Bamako – the opening film of the second annual Montreal Human Rights Film Festival – is fascinating and intriguing, but mostly for cinematic reasons that have little to do with human rights. Far more compelling than its political context and messages, the films manipulations of genre and systems of identification are complex and original.
Directed by Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako, the film is set in a communal courtyard in the Malian capital Bamako. Amidst the locals’ daily activities, the courtyard has become the setting for a trial: spokespersons for the African civil society are taking the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to court. The trial dominates the films narrative, but we are also aware of other goings on in the courtyard from which subordinate plots slowly emerge. Nightclub singer Melé (Aïssa Maïga) and her stoic husband Chaka (Tiécoura Traoré), the closest this Bamako comes to having main characters, provide a family melodrama as the couple drift apart and the future of their daughter remains unclear. This plot, however, stays undeveloped and is constantly displaced by the global trial unfolding outside their door.
The trial in the courtyard is a clever device, allowing Sissako to juxtapose impoverished Malian village life with a discussion of the international power structures perpetuating African poverty. But for a film being shown at the Montreal Human Rights Film Festival, a biting critique and indictment of the IMF and World Bank is, let’s face it, preaching to the converted. Well-articulated as Bamako is – complete with quotations from the father of postcolonial theory Aimé Césaire – the arguments it puts forward are nothing new in the denunciation of the neo-colonial practices of global financial institutions. That said, this film is completely fascinating for the ways in which it plays with cinematic conventions.
Bamako combines several different film genres in very jarring ways. The films form, a collision of different genres, becomes an analogy for the way globalization forces disparate cultures into dialogue in more or less exploitative ways. This piecing together of genres also testifies to the influence of the films multiple nodes of production – France, Mali, and the United States. The majority of the film, therefore, is a courtroom drama that overlaps with a humanitarian documentary on community life. Our glimpses of the domestic troubles between Melé and Chaka also provide a hint of the family melodrama genre. The most jarring use of genre in Bamako, however, is the intrusion of a xenophobic Western.
About halfway through the film, a family takes its TV into the empty courtyard at night to watch a film entitled Death in Timbuktu. What follows is five minutes of a hilarious movie-within-the-movie that stars Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon, Beloved). Death in Timbuktu shows a group of cowboys roll into the Malian city and shoot up every local who crosses their path for no reason. When the solitary Danny Glover character kills one of the cowboys their outlaw antics degenerate into dark comedy, and the group resorts to shooting wildly in the deserted streets.
This sequence brings in the Western genre – often associated with something between colonization and genocide – and uses it for parody. First, when the Danny Glover character kills one of the outlaws, he becomes something of a good guy, protecting the people of Timbuktu. Glover is also, it turns out, the executive producer of Bamako, so this sequence is a parody of the idea that just by financing a Malian film Glover is somehow saving the whole country from the IMF and World Bank. Making a movie – or watching one for that matter – does little or nothing to curb humanitarian injustice. There is the added irony that the Malian family watching Death in Timbuktu don’t root for the Malians in the film, or Glover’s character, but the murderous rampaging cowboys. Bamako points out the assumptions of Western viewers that Malian movie-goers necessarily identify with Malian characters onscreen. The broader project of this Western sequence is to underline the fact that identification in film is not restricted by gender or race.
While the film concludes with moving speeches on the evils of global finance and the resilience of the African people, these moments are pre-digested. Bamako articulates those arguments in a very convincing way, but brings little new to the table in terms of its political message. Particularly in the context of the Montreal Human Rights Film Festival, Bamako is much more innovative in its treatment of film than its discussion of human rights.
Note: This article was published on 22 March 2007 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website
here.
No comments:
Post a Comment