Contents
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Colonial Cinema Colonial Cinema
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Tunisia Tunisia
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South Africa South Africa
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Egypt Egypt
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Algeria Algeria
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Conclusion Conclusion
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Notes Notes
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Abstract
This chapter shows the nature of the varying strands of film production which existed in Africa at the time when post-independence feature filmmaking was established, in both the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan West Africa, in the mid-1960s. Foreign producers from Europe and the United States still use the rural landscapes of the Maghreb as locations for their films and, though the old colonial ideology no longer prevails, the works produced have as little relevance as ever to the realities of African life. A number of filmmakers in Morocco and Tunisia have taken the opportunity to gain some experience by working on these foreign features, but only very subordinate roles — as production managers or assistant directors — are open to them. The nature of the African industries which emerged in Egypt and South Africa show clearly how filmmaking is of necessity shaped both by overall national industrial development and by ideological factors: Islamic beliefs about morality, social responsibilities and gender relations, on the one hand, apartheid assertions and assumptions about race, on the other.
North Africa has given us better wines than we could have imagined. I see no reason why she should not, tomorrow, give us the best French films.2
French actor Harry Baur, 1937
Colonial Cinema
The cinema reached Africa at much the same time as it spread across Europe and the United States. There were film shows in Cairo and Alexandria as early as 1896, in Tunis and Fez in 1897, Dakar in 1900 and Lagos in 1903. The initial impulse behind this worldwide spread was purely commercial: the desire to exploit to the full the commercial potential of what its inventors, like the Lumière Brothers, feared might be just a passing novelty. But as film narrative developed in length and complexity, the export of film took on a new significance. As Ferid Boughedir has observed: ‘Cinema reached Africa with colonialism. Its principal role was to supply a cultural and ideological justification for political domination and economic exploitation’.3 In many ways cinema succeeded in this role: ‘A native worker performs better when he believes that the representatives of colonial power are his betters by race, and that his own civilisation is inferior to that of the whites’.4
Little one-minute films were also shot in Africa at the turn of the century, as the Lumière operators made a habit of shooting local -views' (a comparatively simple procedure since Lumière's cinematograph was both camera and projector combined).The aim was both to increase the attractiveness of the Lumières' local screenings and to provide films for subsequent worldwide distribution. The Lumière catalogue of 1905 contains over fifty such views shot in North Africa. One of Lumière's leading operators, whose career is of particular interest, is Alexandre Promio (1868–1926). He shot little scenes in Algiers and Tlemcen as early as 1896, and worked in Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt in 1897, returning to North Africa once more in 1903. Promio, who discovered the East on his first trip to Algeria, remained fascinated by it, but, as Jean-Claude Seguin notes, his gaze ‘may be subtle, but it is nonetheless obviously ori-entalist’.5 Promio went on in 1912 to work for the film and photographic service of the French government in Algiers, where he stayed for twelve years. Seguin sees a continuity in his thirty-year career, which can serve as an exemplar for the development and use of cinema in colonial Africa as a whole in the early years of the twentieth century. Working for the Lumière company for ten years, Promio ‘had explored the planet to reveal its comical, surprising or simply exotic aspects’. For the French administration he had subsequently ‘journeyed across the colony, travelling in the service of the vast propaganda project inspired by the French authorities’.6
The arrival in Tunisia in 1919 of the director Luitz-Morat – a former stage partner of Sarah Bernhardt in La Dame aux camélias and of Réjane in Madame Sans-gêne – to shoot scenes for his feature film The Five Cursed Gentlemen/Les Cinq gentlemen maudits,7 marked a new stage in the exploitation of the Africancolonies, namely their use as locations for foreign feature films. Of the handful of films set in West Africa, most – such as Léon Poirier's Brazza or The Epic of the Congo/Brazza ou ďépopée du Congo (1939) and Jacques de Baroncelli's The Man of the Niger/ĽHomme du Niger (1939) – dealt with the French colonial experience in West Africa seen through the eyes of a heroic European protagonist. The tone of the latter film – and its ideological message – is clear from a 1940s French review:
