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).

Eijanaika

 

Director Shôhei Imamura

actor Shigeru Izumiya

actress Kaori Momoi

EIJANAIKA              A-                                                                                                                  aka: Why Not?                                                                                                                             aka:  What the Hell?                                                                                                                    Japan  (151 mi)  1981  ‘Scope  d: Shôhei Imamura                                                               

The world is cruel when it is changing. 

The title translates to “What the hell?”, a masterful, unforgettable historical epic about the eijanaika riots in 1867, displaying a brief glimpse of people power in the Edo era as the Tokugawa Shogunate, a military dictatorship that ruled for more than 700 years, gave way to the Meiji Restoration, effectively ending the Shogunate’s 264-year feudal system, while doors to the West were just starting to crack open.  Commodore Perry’s visit to Yokohama harbor a decade earlier helped destabilize a strict social order, opening doors of commerce, where mismanagement at local levels led to widespread corruption and criminality.  Some of this was difficult to follow, as you couldn’t keep track of which side each character was on, perhaps intended to all be a blur, as local warlords and masterless samurai were battling the Emperor for control of the country, but most of this is told through ordinary people or those on the fringes of society, becoming an extremely compelling and cynical look at how both government and business collude with samurai soldiers and thugs, whoever is available, to protect their interests, while the underclasses scurry about trying not to be crushed by the changing vanguards of power.  In this film, political loyalties and personal relationships disintegrate, as the only certainty is money, where money is power, but power is constantly shifting.  The story follows Genji (Shigeru Izumiya, a rock ‘n’ roll singer), poor and rootless, who dreams of migrating to America where he can be a farmer and own his own land, yet he’s constantly besieged by his own confusion, among the more bewildering Japanese characters in cinema, while the same can be said for his more sexualized wife, Ine, played by Kaori Momoi, Hirohito’s wife in Sokurov’s THE SUN (2005), also appearing in Doris Dörrie’s Greetings from Fukushima (Grüsse aus Fukushima) (2016), who has become an alcoholic with a constantly changing mindset, routinely shifting her position, yet always remaining steadfastly loyal, despite all the sexual shenanigans she’s forced to endure, never really crawling out from the carnal world that engulfs her, remaining something of a puzzlement throughout, known for performing salacious sexual acts at a decadent street carnival owned by Kinzo (Shigeru Tsuyuguchi), a gangster boss who controls local criminal business interests.  Everyone seems to be owned and controlled and manipulated by corrupt powers.  Moral behavior, rules of a civilized society, are nowhere to be found.  Absent is the refined, more controlled aristocratic Buddhist culture, which reveals what it means to be Japanese as seen through the eyes of Mizoguchi or Ozu, who mentored Imamura, working as the second assistant director on Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari) (1953), yet the precise, regimented style did not suit him, with characters rendered completely powerless and artificial in this world, replaced by a Shinto spirit that is more magical, raw and primitive, revealing a lower class world of frenzied sexuality and irrepressible energy, driven by forces outside themselves to criminal behavior, and ultimately to a class revolution, spurring the open acts of rebellion and riots shown at the end of the film.  While based on a historical reality, the Ee ja nai ka riots, Imamura’s vision is purely fictional, with no real interest in exploring what led to this condition, or why various factions are so distrustful and at odds with each other, growing delirious with near-hallucinogenic exaggeration, becoming a defiantly fatalistic protest expressing society running amok, creating a spectacular, bravura finale that far outweighs anything that precedes it, with “Eijanaika” becoming more of a projected state of mind, becoming an epic design of massive scale, and something not easily forgotten.    

