Innovation and Imagination 1 Running Head: INNOVATION AND IMAGINATION

On Innovation and Imagination in the work of Jean Rouch and Jean-Pierre Bekolo: Engaging an Aesthetic of Opening and Encounter

Jamie Berthe New York University

Innovation and Imagination 2 On Innovation and Imagination in the work of Jean Rouch and Jean-Pierre Bekolo: Engaging an Aesthetic of Opening and Encounter

Jean Rouch was not as interested in recording the real as he was in re-imagining it, provoking it, and pushing it in new, uncharted directions; the cinema, for Rouch, was the medium that made dreams into reality, infusing ‘real’ life with artistry, poetry, even magic. Inspired, provocative, at times sober, at others whimsical, Rouch’s films defy simple categorization, a fact that has enabled his work to transcend the field of visual anthropology and enter into productive dialogues about the nature of fiction film.1 Oddly, in spite of the fact that the majority of his work was completed in West Africa, very little has been written (to my knowledge) that can provide us with a meaningful way to think about Rouch’s films in relationship to the landscape of African cinema.2 On the one hand, this gap in the literature is understandable. Born at the moment of independence, African cinema developed largely in opposition to Western film practices, its goal being to replace the exoticized, racist images of the colonial era with a distinctly African film language (Diawara, 1992; Ukadike, 1994). This drive for a complete and radical break from the West has made talking about Rouch’s work in the context of African cinema a contentious and rather delicate matter. On the other hand, watching Rouch’s films – and particularly his fiction films like Jaguar (1957-67), Moi, un noir (1958), La pyramide 1

See Diiorio (2005); Grimshaw (2007); Scheinfeigel (2008); and Warren (2007). While there have been some attempts to create a dialogue between Rouch and other African filmmakers, for the most part these conversations have led to a distancing rather than a rapprochement of the two (Ellerson, 2004; Haffner, 1982; Sembene, 1982). Some exceptions include Manthia Diawara’s film Rouch in Reverse (1995); Steve Ungar’s recent article, “Whose voice? Whose film? Jean Rouch, Oumarou Ganda and Moi, un noir” (2007); and Bunmi John Olaruntoba’s, “Constructing a Postcolonial-Surrealist Framework for West African Cinema: The Cinemas of Jean Rouch and Djibril Diop Mambety” (2008). 2

Innovation and Imagination 3 humaine (1959), Petit à petit (1969), Cocorico! Monsieur poulet (1974), and Madame l’eau (1992) – one is left with the distinct impression that something very important in the history of cinema is taking place in Africa and nowhere else. It is my belief that the work of Jean-Pierre Bekolo can offer us a way out of the stalemate between Rouch and African cinema. For in the same way that Rouch has destabilized and re-defined the genre of ethnographic film, so too, has Bekolo reconfigured the realm of the possible within African cinema. Anyone familiar with Bekolo’s films – particularly his most recent feature Les Saignantes (2005) – is likely to raise an eyebrow at my attempt link the two filmmakers. But by putting Rouch and Bekolo in conversation, I do not want to imply that they are doing the same kind of work. The points of divergence between a French ethnographic filmmaker working in Africa as early as 1941 and a Cameroonian fiction filmmaker who released his first film in 1992 are many and complex. By bringing their work together, my goal in this essay is not to draw a perfect line of continuity between the two filmmakers but, rather, to suggest that there exists a certain affinity between the two in their focus on the transformative potential that resides within cinematic expression, in their commitment to formal experimentation, and in their drive to re-imagine Africa through the medium of film. Without forcing false parallels, I hope to illustrate how, in portraying an Africa that is both socially complex and historically contingent, both Rouch and Bekolo have succeeded in re-negotiating the ways that we envision the African cultural, political, and social landscape, creating cinematic spaces where new forms of subjectivity have been able to emerge and where our notions about ‘Africa’ and about conventional forms of cinematic representation have been profoundly destabilized. Once this parallel has been

Innovation and Imagination 4 established, I will conclude by arguing that while most film theories can only awkwardly accommodate a dialogue between artists as diverse as Rouch and Bekolo, Achille Mbembe’s concept of “an aesthetic of opening and encounter” (2002, p. 640) can provide us with a very productive way to qualify the ways in which their films can be seen to speak to one another. It is my hope that this discussion will offer a fresh perspective on Rouch’s films and, perhaps more importantly, suggest a new way of thinking about the relationship between Rouch and African cinema.

