The Filmmaker and the Critics<\/h2>\n
Before Khadijatou told me about Sissako, I had no idea who he was. So, I am assuming, excuse me, dear readers, most of my readers wouldn’t either. While that ignorance does reveal a very specific and significant element of global film-history and our perceptions of that history, or even complex kinds of displacements, I will not get into that here. Instead, I will get into my understandings of the film La Vie Sur Terra (Life is on Earth)<\/em> proper after providing a brief biography of Sissako.<\/p>\n Abderrahmane Sissako was born in Kiffa, Mauritania in 1961, but grew up in Mali. Trained as a filmmaker at University of Moscow, Sissako, so far has made three feature films\u2014Heremakhonon (Waiting for Happiness)<\/em>, La Vie Sur Terra (Life on Earth<\/em>) \u00a0and Bamako<\/em>. Often times, he is clubbed, along with Sembene Ousmane and Cheikh Oumar Sissoko, as one of the contemporary proponents of an African \u201csocial realist cinema,\u201d which, amongst other things, claims, that African cinema, should be essentially committed to \u201cAfrican society, African people, African culture\u201d and attempt to \u201cspeak back\u201d to the problematic representations of Africa in Hollywood and other colonialist modes of representation. But then, this specific claim has also produced several critiques and has prompted many to ask how we are to perceive the function of film itself. For example, Kenneth Harrow, an American critic, whose recent book African Cinema: From the Political to the Postmodern <\/em> has gained lots of critical acclaim, both from fellow critics and other filmmakers, writes that, \u201cTo begin, there is no history to represent, to correct, in film. There is only authority that represents itself, and in its power represents its images and narrative as authoritative, as authorized, as official, or worse still, as real.\u201d Implicit in Harrow’s statement is the view that films, like all other forms of cultural productions, are constructed narratives themselves. And since they are always constructed, films, like other forms of cultural narratives, cannot be looked upon as \u201ccorrective.\u201d Indeed, Harrow’s assertions are based upon a claim that African cinema \u201cdisplace\u201d itself from any declared\u00a0\u00a0 ideological responsibility whatsoever. In that sense, films, according to Harrow, can merely represent one version of that history, which is then open to interpretation, critique and de-construction. In other words, films are primarily modes of representations and must be looked upon as such.<\/p>\n On the\u00a0\u00a0 surface, Harrow’s claim appears to be covering the same ground as the Sissako’s retort itself that, \u201cA film has no necessity.\u201d That sentence, extracted from its specific context, indeed makes us stop and step back for a while. How do we make sense of the supposed non-importance of\u00a0\u00a0 films, especially when it is made by a filmmaker? However, a closer look into the transcript of Sissako’s interview with reveals certain underlying complexities. In that interview Sissako frankly tells Kwame Anthony Appiah, the interviewer, that,<\/p>\n Well, I do not really feel that I have things to say. I do not think such or such movie absolutely needs to be made. A film has no necessity. As long as it does not exist, it does not need to be made. Art is not the truth. I do not think creation has a mission to tell the truth. I am very aware that we live in an unjust world not engaged in finding the truth. I am aware that one can be totally destitute, and yet it is in that state of destitution that one finds human dignity, fundamental values. Today, something else is being imposed. So, I portray people nobody else would portray, but my intention is not to give them a voice, not to speak up for them, but to convince myself of the necessary frailty of human life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Like Harrow, Sissako begins from a premise which would appear to be a de-familiarization of the claims made by the classic African social realist filmmakers\u2014that African cinema should engage in a conscious \u201ccorrection of past misrepresentation of history.\u201d Yet, when Sissako talks about finding \u201chuman dignity, fundamental values\u201d amongst people in destitution, he is posing an ethical-political arguments which does not always sit very well with Harrow’s implicit claim that films are representations and only representations and can be made sense only through a de-construction of the authorial intent which engages with that act of representation. In a way then, the question that intrigues me vis-\u00e0-vis Sissako’s film La Vie Sur Terra is that, how does Sissako theorize and negotiate the relationship between African material realities and the representational apparatuses which the film as a cultural form endows him with. And indeed, that negotiation entails that Sissako as a filmmaker and La Vie Sur Terra as a film-text attempt to deal with multiple levels and histories of displacement, in one way or the other, but in a way that’s more complex than pointed out by Khadijatou’s Stephen Greenblatt.<\/p>\n Specifically, at that point, we see a shot of the filmmaker himself. The insertion of his own image against the backdrop of an European-French departmental store becomes an important narrative strategy, which not only allows Sissako to complicate further\u00a0\u00a0 the inter-connectedness between his African homeland and the late-capitalist West European world, but also opens up important vantage points through which he can play with the narrative conventions of the African social realist school . To begin with, it allows him to reveal to his spectators the space he himself occupies. He is, himself, after all, like a lot of us. A Third-World elite in search of mobility. An\u00a0\u00a0 assertion that is exacerbated by the image of the filmmaker’s hands clutching the white teddy bear. The filmmaker or the so-called Third World intellectual, thus, gets implicated within the structures of global-capitalism in a conspicuous way. He, too, is a consumer. A fact that also makes him complacent with the history of material displacement in Africa in some way or the other.