Thus, as you see, French cinema during recent years has done its utmost to show the true face of Africa and the true face too of France in the African domain. Through this magic lantern, the world has been able to perceive that France has accomplished the remarkable feat of making itself loved like a mother in its colonies, because everywhere and always it has shown itself to be just and humane.8
The overwhelming bulk of the colonial films were, however, set in North Africa. Even the Pierre Loti novel The Novel of a Colonial Soldier/Roman ďun spahi, which is set in Senegal, was filmed in 1935 by Michel Bernheim with the location changed to Southern Morocco. A mythical North Africa became the location for a succession of notable films. As David Henry Slavin observes, ‘colonial films are melodramas, simple stories of individual lives and loves. But they are suffused with racial and gender privilege’.9 In comparison with other mainstream European and Hollywood films, they also contain a very high proportion of tales of defeat. The flavour of this cinema is excellently captured by Dina Sherzer. The colonies are presented as ‘territories waiting for European initiatives, virgin land where the White man with helmet and boots regenerated himself or was destroyed by alcoholism, malaria, or native women’. The films ‘displayed the heroism of French men, along with stereotypical images of desert, dunes and camels, and reinforced the idea that the Other is dangerous’. But what is most remarkable about this body of films is what they omitted: ‘They did not present the colonial experience, did not attach importance to colonial issues, and were amazingly silent on what happened in reality’. In this way they ‘contributed to the colonial spirit and temperament of conquest and to the construction of White identity and hegemony’.10 Common to all such colonial melodramas is a single ideology, well defined, from a South African viewpoint, by Keyan Tomaselli five years before the advent of black rule:
For Africa as a whole, cinema has always been a powerful weapon deployed by colonial nations to maintain their respective spheres of political and economic influence. History is distorted and a Western view of Africa continues to be transmitted back to the colonized. Apart from the obvious monetary returns for the production companies themselves, the values Western cinema imparts and the ideologies it legitimates are beneficial for western cultural, financial, and political hegemony.11
Pépé le Moko (1936) is the archetypal French colonial film, though very little of the film was actually shot in North Africa – the Casbah was reconstructed by designer Jacques Krauss at the Joinville studios in Paris. Made by Julien Duvivier, one of French cinema's most successful technicians who was then at the height of his powers, the film tells of the doomed love of the Parisian jewel thief Pépé le Moko (played by Jean Gabin), who has taken refuge in the casbah, and Gaby (Mireille Balin), a high-class prostitute (poule de luxe), who is visiting Algiers with her rich champagne-merchant lover. Though Pépé is aware that he will be arrested if he leaves the Casbah, he nonetheless tries to accompany Gaby when she leaves. Captured and handcuffed, he stabs himself on the dockside, as the unsuspecting Gaby sails away.
Like most colonial films, this is a purely European drama, to which the inhabitants of Algiers (and to a considerable extent the setting itself) are irrelevant. What is very striking from a present-day standpoint is the handling of the setting and the Arab characters. When the local French police chief, Slimane, describes the Casbah, he mentions nine national or racial types as making up the Casbah's 40,000 inhabitants, but the word ‘Arab’ does not occur. There are, as most commentators on the film have noted, no Arabs in the Casbah! Slimane is stereotyped as a wily and treacherous oriental, detested by his French superiors, and Pépé's girlfriend Inès (French actress Line Noro) is depicted not as an Arab, but as a gypsy, complete with dark make-up, black frizzy hair and large earrings. As the Algerian critic Abdelghani Megherbi notes, ‘Duvivier did not think it worthwhile to give even the slightest role to Algerians. The latter, as was the custom, formed an integral part of the decor on which colonial cinema fed so abundantly’.12 The sole Arab name in the credits is that of Mohamed Iguerbouchen, who supplied the ‘oriental’ music to supplement Vincent Scotto's effective but fundamentally Western score.
