Ouagadougou, the capital of the tiny West African country of Burkina Faso, is also the self-styled capital of African cinema. Every two years it hosts Fespaco, the festival of films from Africa and the African diaspora. John Matshikiza, who attended for the first time this year, talks about two of his favourite films from this year’s list of prizewinners
Riding in a battered taxi through Ouagadougou on my first day, a thought sprang into my mind: wouldn’t it be great to observe the arrival of the new millennium from here? No huge electronic fuss from huge electronic billboards. No expensive symbolic gestures. No insincere congratulations, and no television countdown. No Father Christmas in the chimney, no laser shows in the sky, no BMWs on the ground. Just heat, dust, camels, scooters and people going about their lives with the same extravagant moderation as they always have.
Mauritanian-born filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako’s film is about exactly that.
In La Vie Sur Terre (Life on Earth) – which won three prizes and a special mention at this 16th edition of Fespaco – Sissako tells the story of a Paris-based film maker (played by himself) who returns to his native village of Sokolo, deep in rural Mali, to experience the arrival of the new millennium.
There is almost nothing new in the village. The only things that reflect the advent of a technological age are the local radio station, the post office with its single telephone line and the street photographer with his ancient pin-hole apparatus standing forlornly on its tripod in the village square.
Almost nothing happens. Figures move in and out of an eternal, empty frame – except that the frame is never completely empty. There is always a tree, the tilting wall of a mud- brick building, a herd of goats, a group of women passing to or from a well. Then there are the young blades of the village, sitting immobile against a wall in their rickety chairs, listlessly listening to the radio, and changing position only when the sun is impudent enough to intrude on their luxurious shade.
The only other time they move a muscle is when Nana rides by, and their heads are inspired for a moment to turn like a single, curious beast to follow her progress.
Nana, like the filmmaker/narrator, is an intrusion into the frozen, heat-struck frame of Sokolo. She is breathtakingly beautiful. No one knows why she has come here, riding around on her bicycle, and hardly anyone tries to communicate with her. The tailor, who measures her endlessly for a dress that he will never make, and the photographer, whose camera finds a sadness hidden behind her radiant smile, are among the few who speak to her. The telephone operator has to communicate with her too, when she tries to make one of her many fruitless calls home. And, of course, the prodigal filmmaker also has brief conversations with her. In fact, he immediately falls in love with her, but never quite finds a way to touch her soul.
This unconsummated love affair is as close as the film allows itself to having a narrative thread. But in a strange way, allowing even this thread to creep into the beautifully still tapestry of the film is the one jarring element, the only visual sense of the outside world intruding.
Perhaps that is the whole point. I can imagine an executive producer in Paris looking over Sissako’s screenplay and saying, “Yes, but where’s the story? Who are the male and female leads? Where’s the love interest? How do I sell this thing?”
“The story is that there is no story,” the filmmaker would have replied. “That is Africa. And to prove it to you, I’ll give you a bit of love interest, to show you that it makes no difference to anything.”
The real story is that, while the love story is going nowhere, the rest of the world is celebrating a raucous millennium by satellite and internet from the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Sokolo, meanwhile, is still trying to make contact with the next village by telephone.
“It’s a matter of luck whether you get through or not,” says the telephone operator, as he hangs up and tries again on behalf of his infinitely patient customers.
The most banal needs become fraught with technical challenge because of the cranky telephone. Among these are the needs of Nana herself, waiting for news from home, news that will decide whether she stays or goes. In the end, of her own volition, she goes. It makes no difference.
This could be a mournful film, steeped as it is in images of African poverty. But it isn’t. It soars with humour and insight. Repeated flashes to the impossibly creaky radio station are hilarious – a couple of old guys with prehistoric equipment doing their best to keep the intellectual life of Africa alive, with readings from Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism and other revolutionary texts of the long-forgotten past.
Is anybody in the village (or in Africa) listening? It doesn’t matter. The radio goes on broadcasting; the flame is kept alive …
Of all the films I saw at Fespaco, this one leaves the most enduring images in my mind, throwing up new questions and new possibilities each time.
In the enigmatic tone of its storytelling, Life on Earth could fit comfortably in the European art-house genre. Yet it is entirely African in its spirit. It is short (61 minutes) but has magnificent depth. It is about the rejection of Western values, yet it was made with Western money and Japanese technology.
Thus the eternal dilemma of African film: who pays the piper? Who calls the tune? And yet, as this film shows, in Africa all things are possible.
Detroit used to be known as Motown, the capital of the motor manufacturing industry of the whole entire world.
When the American automobile was dinosaured by the more svelte machine from Japan, thousands of black people who’d become the backbone of the motor industry, and who had earlier moved up from the bitter South to find work, suddenly found themselves unemployed.
With the death of Malcolm X, political correctness and the Afro hairdo, some of them found a new source of income farming hair. The hair on top of black people’s heads, it appeared, could be very big business indeed.
Older generations of barbers and hairdressers delighted in the revival of the “conk”, the process of stretching kinky hair with chemicals or “hot irons”. The younger generation took the conk and turned it into a Walt Disney fairytale castle with accessories.
It is this sub-class of Americans who populate Hot Irons, a hilarious film about the hair-workers of Detroit.
Hot Irons was made by a New York-based filmmaker who was born and grew up in London. But since Waheed Andrew Dosunmu has Nigerian parents, the film made it into Ouagadougou as a Nigerian film.
“It make me feel good about myself when I have my hair done,” says one young lady, as the muscular ex-auto-builder teases her stressed curls ever upwards in a concoction of candyfloss swirls, augmented by huge hunks of human hair imported from somewhere else.
“I feel good about makin’ her feel good,” rejoins the ex-technician. “Fact is, lot of people think that a man that spend his time tweakin’ on a woman’s hair gotta be less than 100% man. Let me tell you somethin’: I’m 199% pure full-blooded man, and I love this job.” And he flexes the huge muscles on his chest to show it.
This is serious business. It’s worth a billion black dollars a year. It’s spawned a host of trade magazines and web sites, and it has even spawned its own trade shows.
The biggest of these is called the Hair Wars. In the Hair Wars, thousands of negroes congregate to show off to other negroes what specialist hair-negroes have been doing to their hair for the last year. And what a parade.
There’s the spiral that’s called Steps to Heaven. There’s another one that starts off being Marie Antoinette in ebony, then turns into a fairground carousel with its own tiny battery-powered motor. And then there are several items that look like someone’s kid brother threw a tar pancake from the balcony above as the sister was getting ready to go out.
Never mind, the sisters and brothers who get into this hair thing don’t seem to care about the eye of the beholder. They care about themselves, and they feel good.
And if there are some bits of their bodies that they’re not so comfortable with, hell, the hairstyle provides a perfect distraction.
These are black people out there in their own loud, electric universe, where Mister Charlie doesn’t exist. They are black courtiers in the salons of an invisible black Sun King.
Dosunmu’s film, alternating between colour and black-and-white footage, has a great soundtrack that draws on Motown, the Caribbean and elsewhere (including a piece by South Africa’s legendary Manhattan Brothers) and matches the fantasy world portrayed in the film.
And quietly juxtaposed in the background, a glimpse of the real world: a camera tracking quietly through street after desolate ghetto street, in the dead, black outskirts of the city that used to make Cadillacs and Fords.
Hot Irons is Dosunmu’s debut documentary feature (up till now he’s been making music videos.) He chose Fespaco for its world premier, and was rewarded with the jury prize for best documentary.
Once again, Fespaco has unveiled a potential world-beater from Africa.