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)

Timbuktu

Director Abderrahmane Sissako

TIMBUKTU        B+                                      

Mauritania  France  (97 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Abderrahmane Sissako

They’re singing praise to the Lord and his prophet; should I arrest them?

—young soldier radioing his superior

This film couldn’t be more timely, as it’s perhaps the only film that predicts the presence of a murderous rogue Islamic militant group like ISIL currently grabbing the headlines with beheadings and unparalleled violence, as it’s based upon real incidents that took place in Northern Mali in 2012 when Ansar Dine Islamic militants occupied Timbuktu, once the center of scholarly Islamic learning in Africa, burning down the only public library, the Ahmed Baba Institute, including 18,000 historical manuscripts in the process.  But in particular what captured the director’s attention was an event depicted in the film, the public stoning of a young unmarried couple in the northern town of Aguelhok, both buried up to their necks and stoned to death in front of hundreds of watchers, a horribly tragic incident precipitated by their view that the couple was committing a crime against divine law.  According to Sissako, “Aguelhok is neither Damascus nor Teheran, and in no way am I looking to over-emotionalize these events for the purposes of a moving film.  What I do want to do is bear witness as a filmmaker.  Because I will never be able to say I didn’t know.  And because of what I know now, I must tell this story — in the hope that no child may ever have to learn this same lesson in the future.  That their parents could die, simply because they love each other.”  Historically, different tribes controlled Timbuktu until the French colonized Mali in 1893, granting their independence in 1960, where it remains one of the poorest regions in the world.  At the request of the government, the French military was eventually called in to run the Tuareg rebels out of the region and re-establish order, where the country recently conducted democratic elections.  While the filmmaker was born in nearby Mauritania, where he was forced to shoot the film due to the actual turmoil taking place in Timbuktu, he completed his early childhood education in Mali before returning home.  He studied cinema in Moscow at the prestigious VGIK (Federal State Film Institute) and now lives in Paris, where he discovered most of the non-professional cast he used, as well as the cinematographer Sofian El Fani, who shot Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle, Chapitres 1 et 2) (2013).  Many of the lead roles are played by professional singers, the most prominent being Malian musician Fatoumata Diawara, seen here Fatoumata Diawara - Bissa (OFFICIAL VIDEO) - YouTube (3:24). 

Initially screened in competition at Cannes, the film reportedly received a 10-minute standing ovation afterwards and won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury honoring works inspired by “the spiritual dimension of our existence,” and also the François Chalais Prize recognizing “the values of journalism.”  What Sissako brings to the subject is pure cinematic poetry, a common thread throughout his films, including WAITING FOR HAPPINESS (2002), winner of the FIPRESCI Award at Cannes, while also awarded the French Culture Award as the Best Foreign Cineaste of the Year, and BAMAKO (2006), a thought provoking film that examines the effects of globalization in Africa, specifically Mali, where the first world G8 nations historically stole what they could from African nations through colonialist exploitation, only to be replaced today by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund financial systems that remain even more deeply entrenched through the huge debts these impoverished nations supposedly owe to these international institutions, ranging from 40 to 60% of the nation’s total income.  Perhaps even more prescient was the director’s humorous insertion of a film within a film, a fictitious, rather cartoonish American film playing in the region called DEATH IN TIMBUKTU starring Danny Glover in a Sergio Leone style Hollywood western depicting a small African village falling under a torrent of bullets to rebel outsiders, watched in a feverish trance by children, a rather unfathomable intersection of fiction and reality.  While most of the news reports focus upon the wanton jihadist destruction of Timbuktu’s cultural heritage sites, outrageous acts that are themselves unconscionable, Sissako instead focuses upon the day to day effects it has on the local population, a tribal culture that has survived centuries in a brutally harsh sub-Sahara desert climate.  Opening in a stunning moment of lyrical beauty juxtaposed against the madness of ongoing violence, we see a truck of jihadists inexplicably firing machine guns at a deer/gazelle streaking through the desert, where the movement is captured as poetry in motion.  In the next shot, tribal carvings are destroyed by machine gun fire, where the centuries-old traditions of the past are wiped away in seconds.  The incomprehensible aspect is our entryway into understanding the presence of this occupied force, which goes against the laws of nature.  When they enter the mosque with their weapons, explaining they are practicing jihad, the local imam (Adel Mahmoud Cherif) tells them he is practicing jihad as well, but in Timbuktu they use the mind instead of weapons, where bringing guns into the mosque is a disgrace to the piety of God.    

The film recalls the insidious terror expressed in Raoul Peck’s Haitian film The Man On the Shore (L’Homme sur les quais) (1993), shot during the reign of the Duvalier dictatorship and his armed militia, the Tontons Macoute, who similarly terrorized the population.  The villagers in Timbuktu are comprised of various ethnic groups speaking French, Bambara, Songhay, and Tamasheq living in harmony with the nomadic Tuareg people, while these militants bring with them Arabic and even English speaking jihadists from around the globe, where the irony is they have soldiers drive around the city in trucks with loud speakers warning residents of the new laws, where they are not allowed to sing, play music, or dance, while covered women must wear socks at all times and gloves on their hands, but they require multi-lingual interpreters to get their ultra orthodox message of forbidden activities across.  Easily the most absurd example is banning the game of soccer, with armed men with machine guns taking the ball away, leaving the fully dressed players in uniform to continue playing without the ball in a choreographed, ballet-like pantomime that expresses the joy and beauty of movement, where these guys revere the skill level of Lionel Messi and imitate his post goal scoring celebratory moves on the field.  Mali is also known around the world for their intricate music, where the names of Ali Farka Touré and Oumou Sangaré spring to mind, where the idea of soldiers silencing these voices is catastrophic, but real, as they go house to house hunting down the origins of musical sounds, arresting those responsible, including Fatoumata Diawara and others who are then given 40 lashes in public, where she breaks out in song midway through her punishment.  Anyone who has seen Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013) will appreciate the profound difference in how this is visually expressed, losing the grotesque aspect of mutilated flesh, where the focus is on pain, and instead adds a poetic lyricism that highlights the injustice.  Inflicting punishment, like the public stoning, appears to be the goal of Ansar Dine rebels, where they round up villagers and subject them to a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic sharia law, bringing the imam out of the temple to question where does God enter into these ungodly actions?  When a young girl is hauled out of her home and forced into marriage to one of the armed rebels against the protests of her family, the ruling court claims this is perfectly legal, as “We are the guardians of all deeds.”  Against this backdrop, another local family is destroyed, where Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed, aka Pino) is a goat and cattle herder living in the freedom of a tent out in the desert with his wife Satima (Toulou Kiki), young daughter Toya, while also raising a young orphan Issan, who tends to the cattle every day.  When a local dispute over a dead cow results in an accidental death, Kidane is arrested and immediately sentenced to death, where the harsh and excessive punishment contrasts against the sight of rebels routinely violating their own rules, including one that lusts after Kidane’s wife, where the lingering question raised at the end is who will they be coming after next, as instead of a deer they are chasing down humans.