Imagined worlds and social realities: La pyramide humaine (1959) and Quartier Mozart (1992) I will begin by discussing Rouch’s 1959 feature La pyramide humaine. Set in colonial Abidjan one year prior to independence, the film opens with Rouch inviting two separate groups of students – one African, one French – to participate in a fiction film about inter-racial relationships (or the lack thereof) at their local high school. Though the two groups have never interacted with each other outside of the classroom, both agree to take part in the film experiment. The film’s fictional narrative centers on a young French woman (Nadine Ballot) who arrives in Abidjan and cannot understand why the African and European students do not associate with each other. Bored with the company of her French comrades and curious about her African peers, she suggests that the two groups spend more time together. Powerful encounters and dramatic twists and turns ensue as the two groups begin to reach out to one another. But as Rouch points out to the viewer, the ‘true’ story of the La pyramide humaine is how the imposition of the film’s fictional narrative functions as a transformative catalyst in the lives of the students, for, as their

Innovation and Imagination 5 ‘characters’ grow closer to one another over the course of the shoot, this intimacy and these new relationships necessarily spill over into their real lives. As Rouch reminds us at the end of La pyramide humaine, the film successfully accomplishes what many years of school together could not – it brings these African and European students together. Long before anthropology took its ‘literary turn,’ Rouch was tapping into the imaginative resources offered by fiction in order to engage his subjects, challenge his audiences, and deconstruct the conceits underlying the documentary realism of ethnographic film (notably, the idea that there is a transparent reality ‘out there’ for the taking). Disrupting traditional modes of ethnographic address, La pyramide humaine uses a fictional storyline as a way to stimulate and provoke new ways of thinking about cross-cultural exchange, racial difference, and the apparent fixity of social roles in the colonial world order. Though some of its claims might be dubious and some of its images “idyllic” (Margulies, 2007, p. 127), this is the luxury that working in fiction affords Rouch; even in the moments when he does his best to convince us of the film’s ‘truth,’ his on-screen presence and highly subjective voice-overs create a dizzying miseen-abyme effect that constantly refers us back to the film’s status as a fiction. Provided we recognize that the film is a fantasy – one of Rouch’s filmed “dreams” (Stoller, 2008) – we do not have to believe that every aspect of the story is true in order to be moved by the imaginative possibilities that its fictional world opens up. By placing his story firmly within the realm of fiction, Rouch manages to create a space where the authoritative stance of the ethnographer is destabilized and where new kinds of relationships are made thinkable.

Innovation and Imagination 6 In this film and others, Rouch uses fiction as a means to explore new narratives about Africa, to decolonize the ethnographic gaze, and to reconfigure the power relationships inherent to the anthropological project. This is a remarkably different burden of representation (Tagg, 1993) than the one faced by Jean-Pierre Bekolo. As an African working in the postcolonial context, Bekolo’s work must dialogue with very different power structures, visual legacies, and subjective concerns. His first film, Quartier Mozart, is set at some point in the late 1980s/early 1990s in a working-class neighborhood of Yaoundé.3 It recounts the story of a feisty young schoolgirl – known locally as Queen of the Hood – who solicits the help of a sorceress in order to enter into the body of a man. Tired of being harassed by the men in her neighborhood, Queen of the Hood yearns for a way to transcend her own subject position and see with her own eyes what it feels like to be a man. Once the spell is cast, Myguy (as s/he is now known) becomes enmeshed in the local masculine social scene and before long finds him/herself caught up in a game of seduction with the police chief’s only daughter. Using jump cuts, direct-address, an original musical score, and an utterly urban aesthetic, the film addresses the complexity of sexual politics in contemporary Africa in a way that is at once comical, socially relevant, and stylistically innovative. A radical break from the

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Bekolo has made three feature length films: (1996); and Les Saignantes (2005).