Tunisia
The only pioneer filmmaker to work independently in either the Maghreb or West Africa under colonialism was the Tunisian Albert Samama Chikly 1872–1934), a remarkable figure in every respect to be a pioneer of Arab and African cinema. For one thing Chikly was a Jew, son of the Bey of Tunis's banker, who had acquired French citizenship. Chikly's Italian wife and his only child, his daughter Haydée, both converted to Islam, and there can be no doubt about his personal sense of his Tunisian identity. But after running away to sea as a teenager, Chikly remained fascinated with the West and its technology. He was one of the first Tunisians to own a bicycle, which he used to explore the Tunisian South. He then set up the first X-ray laboratory in Tunis and imported radio equipment within a few months of Marconi's invention becoming known and while it was still an experimental technology. As an active photographer, he was inevitably fascinated by the Lumières' invention of the cinematograph in 1895, and his daughter Haydée claims he organised a first film show in Tunis in 1896. Certainly, he and a fellow photographer, Soler, organised public ten-minute screenings for a week or so in 1897, to great acclaim according to his nephew Raoul Darmon: ‘Every showing was greeted with acclamation by the audience and the enthusiasm was such that when the programme finished, half the audience regularly refused to leave and paid for a second screening’.13
Ever the enthusiast, Chikly explored underwater photography in a submarine designed by the vicar of Carthage, the abbé Raoul, and aerial photography in collaboration with the aeronaut Valère Lecomte. He also attached his camera to both a microscope and a telescope. Continuing to use both his still and movie cameras, Chikly became a reporter, recording local issues for Paris newspapers and the Gaumont newsreels, and then embarking on a filmic documentation of all aspects of Tunisia. As Guillemette Mansour notes, his photographs are not orientalist compositions, but works that display ‘an acute sense for framing an image and a remarkable mastery of light’.14 His first experience as war reporter came when he filmed and reported on the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911, from the Turkish side. When the First World War began, Chikly became one of the dozen cameramen employed by the French Army film service (along with Abel Gance – future creator of Napoléon – and Louis Feuillade – author-to-be of the Fantômas and Judex series), filming at the front at Verdun in 1916. His services, in a war in which 10,000 Tunisian volunteers and conscripts died in the trenches, earned him the Military Medal.
The extensive use of North African locations by French filmmakers began soon after the end of the First World War, and Chikly served as cameramen for one of these films, Tales of the Arabian Nights/Les Contes des mille et une nuits (1922) directed by the Russian émigré Victor Tourjansky. The same year Chikly directed his own first fictional film, Zohra, scripted by and starring his daughter Haydée. This short film tells the story of a young French woman shipwrecked on the coast of Tunisia and rescued by Bedouin tribesmen, with whom she lives for a while. Captured by bandits while travelling in a caravan taking her to a French settlement, she is again rescued, this time by a dashing French aviator, and restored to her parents. This simple tale reflects two of Chikly's passions, Bedouin life and aviation, and Haydée's performance earned her a part in Rex Ingram's The Arab (1924), which starred Ramon Navarro.
Chikly's second, feature-length, film, The Girl from Carthage/La Fille de Carthage/Aïn El-Ghazel (1924), was also scripted by Haydée who again took the leading role and also edited the film. If Zohra was, as Guillemette Mansour observes, ‘a semi-documentary’,15The Girl from Carthage is the full fictional story of a young woman, under pressure to marry her father's choice of husband (a rich and brutal landowner), who runs away to the desert and is followed by the gentle young teacher she loves. When he is killed by their pursuers, she stabs herself and falls dead across his body. Chikly's personal friend, the Bey of Tunis, provided extras, allowed the use of one of his palaces, and even visited the shooting on several occasions. The film's theme of forced marriage and the use of a female protagonist (together with the particularly important role in the production played by Haydée Chikly) make The Girl from Carthage a fascinating precursor of the kind of Tunisian cinema which would come into being over forty years later.
Chikly refused to allow his daughter Haydée (later Haydée Tamzali) to take up Rex Ingram's invitation to Hollywood (she was a teenager, taking her baccalaureate at the time), so her film career effectively ended with The Girl from Carthage, though she did appear, in old age, in Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud's documentary about her father and in Ferid Boughedir's feature film One Summer in La Goulette/Un été à La Goulette. Since large portions of both his films are preserved, Chikly's own place in film history – anticipating the first Egyptian-made feature by three years – is assured. But, like so many film pioneers, he was to die in poverty, succumbing in 1934 to lung cancer contracted at the front in a gas attack during the First World War and aggravated by his smoking.16
