Film-Philosophy 14.2
2010
Review: Lindiwe Dovey (2009) African Film and
Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen. New
York: Colombia University Press. 334pp.
Helena Cantone
African Film and Literature is an ambitious attempt to address the lack of in
depth critical theory on African film generally, and specifically on the films
of individual African filmmakers. Although post-colonial theory has helped
to contextualise and critique eurocentricity, the objectification of the ‘Other’
and to highlight questions of subjectivity and representation, Lindiwe Dovey
manages to offer an updated wealth of material for a fresh analysis of
African film. As Manthia Diawara (the first African filmmaker to write a
book about African film production) replied when asked by Dovey what
direction African film criticism should take: ‘What has been lacking within
African film studies is a serious and profound consideration of the films
themselves’ (xii).
Lindiwe Dovey sets out to analyse a number of South African and
West African films that are adaptations of African and non-African
literature, focussing on how violence is adapted to the screen, in order to
illustrate how African filmmakers are developing on the one hand a distinct
filmic identity, while on the other, engaging in a platform that transcends
cultural and geographical boundaries.
Dovey begins by giving a personal background to how her interest in
the film medium developed.
‘Born in apartheid South Africa to parents
involved in anti-apartheid work, I was raised in a highly politicised and
violent context’ (xi). Interestingly, she omits her racial identity as a white
Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615
137
Film-Philosophy 14.2
2010
South African. Her academic background is both in cinema and literature,
hence her interest in film adaptation, and she is Lecturer in African Film at
the School of Oriental and African Studies as well as founder of the
Cambridge African Film Festival and London African Film Festival,
increasing the exhibition and distribution of African films in the UK.
In the introduction Dovey explores some of the problems linked to
African cinema, with some African filmmakers rejecting the very notion of a
totalised ‘African’ identity, while other post-colonial theorists have tried to
focus more on local, multiple and complex Africas. Still more African writers
and writers such as Achille Mbembe and Tsitsi Dangarembga, Dovey
suggests, believe the desire for a pan-African identity still prevails. This is
seen in the arts festivals in Africa today, such as FESPACO, that exhibit
works by filmmakers from all sides of the continent, bridging the separation
of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Although recognising that:
The desire for pan-Africanism undoubtedly has something to do with a
sense of shared, past oppression at the hands of the colonizers and, in
film terms, it marks Africa as a continent that ‘is trying to
reappropriate its image’ (Gaston Kaboré cited in Dovey, 3)
Dovey goes on to stress that:
The persistence of pan-African beliefs and attitudes in the African film
scene cautions us against overlooking the role of desire, imagination,
and subjectivity in the construction of African cinematic identities on
the local, regional, and continental scales. (3)
She interestingly points towards some of the very first films made by African
filmmakers in order to exemplify how the medium has been used to express
complex themes. These vary from a documentary on religious intolerance in
Madagascar with La Mort de Rasalama (Raberono, 1947); an adaptation of
a West African oral story that allegorically critiques the subordination of
women in a short film made in France called Mouramani (Mamadou Touré,
1953); to the process of Westernization in Nasserian Egypt by the ‘Father of
Egyptian Cinema’ in Bab el Hadid (Youssef Chahine, 1958) and the first
Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615
138
Film-Philosophy 14.2
2010
short fiction film to be made by the ‘Father of African Cinema’ Borom Sarret
(Ousmane Sembene, 1963) that looks at the cycle of exploitation and
oppression of the poor by the rich and the poor of each other. While La
Noire de… (Ousmane Sembene, 1965), which represents the first featurelength sub-Saharan production, explores white racism in the post-colonial
era and the drive for materialism of its protagonist, Diouana, who chooses to
move to France and work as a maid.
Therefore from the beginning of African filmmaking, directors have
chosen not only to look at colonialism and its legacy in postcolonial forms of
oppression and violence, but also at the responsibility of Africans themselves.