Quartier Mozart (1992); Aristotle’s Plot

Innovation and Imagination 7 conventions of realism often associated with African cinema, 4 many argued that the film heralded the dawn of a new generation of African filmmakers (Ukadike, 2002, p. 219).5 Bekolo’s use of editing techniques that are widely associated with Western cinematic codes (direct-address, jump-cuts, etc.) destabilizes the notion of an ‘authentic’ African film language at the very moment the film affirms its existence (for what else is Quartier Mozart if not an African film?).6 By subverting these codes in clever and playful ways, he manages, as Jonathan Haynes remarks, to “[enlarge] the stylistic repertoire and [demonstrate] an approach that is fresher and broader than most African films” (Haynes, 2007, p. 125; see also Harrow, 2007; Tcheuyyap, 2007). Furthermore, as scholar Sarah Bunchanan has shown, Bekolo’s explicit and reflexive engagement with these techniques also calls attention to the film’s status as a cinematic text and, in as much, it offers him full creative license to play with and reconfigure the social roles and relationships that figure in the film. An example of this can be seen in his treatment of sexual identity, which Buchanan discusses at length in her thoughtful essay “Untraditional Tradition: Orality and Gender in Quartier Mozart” (2007). 4

For the sake of brevity, I have collapsed the very complex history of African film into something of a cliché – for more nuanced readings on the aesthetic tendencies of African cinema, see Manthia Diawara (1992) and Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike (1994). Also, for more information about how Bekolo’s work challenges the paradigm of African cinema, see Kenneth Harrow (2007), Jonathan Haynes (2007), P. Julie Papaioannou (2007), and Alexie Tcheuyap (2007). 5 It is important to note (as Bekolo himself often does) that he was not completely without precedent in this respect – Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety experimented with somewhat similar aesthetic transgressions as early as the 1960s. 6 African film scholar Jonathan Haynes’ comments are particularly insightful on this point: “[Quartier Mozart] has shifted the ground beneath old arguments about ‘authenticity’ versus ‘universal themes’ in African cinema by showing that a film can be authentic in the only sense that really matters, that is, by being true to its African subjects and audience and representing their lives without betraying them, at the same time that it is pitched to foreign viewers whose nervous systems are programmed to the rhythms of MTV” (2007, p. 125).

Innovation and Imagination 8 As Buchanan illustrates, by transforming Queen of the Hood into the character of Myguy, Bekolo not only creates a cinematic space where his characters are able to transcend and subvert their traditional social roles, he also disrupts the myth of stable sexual identities and encourages the audience to consider the many and complex ways that gender roles are socially constructed. This effect is intensified when we learn that the sorceress who cast the spell on Queen of the Hood has also taken up residence in a masculine body, and not just any body, but Panka, a well-known character in Cameroonian folklore whose magic handshake shrivels the penis of any man unfortunate enough to offer him a hand. “[By] voiding the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ of any monolithic significance,” Buchanan tells us, “Bekolo…opens up a space where social roles can be decentered to allow new behaviors and relationships to emerge” (p. 246). This decentering produces a situation of “gender trouble” within the film (Butler, 1990), encouraging viewers to reconsider sexual identity as a more fluid category. In this way, Buchanan argues, Quartier Mozart not only expands and destabilizes our notions about what is possible within realm of African cinema, it also encourages us to ask deeper questions about the nature of gender, identity, and how social conventions position people in very particular social and political relationships to one another (Buchanan, 2007, p. 238). By disrupting the politics of particular modes of cinematic representation (be that documentary realism or the realism that has characterized much of African cinema), both Rouch and Bekolo offer us images of Africa’s sociocultural landscape that are contradictory, contingent and profoundly complex. Though working in different genres, at different historical moments, and with different goals, their work suggests that a

Innovation and Imagination 9 thoughtful, engaged, and deeply creative approach to film can provide audiences (African or otherwise) with a set of visual tools to help them re-imagine the realm of the real and interrogate their positions as subjects within a global social order.

Rouch and Bekolo: Engaging an aesthetic of opening and encounter What first led me to try to put Rouch and Bekolo in conversation was viewing Les Saignantes. Prior to seeing the film I had never heard of Jean-Pierre Bekolo and though its images left me quite bewildered, I was moved by the energy of the film and by its capacity to be at once playful and earnest. The narrative follows two young prostitutes who manage to harness occult powers that help them navigate through their complex relationships with various government officials. Described by Bekolo as a “scifi–action–horror hybrid” (Bekolo, 2005), its eclectic mix of generic forms and its eerie, hyper-stylized, digital aesthetic presented me with a vision of Africa that was wholly novel. Sutured together by a series of Godardian inspired intertitles that pose pertinent and thorny questions about the politics of representation in Africa – e.g., “How can one make a futuristic film in a country that has no future?” – the film challenged me to think about the limits of my own understanding and it encouraged me to ask new questions about Africa, cinema, and the relationship between the two.7 Oddly, the only viewing