South Africa
At the time of independence in the Maghreb and French colonial Africa – when the new African cinemas were about to come into being – there were only two film industries in Africa. One of these – that located in South Africa – could obviously be of no relevance, despite the state subsidy scheme established in 1956 and the existence of 1,300 or so feature films produced there between 1910 and 1996,17 since it was a white cinema constructed for a white audience. Writing in 1989, Keyan Tomaselli notes the strategic ideological importance of South African cinema: ‘Repression has to be legitimised in some way, and cinema has historically played an important role in presenting apartheid as a natural way of life’.18 South African cinema during the apartheid era continued the traditional role of cinema in colonial societies. Though South Africa's filmmakers ‘feel that their films lie outside politics, that they are merely entertainment’, Tomaselli argues that the films in fact serve the state through ‘their class position, their underlying social and cinematic assumptions’, as well as ‘their displacement of actual conditions by imaginary relations which delineate an apartheid view of the world’.19
In the one of the first comprehensive surveys of African filmmaking -Guy Hennebelle's Les Cinémas africains en 1972 – the white Zimbabwean (at that time, before independence, Rhodesian) filmmaker Michael Raeburn gave an interesting introduction to South African cinema, pointing out that these films are ‘made by whites, for whites. The financing of this production is made possible by the extremely high standard of living of the white minority privileged by shameful racial laws’.20 Raeburn characterises the 100 feature films shot since 1945 as ‘just pale imitations of Anglo-American archetypes’,21 noting a striking resemblance to Western colonial cinema: ‘in the white films, the non-whites are only extras. If the script requires a non-white to talk to or touch a white, the role has to be played by a blacked-up white’.22
The one South African feature film to become an international success was The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), made by one of South Africa's leading directors, Jamie (Jacobus Johannes) Uys. A former school teacher, Uys had been active as a film director for thirty years and was to be awarded South Africa's highest civil award, the Order of Merit, for services to the film industry, in 1983.23 On the surface, the film – known in France as Les Dieux sont tombés sur la tête – is simply a very amusing comedy about a bushman, !Ky, who sets out to return an empty Coke bottle which he thinks is a gift from the gods. The other plot strand concerns a white scientist (whose speciality is elephant dung), who involves !Ky in his effort to help save a white school teacher who has been kidnapped – along with her class of black schoolchildren – by a black guerrilla leader. Though the film is seemingly innocuous, poking fun at blacks and whites alike, it is in fact, as the English documentary filmmaker Peter Davis demonstrates, ‘impregnated with the spirit of apartheid’.24 The film masquerades as a Botswanan production, but the ‘Botswana’ where the bushmen lead their idyllic life in no way resembles the real landlocked republic of the same name. Significantly, the film could not have been set in South Africa, since there the pass laws restricting the movement of blacks would have rendered its plot impossible. The commentary accompanying the opening travelogue is highly condescending, and the name of the black guerrilla villain, Sam Boca, has curious connotations, since the sambok is the leather whip regularly used by white South African police to disperse black demonstrations. The name also recalls that of Sam Nujoma, leader of the SWAPO liberation movement in neighbouring Namibia, and indeed the film has disturbing echoes of the actual political situation there, since the South African authorities had enlisted the bushmen in their fight against SWAPO.25 Davis concludes that, whatever his intentions, Uys has created ‘an imaginary country which the architects of apartheid would like us to believe in, a South Africa well-intentioned to all’.26 If the plot is read metaphorically, it shows that ‘the blacks are like children led astray by agitators coming from outside (the black liberation forces). But they are not the only ones under threat: the white race, personified by the heroine, is also threatened too’.27
The Gods Must Be Crazy embodies a particular moment in African history. Three years later (though still nine years before the end of apartheid in 1994), the filmmaker John van Zyl could already look towards the emergence of a very different South African cinema, which would relate more closely to developments elsewhere in the continent, a cinema ‘whose vigour and inspiration will have to come from the same roots as the vigour and inspiration of its theatre’. He recognises that ‘the real industry of the future will be a predominantly black one, and will link itself to the energy of other Third World film industries’.28 There were indeed interesting co-production links with West African filmmakers (Souleymane Cisse, Idrissa Ouedraogo and Jean-Pierre Bekolo) in the mid-1990s, and by the beginning of the new millennium, some steps at least had been taken to transform South African cinema itself.29
