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4 Jean-Pierre Bekolo and the Challenges of Aesthetic Populism If Sembene’s Xala highlights the preoccupations of the politically engaged filmmaker , and Kelani’s ἀ underbolt: Magun reflects an awareness of film as a commercial product, Cameroonian-born Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s work, especially Le Complot d’Aristote (Aristotle’s Plot, 1996), stands between both, suggesting that the two concerns are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Aristotle’s Plot is not a straightforward drama in the manner of either Sembene’s Xala or Kelani’s ἀu nderbolt : Magun, and perhaps this is what makes it such a conciliatory work when compared to both films. Taking a conceptual approach to the issues that preoccupy African filmmakers, Aristotle’s Plot makes a germane point that is easily overlooked, namely that speaking to a society as heterogeneous as contemporary Africa means speaking to a diversity of audiences and thus requires a diversity of filmmaking practices. I argue in this chapter that the central impulse in Bekolo’s work is to address the ideological fissures that have come to define African cinema: fissures between those who hold that a film, as an artwork, is justified by its singularity, those who argue for politically engaged cinema, and those who decry the unresponsiveness of African filmmakers to their audiences’ desire for popular stories. ἀ e divisions may look somewhat schematic but, in fact, three directors have taken these three positions. Djibril Diop Mambèty, the deceased but unforgettable Senegalese director, saw matters in stark terms, saying, “either one is very popular and talks to people in a simple and plain manner, or else one searches for an African film language that would exclude the chattering and focus more on how to make use of visuals and sound” (Pfaff 1988, 218). In a 2002 interview with the critic Michael Martin, the cinéaste Gaston Kaboré was asked to comment on the impact of new media on indigenous modes of expression, and he said, “while it is difficult for us today . . . we must continue to try to make people understand that Africans have contributed to world civilization and our universal patrimony” (Martin 2002, 166). Mweze Ngangura, who produced the popular musical comedy La Vie Est Belle (Life Is Rosy, 1987) is also on record (1996) as having attacked the so-called cinema d’auteur as didactic and militant in ways he judged to be unpalatable to mass audiences. Bekolo is foremost among those who attempt to integrate the different positions. He explicitly rejects an either/or solution to the problem of meeting these diverse needs, instead adopting a position which entails a complex artistic undertaking. ἀ erefore it Jean-Pierre Bekolo and the Challenges of Aesthetic Populism 109 is important, in discussing his work, to couple the last two of the three manifestations of the peculiarity of postcolonial texts I highlighted in the introduction , namely the aesthetic dimension of uneven geographical development and the role of metropolitan location and commodification as shapers of genre. In this chapter, I pursue the task by focusing on Bekolo as an example of the generation of African (and diasporic) filmmakers whose careers coincide with or are implicitly connected to the phenomenon of globalization. I look at this phenomenon both specifically in the annals of African filmmaking and in the general context of what the expatriate Iranian scholar Hamid Naficy calls the accented cinema (2001). ἀr ough the discussion of Bekolo’s Aristotle’s Plot, I argue that the works of these filmmakers (such as Abderrahmane Sissako, Moussa Sene Absa, Raoul Peck, Joseph Gaï Ramaka, Alan Gomis, Régina Fanta Nacro, Mahamet Saleh-Haroun, and many others) represent a more fruitful articulation of the tensions between the poetics of decolonization and its aftermath— the diverse subjectivities that are characteristic of postcoloniality—which are mirrored in the three different positions on the proper preoccupations of African cinema. If, as I have argued in the introduction, artistic representations of decolonization such as we see in Xala have to be set against new postcolonial subjectivities which those representations did not always countenance, then the paths taken by this generation of filmmakers can be seen to lead to more complex understandings of African realities. One can no longer plausibly see African identity as undifferentiated. Such a notion was perhaps useful in motivating the anti-colonial critiques of the artists who came to maturity as the colonies were gaining independence. At the same time, the ways in which other kinds of politicized representation persist in the works of younger artists cannot...

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