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What I have learned since my initial viewing of Les Saignantes is that it takes many of its cues from the wildly successful Nigerian video film industry, known popularly as Nollywood. (For more about the political, social, and aesthetic significance of the Nigerian video film industry, see Larkin [2008].) Mbembe’s ideas about African subjectivity and the “aesthetics of vulgarity” as articulated in On the Postcolony (2001) also seem to have been a source of inspiration for the film’s narrative. And although Bekolo never explicitly credits Mbembe, he has agreed that there is a connection between his films and Mbembe’s writing, stating in a recent interview that “[Mbembe’s] work is really important” (qtd. in Adesokan, 2007, p. 11).

Innovation and Imagination 10 experience I could relate it to was seeing my first Rouch film, Madame l’eau.8 At the time, this parallel struck me as simultaneously outrageous and compelling; the challenge became finding a way to think through this intuition in a theoretically rigorous manner. While I have already shown that there exists a certain affinity between Rouch and Bekolo’s work, the tremendous disparity between their historical trajectories and aesthetic styles makes any attempt to link their projects through traditional film theory largely unsatisfying.9 With few exceptions, Rouch’s films are generally thought of in relationship to documentary, ethnographic, and/or (though less frequently) French New Wave film and Bekolo’s work tends to be approached through the lens of postcolonial African film theory. While these frameworks are extremely useful for elucidating how Rouch and Bekolo have challenged the conventions within their respective genres, they are of little help when it comes to putting the two men in conversation with one another. But where film theory fails, the social theory of Cameroonian thinker Achille Mbembe appears to offer a chance at success. In a short essay entitled “On the Power of the False” (2002), Mbembe argues for the necessity of a radical re-conceptualization of the contemporary African social landscape. His concern is to illustrate how the claims to truth coming from the authoritative discourses that have shaped our understanding of the “sign that is Africa” (p. 640) have limited our capacity to think about the continent in terms that are contingent, open, and nonlinear. To counter this tendency Mbembe suggests we 8

For an insightful reading of Madame L’eau see “Two Kinds of Truth” (Ginsburg, 1996). It might be worth noting here that the two filmmakers do have some interesting points in common, notably that they both were originally trained as ‘hard’ scientists (Rouch studied structural engineering and Bekolo studied physics) and only after this initial training did they come to filmmaking. Furthermore, though Bekolo began his career working for Cameroonian television, he studied filmmaking and film theory in France. Perhaps this is simply coincidental, but…perhaps not? 9

Innovation and Imagination 11 “[develop] a technique of reading and writing that would be an aesthetic of opening and encounter” (p. 640 – emphasis in the original). The goal of engaging this aesthetic is to disrupt authoritative narratives about the continent in order to allow for a more complex and dynamic picture of the African experience to emerge. Such encounters, Mbembe argues, should enable us to expand our ideas about what constitutes African identity, to rethink traditional discursive categories, and to produce new kinds of questions about “what Africa and Africans are (theory)…[and] what might or should be the destiny of Africa and Africans in the world (praxis)” (p. 629). It seems to me that it is precisely this kind of aesthetic that we see at work within the films of Rouch and Bekolo.

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More than mere visual artifacts, films are imaginative social objects that circulate in particular contexts and produce meanings about the world in very particular ways (Appadurai, 1996). Taking this fact seriously, Bekolo and Rouch have used fantasy and fiction as an antidote to the authoritative gaze of realist tendencies, disrupting dominant ways of seeing ‘Africa,’ and creating imaginative worlds where new opportunities for engagement with both ideas and people flourish. So while their films are about Africa, they are also about cinema and about social relationships; they are about the potential that resides within cinematic expression to effect meaningful change in the lives of people; they are about, we might now say, openings and encounters. While Rouch and Bekolo are certainly not the only two filmmakers whose work can be qualified this way, finding a way to make them speak to one another was my primary concern here; where this

Innovation and Imagination 12 dialogue will lead remains to be seen. In any case, it seems very fitting that their work be brought together through the theory of a creative thinker like Achille Mbembe – for while their films certainly entertain and enchant, they also, like Mbembe’s theory, challenge us to engage with the realm of the real in innovative and imaginative ways. As Bekolo himself recently wrote, “Our role, with or without technology, is to make social structures, relationships between people, and between groups…We shouldn't just be making movies we should be changing reality” (2008, p. 113). I think Rouch would agree.