Egypt
The second African film industry in existence at the time of independence in the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa was that in Egypt, which also had a very different political and economic history from that of its neighbours. Notionally independent since 1922 – though with British dominance persisting from 1882 until the 1952 military coup against King Farouk – Egypt had a history of industrial development going back to the early part of the nineteenth century, when, as Tom Kemp points out, Mohamed Ali ‘initiated a state programme, designed to strengthen the economy of his country, not unlike that of Peter the Great in Russia a century before’. For various reasons, not least the Anglo-Turkish Treaty of 1838 which insisted on the ending of state monopolies, Mohamed Ali's project failed and ‘for the rest of the nineteenth century Egypt became a primary-exporting, predominantly agricultural country’. But with the attempts at industrialisation came – for the élite at least – a growing sense of national identity. Fresh attempts at modernisation were made in the twentieth century when ‘some import-substitution industries were established’, the trend being ‘assisted by the two world wars and the slump in export prices during the 1930s’.30
This was the context in which Egyptian cinema came into being. Initially, developments were the work of isolated pioneers, many belonging to Cairo's thriving expatriate communities. As Kristina Bergmann puts it, ‘at first financed by Lebanese and Greeks, shot by Italians, designed and acted by the French, films then became Egyptian’.31 The key date was the founding of the Misr Studios in 1935, after which Egyptian cinema became a genuine film industry, capable of producing a dozen films in 1935 and building continuously so as to reach over forty a year by 1945. The vision and drive behind this development was that of Talaat Harb, director of Bank Misr, who envisaged a company ‘capable of making Egyptian films with Egyptian subjects, Egyptian literature and Egyptian aesthetics, worthwhile films that can be shown in our own country and in the neighbouring countries of the East’.32 Since Bank Misr was the leading Egyptian bank, the film industry was at the heart of the development of Egyptian capitalism. As Patrick Clawson has explained, ‘Bank Misr was established precisely to foster local industry … Through such firms as one of the world's largest textile mills, printing presses, button factories, linen-spinning mills, Bank Misr dominated the entire Egyptian economy until its nationalisation in 1960.33 The film industry itself was nationalised, to become the General Organisation of Egyptian Cinema, a year later.
In her foreword to a volume celebrating 100 years of Egyptian cinema, Magda Wassef notes the existence of 3,000 fictional feature films with which millions of Arabs could identify: ‘several dozen unforgettable titles, some outstanding filmmakers and, above all, an impact that exceeds the aim fixed at the outset: “entertainment”.’34 Through its stars and singers, Egyptian cinema became ‘an object of Arab desire and pride. Through it they feel reconciled with their identity, ridiculed and crushed by the destructive and often castrating colonial presence’.35 Egypt's dominant genre, the melodrama, is worth considering briefly, not because of its direct influence on post-independence filmmakers elsewhere in Africa, which was virtually nil, but as a fascinating contrast to the European colonial film, and as another kind of baseline against which the particular approaches of the post-independence filmmakers north and south of the Sahara can be assessed. It is the form through which all future Arab filmmakers discovered cinema as children.
Three basic features of melodrama are common to both the Egyptian film and the European or Hollywood colonial feature. The first is the focus on emotional intensity and calamitous events to which, from an Egyptian perspective, Ali Abu Shadi draws attention. Plots are ‘marked by the sudden movement between highly exaggerated situations in which coincidence plays a major role’, and melodramatic style ‘uses emotionalism in the writing and the directing and exploits any device to manipulate the feelings of the audience’.36 The second element shared with the colonial film is the use of ‘a succession of stereotypes and clichés’, and characters whose progress and relationships are structured so as to meet the needs of accessible dramatic patterns.37 The third shared feature is the manichean world, which Khémais Khayati sees as particularly characteristic of Egyptian cinema: ‘There is good and evil. There is God and the Devil. Between them no reconciliation is possible. Values are total and never relative … Nothing usurps the absolute nature of God’.38 There is immense comfort for the audiences – in the West as much as in the Arab world – in such a black-and-white world of total certainties. We know how people should behave and can appreciate when the accepted norms are violated. There is no ambiguity about how the world should be. The ambiguity for us comes from empathy with characters who transgress, but it is a comfortable ambiguity, because we know that they will, in the end, have to face up to the consequences of their actions.
