Yeelen (Brightness)

 

Director Souleymane Cissé

YEELEN (Brightness)                        A                                                                                          aka:  The Light                                                                                                                                 Mali  Burkina Faso  France  Germany  (105 mi)  1987  d: Souleymane Cissé

One night I was watching late-night films on . . . I think it was on Showtime.  There was this film called Yeelen [1987].  The picture had just started at 2:30 in the morning, and the image was very captivating, and I watched the whole thing.  I discovered that it was directed by Souleymane Cissé and came from Mali.  I got so excited.  I had seen Ousmane Sembène’s films from Senegal—he was the first to put African cinema on the map, in the ‘60’s—but I hadn’t seen anything quite like this . . . the poetry of the film.  I’ve seen many, many movies over the years, and there are only a few that suddenly inspire you so much that you want to continue to make films.  This was one of them.           

—Spike Lee interviews Martin Scorsese, November 24, 2008, Martin Scorsese - Interview Magazine 

The rich imagery and symbolism are carefully depicted to achieve a specific goal and significance, which is to invite the spectator to seek for the deeper meaning which transcends the literary meaning of what the entire film signifies.  

—Souleymane Cissé

Winner of the Festival Jury Prize at Cannes in 1987, the first African film to win any prize at Cannes, a festival known for its paucity of African films, and one of the first African films ever distributed on video, this is a mythic story set in an unspecified, pre-colonial past, firmly rooted in West African Mande culture (Mandé peoples), which is nothing less than the story of the world’s creation, set in an ancient Malian kingdom of West Africa, as told through an elaborately visualized African mythology and lore as seen through the eyes of a young Bambara (Bambara people) native, Nianankoro (Issiaka Kané), son of one of the elders, who upon reaching manhood discovers his life’s destiny, that he must confront his own father who has relentlessly been tracking him down since birth vowing to kill him.  His father Soma (Niamanto Sanógó) is an evil sorcerer who can summon magic powers and walks the earth chanting to the gods with a magic post carried by two servants.  Although Nianankoro recognizes his future is fraught with danger, he follows his mother’s instructions wearing a neck fetish for protection before setting out on a spiritual journey where he not only intends to escape from his father but also hopes to find his blind uncle, his father’s twin Djigui Diarra (also played by Sanógó), who will offer him more protection.  Shifting the social realist style of his earlier films, consulting with Malian historian Youssouf Tata Cissé, a specialist in the oral history of Mali, the filmmaker has reconfigured his own African cinema language, continuing the legacy of Senegalese film director Ousmane Sembène and Burkina Faso filmmaker Idrissa Ouédraogo, combining the music of Malian vocalist Salif Kefta with French jazz artist Michel Portal, opening with a brief prologue referencing Bambara symbols and divine knowledge essential to the Komo, a powerful secret society of sorcerers, “Heat makes fire and the two worlds, earth and sky, exist through light.”  In a sign of respect, permission of community elders was asked by Cissé before reenacting scenes of Komo incantations.  The film follows Nianankoro’s mythical adventures and is essentially an examination of the process of creation and destruction through light (Yeelen), expressed through oral African traditions, oftentimes featuring tribal ceremony, as Nianankoro crosses through various tribal regions.  Described by Film Comment magazine as “not only the most beautifully photographed African film ever, but also the best African film ever made,” where it was specifically designed to highlight African as opposed to Western influences, yet it surprisingly contains Western influences as well, including an Eden-like quality to the landscape, surrealistic mysticism, and an adherence to an Oedipus complex that the director may have subconsciously not even been aware of.  While this film was clearly aimed at African viewers, accentuating a culture rarely depicted on celluloid, it’s nonetheless unsurprising that those who are completely unfamiliar with the cultural references have also been mesmerized by the artistic aesthetic, as it speaks to both African and Western cultures, a film of hypnotic beauty and spiritual depth, playing out as an allegory of the times, where the ambiguous mythic narrative and arresting visual style transcend borders, lending it a universal appeal.  Part of the 1960’s decolonization and national liberation struggles on the continent, which were jolted by the assassination of democratically elected Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, African directors such as Cissé (who died earlier this year in February), Ousmane Sembène, Sarah Maldoror, and Abderrahmane Sissako were all educated in Moscow film schools, a practice that has discontinued, where there was initially some question about who might follow in their footsteps, but their collective influence clearly extends to a new crop of filmmakers like Mahamat-Saleh Haroun from Chad and Mati Diop of Senegal, both of whom studied film in Paris.

