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

Abstract

In African Cinema: Decolonizing the Gaze, Olivier Barlet describes shift of purpose and technique in recent African filmmaking. African filmmak? ers, he writes, reveal 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, 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 (11). The African filmmaker, no longer 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 (156). The films discussed in this review, Dole, Ainsi meurent les anges, Faat Kine, and Karmen might exemplify less didactic cinema, but they are by no means representative of less ideological cinema. The filmic 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 produce cinematic real that is wholly ideological. The difference Barlet identifies as newness points to what I will describe, imperfectly, as melodramatic aesthetic that reveals itself in different ways in the films. Imunga Ivanga's Dole and Moussa Sene Absa's Ainsi meurent les anges are melodramatic in that they focus on the individual in the private realm from 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 ofthe films. Directors Sembene Ousmane in Faat Kine and Joseph Gai Ramaka in Karmen create melo? dramatic character types. The protagonists for whom the films are named are intended to model 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 Dole (2001) follows the exploits of four young rap artists with large dreams and limited prospects. The opening segment of the film, lively musical sequence composed of skillfully edited quick cuts, finds the rap