Here are two things that cannot be contested: The greatest film made by a black American is Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger, and the greatest film made by a black African is Djibril Diop Mambéty's Hyenas.
These films have a lot in common. To begin with, they
were released in the early 1990s (the former in 1990, the latter in
1992), and they are very polished works with themes, philosophical
depths, and plot structures that are more literary than cinematic. For
example, To Sleep with Anger, which stars Danny Glover as a
villain who visits and upsets the comfortable world of a black
middle-class family (the film was certainly paid for with money Glover
made from the lucrative Lethal Weapon series), draws heavily
from black American folklore, and it has a script with the density of a
Harlem Renaissance novel (it's closer to Jean Toomer than James
Baldwin).
For Hyenas, the Senegalese Mambéty faithfully adapted, of all things, a mid-century Swiss-German play, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit.
In this film, Mambéty's second to last feature (he died in 1998), the
plot of the European modernist play is packed with black African
folklore and imagery. Both Anger and Hyenas are also longish, slowish, and end with an almost magical death.
It's an interesting coincidence that the first features by these two black directors also have much in common: Mambéty's is Touki Bouki (1973) and Burnett's is Killer of Sheep
(1978). Both are unpolished and very experimental works. Both feature a
disconnected, melancholy couple, and both have disturbing sequences
that involve the butchery of farm animals (cattle in the former, sheep
in the latter). There is more: Both have great soundtracks, striking
actors, and are set in a big city. In the way you will find almost
nothing in common between Killer of Sheep and To Sleep with Anger, you will find nothing in common between Touki Bouki and Hyenas.
In both cases, the second work is made by a master who has complete
control of his art form (its images, language, developments, actors—and
their bodies, their rooms, their faces). The first work is just the
energy, the will, the madness of raw genius.
Touki Bouki is not an easy film to describe.
It is about a young man and woman. They might be in love. How they met,
we do not know. They live in a modern African city, and they do not
exactly fit with the modern world or the traditional one. They spend
much of the film on a motorcycle with cattle horns mounted on the
handlebars. They seem to be looking for something but are clearly going
nowhere. Then they meet a gay man at a posh hotel, steal his clothes,
become local celebrities, and then try to flee the country.
The last act of this film will blow your mind. It
reaches the condition of a music video. It has two tunes: One is
Afro-funk, and the other is an orchestral blend of jazz horns, electro,
funk, and Afro-pop. The second tune steals the show. It swells and soars
as the lovers (or whatever they are) rush to the seaport to catch the
next ship to France. They sit in the back of a convertible, passing
small and big businesses, modernist office buildings, government and
military officers. There's an indication of the genius of
Mambéty—successor to the only other African director to achieve
world-class status, Ousmane Sembène—but it won't reach full flower until
Hyenas. The last act of Touki Bouki is impressive, but it's still too messy, too experimental, too impatient.
There's another, more telling difference between Killer of Sheep and Touki Bouki. Thanks to support from the Hollywood director Steven Soderbergh, Killer of Sheep
was revived in 2007, did well in art houses across the country,
received a high-profile DVD and Blu-ray release, and, as a consequence,
became much better known than Burnett's best film, To Sleep with Anger. In the absence of a famous white patron, Touki Bouki,
which was recently restored by World Cinema Project (you will dig the
colors in this new print), is nowhere near as well-known.
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T’Challa,
also known as the Black Panther, the title character of the blockbuster
movie, wasn’t the first person to land a spaceship (or something like
it) in downtown Oakland, Calif.
In
the 1973 film “Space Is the Place,” the musician Sun Ra and his band
descend into Oakland from their new home planet, seeking
African-Americans to join them, “to see,” as he puts it, “what they can
do with a planet all their own, without any white people on it.” In
“Black Panther,” T’Challa establishes a tech exchange enterprise in
Oakland; in “Space Is the Place,” Sun Ra opens the Outer Space
Employment Agency.