<\/p>\n And as if to drive home that point, the camera shifts to a leafless tree in the film-maker’s native village in Mali. A close-up of its leafless branches. An image which when thought of in contrast to the luxurious expanse of the departmental store, strikes us immediately. The leaflessness of the tree, thus, almost becomes an embodiment of the general impoverishment of Africa, the after-effects of the colonial drainage of wealth, which has left Africa exhausted and bereft of its essential life-resources. It\u2019s also not impossible to read the barren tree as a symbol of the neo-colonial African present. In fact, one can also think of a complex history of continuation in there. The tree thus begins to embody that complex history of over-lapping colonialism and neo-colonialism. One might even say, implicit within that image of the tree are multiple layers of that\u00a0\u00a0 history of economic violence, which, for Africa, also suggests a history of a long series of displacements. Material displacement of bodies and people from the continent as forced labor, displacement of material wealth and the displacement of the continent itself from the global power-grid. Simultaneously, such a sequence also establishes Sissako’s political impulse. He is not so much interested in claiming a \u201cpost-modern\u201d present for Africa, as he is to show what that so-called \u201cpost-modern\u201d has unfolded for the continent. More specifically, La Vie Sur Terra<\/em> is specifically bent upon de-stabilizing the popular notion that is often times held within the global public spheres that we all live in a post-modern, trans-national world. Rather, Sissako’s project is to locate gaps within that meta-narrative, which, ironically and interestingly enough, has come to replace the modernist teleological narratives of progress, in-spite of post-modernism’s repeated claims of dis-mantling grand narratives of any sort.<\/p>\n Here, without letting go of that analysis, I will say that, Sissako, by no means, is interested in creating an uni-directional trauma narrative, which reads and interprets Africa primarily as a continent of poverty, sickness and mute, helpless dependence. For example, just as the camera concentrates on the leaflessness of the tree, it also focuses on the branches of the tree for a long time, zooms in and out repeatedly and then provides the spectator with an intriguing close-up of the uppermost branches. In a way, then, the spectator becomes conscious not only of the state of leaflessness, but also of\u00a0\u00a0 the tree\u2019s concrete existence, its many branches spread in different directions. For Sissako, then, survival is never just survival, it is also full of possibilities, if not a form of agency in itself, It is, then, I will argue, within this dialectic between colonial trauma, histories of displacement, survival and heterogeneity that Sissako places the continent of Africa generally and more specifically, his own native village, the return to which forms the core of his filmic narrative.<\/p>\n In a letter to his father, with which the film opens, the filmmaker explains that he is coming back to film Sokolo, his native village. Especially since it is 2000, the end of a millennium and beginning of another. However, the film-maker’s letter also informs us that, he himself is convinced that the year 2000 \u201cwill bring no improvements.\u201d As I listen to Sissako\u2019s voice imposed upon the visuals of his ageing father reading his son\u2019s letter, I begin to think, why is it that the year 2000 is so very important to Sissako himself. From when did the world begin to have one single calendar? How and why? Are there other different ways of measuring time in Sissako\u2019s native village, Mali and the continent of Africa? There must be. Then, how it is that all of them have been displaced by one form of measuring and understanding time, days, months and years? In a way, for me, Sissako\u2019s film is an attempt to negotiate with that question. Or something similar.<\/p>\n As we listen to Sissako’s voice-over juxtaposed over certain images—the expansive paddy-fields, the boy chasing away the birds, the sun over a rural agricultural landscape, and then , in the very next shot, an image of a truck piercing through the semi-arid desert landscape, we begin to think, what\u2019s going on in here. For me, it becomes difficult to ignore the two simultaneous but obvious references here\u2014the pre-valence of the so-called \u201cprimitive,\u201d \u201ctraditional\u201d modes of production and a out-of-the-place modernity, as symbolized by the truck. In fact, one can even argue that there is something viciously violent about the way in which the truck pierces through the filmic landscape, in obvious discord to the previous shots of the boy, the birds and the paddy-fields. Indeed, I will say, this is one of the central themes with which Sissako is pre-occupied in this film—the violence of modernity in Africa and the ways in which it produces multiple forms of displacement within the textures of everyday life. But one also has to concede that the truck has not totally re-placed or dis-placed whatever was there before. Then? Here, I would say, that Sissako\u2019s understanding of an African modernism is far more complex. He takes into account the ways of life that have been displaced, but there are ways in which he also wants to see the complexities of the co-existence. In a way, then, Sissako is far more interested in seeing what that co-existence displaces, rather than constructing an unilinear narrative of the \u201cmodern\u201d replacing\/dis-placing the \u201ctraditional.