Taking three years to film, with a series of setbacks that included dust storms that lasted for months, making the crew sick, along with the unexpected death of the lead actor Issiaka Kané who tragically died during the production of the film, it was further delayed due to overseas shipping of equipment and film stock from France, where the French financing actually led to the arrest and imprisonment of Cissé, as it was legally forbidden in local productions, while shooting under such strong sunlight in a location not far from the equator presented its own challenges.  Set in a timeless age, spoken in Bambara and Fula, a historical fiction loosely based on the Epic of Sundiata, the Bambara even today remain the most powerful ethnic group in Mali, a country that prides itself in the inclusion of minority groups, each of which maintains their own distinctive ethnic culture.  While the Bambara culture features ancestor worship, the film is steeped in the traditions of the Komo, a ritualistic blending of science and nature, mastered by the descendants of powerful magicians, some of whom, like Somo and his younger brother Bafing, have abused their control of the supernatural, becoming corrupt with tyrannical power (a metaphor for the current rulers of Mali), refusing to share their wisdom outside their small enclosed ranks, or use their power for the wider benefit of all, which is the ideal sought by Nianankoro who has inherited his father’s gifts.  Forcing viewers to navigate the fundamental oppositions of change and tradition, life and death, light and darkness, Cissé indicts the corrupt and violent regime of President Moussa Traoré, who was in power when the film was made, a military dictatorship that killed protestors as well as political opposition, coming to power through a military coup that ousted the first president of an independent Mali, Modibo Keïta.  Simply put, this is the story of good and evil, imagining what happens when the two forces finally encounter one another, a film that thrives on the subjective point of view, as the director reveals the central conflict from various perspectives.  Much of it told through the amateurish performances of non-professional actors in an excruciatingly slow, non-narrative, dreamlike quality, where the dialogue is sparse, much of it perplexing, remaining a mystery, where Nianankoro, despite his magical gifts, is an everyman that the audience can sympathize with as he’s the only character that’s fully realized, earnest and kind-hearted, a young man who means well, where people willingly bestow upon him their wisdom in ordinary, everyday conversation.  Many of the rituals displayed are impressive, even if not fully understood, as the filmmaker is adhering to the authenticity of the Malian people.  Abandoned and repudiated by his father at birth and raised by his mother, Somo continues to spew venom about his desire to kill his own flesh and blood, beautifully expressed in a secret Komo ceremony where he convinces the others within the circle, “My son is the knife blade, but I am the handle.  Not even the sharpest knife can cut its own handle,” where his mantra seems to be, “You have to know how to betray in order to succeed,” featuring another weird moment where he magically forces a dog and an albino man about to be sacrificed to the gods to walk backwards towards him, as if being pulled against time, which only adds to the layered richness of the setting.  Nianankoro grows curious why his father hates him so much, a mystery that is addressed, but never really answered, so true meaning remains engulfed in mystery, continually hidden throughout, even to those who seek such knowledge.      

