By Patricia Lee Sharpe
We’re always bombarded, about now, with inducements to see the summer blockbusters on offer from the U.S.-based film industry. What usually keeps me out of the dark rooms called theaters over the summer months isn’t the beautiful weather. It’s the predictable banality of what’s on offer. The assumption seems to be that we turn our brains to “off” when vacation time rolls around. Surely this is counter-intuitive. If we have less pressure and more leisure, we should be ready—no, eager!—to sink into something a little more intellectually-demanding (and rewarding) than a sex comedy or a shoot ‘em up. I know I am. I doubt if I’m alone.
Fortunately for me, a wonderful institution in Santa Fe, the Center for Contemporary Arts, held its sixth annual African Effect Film Festival this past week. Gorgeous late spring weather notwithstanding, I took in four out of six offerings. Every film I saw was a winner—and the only reason I didn’t see the other two is that I had a houseguest from Pakistan. We were too busy talking (and arguing) about politics in a very different quadrant of the globe.
One thing I savored about all the African films was the pace. In America today everything militates against thinking. Most of what the media beams at us demands nothing but emotion and reaction. Bang! Bang! Bang! Quick cutting for an entire population suffering from attention deficit syndrome. Even the embedding culture demands that we react from the gut, that we trust only our feelings, that we submit to the wisdom of crowds which, hopefully, won’t turn into lynch mobs. The current foreign policy bias is consistent. The Bush administration overvalues shooting from the hip and devalues diplomacy as treasonous appeasement of enemies.
So it was wonderful to experience films that allowed me to indulge in a little reflection as they unrolled. The films I saw were from Mali, Congo, Chad and Tunisia, those I missed from Rwanda and South Africa. Each time, when I emerged into the sunlight, I felt both exhilarated and relaxed, a mood that must be close to the state encouraged by zendo masters who want their charges to be calmly ready to move in any direction. These Africans are also on to something.
Even the look of the films was pure pleasure, except for the shots of Kinshasa in On the Rumba River, by which I don’t mean to imply that the cinematography was sloppy. The film succeeded almost too well in the morally-ambiguous project of making charm out of ambient ugliness, since Kinshasa is a palpably unhealthy place for human residence or activity. Filthy old plastic bags and garbage strewn everywhere. Puddles so disgusting you want to hold your nose, even in the theater. Buildings shabby or just plain falling apart. The mighty Congo clogged with rusty, long-sunk river boats, including some that must date back to Joseph Conrad’s time. This is the grubby reality of Kinshasa for all but the elite, who attend conferences at glittering luxury hotels with spotlit Versailles-like fountains. Rumba gave us just a glimpse of one of these pleasure palaces. It was a shocking reminder of the post-colonial corruption that drains the wealth out of resource-rich countries and reduces good people to a life of bare survival and beaten down resignation.
In such an environment music is not merely entertaining; it is salvific, and Rumba is the biopic of a legendary song-writer whose music was banned first by the vicious Belgian colonial regime, then by the U.S.-backed Mobutu Sese Seko. Both regimes feared an artist’s popularity among an impoverished, disenfranchised people.
Two women who trailed me out of the theater were unhappy with what they saw as sloppy editing and camera work for On the Rumba River, but to my mind all that technical stuff perfectly captured the way art can arise, with joyous spontaneity, out of chaos and cruelty, how the random collects mysteriously into the ordered, how talented instrumentalists of the wildest variety can coalesce into an ensemble that produces music inspired enough to make body and soul dance. In this case, the plot-inspiring question was whether (and how) long dispersed musicians could be brought together again after the rediscovery and rehabilitation of Wendo, the popular name for Antoine Kolosoy, the too good lyricist who had been reduced to invisibility and beggary. One by one the old gang collects, and one by one an audience also reconstitutes itself. In the end, Wendo is singing, the musicans are playing, people are dancing and everyone is smiling. It was very infectious. A Santa Fe audience, including me. was beating time and smiling, too. Well, I was smiling. I couldn't actually see the others.
There’s another level to savor in the Rumba story, though the film doesn’t make much of it. The nearly miraculous rebuilding of Wendo’s ensemble suggests that the people of the Congo, likewise, can come together and make something fine out of the shambles resulting from decades and decades of misrule. A cautionary note to American political missionaries, however: eventual good governance Congo-style may not have the precise form of American democracy. There are many ways of embodying justice and expressing the popular will.
But don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to oversell the power of music. I’m not claiming that a few tunes and one well-made biopic of one artist restored to favor before he dies, is enough to compensate for the poor governance and the brutality of the wars that afflict the Republic of the Congo (once Zaire) today. That would be pretty sappy. But it would be equally wrong to overlook that fact that a vast country like Congo is clearly capable of producing many bright people. Actually, this is a matter of the good old bell curve, but we often forget that. India and China are going to product more geniuses that we do because they have many more people. That doesn’t mean their educational and social systems will permit those people to flourish, a deficiency from which the Congo clearly suffers.
And without institutional support bright children will not grow up to be engineers, doctors or film-makers. Which brings me to an interesting fact. All of the films in the festival were produced with foreign financial support, usually from countries which held the colonial franchise or had other political connections over the years. Guilt money, perhaps, but thank goodness for that. These funds were enough to make fine movies without a lot of fancy technological enhancements. Thank goodness for that, too. Good camera work. Sensitive acting. Effective editing. What more do we need for an opportunity to sink into a superficially foreign reality, which is nevertheless familiar, as part of the human story that encompasses us, too. In Rumba as in Faro, Goddess of the Waters and Daratt, the Dry Season, the heroism takes place on a human scale. No supermen or women needed. Thank goodness again. Bab’Aziz: the Prince who Contemplated His Soul belongs to a different genre, but much of its charm also comes from the appeal of its very human characters. I’ll write about all three of these films in subsequent postings.
Africa is a continent of mighty rivers and huge deserts, and these films make us very aware of the epic landscape within which human life unfolds in modern Africa. Such rivers and deserts also play a huge symbolic role in all these pictures, which, seen less aesthetically, should convince us that Africa has within itself all the wisdom it needs to overcome the social and political difficulties it finds itself in. Maybe these film makers should be put in charge of the corrupt and/or incompetent governments that disfigure so many African countries.
No! Send these talented people to Hollywood. Let them replace the hacks turning out the mindless clunkers we’re expected to waste our time on each summer—and most of the year, for that matter.