Troubled Men and the Women Who Create Havoc: Four Recent Films by West African Filmmakers

In African Cinema: Decolonizing the Gaze, Olivier Barlet describes a shift of purpose and technique in recent African filmmaking. African filmmakers, he writes, reveal "less concern now for ideological legitimization than was evident in their early years" (138). Unlike the first generation of African filmmakers, who considered themselves part of an emerging Third Word cinema and used film as "a tool of revolution, a means of political education to be used for transforming consciousness"(Barlet 34), this new generation of filmmakers have been "freed from the obligation to convey an ideological message" (11). The African filmmaker, no longer a revolutionary, has become "a cultural energizer" who uses the language of images to create "a new speech in which modern humanity, both African and non-Africa, can recognize itself" (156). The films discussed in this review, Dôlè, Ainsi meurent les anges, Faat Kine, and Karmen might exemplify a less didactic cinema, but they are by no means representative of a less ideological cinema. The filmic conventions employed in the films more closely resemble what Teshome Gabriel describes as "Western dominant conventions" (354), or Third Cinema labels bourgeois aesthetics, than the alternative aesthetics of early African cinema, but as Third Cinema set out to demonstrate, such conventions produce a cinematic real that is wholly ideological. The difference Barlet identifies as newness points to what I will describe, imperfectly, as a melodramatic aesthetic that reveals itself in different ways in the films. Imunga Ivanga's Dôlè and Moussa Sene Absa's Ainsi meurent les anges are melodramatic in that they focus on the individual in the private realm from a fixed perspective. This act of tightening the frame is also an act of erasure that eclipses the political and historical issues that are central to the films' conflicts and characters. What is ignored or obscured discloses the ideological investments of the films. Directors Sembene Ousmane in Faat Kine and Joseph Gaï Ramaka in Karmen create melodramatic character types. The protagonists for whom the films are named are intended to model a resilient and defiant African womanhood, but the films fail to reconcile the ideological tensions generated by the strength and sexuality of their heroines. The figure of woman signifies the contradiction and excess that preclude closure and certainty, and, therefore, she troubles the "message" her image is meant to impart.

Set in Libreville, Gabon, decades after independence, Imunga Ivanga's film Dôlè (2001) follows the exploits of four young rap artists with large dreams and limited prospects. The opening segment of the film, a lively musical sequence composed of skillfully edited quick cuts, finds the rap singers practicing on their rooftop retreat. Here, from above Libreville, the boys look down on the poverty that defines their neighborhood and plot strategies to rise above it. Petty theft and Dôlè, the lottery game described by a radio reporter as "the greatest thing to happen to Gabon since independence," offer the only realistic hopes for the fulfillment of the dreams of the characters: Baby Lee, the oldest boy who jealously guards his role as "leader of the group," plans to win the lottery to buy music recording equipment; Akson, the group's advisor who speaks to his friends in proverbs, hopes to organize a boxing match with his share of the winnings; Joker, the youngest, dreams of buying a tugboat that will take him around the coast of Africa; and Mougler, who, unlike his friends, does not want money for unrealized desires, needs money urgently to buy medicines for his ailing mother.

Despite the seriousness of the topics addressed in the film, Dôlè's treatment remains light and superficial. The film presents the spectator with sympathetic and entertaining criminals engaged in comic exploits and completely ameliorates the crimes they commit against rather reprehensible, and comfortably rich, victims. The film renders "Operation...