AFRICA AND LATIN AMERICA: CINEMATIC CONNECTIONS
Research Premises
Surprisingly little scholarship has examined the contacts and connections between African and Latin American cinemas, but these must exist, since several directors readily acknowledge their awareness of films from the “other” continent, despite limited international distribution. [i]
Haile Gerima (Ethiopia/U.S.) speaks of the influence of Latin America on his evolution as a filmmaker, citing Brazilian Cinema Novo and directors Jorge Sanjinés (Bolivia), Fernando Solanas (Argentina), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Cuba), and Humberto Solás (Cuba) (Gerima Interview, 1983). Cubans had a chance to see Gerima’s 1976 film Harvest: 3,000 Years when it was screened there, and his Sankofa (1993) was shown in Brazil.
Cuban filmmaker Rigoberto López exclaimed regarding a “Black Roots” festival in Cuba: “Films from Africa and the Francophone Caribbean, for the first time with subtitles in Spanish! It’s wonderful to be able to peer into our neighbors’ window, find our historical relatives, and surrender to the telling of their tales” (R. López “Palabras,” 23). [ii]
Mauritanian director Med Hondo recalls the influence on his development of works by Brazilian director Glauber Rocha, especially Black God, White Devil (1964); of Cuban Manuel Octavio Gómez’s First Machete Charge (1969); and of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces (1965-68), “not so much for their cinematographic technique, strictly speaking, but for what I would be tempted to call a foundational cinematic act: the bursting of the masses onto the screen, where they appropriate the word to denounce lies and hypocrisy, reveal social contradictions, and explore new possibilities for action” (qtd. in Signaté 24-25).
Documentary filmmaker Samba Félix N’Diaye (Senegal) recognizes Brazilian directors who “worked on the frontier between documentary and fiction” as important in his evolution (Garcia “Rencontre,” 90). N’Diaye also signals his knowledge of Latin American filmmaking when he includes Cuba among the “great family of documentarists” and observes in 1991 that “the Cuban Film Institute [ICAIC] influences and promotes the production of documentary films in almost all the countries of Latin America” (N’Diaye 7). [iii]
These suggestions of transnational pollination have inspired insufficient research on linkages between cinemas of Latin America and Africa, with only a few comparative studies, such as those by Andrade-Watkins on Brazil and Lusophone Africa; Gabriel’s theorizations that embrace both continents; suggestions by N. Frank Ukadike and PaulWillemen of certain commonalities in African and Latin American films; and Van Wert’s comparison of Sembene and Glauber Rocha. This essay-the first attempt to examine the contexts for linkages and to document the ample contacts over the past forty years between these cinemas-charts new ground for further research. [iv]
Common Contexts and Initial Contacts: Politics and Cinematography
The extraordinarily fervid period that began in the late 1950s gave Africa and Latin America a common context for beginning a dialogue: civil wars and armed struggle by national liberation movements, specifically those in Algeria, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Cuba, and Vietnam; the Black Power movement in the U.S.; the Black Consciousness movement in various parts of the world; and violent police actions against protesting students in Paris, Mexico City, and Ohio (Kent State).
Groundbreaking studies led to a reconsideration of the relations between areas of the world and obstacles to change in “underdeveloped” nations. [v] Intellectuals and cultural workers in Africa, Latin America, and Asia identified commonalities in their struggles and embraced the concept of unity among so-called “Third World” peoples fighting against neocolonial, capitalist structures and relations. Cuba’s involvement in the international historical moment was concretized in its contributions of military forces to African struggles, and it “redrew the political map” of the Southern Cone of Africa by sending some 300,000 Cubans into the fight (King 158). This solidarity in arms had implications also for Cuban cinema: documentary techniques learned after the 1959 triumph of the Revolution led by Fidel Castro were used to portray liberation struggles in Africa. [vi]
The broad context for these actions and films was set in Latin America: “At the beginning of 1968 came the momentous Havana Cultural Congress on the theme of ‘The Intellectual and the Liberation Struggle of the Peoples of the Third World,’ which brought together about five hundred revolutionary and progressive artists and intellectuals from as many as seventy countries in a great act of affirmation. They were . . . Europeans, Asians, Africans, delegates from Vietnam, India, Mexico, Algeria and Laos” (Chanan 216).
Shortly thereafter, African filmmakers organized as the Fédération Panafricaine des Cinéastes-FEPACI (1970), which resonated with Latin American producers and directors who had begun hemispheric organizing attempts as early as 1958 (A. López 146ff), though a continuing entity, the Comité de Cineastas de América Latina (CCAL), began only in 1974.
African film professionals assumed a leading role in organizing the important 1973 Third World Film-Makers Meeting in Algiers, which brought together North and Subsaharan Africans, Latin Americans, and others to “discuss common problems and goals and to lay the groundwork for an organization of Third World film-makers” (“Resolutions,” 463). Committees of mixed national and continental composition studied specific aspects of cinematic practice and allowed filmmakers to work together on common issues. Among the future bridge builders between Africa and Latin America at this Algiers meeting were Med Hondo (Mauritania), Santiago Alvarez (Cuba), Flora Gomes (Guinea-Bissau), Fernando Birri (Argentina), and the “Pioneer of African Cinema,” Ousmane Sembene (Senegal).
