Self Representation in African Cinema

SELF REPRESENTATION IN AFRICAN CINEMA Souleymane Cisse, Film still from Yeelen, 1987 7 4 * N k a Journal of Contemporary African Art A s I recently paged through a voluminous book, Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography,1 I could not help but think about the aesthetic links between still photography and film in Africa. A crucial question we must ask ourselves, therefore, is what happened when Africans got hold of still and motion-picture cameras to represent themselves? Did they inherit the stereotypes of Africans forged by Europeans, or did they try to find a new language? There are aesthetic links between African photography and film that, if explored, will yield a new appreciation of both media in Africa. It is my aim here to show that black-and-white photography in Africa provides a powerful metaphor for pursuing the aesthetic signifiers in African cinema. African Cinema in Black and White Looking at the photographs in the anthology, one can see the African youth movement toward modernity framed by the still camera. Each photograph by Seydou Keita, Malick Sidibe, Samuel Fosso, and Philip Kwame Apagya is filled with energy, desires, and a kind of modernist melancholia that constitute its aesthetic source and pleasure. Furthermore, the subjects in Sidibe's work in particular seem to imitate actors and pop music stars from B-movies and magazines from the West. The dress styles—tight shirts, Afro-hair, bell-bottom pants, and platform shoes—and the body languages of the characters are filled with cinematic vignettes of the life of hip youngsters in Bamako in the 1960s and 1970s. The mise-en-scene is perfected, with outdoor and studio props like motorcycles, telephones, records, and turntables that are signifiers of the pop-culture period in Bamako. The characters occupy the center of the photographs like Hollywood heroes and individuals who have conquered history. My biggest surprise is that I found no strong continuity between these photographs and the African cinema coming out in the 1960s and 1970s. Only a handful of films in the seventies gave a nod to the modern African style and aesthetics I have referred to here. Tooki Bouki (1975) by Djibril Diop Mambety, like Sidibe's photographs , borrows from the mise-en-scene of the Western and B-movies, as well as from the French Nouvelle Vague. The poetic connotations in the representation of the youth in Tooki Bouki signal to the same symbols of freedom and independence emphasized in the black-and-white photographs. Den Muso (1974) by Souleymane Cisse is another film with fascinating intertextual connections to the photography of the 1960s and 1970s in Africa. Den Muso tells the story of two young people —Tenin and Sekou—caught in the struggle between tradition and modernity. Tenin's father represents traditional nobility and wealth, while Fall 2007 N k a - 7 5 Sekou's family is from a poor background. But Tenin and Sekou are united through the modern youth culture as signified by free sex, the music of a young Salif Keita and the Super Rail Band of Bamako, the dress styles, and the motorcycles that have become the new symbols of mobility in the city. Tenin's parents are filmed like the studio portraits of the men and women in Seydou Keita's classic portraits of the Bamakois clad in their embroidered grand boubous, with a red curtain in the background. The recourse to Keita's style of portraiture to represent traditional Bamako contrasts nicely with the use of Sidibe's style to connote the new and the challenge to tradition. Both Sekou and Tenin are characters straight out of a Sidibe photo album. In his Afro-hair, tight shirts with long collars, and platform shoes, Sekou looks like a rebel against all that Bamako represents . He quits his job in the beginning of the film and becomes a pickpocket. He is a playboy without a conscience or a commitment to anything in life, except for the clothes he wears. He changes girlfriends several times in the film. In one classic scene la Malick Sidibe, shot at the beach by the river, the youth, dressed in their bikinis, drink tea, and play while...