\u201d<\/p>\n For one thing, neither the paddy-fields, the birds, the boy and the sun, nor the beaten down truck invoke in us the images of a glittery, affluent, colorful post-modernism which the year 2000 was supposed to solidify. Sissako’s film, then, becomes, in certain ways a treatise on where can we locate Africa within the current debates on globalization : it tells us that Africa no doubt has been interpellated within the structures of modernity, but on different terms than Europe or North American nations. That is, Africa has not been the beneficiary of the economic-cultural apparatuses of the capitalist modernity in the way Europe has been. For example, think of the following sequence from the film. A young boy drives a donkey cart straight towards the camera. And at the back of the cart, a tin oil drum has been precariously balanced. The cart jumps up and down through the rough village roads, and the tin drum jumps along with it. As spectators, we begin to expect the drum to fall off at any moment. And very soon enough, it does. The boy stops the cart, walks down, puts the drum back and resumes his journey. For me, this scene, more than anything else in the film, sums up Sissako’s\u00a0\u00a0 political understanding of Africa\u2019s location within the global economic and political structures. Or, in other words, his understanding of\u00a0\u00a0 many forms of displacement that accompany colonial or neo-colonial violence.<\/p>\n The oil drum, here, functions as a symbol of Africa’s coming in contact with capitalism, and there is no way one can imagine an African life outside and beyond the circulation of global capital. But at the same time, the tin drum can only sit uncomfortably within an African landscape, it keeps toppling down and one needs to spend additional human labor to keep in place and continue the journey. And almost simultaneously, the space of discomfort accorded to the drum, invites the spectators to reflect on what are the things that this drum has displaced\u2014specific modes of production, foodways, cultural expressions and so on. Thus, in Sissako’s film, the tin drum becomes the symbol of a dysfunctional capitalism, instruments of production unevenly developed, which, by no means, can address the imperatives of an African reality in a sustainable way. The tin drum, then, one might argue, becomes the symbol of the development of \u201cunder-development\u201d in Africa . In a La Vie Sur Terra<\/em> becomes a filmic exploration of the theoretical work done by such social scientists and historians as Andre Gunder Frank and Walter Rodney. As Gunder-Frank writes in his essay \u201cThe Development of Under-Development\u201d that,<\/p>\n It is also widely believed that the contemporary underdevelopment of a country can be understood as the product or reflection solely of its own economic, political, social, and cultural characteristics or structure. Yet historical research demonstrates that contemporary underdevelopment is in large part the historical product of past and continuing economic and other relations between the satellite underdeveloped and the now developed metropolitan countries. Furthermore, these relations are an essential part of the structure and development of the capitalist system on a world scale as a whole.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Such a view closely corresponds to the one Sissako expresses within the film, and interestingly enough, the clear articulation of such a political philosophy, also leads us to think of the state of under-development itself as a form of displacement, which, not only decimates an existing form of life, society and culture, but also destroys the possibilities of a viable future<\/p>\n So, basically, I have to disagree with Greenblatt, my friend Khadijatou and possibly a lot of others. All displacements are not the same. Yes, if we go by the strict dictionary definition, any act of moving around connotes a certain kind of displacement. Yet, all processes of moving around are not violent, coerced or involuntary. Sissako’s film, hopefully, communicates to us that complexity, in ways that this essay does not have space to explicate successfully. But hopefully, what it has communicated is that, that the violence of displacement, material, economic and historic, is often dispersed within the structures of our everyday lives in complicated ways. And Sissako’s film attempts to capture that in complex and myriad ways.<\/p>\n (All pictures used in this article are courtesy the Internet)<\/em><\/span> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Trained as a filmmaker at University of Moscow, Sissako, so far has made three feature films\u2014Heremakhonon (Waiting for Happiness), La Vie Sur Terra (Life on Earth) and Bamako. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":691,"featured_media":1569,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[421,14],"tags":[870,871,872,873,869,868],"class_list":["post-979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-film-reviews","category-volume-6","tag-abderrahmane-sissako","tag-african-cinema","tag-bamako","tag-heremakhonon-waiting-for-happiness","tag-la-vie-sur-terra-life-on-earth","tag-sissako"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/691"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Film<\/h2>\n
![\"Abderrahmane](\"http:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2008\/11\/9-1.jpg\")
La Vie Sur Terra <\/em>begins with\u00a0\u00a0 expansive shots of the interiors of a departmental store in France\u2014rows and rows of glittering commodities, stacks of mouth-watering cheese, beautiful shoppers trying on gorgeous hats and so on. A characteristic late-capitalis space, one might say. Sissako’s camera almost works as a mirror or even a tour-guide. One which takes the viewer through a visual tour of the museum of commodities. But then, one also begins to wonder where did all the raw materials for these commodities come from. Who made them anyway. And, one begins to feel commodities have a history too—a place of origin, a process of transformation through someone’s labor. One also begins to wonder how can we locate this museum of commodities within the complex structures of the world-system. What Sissako’s film reveals, in that context is that, these commodities are embedded essentially within multiple\u00a0\u00a0 histories of\u00a0\u00a0 economic violence and material displacements. It is specifically those histories that, for Sissako, bind Africa and Europe together.<\/p>\n![\"Abderrahmane](\"http:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2008\/11\/9-2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Abderrahmane](\"http:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2008\/11\/9-3.jpg\")
<\/p>\nConclusion:<\/h2>\n