Resolutions created at Algiers in 1973 broadly structured collaborations between African and “New Latin American Cinema” over the next 15 years. It was resolved that Third World cinema and filmmaking should fight against the cultural repercussions-acculturation and deculturation-wrought by imperialism and neocolonialism and concomitant with the incorporation of certain regions into a worldwide capitalist system that required their “underdevelopment” and “dependency,” with a resulting distortion of local economies, impoverishment of the masses, creation of a comprador bourgeoisie and social inequities. The culture of dominated peoples-language, arts, history, traditions, sciences, social relations-had been destroyed or usurped for the imperialists’ benefit, with the creation of pseudo-racial, community, and language differences and assignations of inferiority and superiority.
Algiers 1973 defined cinema as an instrument of class struggle that historically had propagated capitalist and false ideological values, with a special preponderance of U.S. official and Hollywood versions, but which, by the same token, could also be a potent weapon of resistance in the hands of militant filmmakers. Films could dis-alienate and re-sensitize colonized peoples, including those marginalized within colonizing countries, by reflecting objective conditions and “swinging the balance of the power relationship in favor of using cinema in the interest of the masses,” in order to eliminate colonized mentalities (as in Franz Fanon’s conception) and to educate a public that would actively question the premises of cinematic as well as other informational and cultural media. National cinema infrastructures were of crucial necessity, but international solidarity was also important, requiring special support by already-independent national cinemas, now invited “to organize and develop the teaching of film techniques, to welcome the nationals of countries in which the training is not ensured.” Filmmakers resolved to compile data to determine the best ways to improve film distribution and to promote governmental agreements in support of coproductions (“Resolutions”).
The two-pronged, African-Latin American, prominence in the 1973 Algiers Resolutions is indicated in the decision to filter all information on the implementation of the Resolutions through FEPACI and to establish a permanent secretariat of the Third World Film-makers Organization in Cuba.
Out of these contacts and struggles came new perceptions of cinema, such as the Cuban concept of Imperfect Cinema, whose “core is the call that García Espinosa shares with other key polemicists of third world struggle, like Fanon and Freire, for cultural decolonisation” (Chanan 252). Didactic Cinema, Third Cinema, Third Aesthetics, and Militant Cinema all suggest a revision of concepts to rethink the potentialities of film, especially, “the adoption of a historically analytic yet culturally specific mode of cinematic discourse,” exemplified, according to one critic, in films by Africans, Brazilians, and others (Willemen 3-4; see also Gabriel, Pines and Willemen, and Solanas and Getino).
“The euphoric mood of the late 1960s is very apparent in the work of many of the film makers who, born mostly in the 1930s, began as feature film makers at this time” (Armes 89). Whether they were from Algeria, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Egypt, Mauritania, Senegal, Tunisia, or Turkey, they shared a belief in the political function of cinema (Armes 89-91). It is perhaps natural, then, that the historically strongest connection for African filmmakers has been with the only Latin American country that officially supported political cinema-Cuba.
Contacts: Film Training in Cuba, ICAIC
The Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, known by its Spanish acronym, ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos), was created just months after the victory of the Revolution. It provided state funding for filmmaking, collaborated with the Cuban armed forces to make frontline documentaries on liberation struggles in Africa, and established the possibility of training African filmmakers in its facilities. Several of those filmmakers gained prominence as directors, including Florentino “Flora” Gomes and Sana Na N’hada from Guinea-Bissau, both of whom made documentaries and feature films on their nation’s guerrilla warfare and its aftermath. Gomes defined the Cuban “influence” in a 1993 interview with Ukadike:
NFU: How did your training in Cuba affect the way you look at cinema?
FG: From my point of view as a filmmaker, when one goes abroad to study, what one should learn is the technique. . . . It’s true that the Cuban cinema is very advanced. It has a very descriptive technique, and this is where its strength lies, in its technique. . . . Once one acquires this technique, one has to blend it, mix it with one’s own personality and way of looking at life, at the world. Cubans are Cuban, so their cinema is Cuban. When I return home, to Africa, to Guinea-Bissau or elsewhere, I have to find the views that correspond to our reality. . . .
NFU: While watching your films, one can see some influences traceable to Cuban dialectic revolutionary film practices. Are you a revolutionary filmmaker?
FG: I don’t know if I’m really a revolutionary. Revolutionary is such a big word. I would rather say of myself that I am a “contester.” In my films I try to bring up the most striking issues in our society. (Ukadike, Questioning 102-103)
Film Training in Cuba: EICTV
In 1974, a few years after the FEPACI united African directors, the Committee of Latin American Cineastes (CCAL) was established. Eleven years later, it created the Foundation of the New Latin American Cinema, presided over by Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez. “Its most ambitious undertaking was the establishment of the Film and Television School . . . at San Antonio de los Baños near Havana” (Pick 32-33). The new school, inaugurated in December 1986, offered its first courses in January 1987. Officially named the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños (EICTV), it is often called the “International Film School of Three Worlds”-Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Argentine filmmaker Fernando Birri was the moving force behind the creation of the school and its inclusion of Asian and African students and was its first director.
