Review: Lindiwe Dovey (2009) African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen. New York: Colombia University Press. 334pp.

Transcription

1 Review: Lindiwe Dovey (2009) African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen. New York: Colombia University Press. 334pp. Helena Cantone African Film and Literature is an ambitious attempt to address the lack of in depth critical theory on African film generally, and specifically on the films of individual African filmmakers. Although post-colonial theory has helped to contextualise and critique eurocentricity, the objectification of the Other and to highlight questions of subjectivity and representation, Lindiwe Dovey manages to offer an updated wealth of material for a fresh analysis of African film. As Manthia Diawara (the first African filmmaker to write a book about African film production) replied when asked by Dovey what direction African film criticism should take: What has been lacking within African film studies is a serious and profound consideration of the films themselves (xii). Lindiwe Dovey sets out to analyse a number of South African and West African films that are adaptations of African and non-african literature, focussing on how violence is adapted to the screen, in order to illustrate how African filmmakers are developing on the one hand a distinct filmic identity, while on the other, engaging in a platform that transcends cultural and geographical boundaries. Dovey begins by giving a personal background to how her interest in the film medium developed. Born in apartheid South Africa to parents involved in anti-apartheid work, I was raised in a highly politicised and violent context (xi). Interestingly, she omits her racial identity as a white Film-Philosophy ISSN:

2 South African. Her academic background is both in cinema and literature, hence her interest in film adaptation, and she is Lecturer in African Film at the School of Oriental and African Studies as well as founder of the Cambridge African Film Festival and London African Film Festival, increasing the exhibition and distribution of African films in the UK. In the introduction Dovey explores some of the problems linked to African cinema, with some African filmmakers rejecting the very notion of a totalised African identity, while other post-colonial theorists have tried to focus more on local, multiple and complex Africas. Still more African writers and writers such as Achille Mbembe and Tsitsi Dangarembga, Dovey suggests, believe the desire for a pan-african identity still prevails. This is seen in the arts festivals in Africa today, such as FESPACO, that exhibit works by filmmakers from all sides of the continent, bridging the separation of North Africa and sub-saharan Africa. Although recognising that: The desire for pan-africanism undoubtedly has something to do with a sense of shared, past oppression at the hands of the colonizers and, in film terms, it marks Africa as a continent that is trying to reappropriate its image (Gaston Kaboré cited in Dovey, 3) Dovey goes on to stress that: The persistence of pan-african beliefs and attitudes in the African film scene cautions us against overlooking the role of desire, imagination, and subjectivity in the construction of African cinematic identities on the local, regional, and continental scales. (3) She interestingly points towards some of the very first films made by African filmmakers in order to exemplify how the medium has been used to express complex themes. These vary from a documentary on religious intolerance in Madagascar with La Mort de Rasalama (Raberono, 1947); an adaptation of a West African oral story that allegorically critiques the subordination of women in a short film made in France called Mouramani (Mamadou Touré, 1953); to the process of Westernization in Nasserian Egypt by the Father of Egyptian Cinema in Bab el Hadid (Youssef Chahine, 1958) and the first Film-Philosophy ISSN:

3 short fiction film to be made by the Father of African Cinema Borom Sarret (Ousmane Sembene, 1963) that looks at the cycle of exploitation and oppression of the poor by the rich and the poor of each other. While La Noire de (Ousmane Sembene, 1965), which represents the first featurelength sub-saharan production, explores white racism in the post-colonial era and the drive for materialism of its protagonist, Diouana, who chooses to move to France and work as a maid. Therefore from the beginning of African filmmaking, directors have chosen not only to look at colonialism and its legacy in postcolonial forms of oppression and violence, but also at the responsibility of Africans themselves. Dovey therefore explains: The films examined here have been chosen not only because they are adaptations of literature but also because they are illustrative of a broader trend in African screen media that emphasizes the political and pedagogical responsibility of African film authors and audiences. In particular, the films highlight the filmmakers concern with the social realities of violence, and offer ways of conceptualising, visualising, and critiquing violence. (6) The introduction is also dedicated to exploring theories of film adaptation. Dovey points out that adaptation in Africa has tended to focus on oral narratives rather than literature due to Africa s rich oral heritage, although many of Sembene s films are adaptations of novels written by him, and other filmmakers have drawn on both mediums to engage with African audiences in multiple ways. Dovey suggests that applying conventional film adaptation theory to African screen media is limited because there is not the same focus on the notion of fidelity and the original meaning of the literary text. She writes that there are equally difficulties applying poststructuralist and postcolonial theories, due to a strong sense of authorship held by many African filmmakers on the one hand, and on the other, the tendency to reduce African rewritings of canonical texts to a form of opposition, resistance and appropriation. Dovey concludes that: Film-Philosophy ISSN:

4 Nevertheless, two theories of adaptation have proven useful on a heuristic level performative criticism and Theodor Adorno s concept of mimesis in that they aid the conceptualisation of a specifically African form of adaptation. For while the new millennium has seen a surge in research on film adaptation, little account has been taken of African practices of adaptation, or of postcolonial adaptation more generally. (12) Dovey explores film adaptation as performative criticism to illustrate how many African filmmakers such as Sissoko refer to themselves as screen griots, claiming a position as the inheritors of the tradition of communal West African oral storytelling and critique (13). Adopting this title, and translating oral stories as well as literary texts to the screen, African filmmakers are able, first of all, to reach nonliterate African audiences, and, second, to encourage audiences to react to the cinematic experience in the same way that they would to a griot s performance of an oral tale that is, with a critical, modifying eye and not with an absent-minded passivity of spectators expecting merely to be entertained. (13) By focussing on the performative dimension of African arts, Dovey highlights both the blurring between production and consumption as well as the embodied role audiences play through interacting with the performance. While the role of filmmakers as griots is seen sometimes in the use of voiceover, the prominent feature of a griot in the film, and the filmmakers acting in the films themselves, lack of funding is also recognised as resulting in African filmmakers being forced to fulfil multiple roles as writers, directors, producers, editors and actors. Hence, Dovey suggests, The authorial role in African films is more marked than in Hollywood films, for example, where specialisation results in hierarchies of expertise. This form of authorship in African films is not oppositional, as was auteur cinema in Europe, but can be seen as an extension of social and artistic responsibility, a role articulated by DRC filmmaker Mweze Ngangura as follows: in Africa, for many years now almost all filmmakers have regarded themselves as authors, as people with a mission, charged with carrying a message to their people. (15) Film-Philosophy ISSN:

5 Dovey goes on further to explore film adaptation as Adornian mimesis, suggesting that Theodor Adorno s concept of mimesis is useful because it marries the concepts of embodied and rational modes of being and sees this marriage as a prerequisite of critique (16). While mimesis historically is linked to embodiment, in bodily mimicry, and Plato s idea of mimesis as imitation, Adorno and co-author Max Horkheimer trace how during the Enlightenment, Europeans began to identify mimesis as an embodied mode of being, less civilised than rational modes of being. Linked to imperial justification, Africans were debased as primitive, natural and pre-rational as opposed to European civilisation. Using Horkheimer and Adorno s theory in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, that myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology, Dovey suggests that: Adorno thus seeks to locate embodiment and rationality within a continuum or constellation, with no dichotomy between them they do not constitute a binary opposition. As soon as the bodily suppresses rationality, it forfeits its meaning-making power. (17) Therefore, while some film and literary theorists critique the validation of the rational over the bodily, many African filmmakers, Dovey suggests, seem to be engaged in the opposite process: they are using the hyper-embodied medium of film to project their own versions of rationality into their films (17). Thus the use of voice-over in the case of Cameroonian filmmaker Jean- Pierre Bekolo challenges what was once told that no one ever hears what Africans say or what they think. And by extension such a statement would seem to suggest that Africans don t think at all (17). Likewise, Dovey mentions the masterful and influential writing of Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko and Ngugi wã Th iongo s Decolonization of the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), which explored the violent effects of colonialism on the psyche of the colonized, rather than the body, to further illustrate the complex argument of mimesis in postcolonial Africa. Film-Philosophy ISSN:

6 In the last part of her tightly packed theoretical introduction, Dovey turns her attention to African screen media, mimicry and violence. As the main interest of the author is to explore how African filmmakers represent and critique contemporary examples of violence such as rape, war, murder and genocide, Dovey addresses the relationship of violence with colonial Africa in order to contextualise contemporary African representations of violence on screen. Recalling the role of mimicry in the context of the colonizer s savagery towards the savage Africans, and inspired by Fanon s Black Skin, White Masks (1967), and Homi Bhabha s notion on the ambivalence of the stereotype of the black African in the Western psyche, Dovey attempts to show, in her words, how remarkable it is that certain African filmmakers have rejected a similar form of mimicry in their films and have instead embraced a form of (Adornian) mimesis that critiques violence (27). European colonizing authorities mainly used cinema and ethnographic filmmaking early on to perpetuate the idea that Africans were an inferior race, essentially violent, in need of civilising and taming. Black Africans were made to identify with white heroes, while other films were specifically made for propaganda and termed educational to control and establish law and order. It is within this history that Dovey argues the first African filmmakers who emerged out of the decolonisation struggles in the 1950s, chose to use cinema not as a revolutionary tool but as a critical medium. Whereas the Argentinean founding members of Third Cinema, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, in their manifesto, Towards a Third Cinema (1969) referred to filmmaking as a guerrilla activity, Dovey suggests Ousmane Sembene was the first black African filmmaker to use the medium of film for raising the consciousness of people, encouraging reflection and therefore pioneering critical awareness rather than revolutionary action (31). Malian film critic Moussa Bolly suggests contemporary filmmakers from Chad, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia are exploring ways of breaking cycles of violence in which Africa is plunged. A violence which, according to them, can never be the solution to the problems of Africans (31). Therefore, Dovey concludes Film-Philosophy ISSN:

