cinemas of the south

Souleymane Cissé
The Right of Expression through Cinema
By Hassouna Mansouri

If there is one film director who knows how to treat the complexities of Africa, the richness of its culture and the necessity of its cinema, it is the Malian Souleymane Cissé. Yet his discourse is so subtle and so penetrating - it goes to the heart of fundamental questions – it lets us believe that he is avoiding them or putting them aside. The force of Cissé's vision of Africa is that it has elevated the Bambara culture to a universal level. According to Hedi Khélil, "This cinéaste is proof of a certain maturity, a passionate sensibility open to the splendour of the world, an aesthetic refinement and the grandeur of cinema. In the pain and the perpetual questioning, his cinema of ascetism has stripped off the militant vein which marked his first stammerings. He has acceded to the universal without ever ceasing to be authentically African."

Souleymane Cissé

Cissé makes films in Africa when a certain idea of the continent has arisen by non-Africans or by those Africans moving in the same direction. He believes that the cinema is – and can only be – a factor in the development of culture and not a false ally of it.

He is against the reductionism of western directors or some Africans who have followed their example. Cissé puts into question not only social and political values but, above all, a way of representing Africa and the world. The African continent is circumscribed by world-wide socio-politics as a consequence of its crises and the possibilities of ecomomic growth. One can identify the zones of social and political crises like racism in South Africa; the zones of economic growth such as the Ivory Coast, the incarnation of the African dream of an economic miracle, and the areas of distress which make appeals for international aid like Ethiopia.

Cissé placed Waati (1995), in the same terrain in order to destroy the reductive portraits of the continent, while avoiding a frankly militant discourse. He attempts to bring out what one could call "the profound spirit" of Africa. Certainly the socio-political context of South Africa is responsible for the departure of Nandi, the leading character, because, following the incidents she experienced at her school, she flees accompanied by others more politically engaged. Nandi is not engaged, in the political term, in the fight against apartheid. She does not take part in the demonstrations organised in her school. When she kills a white policeman, her action is not dictated by a nationalistic sentiment nor by any ideology. The act was one of the simple right to live. Her action is not political but a reaction against the absurdities she encounters. Her discourse goes beyond the political struggle and transcends the crisis to place it on a higher level.

The policeman had humiliated her and killed her father and brother. Faced with this man who has just shamelessly killed her family, the young girl advances with her only weapon being the force that transformed her into a serene fighter, sure of herself. Then something mysterious happens. In the shot/reverse shot between Nandi's look and the eyes of a horse, a sort of complicite is established and the unarmed fighter is saved by the animal.

Waati

The episode on the Ivory Coast has the theme of the acquisition of knowledge. This knowledge is double sided. On one side is the Western model represented by the university, the course, the professor, the students' thesis. On the other side is traditional teaching represented by the Rasta master of ceremonies. The two sources of knowledge are treated in the same manner. That is to say, with a certain ironic distance in which Cissé stresses the naivity of the keepers of knowledge, the professor on the modern side, the master of ceremonies on the traditional. Nevertheless, Nandi experiences a moment of enlightenment in both contexts. The defence of her thesis is accompanied by a celebration in the form of a theatre performance.

In voice-off, we hear Nandi defending her thesis: she has chosen a subject constituting almost a cliché of African culture, the mask. This is an intrusion into the modern frame to develop an element of traditional culture. During the evening, after having seen the images of famine in Africa, the character undergoes a sort of inexplicable metamorphosis. Nandi suddenly feels the need to get out to get some air. On the road back to the university, she sees a woman in traditional clothes with a baby on her back crossing the deserted autoroute. She passes Nandi and disappears rapidly into the emptiness of the modern city. We see in this meeting of two women, a meeting between a young woman open to modernity and ancestral Africa embodied by this apparition of a woman which rises from the depths of memory.

The pantomime of the masks, the dance of a nude couple in the savage manner of the Rasta celebration, seems to be introduced uniquely to make a didactic point: that Africa has become a more and more pressing urgency. Cissé insists on this precise point in this episode, which reveals Nandi as a character in possession of intellectual knowledge and a spiritual one independent of the academic framework of the university. Instead of choosing between modern and traditional knowledge, Cissé seems to choose a synthesis of the two, provided that each stays authentic.

Abidjan is considered one of the most modern cities in Africa. But it is evoked as the transition of the character from the modern city to the ancient one, where they prepare the traditional dish of manioc. It is then that the film become closer to documentary. The digresssions become more and more demonstrative and even artificial. This is the case also relating to the television images seen during the evening. From the purely dramatic aspect, it provides an obvious reason for the departure of Nandi to Ethiopia.