Castro, in a speech at the closing ceremony of the 7th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in 1985, reminisced on the initial process that would bring the school to reality: “An idea came to us . . . to create a film school for Latin American and Caribbean students. This is, without a doubt, a good idea, but I think, also, that as long as the Africans have no similar possibility, the idea should be extended so that the school will also be for African students, or those from any other Third World country” (Castro 10). Symptomatic of Fidel’s conceptualization of Africa as a unit is his semantic equivalence here of the African continent with any “other country”! This embrace of Africa was not at all incidental, but was rather an act of solidarity clearly aligned with the resolutions from the Algiers meeting of 1973. African professionals were included in programmatic ways also: accepting an invitation to participate in the EICTV program of Advanced Studies Dialogues with established international filmmakers was Ousmane Sembene, cited in an initial group that included Nelson Pereira Dos Santos, Nikita Mikhalkov, and Francis Ford Coppola (Vázquez 1).
By the end of 2002, EICTV claimed 308 graduates from forty countries, in addition to 2,185 participants from thirty-six countries in its workshops (“Un poco de historia”). Between 1986 and 1993, at least fifteen Africans from five countries graduated in the five areas of concentration: Directing, Sound, Editing, Photography and Scriptwriting (Diago Pinillos). Issoufou Tapsoba (Burkina Faso) was in the first group of African students at EICTV (1987-1990), graduating with a diploma in Directing, along with Domingos Sanca (Guinea-Bissau) in Photography and José Passe (Mozambique) in Sound, all of whom have established successful film careers in Africa. Tapsoba told me that two later (1992) EICTV graduates from Burkina Faso have gained enormous respect as professionals in filmmaking-Arsène Yembi Kafando, Photography, and Habibou Barry Zoungrana, Editing (Tapsoba).
Guy-Désiré Yaméogo (Burkina Faso) was selected by FEPACI to attend EICTV, where he chose scriptwriting over directing in order to study with García Márquez, and graduated in 1992. His filmography includes both documentary and fiction. Lest we assume that the Cuban school might be locked into teaching outmoded cinematic techniques and values, Yaméogo stated his intention to depart from the “classic style of African cinema which at times is . . . too didactic: . . . ‘the evolution of our cinema requires, in my opinion, that today we further integrate the factor of the public by creating works that both arouse awareness and entertain’” (C.T. 20).
Mariano Bartolomeu (Angola) coincided at EICTV with Guy-Désiré Yaméogo and graduated in 1991 with a diploma in Directing. He returned to Angola and has continued to make documentary and fiction films.
After sponsoring José Passe in the first EICTV basic course, Mozambique sent others, including João Carlos Ribeiro. Like Guy-Désiré Yaméogo, Ribeiro distances his work from past practices and defines the function of cinema in 1996 as social, but in a different way from the militant cinema of the 1960s: “Cinema, fantastic by nature, should resume its role as a creator of dreams, to help restore the social cohesion that has been weakened” (“Le regard des étoiles,” 15). Pedro Pimenta, long associated with the National Film Institute in Mozambique and a film producer, remarked in 1992 that, paradoxically, Mozambicans continue to train at the film school in Havana “for an industry that no longer exists” (Garcia and Helburg 11). Pimenta recognized the role of EICTV in forming the new Mozambican cinema: “With regard to pure fiction, few films have been made, not for lack of ideas or projects, but for lack of funding. . . . The directors all studied at the School in Havana and returned to Mozambique with this new element, fiction, and the ability to write a script as it should be done. If we had to find an influence on Mozambican cinema, it is without a doubt Latin America, because the relations between Cuba and Mozambique have always been very strong” (Garcia and Helburg 11). [vii]
Contacts: FEPACI at Havana Festival 1985
1985 was a key year for enhanced relations between Latin American and African cinemas, with increased mutual recognition, tributes, and contacts continuing over the next four years. [viii] The 1985 reorganization of FEPACI coincided with the embrace of African film at the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, held annually in Havana. The entire new FEPACI leadership attended that festival, in addition to other filmmakers; the doyen of African cinema and scholarship, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, as president of the Committee of African Cineastes; the directors of the Angolan and Mozambican Film Institutes; the head of Ghana Film; and the directors of the two major African film festivals, Carthage and FESPACO.
