Rabi

Cinema on the earth. Glimpses of Africa from tradition to globalization by Maria Coletti and Silvia Zaccaria

Et la voix prononce que l’Europe nous a pendant des siècles gavés de mensonges et gonflés de pestilences,

car il n’est point vrai que l’œuvre de l’homme est finie

que nous n’avons rien à faire au monde

que nous parasitons le monde

qu’il suffit que nous nous mettions au pas du monde 

[...]

et aucune race ne possède le monopole de la beauté, de l’intelligence, de la force

et il est place pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquête et nous savons maintenant que le soleil tourne autour de notre terre éclairant la parcelle qu’a fixée notre volonté seule et que toute étoile chute de ciel en terre à notre commandement sans limite.

Aimé Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal

Wars, devastation, famine, AIDS, corruption, but also art, cinema and environmental commitment – this is Africa today. It is possible to change things but only if the Western world considers the most positive and vitalising side of African life, together with the contribution given by African society to a better and more sustainable world.

The fastest growth in environmental awareness is taking place on the African continent. There are United Nations projects in Africa which give guidelines and support for national eco-friendly policies. Moreover there is a blossoming of local non-governmental movements to protect the environment, of which we may remember the Green Belt Movement that was founded by the Kenyan ecologist, Wangari Maathai, the first African lady to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Her battle-cry was that there could be no peace without the guarantee of equal division of the world's environmental resources among all its people.

There is an urgent need to rethink the entire global economic system as claimed by the “no global” or rather “new global movements”. This is due to the tragic political events and natural disasters which have marked the world scene in the last two decades; they have supplied the mass media with an avalanche of war scenes, murder attempts, genocides, imbalance and environmental catastrophes.

The immense amount of information from the media has not, in fact, galvanised the states into political and social commitment with a real growth of understanding, as should have been the case. This would render the visual pictures senseless and relegate them to a position alongside the many reality shows which fill the TV screens in the world. It becomes clear that economic and political systems must be considered in relation to the media and means of communication. The very simple idea of “thinking globally and acting locally” may be applied to the held of audio-visual communication, from television and documentaries to the cinema.

Even the seventh art is influenced by the epochal changes that are mutating the physiognomy and philosophy of our planet. In the 1970s there began a way of thinking about cinema which aimed at overcoming the Eurocentric vision, following the “new wave” in Europe and in the developing world. This way of thinking has further progressed in the third millenium. It is imperative to compare ourselves with other cultures, with other ways of looking at the world and relating to it, especially when considering African cinema. This cinema developed especially in sub-Saharan lands and began as soon as colonialism had been overcome; it was first a mixture of documentary and fiction, following the traditions binding man to his social and natural surroundings. Such traditions included local arts and crafts and cultural customs.

These films help us understand the African continent in a new way, together with its cinematographic techniques. We may mention the following: the early productions of the Senegalese Ousmane Sembene (known as the father of African cinema for his impact on international festivals); the works of rare and combative cinematographers like Safi Faye and Fanta Régina Nacro; the innovative and poetic vision of Djibril Diop Mambety and Souleymane Cissé; the social and artistic commitment to storytelling of Gaston Kaboré and Idrissa Ouédraogo; the concentrated and self-revealing writings of recent authors like Abderrahmane Sissako and Mahamat Saleh Haroun.

All these works enable us to visualise the African continent and its cinematographic art in a new light.

CinemAmbiente [CinemAmbiente 2005] has decided to dedicate a special session to Africa, its guest of honour, coinciding with the 3rd world meeting on environmental education (WEEC – World Environmental Education Congress). We are showing many and varied cinematographical productions that have until now been largely unseen outside Africa. They portray dramatic events which have upset natural and human surroundings but they also reveal the hopes and transformation of a continent in continual evolution. A session that will again be proposed in Rome in collaboration with the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale and the Associazione Culturale Yeelen, at the Cinema Trevi, in the showroom of Cineteca Nazionale, giving also the public in Rome the opportunity of seeing films and documentaries on Africa made by African people.

Although it does not follow a clear line of “environmental cinema”, it reveals a widespread concern to promote ecological awareness. This is seen in the topics chosen and the language used to describe the environment in a fluid and non-intrusive manner. We may mention the following: the fictional ecological denouncement of the short-length Somali film Aleel – La conchiglia (1992); the aesthetic research of Flora Gomes in Po di sangui (1996) set in a village in Guinea Bissau, telling of the transition from traditional to modern; the poetic diary of a “return to the homeland” on the eve of 2000 by the Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako, in La Vie sur terre (1998); the more recent reflections of Bassek Ba Kobhio and Didier Ouénangaré on racism against the pygmies of the equatorial forest and their proud and resistant cultural identity, Le Silence de la forêt (2003). 

The most recent works shed a greater light on the exploitation of man and the environment for furthering the interests of the large multinational concerns; the other films have been rather generalised whereas these productions catch the attention by starting with an in-depth analysis of specific cases. Among such films are the following: Darwin's Nightmare 2004, dealing with the commerce of fish and fire arms on Lake Victoria; Pinocchio nero 2005, about street children in Nairobi; Acampamento de desminagem, 2005, on the problem of land mines, Arlit, deuxième Paris, 2005, about abandoned uranium mines. These stories indicate that it is never too late to change direction and it is possible to imagine a different cinema, together with a different world.

We sincerely hope this will be an opportunity for the public to discover or rediscover directors and works that are worthy of attention. It could open our eyes more widely on the world and the cinema around us, on reality and on the hundred and one ways of interpreting it. We would then leave behind the sterile Eurocentric perspective which has for years caused damage to the cinema, and even more so to environments and cultures.