Innovation and Imagination 13 REFERENCES Adesokan, A. (2008). The Challenges of Aesthetic Populism: An Interview with JeanPierre Bekolo. Postcolonial Text, 4(1), 1-11. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barlet, O. (2005). Etre à la fois africain et contemporain: entretien d’Olivier Barlet avec Jean-Pierre Bekolo à propos de Les Saignantes. Retrieved April 4, 2008 from www.africultures.com Bekolo, J.P. (2005). Les Saignantes: Synopsis. Retrieved April 4, 2008 from www.auteurfilmmaking.com Bekolo, J.P. (2008). Welcome to Applied Fiction. (S. Burt, Trans.) Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 49(2), 106-113. Brink, J. T. (2007). Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch. London: Wallflower Press. Buchanan, S.B. (2007). Untraditional Tradition: Orality and Gender in Quartier Mozart. In A. Tcheuyap (Ed.) Cinema and Social Discourse in Cameroon (pp. 224-247). Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Diawara, M. (1992). African Cinema: Politics & Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Diiorio, S. (2005). Notes on Jean Rouch and French Cinema. American Anthropologist, 107(1), 120-122. Ellerson, B. (2004). Africa Through a Woman’s Eyes: Safi Faye’s Cinema. In F. Pfaff

Innovation and Imagination 14 (Ed.) Focus on African Films (pp. 185-202). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ginsburg, F. (1996). Two Kinds of Truth. American Anthropologist. 98(4): 832-836. Grimshaw, A. (2007). Adventures on the Road: Some Reflections on Rouch and his Italian Contemporaries. In J.T. Brink (Ed.) Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch (pp. 277-286). Haffner, P. (1982). Jean Rouch jugé par six cinéastes d’afrique noire. Cinemaction, 17, 62-76. Haynes, J. (2007). African filmmaking and the Postcolonial Predicament. In A. Tcheuyap (Ed.) Cinema and Social Discourse in Cameroon (pp. 111-136). Larkin, B. (2008). Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press. Mbembe, A. (2001). On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mbembe, A. (2002). On the Power of the False. (J. Inggs, Trans.) Public Culture. 14(3): 629-641. Olaruntoba, B.J. (2008). Constructing a Postcolonial-Surrealist Framework for West African Cinema: The Cinemas of Jean Rouch and Djibril Diop Mambety. PhD thesis. Virginia Beach, VA: Regent University. Retrieved March 31, 2009 from ProQuest. Papaioannou, P. J. (2007). Reel Fiction in Cameroonian Cinema. In A. Tcheuyap (Ed.) Cinema and Social Discourse in Cameroon (pp. 198-219). Stoller, P. (2009). Jean Rouch and the Power of the Between. In W. Rothman (Ed.) Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross Mcelwee, Jean Rouch (pp. 125-

Innovation and Imagination 15 139). New York: State University of New York Press. Scheinefeigel, M. (2008). Jean Rouch. Paris: CNRS Editions. Sembene, O. (1982). Tu nous regardes comme des insectes. Cinemaction, 17, 77-79. Tagg, J. (1993). Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Tcheuyap, A. (2005). (Ed.) Cinema and Social Discourse in Cameroon. Bayreuth, Germany: Bayreuth African Studies. Tcheuyap, A. (2005). Introduction. In A. Tcheuyap (Ed.) Cinema and Social Discourse in Cameroon (pp. 1-20). Ukadike, N. F. (1994). Black African Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ukadike, N. F. (2002). Questioning African Cinema: Conversations With Filmmakers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ungar, S. (2007). Whose voice? Whose film? Jean Rouch, Oumarou Ganda and Moi, un noir. In J.T. Brink (Ed.) Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch (pp. 111123). Warren, C. (2007). The Confidence Issue: Rouch and Kiarostami. In J.T. Brink (Ed.) Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch. (pp. 287-296).

Filmography: Bekolo, J. (1992). Quartier Mozart. -----. (1996). Aristotle’s Plot. -----. (2005). Les Saignantes. Diawara, M. (1995). Rouch in Reverse.

Innovation and Imagination 16 Rouch, J. (1957-67). Jaguar. -----. (1958). Moi, un noir. -----. (1959). La pyramide humaine. -----. (1974). Cocorico! Monsieur poulet. -----. (1969). Petit a petit. -----. (1993). Madame l’eau.