Like Homer’s Odyssey, Nianankoro sets out on his journey alone through the territories of Peul and Dogon, a bit like Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), where after they separate, perhaps for the last time, his mother (Soumba Traore) performs a sacred river baptismal asking the gods for his blessing, pouring milk over her naked upper torso, a quiet but immensely moving image.  Nianankoro in bare feet walks through the arid landscape of the nomadic Peul people, a tribe featuring horses and spears, who are intent on arresting him before he casts a spell to freeze one of the Peul warriors before the eyes of their King (Balla Moussa Keïta), an impressive feat.  His sorcery leads to his use in an upcoming battle with a warring tribe, as after a ritualistic head-on-head physical confrontation between two warriors, they are overrun by a neighboring village and are heading towards the King until Nianankoro sets angry bees and fire upon them to turn them back.  Having already saved his kingdom, the King asks if he could fix the infertility of his youngest wife so she could bear him a child, which he does willingly, but can’t help himself and succumbs to her beauty, actually impregnating her himself, a mistake he regrets afterwards, making him fallible, but instead of enduring the King’s wrath, he offers the girl to him before ordering them both out of his kingdom, forcing them into the cliff-dwelling lands of the Dogon, natural stargazers who have the only natural spring for miles, who offer him the advice:  “Science is inexhaustible, miracles eternal.”  Both Nianankoro and his new Peul wife Attou (Aoua Sangare) purify themselves in the waterfall before being led to his more benevolent uncle Djigui Diarra who has the gift of prophecy and offers his wisdom, confirming that his wife is indeed pregnant and carrying his son who is “destined to be a bright star,” also offering his aid, a sacred magic fetish wing of Koré, where all along Nianankoro has been carrying a wooden paddle with a gemstone eye of the Koré given to him by his mother as a gift to his uncle.  Together, they increase his powers, leading to the ultimate showdown with his father, unleashing the full force of their sorcery, with a disembodied voice announcing a final declaration of guilt against Soma, resulting in an apocalyptic blast of light that destroys them both, but it reshapes the entire landscape into sand, as a new world is born, offering a hopeful glimpse of the future, Montage, Faces, and Landscapes in Yeelen (Brightness ... YouTube (4:54).  With this film, which attempts to correct the colonial misrepresentation of African history and culture, Cissé hopes to arouse the African conscience to cleanse the government of corruption and restore the ethical integrity of ancestral Mali by linking Africans to their authentic historical roots, becoming an abstract metaphor for Africans taking control of their own destiny.  Despite attempts by Islam to extinguish the influence of the Komo, whose origins likely precede the arrival of Islam to West Africa, it still exerts great authority in contemporary Mali.  With such a visually hypnotic film, graceful and meditative, Cissé’s most philosophically layered film, the cinematography by Jean-Noël Ferragut and Jean-Michel Humeau is brilliant, while the music and sound design is equally stunning, especially at the finale, where the film remains quiet and haunting as it unravels its mysteries.      

Ben Okri on Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen  BFI Sight and Sound video conversation by Gaylene Gould, BFI’s Head Of Cinemas & Events, with the poet and novelist Ben Okri on YouTube (15:54)

Dahomey

 

Director Mati Diop

Mati Diop with the Golden Lion in Berlin

DAHOMEY               B                                                                                                             France  Senegal  Benin  (68 mi)  2024 d: Mati Diop

For me, the most important gesture with doing this film was to give back – to give back a story, a voice, a language, a power, a subjectivity to these artifacts that have been dispossessed by their own story.  So the first gesture was to make sure these artifacts stopped being objectified and could again become subjects with agency, with point of views, with subjectivity.                  —Mati Diop in an interview with NPR, October 26, 2024

