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  • Close-Up:Teza: A Review
  • Nubia Kai (bio)

Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima is internationally renowned as one of the most innovative and radical writers/directors of African and African Diaspora films. His corpus of films dating back to his first film Hour Glass (1971), the highly successful Sankofa (1993), to his last documentary film, Adwa (1999), all display a continuity of sociopolitical relevance, collective memory, history, psychological introspection, and a relentless commitment to liberate the human spirit. Haile Gerima's most recent film Teza / Morning Dew, which was fifteen years in the making, is a cinematic masterpiece that has won over twenty international awards, including the coveted Etalon de Yennenga Grand Prize Award at FESPACO (2009), the Carthage African Festival Grand Prize (2008), and the Venice International Film Festival Special Jury Award (2008).

Exploring a constellation of human behavior and ideas—civil war, imperialism, communism, nationalism, class struggle, racism, emigration, male-female relationships, generational ruptures, ideological conflicts, sibling rivalry, cultural practice—the inner and outer workings of a virtual universe are ingeniously compressed into 140 minutes of film. Tackling such a diverse range of topics is a formidable task, yet Gerima manages to make it work with his complex cinematic approach to filmmaking in which the cinematic technique itself is integrated into the text. Like impressionist painters whose free flowing strokes form part of the image, or Ethiopian muralists who fill every inch of space with a seamless, symbolic narrative, Gerima employs a semiotic filmic style that amplifies the meaning and beauty of the narrative by using the camera like a paintbrush to capture the mood, rhythm, color, iconic content, and deep emotion expressed in the pensive, transparent gaze of the protagonist, Anberber. A subjective camera mimics Anberber's eyes, the mirror of the soul, follows his wary footsteps across a contemplative landscape marred by civil war, conscription, murder, chaos. [End Page 134]

Set in an Ethiopian village, Addis Ababa, and Cologne, West Germany, during the peak of the "Dergue" era, Anberber returns to his native land from Cologne where he has spent years studying medicine, world revolutionary movements, and Marxist-Leninist thought with a community of African intellectual expatriates. His dreams of a new socialist government and a medical career to help rid the country of diseases are soon shattered when the contradictions between theory and practice are shockingly exposed. The communist oriented social order under the dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam had replaced the three-thousand-year-old Solomonic monarchy with a system more brutal, corrupt, and dogmatic than their predecessors. Anberber's shattered idealistic world is reflected in the cross-cutting and jump-cut editing creating the illusion of dislocation, disruption, fragments of exploded reveries of an idyllic childhood. Haunted by hallucinations, nightmares, pastiches of memory, he envisions himself as a boy who fades into the backdrop of his village. There he embraces a monument on Mussolini Mountain where his father, a war hero who fought valiantly against the Italian invaders before he was killed by poison gas, is commemorated. Mussolini Mountain, an obvious symbol of European conquest and colonization of Africa that would forever change the political economy of the continent is, nevertheless, surmounted by the names of the freedom fighters who resisted, and this metaphorical mise-en-scène intimates the final meaning and outcome of the film. Anberber is a legitimate heir of this heroic legacy, but he has lost memory of his childhood, his youth, the college years in Germany; and neither his mother or the elders in his village understand his alienation and inner turmoil.

Teza is about the recovery of memory, both historic and personal memory which in African epistemology is inextricable. While Anberber recovers from a near fatal beating, he is simultaneously reconstituting his memory, claiming and interpreting his past so he can recover and redefine his future. The entire film subverts linear chronology as Gerima constructs the narrative through the process of involuted montage, a series of repeated short shots and flashbacks strategically arranged in order to convey a great deal of meaning in a short span of time, and at the same time, probe the depths of the protagonist's psyche in an expressionistic exegesis. Anberber's stoic...

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