A special “Meeting of African and Latin American Cineastes,” December 9-10, was an integral part of the Festival, with papers and discussions and broad coverage in the local press, which celebrated the African presence. [ix] One promising result of this festival was the Joint Resolution by FEPACI and CCAL on cooperative organization and participation in festivals, film screenings and the exchange of information; organization of film markets at festivals; coproductions and other collaborative arrangements; training of film professionals; and constitution of a Third World Cinema Front (“Declaración Conjunta”). This Joint Resolution can be considered a more specific continuation of the principles of the Algiers Resolutions of 1973. Castro remarked, at the closing session of the 1985 Havana Film Festival, on the foundational ideas that had fostered the Latin American-African connection. In 1984, he and the CCAL had discussed: “action on the need to establish links with cineastes from Africa and other areas of the Third World, because we are aware that they are living a situation that is the same, or worse, than ours in Latin America. . . . We talked about making Africa’s reality, its social and cultural situation, known throughout Latin America. . . . [The filmmakers] are even talking about a panorama of African cinema at next year’s Festival” (8).
“The Largest Retrospective on African Cinema in the World,” Havana 1986
The panorama of African cinema at the 1986 Havana Film Festival included seventy-three films, thirty-nine of them fiction, from twenty countries. FEPACI may have selected certain films because of the screening venue-a Latin American film festival-or because they were judged to offer an overview of African cinematic production at the time. The majority of the films reflect issues of class struggle and active resistance to situations of oppression. In this sense, they respond, as do certain contemporaneous Latin American films, to similar historical circumstances. The panorama “demonstrated technical and artistic qualities in the nonpaternalistic representation of cinematographic production in all parts of the African continent” (“Inauguran la mayor retrospectiva,” 2).
FEPACI President Gaston Kaboré considered the retrospective a testimony to the struggle by the African people to achieve political, economic, and cultural freedom. He called for a cinema at the service of the masses (which at the time, would have resonated with his Latin American colleagues), and his essay “What African Cinema?” was published in Cine Cubano in 1987 (“¿Qué cine africano?”).
Cuban Vice Minister of Culture, filmmaker Julio García Espinosa, presided over roundtables on African cinema, where filmmakers from the continent spoke on the challenges of making movies and the hope engendered by the establishment of EICTV (Piñera 6). Kaboré delivered an address at the opening ceremony of EICTV, where nine African students were entering the inaugural basic course (“Inauguran hoy,” 1).
Latin American Films at FESPACO 1987
FEPACI reciprocated at the 10th FESPACO in 1987, allowing an exchange of ideas and the viewing of many Latin American films, some of them never before shown in Africa. Several significant events occurred:
1. For the first time, Latin Americans were members of the jury-Cuban filmmaker Sergio Giral, representing ICAIC, and the Argentine Fernando Birri, Director of EICTV. The official program includes a brief summation of Birri’s career and lauds his “exemplary” struggle to create “a cinema that is realistic, national, popular, and critical” (FESPACO 1987, 74).
2. In its “Retrospective on Latin American Cinema,” FESPACO 1987 screened a number of films described in the official program as: “Cinema from a continent very close to Africa in its realities and aspirations to live free” (19). The films selected are classics in the New Latin American Film repertoire. [x]
3. Four Latin American productions appeared in FESPACO 1987′s Film Festival for Children and Young.
Coproductions
With the exception of Cuban-African documentaries related to African liberation struggles and natural problems such as droughts, [xi] collaborative projects between African and Latin American sponsors and filmmakers have been rare. Initial coproductions were conceived as models for the future, but instead, they turned out to be exceptions.
Nigerian director Ola Balogun filmed A deusa negra (Black Goddess, 1978) in Brazil and coproduced it with his production company, the Brazilian government’s Embrafilm, and Brazilian Jece Valadão. Balogun was the first Black to direct a film in Brazil, and despite certain tensions related to this and to funding shortfalls, he was able to carry the project to completion (F. Balogun). Collaboration with Brazilians for filming A deusa negra was such a positive experience for Balogun that he used a number of Brazilian technicians and actors from it in his next feature film, Cry Freedom (1981) and in others. He foresaw such joint efforts as an opportunity for Africa and Latin America to enhance their cinema, but the example did not become a model for transcontinental collaboration
The 1986 feature film Desebagato, le dernier salaire (Desebagato, The Last Pay) by Emmanuel Kalifa Sanon was widely hailed as the “first” Cuba-Burkina Faso coproduction, and it appears to be the only one. [xii] Sanon was part of the FEPACI delegation at the 1985 Havana Film Festival, during which the plans must have been initiated. [xiii] Coproduced by Faso Films and ICAIC, the film was “a product of the new policy of the Burkina Faso government to support cinema” and included actors of various nationalities (Hamalla). Cuba contributed 35% of the budget, was wholly responsible for postproduction, and also provided technical support, with Cuban specialists in charge of photography, sound and script. The story had obvious appeal for Revolutionary Cuba, since it portrays the exploitation of African construction workers by multinational corporations and the beginning of the workers movement. The film won awards but was not commercially successful, however.