From the maker of Atlantics (Atlantique) (2019), a film that won the Grand Prix (2nd place) prize at Cannes, the first black woman to be invited to the Cannes competition, though she was never graced afterwards by a single magazine cover in France, Mati Diop is a filmmaker that attempts to bridge the divide between Europe and Africa, while also establishing an ongoing conversation between the past and present.  Working in both Senegal and France, her films explore exile and identity, also memory and loss, where history is always present, offering a provocative treatise on changing historical perspectives, where this is a film about recovering artifacts and archives looted by colonial powers more than a century ago, which turns out to be a time capsule of a time capsule.  Dahomey is the name of a former African kingdom located in what is today the Republic of Benin in West Africa, initially founded in the 17th century by King Houegbadja, where the reign lasted three centuries until the French army routed and plundered more than 7000 royal objects from the kingdom’s capital in 1892-94, quickly becoming part of the French colonial empire in Africa (it still retains close ties), finally gaining its independence in 1960.  For more than 100 years, the objects were placed on display at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (now the Musée de l'Homme), an anthropology museum in Paris, later moved to the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, an entire museum devoted to art from outside Europe, becoming the subject of some controversy, as these collections are essentially war trophies acquired through colonial conquest.  During an African visit of the Burkina Faso capital of Ouagadougou in 2017, addressing the issue of art brought to Europe under colonialism, French President Emmanuel Macron became the first French president to acknowledge that colonization was a crime against humanity, making a surprise announcement of the return of stolen art to Benin, where he actually used the term “restitution,” a concept that set the gears of this film in motion, while also commissioning a wide-ranging 250-page report ("Rapport sur la restitution du patrimoine culturel africain. Vers une nouvelle éthique relationnelle") written a year later by Senegalese philosopher and economist Felwine Sarr and French art historian Bénédicte Savoy, making a public assessment of specific items that were currently held in France, laying out steps for the long-awaited restitution in 2021, Report on the restitution of African cultural heritage.  According to its findings 90 percent of sub-Saharan African cultural heritage is revealed to be located outside the continent.  Musée du Quai Branly, France’s largest ethnological museum, holds 3,157 other objects from Benin in its collection, while more are believed to reside in smaller museums and private collections.  Mixing the political and the poetic, with most of the film shot inside museums, the artifacts date back to the reigns of King Ghézo (1818-1858), King Glèlè (1858-1889) and King Béhanzin (1889-1894), where the specific pieces highlighted by the film were part of the collection of Béhanzin, the last king of Dahomey, who was captured in 1894 and exiled to Martinique where he lived under house arrest.  Despite a promise to right the moral wrongs, the reaction in France and other European countries has been polarizing at best, with each country devising their own plans, where museums initially drew up plans of return, but an outraged public has other ideas, where unfortunately it’s not so simple to think that stolen art just needs to be returned to its rightful owners, as the precedent-setting ramifications are enormous, not to mention expensive, like opening a Pandora’s Box, leading to a boatload of challenges that have literally stopped the process in its tracks, including the government’s recent move to the far-right, so rather than opening the floodgates of repatriation, only a handful of objects have actually been returned.  The historical setting of the kingdom of Dahomey reflects a time when Europeans felt entitled to exploit African countries by virtue of their own alleged intellectual superiority, as evidenced by the wretched example of 19th century European racism on display in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Black Venus (Vénus noire) (2010), yet the historical, psychological, and political responsibility for undoing the damage of the past remains one of Europe’s greatest challenges for the 21st century.