The key difference between Egyptian melodrama and the colonial film, whether European or Hollywood, lies in the treatment of character. In Egyptian cinema, as Ali Abu Shadi demonstrates, the characters ‘do not change or grow emotionally, and the lines between good and evil are clearly demarcated. There is a relative absence of human will, with fate determining the outcome of events’.39 This view is supported by Abbas Fadhil Ibrahim in his analysis of three melodramas from the years 1959–60: ‘Fatality, fate and chance make and undo the happiness and misfortune of the characters. Accidents, incidents and slips multiply, modifying the course of their lives’.40 According to Khayati, in Arab-Muslim culture, ‘the submission of the individual is complete and the allegiance of the community to God is total. Every revolt against the community is a revolt against God. And every revolt against God is an assault on the immutable order of the world and, for this reason, merits punishment’.41 This is, of course, the very opposite of the Western ideology underlying Hollywood and European films, colonial or not, where the key assumption about characters is that they are individuals, able to make choices as the basis for action. Whatever the pressures or dangers, these choices are ultimately freely made by the individual, and cannot be blamed on background, family upbringing, heredity, social or economic pressures, and certainly not on fate. In contrast Egyptian tradition-based drama is ‘a drama of fatality and happy endings, a drama which does not know the anguish of free choice and which works in blocks and never by nuances’.42
The ideological differences between Egyptian and Hollywood melodrama result in a very different sense of temporality and plot structure. Sayed Saïd argues that in Egyptian melodramas ‘the time measured by the calendar’ is drowned out by ‘everything which is linked to the past: lessons, meanings, values, traditions, ideas, illusions, even myths’.43 In the Western film, by contrast, time moves swiftly forward and, in conventional Hollywood cinema at least, the final part of a film is a veritable rush towards closure. In contrast, ‘the future is almost absent from Egyptian cinema and the exceptions can be counted on the fingers of one hand. As for an optimistic vision of the future, that is even rarer’.44 This difference in temporality – Egyptian cinema locked immutably in the past, Western cinema looking relentlessly forward – is reflected in a very different notion of identity. In Egyptian cinema, as defined by Saïd, the national Self is ‘implicitly defined by a whole series of urban and rural traditions under threat’ while the Other ‘is the source of all evil, the source of all threats’. According to Saïd, ‘you cannot understand meanings in Egyptian cinema without locating the struggle with Western cultures and civilisations’. The struggle with the colonialist Other ‘is not just one of the subjects dealt with by cinema. It is its principal background’.45
A perfect example of the Egyptian approach to melodrama is Henry Barakat's The Sin/Al-haram, produced by the General Organisation for Egyptian Cinemain 1965. The Sin is widely regarded as the prolific Cairo-born director's best work, and it figures in at least one list of the ten best Arab films of all time.46 Adapted from a novel by Youssef Idriss, the film deals with the sufferings of migrant farm workers, whose lives are precarious, since they are hired only by the day at crucial seasons of the year and forced to work far from their homes. Though filmed on location and including many villagers in its cast, the film's stance is far from that of the Italian neorealists. The subject is softened and sentimentalised, the action is set safely back in 1950 (the Farouk era) and, in the central role, Faten Hamama gives a glittering star performance. What is fascinating is the way in which the film shapes its story of a woman who inadvertently kills her own newborn child, so that while its personal emotional impact is maintained, it is, at the same time, swallowed up, as it were, in the eternal, unchanging life of the peasantry. The Sin brings together all the key elements of Egyptian melodrama: a circular narrative structure using a long central flashback through which the past weighs down upon the present, a pattern of images and music that enhances the audience's emotional response, a protagonist who suffers but lacks any individual responsibility for what happens to her, an overall sense of unchallengeable fatality, and the portrayal of an unchanging traditional community which is barely touched by the ripple of personal tragedy.
Algeria
The final potential model of pre-independence filmmaking in Africa is to be found during the bitter Algerian war for independence (1954–62), when 16mm militant film was used as part of the liberation struggle. As the Algerian sociologist Mouny Berrah notes, ‘from 1957–1962, Algerian cinema was a site of solidarity, exchange and expression between members of the Algerian maquis and French intellectuals who sympathised with the liberation movement’.47 The catalyst for this was the French communist documentary filmmaker René Vautier (born 1928), who had been decorated with the croix de guerre at the age of sixteen for his resistance activities against the German occupiers in his native France. But in 1952 he had been imprisoned by the French government for violating the 1934 Laval law by filming without authorisation in Africa, where he had made the first French anti-colonialist film, Africa 50/Afrique 50 (1950).48 Vautier had already made an independent short (now lost), One Nation, Algeria/Une nation, ľAlgérie, when he began filming with Algerian resistance fighters in 1957–8 under the auspices of the National Liberation Front (FLN) leader Abbane Ramdane. The result was the widely seen twenty-five- minute documentary Algeria in Flames/Algérie en flammes (1959), of which the technicians in East Germany, where it was edited, made 800 copies.49 Unfortunately for the director, by the time the film was complete, Ramdane had been murdered in one of the internecine disputes which characterised the FLN, and Vautier himself was imprisoned by the Algerians, without trial and largely in solitary confinement, for twenty-five months.