Dovey therefore explains:
The films examined here have been chosen not only because they are
adaptations of literature but also because they are illustrative of a
broader trend in African screen media that emphasizes the political and
pedagogical responsibility of African film authors and audiences. In
particular, the films highlight the filmmakers’ concern with the social
realities of violence, and offer ways of conceptualising, visualising, and
critiquing violence. (6)
The introduction is also dedicated to exploring theories of film adaptation.
Dovey points out that adaptation in Africa has tended to focus on oral
narratives rather than literature due to Africa’s rich oral heritage, although
many of Sembene’s films are adaptations of novels written by him, and other
filmmakers have drawn on both mediums to engage with African audiences
in multiple ways. Dovey suggests that applying conventional film adaptation
theory to African screen media is limited because there is not the same focus
on the notion of fidelity and the original ‘meaning’ of the literary text. She
writes that there are equally difficulties applying poststructuralist and
postcolonial theories, due to a strong sense of authorship held by many
African filmmakers on the one hand, and on the other, the tendency to
reduce African rewritings of canonical texts to a form of opposition,
resistance and appropriation. Dovey concludes that:
Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615
139
Film-Philosophy 14.2
2010
Nevertheless, two theories of adaptation have proven useful on a
heuristic level – performative criticism and Theodor Adorno’s concept
of mimesis – in that they aid the conceptualisation of a specifically
African form of adaptation. For while the new millennium has seen a
surge in research on film adaptation, little account has been taken of
African practices of adaptation, or of postcolonial adaptation more
generally. (12)
Dovey explores film adaptation as performative criticism to illustrate how
many African filmmakers such as Sissoko refer to themselves as ‘screen
griots’, ‘claiming a position as the inheritors of the tradition of communal
West African oral storytelling and critique’ (13).
Adopting this title, and translating oral stories as well as literary texts
to the screen, African filmmakers are able, first of all, to reach nonliterate African audiences, and, second, to encourage audiences to react
to the cinematic experience in the same way that they would to a
griot’s performance of an oral tale – that is, with a critical, modifying
eye and not with an absent-minded passivity of spectators expecting
merely to be entertained. (13)
By focussing on the performative dimension of African arts, Dovey highlights
both the blurring between production and consumption as well as the
embodied role audiences play through interacting with the performance.
While the role of filmmakers as griots is seen sometimes in the use of voiceover, the prominent feature of a griot in the film, and the filmmakers acting
in the films themselves, lack of funding is also recognised as resulting in
African filmmakers being forced to fulfil multiple roles as writers, directors,
producers, editors and actors. Hence, Dovey suggests,
The authorial role in African films is more marked than in Hollywood
films, for example, where specialisation results in hierarchies of
expertise. This form of authorship in African films is not oppositional,
as was auteur cinema in Europe, but can be seen as an extension of
social and artistic responsibility, a role articulated by DRC filmmaker
Mweze Ngangura as follows: ‘in Africa, for many years now almost all
filmmakers have regarded themselves as authors, as people with a
mission, charged with carrying a message to their people.’ (15)
Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615
140
Film-Philosophy 14.2
2010
Dovey goes on further to explore film adaptation as Adornian mimesis,
suggesting that Theodor Adorno’s concept of mimesis is useful because it
‘marries the concepts of embodied and rational modes of being and sees this
marriage as a prerequisite of critique’ (16). While mimesis historically is
linked to embodiment, in bodily mimicry, and Plato’s idea of mimesis as
imitation, Adorno and co-author Max Horkheimer trace how during the
Enlightenment, Europeans began to identify mimesis as an embodied mode
of being, less ‘civilised’ than rational modes of being. Linked to imperial
justification, Africans were debased as ‘primitive’, ‘natural’ and ‘pre-rational’
as opposed to European ‘civilisation.’ Using Horkheimer and Adorno’s
theory in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, that
‘myth is already
enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology,’ Dovey suggests
that:
Adorno thus seeks to locate embodiment and rationality within a
continuum or constellation, with no dichotomy between them – they
do not constitute a binary opposition. As soon as the bodily suppresses
rationality, it forfeits its meaning-making power. (17)
Therefore, while some film and literary theorists critique the validation of the
rational over the bodily, many African filmmakers, Dovey suggests, ‘ seem to
be engaged in the opposite process: they are using the hyper-embodied
medium of film to project their own versions of rationality into their films’
(17). Thus the use of voice-over in the case of Cameroonian filmmaker JeanPierre Bekolo challenges what ‘was once told that no one ever hears what
Africans say or what they think. And by extension such a statement would
seem to suggest that Africans don’t think at all’ (17).
