Out of Africa
Further stretching the geographical borders of the Nelson’s decade-old Electromediascope film series, curators Patrick Clancy and Gwen Widmer have pulled Contemporary African Film & Video from below the equator. The program “is pervaded by a strong sense of poetry and shifting relationships between the individual and community,” Clancy says. “One senses that something new is under way.”
The loveliest example is Brazilian filmmaker Cesar Paes’ Angano … Angano … Tales From Madagascar (September 27). Shot in a Malagasy village, it dramatizes the importance of lore and storytelling to a culture that has little else. “Tales are the ear’s inheritance,” an elder explains. As if the eavesdropping filmmaker is skeptical about the stories, he adds, “It’s not me telling lies — it’s the people of long ago.”
Paes’ camera finds visual parallels to stories such as the ones explaining how rice became a staple and why the division of property in Malagasy results in two-thirds for men and one-third for women. Captured also is a surprisingly untroubling ritual the villagers call “turning the dead,” in which long-gone townspeople are exhumed only to be rewrapped in clean silk. Though the film is only 64 minutes long, it feels hundreds of years in the making. (Animal lovers should be forewarned, though, that there is a graphic scene of a sheep being sacrificed.)
Electromediascope’s opening week showcases These Hands, a documentary by Flora M’mbugu-Schelling about the world’s poorest women. Filmed in Tanzania, it offers no narrative, but its pictures tell all: lingering scenes of women breaking rocks into gravel day in and day out. Though the work is numbing, there’s sometimes a peculiar musicality to the pounding — and the women hear it, too. It’s both sad and uplifting.
Sharing the bill with These Hands is Abderrahmane Sissako’s La Vie Sur Terre (Life on Earth), a “fictional documentary” shot in the filmmaker’s father’s village in Mali. Sissako’s assignment for European television was (like that of other filmmakers across the globe) to capture December 31, 1999, in any way he saw fit. He choose simply to cart his camera around the village, where voices and influences enter the villagers’ lives through radio and magazines. But there’s no way to reach the outside world except through the one telephone in town, which seldom works.
The September 20 program features guest lecturer Aboubakar Sidiki Sanago, a native of Burkina Faso whose past jobs include programming films at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. He says his talk will take off from two questions: “Does the term experimental have the same resonance in African cinema as in European and American? If not, how and why does it differ?”