Just barely over an hour in length, the backdrop of the film is this ongoing debate, where the film crew followed 26 museum pieces of art as they are removed from public display in Paris, carefully boxed up and sealed in wooden crates, and then shipped on a cargo plane back to Cotonou, Benin, where the initial rhythm of the film is established by wordlessly following this meticulous process, using forklifts and gloved hands to move the heavy weight during the height of a worldwide pandemic.  We discover some works are on display, visible to visitors, while hundreds of thousands of other works are stored in basements, completely out of sight, existing entirely in the dark, so this film metaphorically brings them back into the light.  In something of a surprise move, Diop adds a ghostly supernatural element to something she describes as a fantasy documentary, giving voice to object number 26, a statue that represents former ruler King Ghézo, given a resounding, deeply unsettling, Darth Vader-like electronically distorted voice-over by Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel, who wrote this part of the script, delivered against a black screen, like the void of history, as he assumes the existential identity of the art object in question, “We all bear the same scars,” he says, “uprooted, ripped out...” Bemoaning the time he spent in the darkness, as if in perpetual exile, lamenting the loss of his name, reduced to only a number, this voice of the ancestors, which does not speak French, by the way, communicating in the Dahomean language of Fon, is outraged that he was ripped away from its rightful place of honor in Dahomey, with glowing memories of a proud African kingdom, while becoming increasing excited at the idea of returning to his homeland, saying at the very end, “Within me resonates infinity.”  Breaking free of convention in the format itself, this adds a disturbing element, literally personalizing the pain and anguish of the artifacts themselves, giving them a conscious life of their own, clear evidence of a deep historical scar that is difficult to heal, where the historical treasures become the lead characters of the film, having their own history, which becomes part of the overall story.  In this manner, Diop references Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s 30-minute essay film STATUES ALSO DIE (1953), with its scathing rebuke of colonialism, focusing on how African artifacts lose their cultural and spiritual significance when displayed in Western museums, stripped of their original contexts, causing the film to be banned in France when it was released, not screened in its entirety until 1968, now available on YouTube, Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Sub Ita) - Présence Africaine YouTube (30:03), where the directors were struck by the fact that African art was exhibited at the ethnological Musée de l'Homme, and not in the more prestigious national art museum of the Louvre.  Shot in a cinéma vérité style by Joséphine Drouin-Viallard, while also introducing keyboardist Wally Badarou from Benin, with experimental sounds added by Dean Blunt, a British/Nigerian artist, the film was awarded the Golden Bear (1st place) at the Berlin Film Festival of 2024, the second year in a row a documentary was awarded the top prize.  One thing this film makes painfully clear is that museums have a moral obligation to repatriate questionably acquired objects from their collections, becoming part of a recent pattern of European nations returning invaluable African artworks to their rightful owners, suggesting history is ever-changing and not a fixed understanding, and just like there are new political regimes bringing in their own set of ideas, there are always new perspectives that bring different historical understandings to light.  Diop takes no side and offers no clear answers, as the film’s greatest strength may be its ambiguity.  One thing that is not in dispute is that the slave trade uprooted actual people from the African continent, with more than 13 million kidnapped Africans enslaved or transported across the Atlantic, a heinous practice that lasted more than 300 years, so it was not just art objects that were stolen, as so many lives, families, and ancient cultures were lost or destroyed in the process, yet European museums continue to celebrate the African legacy, turning a blind eye to their own nation’s complicity in the destruction of those same cultures they are publicly celebrating. 