Likewise, Dovey mentions the masterful and influential writing of
Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko and Ngugi wã Th’iongo’s Decolonization of the
Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), which explored
the violent effects of colonialism on the psyche of the colonized, rather than
the body, to further illustrate the complex argument of mimesis in
postcolonial Africa.
Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615
141
Film-Philosophy 14.2
2010
In the last part of her tightly packed theoretical introduction, Dovey
turns her attention to African screen media, mimicry and violence. As the
main interest of the author is to explore how African filmmakers represent
and critique contemporary examples of violence such as rape, war, murder
and genocide,
Dovey addresses the relationship of violence with colonial Africa in
order to contextualise contemporary African representations of violence on
screen. Recalling the role of mimicry in the context of the colonizer’s
savagery towards the ‘savage’ Africans, and inspired by Fanon’s Black Skin,
White Masks (1967), and Homi Bhabha’s notion on the ambivalence of the
stereotype of the black African in the Western psyche, Dovey attempts to
show, in her words, ‘how remarkable it is that certain African filmmakers
have rejected a similar form of mimicry in their films and have instead
embraced a form of (Adornian) mimesis that critiques violence’ (27).
European colonizing authorities mainly used cinema and ethnographic
filmmaking early on to perpetuate the idea that Africans were an inferior
race, essentially violent, in need of civilising and taming. Black Africans were
made to identify with white heroes, while other films were specifically made
for propaganda and termed ‘educational’ to control and establish law and
order. It is within this history that Dovey argues the first African filmmakers
who emerged out of the decolonisation struggles in the 1950s, chose to use
cinema not as a revolutionary tool but as a critical medium. Whereas the
Argentinean founding members of Third Cinema, Fernando Solanas and
Octavio Getino, in their manifesto, Towards a Third Cinema (1969) referred
to filmmaking as a ‘guerrilla activity’, Dovey suggests Ousmane Sembene was
the first black African filmmaker to use the medium of film for raising the
consciousness of people, encouraging reflection and therefore pioneering
‘critical awareness rather than revolutionary action’ (31). Malian film critic
Moussa Bolly suggests contemporary filmmakers from Chad, Nigeria,
Senegal and Tunisia ‘are exploring ways of breaking cycles of violence in
which Africa is plunged. A violence which, according to them, can never be
the solution to the problems of Africans’ (31). Therefore, Dovey concludes
Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615
142
Film-Philosophy 14.2
2010
that, ‘by historicizing violence through the adaptation process, African
filmmakers are problematizing representations of Africa as inherently violent’
(31), while creating an opportunity for hope.
The book is subsequently divided into two distinct sections focussing
on South Africa and Francophone West Africa respectively in which a series
of films are analysed in depth, and include images from the film sequences.
The first section looks at cinema and violence in South African, preand post 1994, in order to give a comprehensive context to the films Dovey
then describes.
Fools (Ramadan Suleman, 1997), is an adaptation of a
novella by Njabulo Ndebele (1983) that is set in 1966 about the rape of a
schoolgirl by her teacher. It represents the first feature film to emerge post
1994 by a black South African screenwriter and director. Instead of
representing black independence and the anti-apartheid struggle, a very
different story is presented. One in which, Dovey suggests, the representation
of rape is from the perspective of the rapist but manages not to be
voyeuristic, while unconventionally presenting the motivation of rape not as
bestial, but as rationalised and disembodied. This is achieved in part by the
use of close-ups, shaky and handheld shots, as well as metaphor, with the use
of the image of a chicken and the shedding of its blood throughout the film.
While on the one hand the chicken serves as a metaphor for men, Dovey
suggests that it equally symbolises ‘the metonymic transfer of violence onto
women as scapegoats in an oppressed society’ (84).