When
“Black Panther,” directed by Ryan Coogler, opened in late January,
there was a brief and counterproductive online discussion as to whether
it was proper to deem it the first true black superhero movie. More
interesting have been the subsequent discussions of the theme of
Afrofuturism. The term, coined in a 1993 essay by the cultural critic
Mark Dery, is defined differently by different writers and thinkers;
through my own critical lens, I tend to see is as an aesthetic that
illuminates African culture’s intertwining with the cosmic (in both the
technological and metaphysical senses).
Relative
to “Black Panther,” the movie’s mythology of Wakanda, a technologically
advanced African country “hiding in plain sight,” presenting itself to
the world as largely faceless, is an Afrofuturist concept to be sure.
Afrofuturism is more prominent in music and the graphic arts than it is
in cinema, but there are movies out there that illuminate the notion in
different ways. Here are a few that can be watched on streaming video.
“Space Is the Place,”
which can be viewed in its 81-minute cut on YouTube (a 61-minute cut,
which omits some odd sexploitation-movie elements, had been available to
stream on the arts site UbuWeb, but the video link would not respond
when I checked) was conceived as a concert picture by John Coney, a PBS
director, but Sun Ra had something different in mind when he wrote the
narrative film with Joshua Smith; it begins with the Sun Ra Arkestra
chanting “It’s after the end of the world.”
The
movie time-travels back to the 1940s, and Sun Ra’s origins as a
boogie-woogie and stride piano player. It allegorically pits the
enlightened orchestra leader against a Machiavellian “Overseer;” the two
play cards in an obscure battle for black humanity.
The
crux of Sun Ra’s philosophy emerges in a scene in which he and his
emissaries, dressed in garb that evokes both sci-fi and ancient Egypt,
confront a group of skeptical teenagers in an Oakland youth center. “I
do not come to you as a reality, but as a myth,” he says. “Because
that’s what black people are. Myths. I am a dream that the black man
dreams long ago. I’m actually a present sent to you by your ancestors.”
The
use of the present tense in describing a black man who “dreams long
ago” is no accident. In Afrofuturism, time is frequently looped. The Art
Ensemble of Chicago, a musical collective affiliated with the
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (a group that
tended to distance itself from Sun Ra because of differences in praxis)
made its motto “Great Black Music: Ancient to Future.” In the Wakanda of
“Black Panther,” incredible medical and construction technology exists
hand in hand with ancient practices like the “Challenge Day” battle
ritual shown early in the movie.
Similarly,
although it deals exclusively with a circa-13th-century African myth,
“Yeelen,” or “Brightness,” a 1987 film directed by Souleymane Cissé, can
be considered in the context of Afrofuturism, particularly because Mr.
Cissé, a director from Mali, approaches it like a narrative documentary.
The movie, available to stream on Kanopy, follows a young mage on a
journey to confront his power-mad father. A man-hyena speaking from a
treetop is treated matter-of-factly, rather than as a mystical or
mystifying occurrence. Mr. Cissé’s languid but mindful pacing and his
indifference to Western film language conventions on space and time
transitions also contribute to the movie’s distinction.
More
radical still is “Touki Bouki,” a 1973 road movie of sorts directed by
the Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, which is available for
streaming on the Criterion Channel of FilmStruck. Mory (Magaye Niang), a
cattle herder (trigger warning: the movie opens with some very graphic
slaughterhouse footage) rides a motorbike with a bull’s horns attached
to its handlebars; he’s aiming to leave Africa for France and enlists
the lithe, enigmatic Anta (Mareme Niang) to join him.
Photo
From left, scenes from Jay-Z and Beyoncé's latest “On the Run II” tour announcement video and “Touki Bouki.”Credit
Cinegrit
Egged on by the Josephine Baker song “Paris Paris,”
they go in search of money and find mostly trouble. In one scene, in a
tricked-out car, Mory is driven down a deserted road, declaiming his
greatness; Mambéty cuts to scenes of crowds on a different road,
seemingly cheering him on; these two lines of footage eventually
converge. The movie is replete with such purposeful disjointedness, the
better to articulate space-time dissociations. (And the movie’s
influence continues to resonate. Earlier this week, to announce their
joint tour, Jay-Z and Beyoncé posted on Instagram an image paying direct homage to “Touki Bouki”: a shot of the couple seated on a motorcycle with a horned animal skull mounted on its handlebars.)