Sporadic Contacts after 1989
FESPACO 1989 included Brazilian professor Lelia de Almeida Gonzalez on a jury, and a “Homage to Latin American Cinema” screened some 150 films from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Guadeloupe and Haiti. [xiv] But FESPACO 1989 was, sadly, the last major exchange of films and cinematic ideas between Africa and Latin America. Pledges of mutual support and the opening of respective markets that so significantly marked the 1985-89 period, thereafter fall into silence. Despite the expressed desire to expand markets, for example, by 1990, the international distribution company for ICAIC films advertised the festivals and markets in which it usually participated, and FESPACO is notably absent (Distribuidora 18).
Some Latin Americans do participate on later FESPACO juries and an occasional Latin American film is screened at FESPACO, usually in the Films from the Diaspora category, but there is no systematic attention. As a rare exception, Argentine director Pablo César’s film Aphrodite (Le jardin des parfums) (Aphrodite, Garden of Perfumes), a coproduction with Mali, competed at FESPACO 1999, and the official program gives a long list of César’s films (FESPACO 1999). He also was a jury member for shorts and documentaries at FESPACO 2001, which included a short docudrama on African descendants in Uruguay (FESPACO 2001).
Similarly, the Havana Festival ignores African films and jurors after 1989, [xv] and there is no later involvement between Africa and Latin America that parallels the contacts between 1985 and 1989. [xvi] The Havana Festival continued its tradition of international screenings but reverted to an emphasis on Latin American, European, Soviet, and independent U.S. offerings.
One explanation for these changes is undoubtedly the economic crisis in certain areas of the developing world. The early 1990s saw the disintegration of the Soviet Union and of the socialist bloc, with devastating economic implications for Cuba’s ability to support cinematic production in its own country, not just in coproductions, as well as the beginning of a “Special Period” of economic contraction in 1989. A significant factor in the discontinuance of African-Latin American cinematic solidarity after 1989 is undoubtedly the concomitant questioning of the viability of joint programs or “Third World” unity (and even, the validity of the concept) after the profound historical readjustments of the 1990s. Both FESPACO and the Havana Film Festival seemed to refocus emphasis on their respective continental unity and integration.
The economic consequences of readjustments were immediately felt. By 2000, the incoming President of ICAIC could note that in 1971, cinema in Cuba had reached a record 110 million spectators, but by the 1990s, “the lack of financing capability and the abrupt changes in Eastern Europe and the rest of the world practically paralyzed [ICAIC] and other cultural industries in Cuba” (González 11). [xvii] In lamenting the effective absence in 2000 of documentaries, one of the landmark genres in Revolutionary Cuba, a critic observes that during the “Special Period,” the production of documentaries has been “alarmingly affected”-from some 80 documentaries per year made in Cuba, about half of them produced by ICAIC, “that number has been reduced to less than a dozen” (Vega 31).
Similar economic problems are reported throughout Latin American film industries. In the early 1990s Spanish television, TVE, abruptly ended its previously generous support for coproductions with Latin America, including films to be shot in Africa on Cuban music. Brazil’s giant national film production agency, Embrafilme, folded in 1992. A major downturn in Latin American film production was attributed in 2001 to several factors, some of which indicate the unresolved challenges of obstacles noted at Algiers in 1973: distribution problems, adverse markets, lack of government support, continual and expensive technological changes, and U.S. monopoly by big studios (Vives 1-3).
Interest in African cinema has continued in Latin America, but on a reduced scale as compared to the 1980s. A blip of renewal occurred in 1995, when, for the first time, the Guadalajara (Mexico) Film Festival screened African films: “Never had that country, with such a rich cinematography, shown such a panoramic selection of films” (“Gros Plan: Mexique,” 40). This festival undoubtedly underscored aspects of Mexican demographics and culture that had been explored just a few years earlier in Rafael Rebollar’s film on Afro-Mexicans in the Veracruz and Acapulco areas, La tercera raíz (The Third Root, 1992), produced by the Mexican National Council on Culture and Art.
African films were part of the seventh French Film Festival in February 1999 in Havana, Camagüey, and Santiago de Cuba, in the “Black Roots” traveling exhibit. In the eastern region of Cuba, in close proximity to Haiti and, therefore, with a large African-descended population, the Black Roots films must have given residents a sense of their historical ancestry.
Brazil has made some attempt to connect to Lusophone Africa through film. The second Film and Video Festival in Vitoria, Espirito Santo, Brazil (Nov. 20-26, 1995) was organized around the theme of “African-Brazilian Encounters.” The September 1998 25th Jornada Internacional de Cinema da Bahia, in Brazil, on Afro-Iberian-American cinema displayed new independent films and videos from Latin America, Spain, Portugal, and Africa.
Post-1989 Coproductions
Latin American-African coproductions after 1989 have been rare. The first Brazil-Cape Verde coproduction was O Testamento do Senhor Napomuceno (Testamento, 1997), with three other countries involved as well (Portugal, France, and Belgium). The only Cape Verdean in the film is diva Évora Cesária; one actor is Portuguese, and all the rest are Brazilian (Kennedy). Given the commercial success of the film, perhaps other coproductions will be planned. Brazilian film historian João Carlos Rodrigues raises issues that could, however, impinge on future coproductions: “The Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé), which are of particular interest to Brazilians, have been unable to sustain film production, and their emerging cinematographies are still dominated by documentaries. There is little or no fiction film. In this genre, the highly regarded Angolan filmmaker (Ruy Guerra) is not Black, nor is the Cape Verde filmmaker Francisco Manso, director of the interesting Brazil-Portugal coproduction, O testamento do senhor Napomuceno (1997)” (173).
Argentine Pablo César is the only Latin American filmmaker who has directed feature film coproductions with Africa. His long filmography includes Equinoxe (Le jardin des roses (Equinox, Garden of Roses), the first Argentina-Tunisia coproduction, and Aphrodite (Le jardin des parfums) (Aphrodite, Garden of Perfumes) (1998), the first Argentina-Mali coproduction, with Black actors from both countries. Filming was completed in 2002 for César’s latest film, Sang (Blood), a South-South coproduction by Argentina, Sudan, and Madagascar.
Contacts in Other Venues
Latin American television has been more successful than feature films in winning African markets, often to the detriment of domestic production, as noted in the complaint that African television cannot compete against imported series: “Brazilian telenovelas, which began to be broadcast in 1986, are now very familiar to African TV audiences” (“La production de series par les TV africaines”). Gabonese filmmaker Imunga Ivanga in 1999 considered television an “unexpected godsend” for filmmakers who can develop new video production practices and genres. He uses the widespread familiarity with Brazilian telenovelas as a source of inspiration, yet a model to be avoided by Africa: “Should we, by imitation or under the pretext of the high costs of cinematic productions, replicate popular sitcoms like . . . the Brazilian soap opera Rosa? That would mean a lack of invention and creativity” (23). Haynes notes that Latin American telenovelas (mainly Mexican and Brazilian) are a staple of Nigerian television and cites their influence on the development of melodrama as a video genre in Nigeria (22-29).
To the extent that Latin American films are shown in France, it is very likely that African filmmakers and students residing there have the opportunity to view them. The magazine Cine Cubano, for example, reports that between January and May 1990, Cuba presented at the Georges Pompidou Center the largest and most panoramic exhibition ever presented outside the country, with 80 films, from the first productions to the most recent feature films, documentaries and animations (“Gaumont,” 38).[xviii]
The possibility that African filmmakers in France can view Latin American films increases with the number of related organizations and festivals. Since 1999, the Brazilian cultural organization Jangada has sponsored films and an annual film festival. Jangada has also shown films as part of celebrations of Brazilian culture organized in cooperation with mayors of several of the arrondissements of Paris. The movie theater Cinéma Le Latina has continued to operate since its founding in September 1984 by the Latin Cultural Association for the purpose of increasing awareness of Latin American cinema. Analogous possibilities exist for African directors and students in other major centers for film study, with annual festivals such as Cinelatino in Germany, Cinema Novo in Belgium, and the London Latin American Film Festival.
African and Latin American participation in international film festivals-Amiens, Cannes, Locarno, Namur, San Sebastián-theoretically promotes contacts, since films from both continents are shown, and the directors are often in attendance and form part of the juries. [xix] But this type of contact is haphazard and pales in comparison to the sustained interactions of the 1980s.
Filming the Other/Ourselves
Latin American directors, especially in areas with a notable presence of African-descended people, have made documentaries and fiction films on Africans under slave conditions in the Americas and on the survival of African traditions in contemporary cultures. [xx] However, Latin Americans focusing on Africans in Africa have tended to use documentary rather than fiction film (with the exception of Pablo César, as described above). Cuban filmmaker Rigoberto López, for example, made Africa, círculo del infierno (Africa, Circle in Hell, 1985), which won the 1986 UNICEF award. The documentary “gives witness to and reveals the true causes of the tragedy of hunger in Africa” (R. López, personal communication). He filmed in areas of Ethiopia, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Tanzania, “forgotten areas, an ignored face of the world,” and showed the drama caused by the international economic order and the advance of the desert, which threatens the very existence of certain African peoples. López studied the presence of Yoruba rites in contemporary Cuba in his Mensajero de los dioses (Messenger of the Gods, 1989), which shows a ceremony of offering to the two most important and popular orishas, Shango and Yemaya. López sought out the origins of Afro-Cuban santería among the Yorubas in Nigeria as part of a project on the history of Cuban music and its influence in the world, and he plans to return there for filming at a future date.
If film historians have noticed a certain reluctance by African directors to examine historical practices of slavery on that continent, [xxi] there seems to be some interest by Africans in tracing the consequences of that history in the Americas. In addition to the exploration of the self/other in the Brazilian-Nigerian coproduction by Ola Balogun, A deusa negra, N’Diagne Adechoubou (Benin) traveled to Cuba to film a documentary on a Cuban painter, Manuel Mendive ou l’esprit pictural yoruba (Manuel Mendive, or The Yoruba Pictorial Spirit, 1987). Sidiki Bakaba, the Ivory Coast actor who starred in the Burkina Faso-Cuban coproduction Desebagato, codirected with Cameroonian Blaise Njeboya a documentary on a maroon slave settlement, the Palenque de San Basilio, founded in the fifteenth century in Colombia by a prince from Equatorial Guinea, Los palenqueros: cimarrons de Colombie (The Palenqueros, Maroons of Colombia, 2000; called “Five Centuries of Solitude” at the 2002 Pan African Film and Arts Festival in Los Angeles). Given these examples and Haile Gerima’s announced project on Maroons, the focus on the African Diaspora in the Americas by African film directors is a promising topic for further research.
New Possibilities
A very useful recent publication, which may encourage coproductions by African and Latin American directors and producers, is Sous l’arbre à palabres II (2001), especially focused on the “South.” This guide gives a wealth of data (with e-mail addresses, web sites, and, often, titles of supported films) on possibilities for financing, production, and distribution (through both for-profit and nonprofit entities), as well as a review of legal questions and contact information for film festivals, schools, revues, film libraries, professional organizations and web sites, including hard-to-find information on funding sources and production companies in South America.
Cuba has a solution that could benefit film and TV production in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere- the First International Non-Budget Film Festival (in Spanish, “Festival de Cine Pobre,” Festival of Poor Cinema). Held April 21-25, 2003, in the eastern city of Gibara, competition included some 118 films, mostly from Latin America, with others from Europe, Turkey, Greece, Iran, Lebanon, and New Zealand, but none from Africa. The “Non-Budget Film Manifesto” by festival director, well-known Cuban director Humberto Solás, suggests the continuing validity and resonance, thirty years later, of the 1973 Algiers resolutions, even as it promotes new video and digital technologies (“Festival International de Cine Pobre”). The Non-Budget Film Festival offers prizes for films and for unproduced scripts (in English, French or Spanish) of feature films and shorts. This festival may indicate that contemporary digital technology is beginning to catch up to contemporary dreams, and “technotronics” might be considered a solution-in-evolution to the demands of filmmakers in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere.
Notes
1 My appreciation to Howard University colleagues Josephine Woll, for her suggestions on improving an earlier version of this essay, and Françoise Pfaff, for allowing me access to her personal collection of film files and books, and to anonymous MACLAS reviewers for their helpful comments. Special thanks also to Françoise Balogun, Sylvie Pernotte, and the filmmakers and critics whose personal communications provided information not elsewhere available.
2 My translations throughout, with thanks to Françoise Pfaff for help with French and to James Kennedy for assistance with Portuguese and Cape Verdean creole.
3 Consider also Tunisian director Nouri Bouzid’s comment regarding the practice of “respectfully lifting the veil on society”: “This aesthetic somewhat recalls the aesthetic of hunger in the Brazilian Cinema Novo developed by Glauber Rocha. In fact, Glauber Rocha’s Terre em transe [Land in Anguish] could have been an Arab film” (57).
4 This study excludes the Mozambican/Brazilian filmmaker Ruy/Rui Guerra, whose career is well-documented elsewhere.
5 See, among others: (1) Andre Gunder Frank’s work on the capitalist center/metropolis development of underdevelopment in the periphery/satellites:Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil(1967; 1969); (2) Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), between his Black Skin, White Masks (1952), and Toward the African Revolution: Political Writings (1964); and (3) Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972; revised, 1981).
6 Among others: (1) José Massip’s Madina Boe (1968), “on life in the liberated areas of Guinea-Bissau . . . and in the rearguard aid areas of the Republic of Guinea,” which includes an interview with Amilcar Cabral, founder of the PAIGC independence movement (Myerson 184). “Massip brings to the screen a close identification with African culture which is one of the constant features of his work” (Chanan 191). (2) Santiago Alvarez’s full-length chronicles of Castro’s trips to Africa in 1972 and 1977. (3) Rigoberto López’s documentary Roja es la tierra (Red is the Earth, 1984), on Cuba’s internationalist troops in Angola fighting against South Africa.
7 Ukadike describes the National Film Institute of Mozambique’s early use of Brazilian directors to make its first films in the 1970s and to teach film production (Black African Cinema, 239ff).
8 Diawara states that Cuba and Ghana have run seasons of each other’s films (118). Granma reported: (1) “the First Retrospective of New Latin American Cinema” in July 1984 in Luanda, Angola, with documentaries, fiction and animated films (“Luanda,” 4); (2) a Cuban Film Week in Accra, Ghana, in July 1985 (“Accra,” 5); and (3) a diplomatic protocol for 1986-88 between Cuba and the Ghana Film Industry Corporation for cinema cooperation: mutual film weeks, commercial showing of films, coproductions and Cuban technical support for Ghanaian cinematography (“Protocolo Cuba-Ghana en cine,” 1).
9 See especially the reports and photographs in Cine Cubano 115 (1986):
1. Castro’s speech, “Nada es imposible” (Nothing Is Impossible), at the closing session of the Festival.
2. Article on the “Presence of Africa,” for the first time, at the Festival.
3. Cuban critic Isaac Ramírez’s paper on the history of African cinema, in which we might note that his dated references are a good indication of the paucity of scholarship available in Latin America on African cinema, and where Ramírez points out the attractiveness of the large African market for Latin American cinema.
4. Interview with Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, “Useful Cinema and the National Consciousness,” introduced with this comment: “From the very beginning, Vieyra has said that the most important aspect of this Festival for him, and for all the Africans present, is the opportunity to explain what has been accomplished in that area of the world in the field of cinema, despite colonialism, hunger, Apartheid, isolation, illiteracy, and so many other factors” (“Cine útil y conciencia nacional,” 58).
5. Photographs of many of the African delegates delivering speeches and participating in the meeting.
6. Declaration by the FEPACI filmmakers, similar to Gaston Kaboré’s presentation at the meeting, regarding intentions to unite African and Latin American cinemas and to support the Joint Resolution eventually adopted.
10 From Brazil’s Cinema Novo, Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Vidas Secas (Barren Lives, 1963) and Glauber Rocha’s Antônio das Mortes (1969); from Cuba, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968); exiled Chilean Patricio Guzmán’s La batalla de Chile (1973-79 (Battle for Chile [1973-79]); and from Argentina, by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1965-68) (FESPACO 1987 41-42). Daily programs distributed at FESPACO and the local newspaper Sidwaya also gave screening data for Cuban filmsRetrato de Teresa (Portrait of Teresa, 1979) by Pastor Vega and Una novia para David (A Girlfriend for David, 1985) by Orlando Rojas.
11 Granma cites a 1985 Cuba-Ethiopia coproduction by Miguel Fleitas and Menghistu Yihum Belay, Hacia la vida (Toward Life) (“Acaba de realizarse una coproducción cubano-etíope,” 4). In addition to the documentaries, the fictional war film Caravanawas produced in 1990 by ICAIC, Granma Studios and the National Film Laboratory of Angola (Caravana, 70).
12 Among ICAIC coproductions for the decade 1980-89, Burkina Faso is the only African country listed (Evora 22).
13 Some circles connect-the interpreter for the Cuban producer was none other than Guy-Désiré Yameogo, later selected by FEPACI to study at EICTV.
14 These included: Los chicos de la guerra (The Boys of War, 1984), by Bebe Kamín (Argentina); Rancheador (Slave Hunter, 1975) and Maluala (1979), Sergio Giral’s classics on Cuban palenques; Un hombre de éxito (A Successful Man, 1986) by Humberto Solás (Cuba, 1986); Clandestinos (Living Dangerously; also, Underground; 1987) by Fernando Pérez (Cuba); and Haitian Corner (1989) by Raoul Peck (FESPACO 1989).
15 A partial exception in 1991 was the participation as juror by Sarah Maldoror, often included among African filmmakers, who is identified at the festival, however, in terms of her Caribbean origin-”Guadeloupe” (“Jurado,” 3).
16 Aufderheide gives a detailed and well-grounded analysis of the tensions at the 1987 and 1989 New Latin America Film Festivals surrounding production difficulties, disaffection among younger directors, a “crisis in rhetoric,” problems and restructuring at EICTV, and other issues.
17 In the overall analysis of the eventual decline in contacts that seemed so promising, we should note, as one concrete factor, the closely ensuing deaths of two participants in the 1985 and 1986 Havana exchanges: Paulin Soumanou Vieyra in 1987, and Jean-Michel Tchissoukou in 1988. Also, Burkina Faso President Thomas Sankara, a strong supporter of cinema, was assassinated in 1987.
18 Granma reports for the same event over 250 films, including 75 feature films (Pollo 5).
19 For example, African directors Dani Kouyaté, Mohamed Camara, Drissa Touré and Moussa Sene Absa offered a roundtable at Amiens in 1995, where the Mexican filmMujeres insumisas (Untamed Women, 1995) by Alberto Isaac was in competition and won the Public’s Award (“Amiens: Films du Sud Primés”). And at the 1999 Amiens Festival, Samba Félix N’Diaye (Senegal) and Gabriel Retes (Mexico) participated together on a jury that awarded prizes to two Latin American films (“Les Dossiers,” C).
20 Some of the best known features are Cuban films, such as Sergio Giral’s trilogy on slavery and slave rebellion: El otro Francisco (The Other Francisco, 1973), Rancheador(Slave Hunter, 1974) and Maluala (1979); Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s La última cena (The Last Supper, 1976); Cuba’s first musical comedy, Patakín (1984), by Manuel Octavio Gómez; and Brazilian productions, such as Carlos Diegues’s Ganga Zumba (1963) andQuilombo (1984) on the seventeenth-century maroon community of Palmares, and Walter Lima’s ChicoRey (1985).
21 See the 1998 “Dossier: Esclavage et images/Slavery and Images,” with Michel Amarger’s article, “African Filmmakers Exposed to the Amnesia of the Slave Trade.”
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