This country, blighted by famine, represents another aspect of the challenging portrait of a starving Africa. We are led to believe that Nandi responds to an appeal launched as a media campaign connected with the international missions of humanitarian aid active in the countries of Africa in distress. But we perceive that the appeal to which Nandi responds is more profound than this. Unlike her companion who is, to a certain degree, influenced by this charitable logic, Nandi, carried by a inexplicable wind, returns to South Africa. We are reminded that the salvation of the continent cannot be reduced to the ending of famine or economic under-development.

Yeelen

This, in a way, is the logic that the director summed up (in an interview in the film he dedicated to the Cambodian cineaste Rity Panh) by the following: "One cries, one is given a feeding bottle, one keeps quiet." Here, Cissé puts his finger on a terrible misunderstanding. One comprehends Africa badly from the moment when one considers that cultural development is secondary and when one believes that what Africans need first is rice and wheat. The salvation of Africa lies rather by a return to its origins, to its authenticity. But this return is only realisable through auto-representation. Didn't the Irish Bishop George Berkeley write «Esse est percipi» (To be is to be perceived)? (1) The cinema of Cissé is part of this spirit according to which "every nation has the right to be represented by the cinema" as he confesses to his Cambodian colleague. The African can only see himself through his own eyes. In no way can he find himself in a so-called discourse of modernity. This sweeping away of Occidental values which create a schematic portrait of the African continent, becomes more radical in Yeleen. In this film, Cissé transcends the tradition vs modernity, Afrique vs the West argument, in order to situate the action in an epoque out of time. There is no sign of contemporary life nor any temporal landmark which places the events in the chronicle of modern Africa. In this absence of contemporary life, there isn't the possibility of the tradition versus modernity situation. There is another theme which concerns a return to fundamental values, and ‘The essential is life and liberty. True liberty not a camouflaged one,' as Cissé remarks in the same interview.

The young man who who has stolen the secret of Bambara knowledge is condemned to face a terrible father. In his small war, he is supported by his mother, an old woman with dry wrinkled skin but with a generous heart, the image of old Africa who dotes on her son with the necessary force to imbue him with the spirit of her ancestors. If Waati is about the relativisation of certain values, Yeleen erects another value system with equal truth.

What one takes away from the two films is a representation of life which doesn't need to be justified by any theory or ideology. It depends solely on a certain "souffle vital" which is a sort of extraordinary gift given to the protagonists of the two films. Their actions don't derive from instruction, neither are they justified by any linear dramatic logic. The characters are already complete, ready to act or are even active when one discovers them on screen. As a child, Nandi has the same look with which she communicates as an adolescent and adult in order to enter into contact with the world which is hostile to her. Cissé represents this active force by popular imagery which he finds in the practice of sorcery, a particular weltanschauung.

Souleymane Cissé

Cissé, as a reaction against a certain perjorative attitude to this practice, raises it to the level of universal culture, knowledge or science. His intention is to show that the essential of life cannot escape mystery. Sorcery is not considered in itself, but as a symbol of the synthesis of all the composites of a culture. It is not that Cissé is fascinated by the practice nor does he try to defend it but declares it as an elementary given. The neutrality of his tone presents it as an essential moral constituant of African culture.

The director seems driven by the desire to speak for Africa, its history and its myths. "Everything forces us to learn about Africa", wrote Catherine Soulard(2). A film can be reduced to a design, a sound and at the start of each of his films, Cissé shows an emblem of African culture and most particularly Bambara culture: a design, a text, a verbal quotation, a sound… In Waati , it is a black sphere. Appearing is the word Kara , a perfect circle. Then we hear a voice-off starting, ‘Once upon a time…'

In all ways, Cissé looks to retrieve the highest values, life at its most primal. The story of Nandi is that of Africa which tries to grow up while suffering from great wounds being inflicted upon it. History, Apartheid, famine. On the aesthetic side, it is one word, a design, a sound or rather a noise, which is capable of telling her alone the secret of the world. It is a mode of representation unique to Cissé.

Cissé attempts to evoke a most mysterious sense of life. He has understood that no discourse can explain the world. He has put in question the traditional discourse on Africa while avoiding the trap of a militant discourse. His cinema transcends the militant to aspire to a dream of the totality of life. It is cinéma vérité a little in the manner of Jean Rouch. Parodoxically, Cissé reaches the universal. ‘When he describes simply the particular, that's when he remains truly himself, wrote Pierre Haffner.

Hassouna Mansouri
© FIPRESCI 2006

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