7 that, by historicizing violence through the adaptation process, African filmmakers are problematizing representations of Africa as inherently violent (31), while creating an opportunity for hope. The book is subsequently divided into two distinct sections focussing on South Africa and Francophone West Africa respectively in which a series of films are analysed in depth, and include images from the film sequences. The first section looks at cinema and violence in South African, preand post 1994, in order to give a comprehensive context to the films Dovey then describes. Fools (Ramadan Suleman, 1997), is an adaptation of a novella by Njabulo Ndebele (1983) that is set in 1966 about the rape of a schoolgirl by her teacher. It represents the first feature film to emerge post 1994 by a black South African screenwriter and director. Instead of representing black independence and the anti-apartheid struggle, a very different story is presented. One in which, Dovey suggests, the representation of rape is from the perspective of the rapist but manages not to be voyeuristic, while unconventionally presenting the motivation of rape not as bestial, but as rationalised and disembodied. This is achieved in part by the use of close-ups, shaky and handheld shots, as well as metaphor, with the use of the image of a chicken and the shedding of its blood throughout the film. While on the one hand the chicken serves as a metaphor for men, Dovey suggests that it equally symbolises the metonymic transfer of violence onto women as scapegoats in an oppressed society (84). Tsotsi (Gavin Hood, 2006), the first South African film to win Best Foreign Language Oscar, is based on white South African writer Athol Fugard s novel (1980). It is on the one hand a morality drama about the restitution of a hijacked baby by a Tsotsi gangster, harking Fugard s redemptive Christian liberalism, while on the other hand represents a critique on the pervasive, systemic violence of HIV/AIDS (102) which has replaced apartheid as the greatest threat to South Africa s future stability and peace (103). Dovey critiques the film s failure to show the patriarchal violence that often leads to the transmission of the disease, but suggests the Film-Philosophy ISSN:

8 film is a powerful representation of class divisions between the rich and poor and praises the film s dialogical qualities. A Walk in the Night (Mickey Madoda Dube, 1998) and Cry, the Beloved Country (Darell James Roodt, 1995) look at racial identity in the 1950s and 1990s South Africa and racially motivated violence in an emerging nation. Both deal with the murder of a white man by a black man but Dovey looks closely at how differently each film adaptation of the novels present cross-racial murder, suggesting that: Both directors then [ ] turn inward to level critique at their own racial communities in South Africa rather than critiquing the Other and thereby, perhaps, provoking retaliatory violence. (119) A Walk in the Night is based on La Guma s novella (1962) which, written under house arrest, highlights the metonymic displacement of violence or scapegoating set in motion by apartheid that J. M. Coetzee aptly suggests may begin in the white city or the black ghetto, but it must end in the ghetto and its last victim must be black (127). Dovey then looks at cinema and violence in Francophone West Africa, giving a clear context before dedicating analysis to two very individual films: Karmen Geï (Joseph Gaï Ramaka, 2001) and La Genèse (Cheik Oumar Sissoko, 1999). The first is a filmic adaptation of both Prosper Mérimée s novella ( ) and Georges Bizet s opera of Carmen (1875). By adapting this canonical piece, Ramaka replies to his critics by the simple assertion of Why not? (219), producing an original and radical interpretation of Carmen that manages to break with conventions while remaining rooted in Senegalese culture. Therefore Dovey suggests that the film is far more than an indigenisation of Carmen In its reclamation of Carmen as a human text belonging to all, Karmen Geï renders the very idea of indigenisation irrelevant (251). Sissoko s La Genèse (1999) is the first African film adaptation of the Old Testament. Made by a Muslim Malian director, Sissoko seeks to represent the shared story of the origins of Muslims, Christians and Jews, Film-Philosophy ISSN:

9 challenging notions of the Old Testament as a Western text while giving it a human narrative. The characters in the film speak in Bambara; while the internationally renowned musician Salif Keïta, playing Esau, leads his clan through northeastern Mali, made to invoke biblical Canaan. The film therefore asks us to rethink Western assumptions about religious heritage. As Dovey points out, While reclaiming the Book of Genesis as a human source, Sissoko simultaneously adapts local Malian traditions the griotic, and the Koteba theatrical traditions which he uses to rewrite an old, familiar narrative for the sake of contemporary audiences in Africa and abroad. His film thus participates in that movement by African film adapters to erode the boundaries between African and non-african epistemologies, allowing them to inflect and influence each other. In this way Sissoko himself can be seen as a griot, intervening in world culture to speak the truth to global violence. That this griot offers his critique of violence from the continent that is most often associated with violence is extremely moving and powerful. (274) Although the book does require a degree of familiarity with African cinema and theoretical knowledge of film adaptation and mimesis, Lindiwe Dovey does successfully give in-depth criticism of individual films and set a new standard for African film analysis. To conclude, Teddy Mattera is quoted as saying at the New York African film festival in 2007: We have been the object of the gaze. We don t want to return the gaze, we want to look elsewhere (177). Dovey has given us this very opportunity. Film-Philosophy ISSN: