world made a whore of me; I want to turn the world into a whorehouse. You can’t walk in the jungle with a ticket for the zoo. If you want to share the lion’s feast, then you must be a lion yourself.” And the villagers are seduced by the air conditioners, refrigerators and TV sets that she showers on them, and the small community becomes dependent on foreign debt.
The film was years in the making. Mambety’s idea stemmed from the real case of a prostitute who would treat the poor to a lavish meal every Friday in Dakar’s harbour district. One week she failed to appear, and Mambety decided to invent a history for her. He only found a suitable ending after seeing Ingrid Bergman in the film version of Durrenmatt’s play.
Mambety recalls, in fantastical detail, travelling to Neuchatel to present the playwright with his idea — walking up the curved road to the modest house at noon on a Sunday; the incessant barking of a red dog which was silenced only when he said: “Bonjour”. “Durrenmatt was the same age as my mama and he regretted never going to black Africa,” says Mambety. By three o’clock that day in 1985, he had been granted permission to film the adaptation. Unfortunately, the playwright didn’t live to see it, but the film is dedicated to “the great Frederich”, and at its 1992 Cannes premire the director left an empty chair next to his.
Made 20 years earlier, his first film, Touki Bouki, deals with many of the same themes as Hyenas, says Mambety: “The link between the two is money and treason.” It follows two teenagers, Mory and his girlfriend Anta, who will go to any lengths to obtain the money they need to escape to Paris. The film’s playfulness has been compared to that of Godard, and its imagery is both exhilarating and bitter-sweet. The hero, for example, rides a motorcycle with cattle horns mounted on its handlebars; and the constant refrain of the popular French music-hall number Paris, Paris, Paris underscores the absurdity of the situation. The inclusion of a gay character (whom the anti-hero fleeces of all possessions) is a first for African cinema.
Mambety explains: “Gays exist in African culture; despite what people say, it’s not clandestine. Although Muslims and Christians might say it’s no good, African religions say they’ve got a place. But for our conscience we say it’s a Westernised phenomenon.” The film became a landmark in African cinema precisely because it deals, without precedent, with issues of authentic values and post- independence with a unique sense of modernity and a poetic flair.
But Mambety is deferential about his status as a film-maker. “I’ve done many things … My life is more important than the cinema.” In a Sight & Sound interview, he said: “Griot is the word for what I do and the role that the film-maker has in society. It is a Wolof word, which for me means more than a story-teller; griot is a messenger of one’s time, a visionary and the creator of the future. The film- maker has much more to account for than an accountant or banker. He represents the collective consciousness of his people and he has to make it sublime and useful.”
Why did he choose film as a medium, as opposed to poetry, art or music? Arms and fingers flailing, Mambety explains: “Cinema is a combination of arts. It creates a visual link between you and the other. You can be naked, and make the others naked. If you imagine you have your back to the sea, and in front of you there’s a mirror, so you see yourself and behind you the sea, that’s the three dimensions that is cinema.”
He shows me the script for his next film, La Petite Vendeuse du Soleil, written like a poetic meditation, images next to snatches of dialogue. This is the expression of Mambety’s subconscious which he will give birth to on celluloid.
Before parting, I ask Mambety how he can deal with such tragic social themes in such an ironic way, infusing his tales with such urbane wit. “Life is serious, problems are serious, but if God looks at them from the skies he can laugh perhaps. God is never sad because he always knows the outcome of the drama. My mother said my name is Djibril — that is Gabriel, so I’m like the angel who sits next to God. She taught me that I can laugh too.”