Tsotsi (Gavin Hood, 2006), the first South African film to win Best
Foreign Language Oscar, is based on white South African writer Athol
Fugard’s novel (1980). It is on the one hand a morality drama about the
restitution of a hijacked baby by a Tsotsi gangster, harking Fugard’s
redemptive Christian liberalism, while on the other hand represents a
‘critique on the pervasive, systemic violence of HIV/AIDS’ (102) which ‘has
replaced apartheid as the greatest threat to South Africa’s future stability and
peace’ (103). Dovey critiques the film’s failure to show the patriarchal
violence that often leads to the transmission of the disease, but suggests the
Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615
143
Film-Philosophy 14.2
2010
film is a powerful representation of class divisions between the rich and poor
and praises the film’s dialogical qualities.
A Walk in the Night (Mickey Madoda Dube, 1998) and Cry, the
Beloved Country (Darell James Roodt, 1995) look at racial identity in the
1950s and 1990s South Africa and racially motivated violence in an
emerging nation. Both deal with the murder of a white man by a black man
but Dovey looks closely at how differently each film adaptation of the novels
present cross-racial murder, suggesting that:
Both directors then […] turn inward to level critique at their own racial
communities in South Africa rather than critiquing the Other and
thereby, perhaps, provoking retaliatory violence. (119)
A Walk in the Night is based on La Guma’s novella (1962) which, written
under house arrest, highlights the metonymic displacement of violence or
scapegoating set in motion by apartheid that J. M. Coetzee aptly suggests
‘may begin in the white city or the black ghetto, but it must end in the ghetto
and its last victim must be black’ (127).
Dovey then looks at cinema and violence in Francophone West Africa,
giving a clear context before dedicating analysis to two very individual films:
Karmen Geï (Joseph Gaï Ramaka, 2001) and La Genèse (Cheik Oumar
Sissoko, 1999). The first is a filmic adaptation of both Prosper Mérimée’s
novella (1845-1847) and Georges Bizet’s opera of Carmen (1875). By
adapting this canonical piece, Ramaka replies to his critics by the simple
assertion of ‘Why not?’ (219), producing an original and radical
interpretation of Carmen that manages to break with conventions while
remaining rooted in Senegalese culture. Therefore Dovey suggests that ‘the
film is far more than an “indigenisation” of Carmen… In its reclamation of
Carmen as a human text belonging to all, Karmen Geï renders the very idea
of indigenisation irrelevant’ (251).
Sissoko’s La Genèse (1999) is the first African film adaptation of the
Old Testament. Made by a Muslim Malian director, Sissoko seeks to
represent the shared story of the origins of Muslims, Christians and Jews,
Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615
144
Film-Philosophy 14.2
2010
challenging notions of the Old Testament as a Western text while giving it a
human narrative. The characters in the film speak in Bambara; while the
internationally renowned musician Salif Keïta, playing Esau, leads his clan
through northeastern Mali, made to invoke biblical Canaan. The film
therefore asks us to rethink Western assumptions about religious heritage. As
Dovey points out,
While reclaiming the Book of Genesis as a human source, Sissoko
simultaneously adapts local Malian traditions – the griotic, and the
Koteba theatrical traditions – which he uses to rewrite an old, familiar
narrative for the sake of contemporary audiences in Africa and abroad.
His film thus participates in that movement by African film adapters to
erode the boundaries between African and non-African epistemologies,
allowing them to inflect and influence each other. In this way Sissoko
himself can be seen as a griot, intervening in world culture to speak the
truth to global violence. That this griot offers his critique of violence
from the continent that is most often associated with violence is
extremely moving and powerful. (274)
Although the book does require a degree of familiarity with African cinema
and theoretical knowledge of film adaptation and mimesis, Lindiwe Dovey
does successfully give in-depth criticism of individual films and set a new
standard for African film analysis. To conclude, Teddy Mattera is quoted as
saying at the New York African film festival in 2007: “We have been the
object of the gaze. We don’t want to return the gaze, we want to look
elsewhere” (177). Dovey has given us this very opportunity.
Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615
145