“Yeelen”
and “Touki Bouki” are both arguably art films, but Afrofuturism doesn’t
adhere to genre hierarchies. If it did, you wouldn’t be able to discuss
it in the context of a superhero movie based on a comic book.
Afrofuturism is equally at home with the Art Ensemble of Chicago and
Parliament-Funkadelic.
In his essay, Mr. Dery also examined the works of African-American science-fiction writers like Samuel R. Delany.
On Fandor, there’s a good documentary film about him, “The Polymath: Or
the Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman.” Mr. Delany has a
fascinating life story and a truly radical philosophy of life that
reverberates through his books. Being an African-American gay man, he
says, imposes on him a responsibility to live his life “as if the world
worked differently.” Subsequently, he notes, to read his works “you have
to inhabit the world I live in.”
The
film, directed by Fred Barney Taylor, presents central points in Mr.
Delany’s life out of linear order, as if the movie itself were unstuck
in time. One of Mr. Delany’s key works, his 1975 novel, “Dhalgren,” is
an after-the-end-of-the-world epic that’s also reflective of the
sexually exuberant pre-AIDS New York underground Mr. Delany inhabited at
the time.
“He’s
a philosophical, confessional and fictional genius,” the author
Jonathan Lethem says of Mr. Delany in the movie. One tidbit in the
documentary brings us back around to the medium in which “Black Panther”
originated: In the 1970s Mr. Delany was the writer for two issues of
the DC comic “Wonder Woman.
A universidade diz que o 'certificado' apresentado pelo secretário-geral do PSD "não prova" o comunicado desta noite
A universidade da Califórnia, em
Berkeley, afirma que Feliciano Barreiras Duarte "nunca foi um
investigador visitante [visiting scholar]" e que a carta por este
apresentada "não prova o contrário" disso mesmo.
Em resposta enviada ao SOL, Berkeley recorda que "não emite
documentos em nenhuma língua que não o inglês" e que o texto presente na
carta, que Barreiras Duarte utiliza para justificar a sua utilização do
estatuto, "é atípico dos convites da universidade a investigadores
visitantes".
A carta foi pela primeira vez apresentada ao SOL como prova
da "inscrição" do secretário-geral do PSD em Berkeley, apesar de hoje
Barreiras Duarte ter rectificado à SIC que nunca se matriculara na
instituição americana.
Em comunicado enviado esta noite às redações, o
secretário-geral do PSD defende que Deolinda Adão dá agora "como
verdadeiro um documento que antes tinha garantido que era falso",
referindo-se à carta que apresentou ao SOL como 'certificado' de
inscrição e que Berkeley novamente desmente.
Ainda em resposta às questões do SOL de hoje, motivadas pelo
comunicado de Barreiras Duarte, a universidade é clara:
"Independentemente de Deolinda Adão ter ou não assinado realmente esse
documento, Feliciano Barreiras Duarte nunca foi um investigador aqui e
essa carta não pode ser usada para provar o contrário".
No comunicado mencionado, o deputado afirma que "a principal
e mais grave acusação de que tenho sido alvo, a de falsificação de
documentos, em que alguns acreditaram, cai por terra".
Questionada pelo SOL, Deolinda Adão recusa comentar se deixa
– ou não – cair as acusações de falsificação que proferira quando
confrontada inicialmente com a carta que Feliciano apresenta e que
Berkeley desmente. "Terá que fazer as suas interpretações do que está
na comunicação. Essa não é responsabilidade minha", escusa-se a
académica.
Hoje, e ainda ao SOL, o departamento de relações públicas da
universidade, que também contactou Deolinda Adão, informa: "Como
Deolinda [Adão] lhe dissera, ela não escreveu esse documento, ainda que a
assinatura eletrónica aparente ser a dela".
