« words of fire have taken up the torch
words of cinders words of flames
that tell the modern tale
of Africa’s children of Icarus »
Tanella Boni, Chaque jour l’espérance,
L’Harmattan, p. 14
When people used to ask Dominique Wallon, the then director of the French Centre national de la Cinématographie (CNC), why he defended African film so staunchly, he used to answer that France could not stand up to the bulldozer of American cultural standardisation alone.
He called for an alliance, an alliance of different types of filmmaking, those that accept the difficult task of trying to understand the world in order to bring about change, rather than reproducing it to make it easier to accept. This alliance helped counter America’s attempt to get cinema and audiovisual included in the World Trade Organisation negotiations on the liberalisation of services.
The on-going cultural exception debate has now resurfaced again thanks to Jean-Marie Messier’s staggering declarations in December 2001. The Chairman and chief executive officer of Vivendi-Universal, and director of Canal +, nonchalantly announced the death of the « typically French cultural exception ». In other words, the Americans are not as bad as all that. We do not doubt so for one moment, but would simply like to point out that cultural hegemony paves the way to economic and political domination. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings blitzed anything that tried to exist alongside them on the screen this December. Yet December’s smaller films were pretty good despite their low budgets. Even when they weren’t French. Even though practically none of them were African. Independent films struggle very hard to find a place in the sun when competing with the big sharks of entertainment.
But let’s take this line of reasoning further. It’s not so much a case of American versus the Rest, as Hollywood versus independent film, classicism versus the cutting-edge. This is so all over the world. We mustn’t forget neo-realism, which sought to break away from the morals and aesthetics that led to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. We mustn’t forget the French New Wave, which rebelled against corporatism, the predominance of the screenplay, the moral of the narrative, the mythologization of the past, and the refusal of present time… We may legitimately wonder whether the system of funding granted specifically to alternative cinemas encourages classicism as it tries to adapt them to the world market. This would be serious, as it is precisely creativity, originality, and rupture that give rise to the famous cultural diversity we all agree should be defended.
Cinematographic production only contributes to the cultural exception when it breaks away from classicism or progressive dogmatism, when it asserts a different gaze – that of a constantly redefined modernity. This dossier detects this exceptional modernity in African film, on the understanding that there is no modernity without rupture.
///Article N° : 5422