After a series of movies in the 50’s and 60’s, Imamura, a provocative filmmaker still relatively unknown outside Japan, spent the decade of the 70’s making documentaries for television, known for his sympathetic portrayals of the poor and socially outcast, expressing a deep interest in folklore and mythology, while displaying a deep distrust in societal authority, where the surface conceals the underlying forces of power, money, and sex.  Becoming disillusioned how significantly the camera alters a documentary reality, he returned to feature filmmaking with VENGEANCE IS MINE (1979), a true story of a serial killer before making this film, written ten years earlier, his first period film and one that stares straight into the eye of his own nation’s history, without a hint of nostalgia for the past, or anything resembling a hero, questioning what really motivates a developing country, creating a sprawling, large-scale epic canvas and a unique historical film taking place in 1866, revealing the turmoil leading up to the Meiji Restoration, when the Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown in favor of a 14-year old emperor.  Unlike other revolutions sparked by uprisings of the lower classes, this was a shift of power from the top, from the positions of privilege, which included the samurai class.  While poverty was widespread, inflation was rampant, causing social institutions to crumble into the economic and political chaos of the times, where criminal activity only escalated, with gangs controlling feudalistic criminal operations, then prosecuting those who those same officials persuaded to act in their behalf, making promises they can never keep, leaving behind a series of neverending casualties, some shown with extreme realism, leaving peasants impotent with rage, with the film literally exploding with movement and color, shot by cinematographer Shinsaku Himeda, exaggerated by a hyper-realistic emotional hysteria of abstract expressionism that guides the film.  Getting underneath the serene nature of Japanese culture, Imamura exhibits a kind of disruptive cinema, with a swarm of characters dominating the screen, essentially an unconventional love story between Genji and Ine, both caught up by historical events, swallowed up into a lifetime of poverty.  Ine’s family sells her to a carnival owner to stave off starvation after her husband Genji disappears in a shipwreck, a sign of the economic desperation of the times, with Ine becoming Kinzo’s mistress and starring performer in his sexual cavalcade of titillating interests known as Tickle the Goddess, where men take turns trying to blow a paper streamer between her legs, a metaphor for their sexual prowess, often left deflated.  Strangely, she differentiates herself from the other women who work as prostitutes, preferring to think of herself as an artist, yet she’s caught between two worlds as well, a willing pawn to Kinzo’s sexual exploits, yet also a comic heroine in Genji’s continual misadventures.  The assortment of weird and grotesquely surreal sideshow acts is baffling, creating discordant images, like the presence of a camel, an animal never before seen in Japan, being led by Arab handlers, shot with a claustrophobic lens, where viewers find themselves immersed in a throwback to the vulgarity and bawdiness of Chaucer’s Middle Ages The Canterbury Tales (I racconti di Canterbury) (1972), where nudity is on full display, conveying the confusion and instability of the era. 

Genji was shipwrecked on his way to Yokohama, rescued by an American vessel, spending six years in America before returning back to Japan, where he immediately kisses the soil before being thrown into jail, suspected of being a Christian, eventually escaping where he discovers his long lost wife in a carnival show working in the sleazy quarters of the East Ryogoku district in Edo (present-day Tokyo), an area along the riverside rampant with pickpockets, beggars, prostitutes, dwarves, lady wrestlers, snake eaters, and slave traders, with Kinzo on the payroll of both the Shogunate and the Emperor, playing both sides against each other, with no distinguishable differences between either side, so it’s hard to say who is the controlling force, further complicating the myriad of plot twists.  With Genji having no means of support, he goes to work for Ginzo, eventually buying back his wife, using his English language proficiency to act as a go-between with Americans, who are selling guns to both sides, and local gangsters, hoping to save enough money to return to America with his reluctant wife, evolving into bumbling slapstick ineptitude when he decides to become a thief.  The fact that the United States is also the country helping to oppress the Japanese peasantry is one of the central ironies of the film, with the Shogunate replacing samurai swords with an infantry armed with shooting rifles sold by Americans.  Much like a novel, there are detours and subpolots, with a multitude of characters introduced, much of which is difficult to follow, with suggestions that some crude edits may have chopped off some of these tangential storylines from an already lengthy film, including Furukawa (Ken Ogata), a samurai-for-hire who gets involved in some unethical assignments, used by the Shogunate as a hired killer, yet he also has a fatalistic death wish involving a double suicide with his blind mistress.  A far cry from Kurosawa’s noble samurai and traditional Japanese insistence on dedication to the nation, it’s the corruption of the samurai class, in particular, that feels most ethically depraved, as their severe Buddhist training helped to shape their meticulous standards of conduct, so to see it undermined by gangsters with so little respect for human life reveals the extent of the deep-seeded societal corruption, where local Shogun clans are fiercely fighting to protect their feudal interests from the Imperial throne, with a nation already in a state of flux by opening doors to the West for the first time after 200 years of enforced isolation.  This film shares a certain commonality with VENGEANCE IS MINE, as both share a similar vision of people as helpless pawns of society.  For the poor, they have nothing left, as the moral rot at the top of the government has stolen their future, where “What the hell?” becomes their rallying cry, with suggestions that Japan has a hidden history of spontaneous protest, as Imamura perhaps advocates for more of the same addressing modern era concerns, “My greatest obsession was individual freedom — the condition that the state had denied us absolutely during the war years — and I became fascinated by existentialism.”  Ine opens a French Can-Can revue which takes to the streets, like a 1960’s living theater, singing and dancing and cavorting in a display of sexually explicit, orgiastic revelry rivaling any Mardi Gras spectacle, which makes for an astonishing film experience, with hundreds upon hundreds of people dressed in crazy costumes, wearing outlandish makeup, filling the ‘Scope widescreen with an explosion of colors bursting with energy as the streets are filled by the carnivalesque, clownish revelers who continuously dance and sing “Eijanaika,” throwing flowers at the armed-to-the-hilt authorities, flaunting their freedom in numbers by refusing to disperse, overflowing across a bridge which separates Edo’s rich and poor districts.  Instigated by anti-Shogunate forces to mask their plans for a coup d’état, it backfires into a chaotic street frenzy of looting and celebration that also includes the women mooning the rifle-toting army challenging them to shoot, creating a moment of “empty” freedom, a freedom of those who have lost everything and have nothing to lose, where government authority is meaningless, where only anarchy exists.