The film is shot in three parts, the first being the preparation for transport taking place in a lower level basement beneath the museum, which introduces the historical artifacts, where the director was struck by how this resembled a funeral sequence, where the underground of the museum is depicted as a prison or a morgue, reflective of the colonial gaze that has morbidly enclosed these artifacts.  This is followed by the arrival in Benin, where they are placed on display for a public exhibition within the presidential palace, prepared by a team of curators from Benin including Calixte Biah, a curator brought in by the Beninese government who supervised the transport from France, and Alain Godonou, who is arranging this new exhibition.  What were mere museum exhibits in Paris take on the mantle of being treasures in Benin, leading to an animated debate on how young people in Benin view the restitution of the treasures, which takes place at an auditorium at the University of Abomey-Calavi.  “Restituting 26 works out of 7,000 is an insult,” one student says, “What about the rest?”  Some remain skeptical, “The aim is not to make people in Benin happy.  The aim is to gratify France.”  One impassioned young woman claims it’s insulting that 90% of Benin’s cultural heritage is still in museums abroad, while another laments, “What was looted more than a century ago is our soul.”  Many seem to express the view that this small gesture is late in coming, and smacks of arrogance, part of a cynical public relations campaign led by Benin President Patrice Talon and French President Macron, as France is dead-set on keeping most of what they stole a century ago, yet they have to acknowledge the irony of having this spirited debate in French, which remains the official language in Benin since colonial times, remaining sensitive to the fact their own history has been erased by such prolonged European rule, as not everyone can even speak their own indigenous language of old Fon anymore, used by roughly one-sixth of Benin’s population.  The final phase includes the reaction from patrons at the public exhibition at the palace, reuniting the people of Benin with their lost treasures, which is an extension of the student debates, as there are multi-faceted ideas on what this means to Africans, who have a completely different view of these works than patrons of Western museums, offering an African perspective on the black experience, as these reference their ancestors, establishing a more personal connection.  Justice is disputed, questioning whether the colonizer is being benevolent or still holding power over the colonized.  The voices of youth are especially prominent, a diverse mix offering a variety of opinions whose views are typically overridden by political leaders who presume to speak for them, but their voices feel like a breath of fresh air, given a spontaneous energy the film otherwise lacks.  In this manner, Diop takes the idea of repatriation and reappropriates it in a way seldom heard, becoming the heart and soul of the film, as it’s their future they’re speaking about, where cultural heritage is an invaluable aspect of cultural identity and real independence.  Diop chose to broadcast the debate over the campus radio, as we see various people listening to it on their phones and laptops around the city, where we, the viewers, are the larger audience, a technique that was similarly used in Abderrahmane Sissako’s film BAMAKO (2006), where truth and reconciliation committee hearings putting war criminals on trial were publicly recorded, allowing the public to see and hear all the eye witness testimony.  The future management of African cultural heritage by African countries will be a challenging process, as Beninese officials say they need time to build a museum for the treasures as well as hundreds of other artifacts.  Security issues are a concern, as theft and terrorist targets are something governments have not always addressed, while storage is also an issue, as proper temperature and humidity levels must be regulated, so there's all kinds of things they need to figure out, which is understandable, but that cannot be an argument against restitution.  Diop really has her finger on contemporary issues linking the two continents together.  

Postscript

What the film doesn’t address is Africa’s own role in the slave trade, including that of the ancient Dahomey kingdom, where some of the fighters who fought the French were female warriors called Amazons, with Dahomey described in Stanley B. Alpern’s 1998 book Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey as a highly militaristic society, perhaps more than any other African state, that “was dedicated to warfare and slave-trading,” trading slaves to the British for guns, which is how they armed themselves with superior weaponry.  The French looting was by no means unique, as African cultural heritage objects were appropriated by French, British, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Belgian forces during 18th and 19th century, where public galleries and museums in Europe and North America, including cultural centers and academic institutions, are filled with looted artifacts stolen during the colonial wars or obtained through dubious circumstances, from the British Museum (69,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa) to the Weltmuseum of Vienna (37,000), to the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale in Belgium (180,000), to Berlin’s Humboldt Forum (75,000), to the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (70,000).  It’s also clear that the citizens of Benin are hugely skeptical of multi-millionaire President Patrice Talon’s government (his family profited from the slave trade before becoming interpreters and accountants for their colonial rulers), which may have their own intentions, as they borrowed $22.5 million dollars from the French Development Agency to help fund the construction of several new museums to house the returned treasures in a bid to make culture and tourism a new economic model.  This burden of debt is the neocolonial model, as it continues to pour African wealth into foreign interest payments and away from needed public services, as Benin has a 38.5% poverty index, ranked 166 out of 191 countries, where nearly 83% of households are unable to afford a healthy diet, Benin country strategic plan (2024–2027).  African museums are by-products of colonization and are, in many ways, still exclusionary and elitist.  Once regarded as one of West Africa’s beacons of democracy following its move away from Marxist–Leninism after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the encroaching autocracy on display during Patrice Talon’s presidency over the past seven years has caused many observers to worry about the country’s trajectory (Neoliberalism and apathy in Benin | Africa at LSE).