The first film collective which Vautier set up in the Tebessa region in 1957, the Farid group, comprised a number of Algerians, including the future feature director Ahmed Rachedi. It aimed ‘to show the methods used by the French administration and army to deal with the Algerian population’.50 In 1958 the group was transferred to Tunis, then the base for the leaders of the Algerian liberation movement, where it became the film service of the Algerian Republican Provisional Government in exile (GPRA). The GPRA thought the role of film important enough for it to send another young filmmaker, Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina, to study film at FAMU in Prague in 1959. Vautier himself, who was wounded three times in his various frontier crossings into Algeria, set up a film school, whose pupils made two collective documentaries in 1957–8. But before the end of the hostilities, four of the five students had been killed.
A number of documentaries were made within the context of the liberation struggle,51 and, as Mouny Berrah notes, these were all ‘collective and committed films, immediate films devoted to their project with the intention of rehabilitating a self-image deconstructed and devalued by the occupier and arguing for the justice of a war condemned as “butchery” by the enemy’.52 For the Algerian film historian Lotfi Maherzi, the films have a double value: recording the precise reality of the situation in Algeria, and showing the close support of the Algerian people for the struggle.53 They found an audience not only in the Arab countries and eastern Europe, but also on Western television, where they served to counter French propaganda efforts. Though they could not, of course, be shown at the time in Algeria, Abdelghani Megherbi notes that they were frequently projected there during the first years of independence.54
In post-independence Algiers, in 1962, Vautier and Rachedi went on to set up the short-lived audio-visual centre (CAV), in the context of which A People on the March/Peuple en marche (1963) was made. But their particular form of committed militant filmmaking had no part to play in the totally bureaucratised mode of film production that emerged in Algeria in the mid-1960s. Considering the post-liberation career of Ahmed Rachedi, Claude Michel Cluny notes what he considers a ‘fundamental error’ in Algeria cinema: ‘They had not worked out what role cinema could play in the elaboration of a new society; they gave priority to a celebration of past battles, rather than to a militant cinema with a revolutionary vocation’.55 Rachedi, like Lakhdar Hamina, became both a prominent feature filmmaker and a bureaucrat, and only René Vautier retained his stance as an independent militant filmmaker (making, among other committed films, the highly praised Being Twenty in the Aurès Mountains/Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès in 1972).
Conclusion
This chapter has set out to show the nature of the varying strands of film production which existed in Africa at the time when post-independence feature filmmaking was established, in both the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan West Africa, in the mid-1960s. Foreign producers from Europe and the United States still use the rural landscapes of the Maghreb as locations for their films and, though the old colonial ideology no longer prevails, the works produced have as little relevance as ever to the realities of African life. A number of filmmakers in Morocco and Tunisia have taken the opportunity to gain some experience by working on these foreign features, but only very subordinate roles – as production managers or assistant directors – are open to them. In any case this is a form of production beyond their aspirations, since the sheer size of the financial resources behind international productions such as Lawrence of Arabia or Raiders of the Lost Ark makes this model of production irrelevant to indigenous African producers.
The nature of the African industries which emerged in Egypt and South Africa show clearly how filmmaking is of necessity shaped both by overall national industrial development and by ideological factors: Islamic beliefs about morality, social responsibilities and gender relations, on the one hand, apartheid assertions and assumptions about race, on the other. Both film industries continue with varying degrees of success to face new challenges in a very different world, confronting the very real threats to freedom of expression posed by Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt, and responding to the equally real opportunities of shaping a black cinema for a black-governed society in the new South Africa. But in the absence of the kinds of industrial infrastructures which were developed in Egypt and South Africa, the models of production developed there remain largely irrelevant to other African filmmakers north and south of the Sahara.
Equally, the increasingly autocratic one-party states that emerged after independence throughout Africa made the Vautier model of militant documentary filmmaking – a perfect example of the ‘third cinema’ advocated by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino and theorised by Teshome H. Gabriel56 – totally impossible. The situation of post-independence filmmakers instead echoes that of Samama Chikly in Tunisia in the 1920s, in that they have no option but to work totally independently but within strict, state-defined limits, finding finance where they can, working as total creators (producing, directing, scripting) in a context lacking in technically trained local collaborators. It is to the very different contexts, constraints and opportunities facing the filmmakers of the Maghreb and francophone Sub-Saharan West Africa that we now turn.
Notes
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