Les cinemas d'Afrique noire: le regard en question (review)

Les cinémas d'Afrique noire: le regard en question, by Olivier Barlet. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996.

This is an excellent book: fresh, graceful, perspicacious, intelligent, current, and always alive with passionate sympathy for its subject. Were it translated into English--publishers take note--it would doubtless establish itself in this country as a standard text for courses in African and Third World cinema. Barlet has impressive powers of synthesis, fashioning an insightful and often elegant thematic argument out of a vast quantity of material. He has immersed himself in African films, stands on the shoulders of the many critics listed in his bibliography, and has conducted interviews with some fifty filmmakers and actors as well as numerous producers and others concerned with African cinema. He refers easily and frequently to African literature and is conversant with recent francophone social scientific reflections on the crisis of development in Africa. In short, the book is quite comprehensive; there is also a Gallic flair and cosmopolitanism about it that are a welcome change from the usual academic plodding.

The books on African film that have been published in English tend to be strongest on issues of ideology, production structures, and the historical evolution of the various francophone, anglophone, and lusophone zones of filmmaking. Barlet does not neglect these issues, but his emphasis is more cultural, aesthetic, and hermeneutical, especially during the bravura thematic survey of the first half of his book. He continues a francophone tradition (e.g., Victor Bachy, Pierre Haffner, and André Gardies) of trying to specify an African film aesthetics, grounded in an African cultural and metaphysical world view. For Barlet, African cinema is based on a non-Western, nonrationalist, animist religious vision, in touch with cosmic forces and conveying a divinatory perception of the natural world. He therefore privileges the natural symbol--trees and waters and earth, or the human figure in a landscape--as the key element in African filmmaking, and at a certain point (231-32) he expresses an alarmingly complete faith in unfettered subjectivity as the only way to apprehend Otherness.

It is possible to feel queasy about what this approach might turn into: it encourages Barlet to undermine the commitments of African cinema's founders to realism and political transformation in favor of cultural and ethical terms, and it causes him to be always constructing a unitary Africa in opposition to the West (sometimes the dichotomy is that between oral and written cultures). One sometimes fears the shades of Frobenius and the more dubious Negritudinists are lurking in that visionary African landscape. But Barlet is too deeply interested in African modernity, is generally too sophisticated an intellectual, and is much too close to the actual producers of African cinema and their concerns to fall into any kind of reactionary nostalgia. His thinking about symbolism allows him to make splendid sense of the simplicities of African films, explaining their silences and spareness and slowness not as impoverishment or an "aesthetic of hunger" but as evidence of another set of values; his attention to the specificities of African oral culture leads him to an appreciation of characteristic ambiguities of form and enunciation and to an excellent treatment of the neglected topic of humor in African films. His formal analyses tend to be evocative rather than exhaustively analytical ; they are not always startlingly original in direction, but they are a real advance on anything published in English.

It is hard to do justice to the richness of the book in a brief review. Characteristic is Barlet's mixture of high-minded anthropological and ethical reflections on the theme of "the gift" with a shrewd appreciation of French motives and African necessities in the coproduction of African cinema. This is very much a book about understanding across cultures and the necessity of multiculturalism--it is an "invitation au voyage," as Barlet says, and a singularly attractive introduction to African film.

--Jonathan Haynes...