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)

Hale County This Morning, This Evening

 

Director RaMell Ross

HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING                  B                                          USA  (76 mi)  2018  d: RaMell Ross          

If we weren’t stuck in our first-person points of view, I would argue that most problems in the world that have to do with inequality would be solved, because we wouldn’t be stuck in our single points of views.                                                                                                                   —Director RaMell Ross                

Much has been written about this boldly impressionistic, kaleidoscopic film, which is largely a photographic exercise, basically confronting viewers to question what they see, documenting small-town life in rural Alabama, where the intent appears to be to break the mold and defy age-old stereotypical perceptions of black life by creating something new, where the filmmaker literally establishes his own uncompromising vision, which is more challenging for viewers.  Told in a non-linear fashion, for the most part, unbound by preconceived ideas on filmmaking, where a stereotypical myth of blackness is entangled at the root of the American South’s depiction, a mythology upheld in textbooks, institutions, media, film, and literature, evolving into fact and growing into laws, so the director treads new ground using a process that evolved organically through his personal engagement with the people and spaces of Hale County, Alabama, honoring its participants by resisting easy consumption, instead challenging our intellect with what has been described as a new aesthetic, offering a fresh and unpretentious take on an often overlooked part of American life, tucked out of sight, away from the distractions of media attention, where life and death exists here much as it did decades ago, with families and neighbors in close contact with one another, where there are literally no secrets, Independent Lens | Hale County This Morning, This Evening ... YouTube (2:09).  With no voice-overs or talking-head interviews, with an unobtrusive electronic musical score by Alex Somers and Scott Alario, the filmmaker utilizes landscape photography to allow nature to occasionally intrude.  What’s not shown and never mentioned is the long history of racial oppression, as this is a place where Martin Luther King sought refuge in a safe house from the Ku Klux Klan just two weeks before his assassination, now a Black History Museum in Greensboro, Safe House Black History Museum: Home, featuring endless acres of cotton fields, where poor white sharecropping families were once the subject of Walker Evans photographs in the 1941 book LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, with a text by James Agee, capturing the lives of impoverished tenant farmers during the Great Depression, a book that inspired Aaron Copland’s 1954 opera The Tender Land.  But that was then and this is now, with the region currently populated largely by people of color, where dreams of a better life have more available options, but people are still economically stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of poverty, where the county’s median income is around $30,000, so progress is slow in coming, if at all, with many facing the same roadblocks preventing advancement, creating a cyclical Sisyphean feel, like a heavy weight of history being held over their heads.  Graduating with degrees in English and Sociology from Georgetown University, while also playing point guard on the basketball team until he was sidelined by injuries, earning a Master’s in Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, currently working as an associate professor in Brown University’s Visual Art Department, Ross is a unique visual artist, awarded an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, a Rhode Island Foundation MacColl Johnson artist Fellowship, Howard Foundation Fellowship, USA Artist Fellowship, Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow, and was a 2022 Solomon Fellow at Harvard University, with this film winning the 2018 Sundance U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, where his work has also been featured in various art museums.  While this film was nominated for an Academy Award in Documentary Film in 2018, the award was given to Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s FREE SOLO (2018), featuring the extraordinary, death-defying rock climbing skills without ropes or other protective equipment by Alex Honnold.   

Stylistically, Ross has developed his own signature experimental style that is not like other black filmmakers, as it doesn’t have the humanist, cinéma vérité aesthetic of Charles Burnett out of the UCLA L.A. Rebellion school of the 60’s and 70’s, perhaps best exemplified by Killer of Sheep (1979), which this film resembles, especially in its depiction of children, or Spike Lee’s tone of provocation in exploring the complexities of black cultural identity in America, like Do the Right Thing (1989), or the sensualized, poetic flair of Barry Jenkins’ 2016 Top Ten List #1 Moonlight, whose films owe a debt of influence to Asian filmmaker Wong Kar-wai.  More than the others, this has the abstract, experimental style of Jean-Luc Godard, as it emphasizes an analytic, intellectual aspect of filmmaking that can feel obtuse and unapproachable, as the style itself is distancing, leaving viewers to reflect as much on the visual aesthetic as the subject matter, where the film is a counterpoint to the politicization of people of color and the entertainment industry’s idealizations of black life.  Ross shows blackness in a way that has rarely been depicted onscreen, with an unsentimentalized focus on emotions and perceptions as opposed to narrative actions, experimenting with form, literally creating a new cinematic language, with creative consultation from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, with his blend of naturalism and poetic realism, maker of SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY (2006), UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (2010), the somnambulistic Cemetery of Splendor (Rak ti Khon Kaen) (2015), or more recently 2022 Top Ten List #3 Memoria (2021).  The director spent five years shooting, moving to Greensboro, Alabama in 2009 to teach photography and coach high school basketball, where he didn’t initially think of shooting a film, but was simply photographing things of interest before deciding to shoot on a DSLR video camera, accumulating an astonishing 1300 hours of footage, pared down to just 76-minutes by Ross and three others in the editing room, making this a deliberately impressionistic and exploratory film, reminiscent of the quasi-experimental work of Terrence Malick’s later films, 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #1 The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012),  Knight of Cups (2015), and Song to Song (2017).  What’s perhaps surprising about this documentary is that it appears to be guided by mundane moments, following multiple protagonists over the course of several years, where sometimes they speak directly into the camera, and sometimes they are simply being observed, using a fly on the wall approach, capturing life as it is being lived, offering no sociological or philosophical conclusions, with little that might seem special or out of the ordinary, which viewers may find challenging in holding our attention, as it’s difficult to sell the banal, yet these are simply moments that most blacks will recognize as having lived through, and there is something deeply meaningful in the personalized way that it is shown.  Entertaining it is not, however, and viewers may find themselves easily distracted and confused by the Godardian dialectic, which is simply not for everyone, as many of the characters are difficult to understand, where it seemingly jumps around at random, with no coherent message, immersing viewers into the connected lives of various black individuals and families in the community, perhaps insisting that we view them on their own terms without filters or bias.  Curiously, in the only artificial, non-natural inclusion, the film also includes archival clips from the 1913 silent film, LIME KILN CLUB FIELD DAY, the first feature to star a black actor, in this case black entertainer Bert Williams in blackface, a popular silent era comedian who played the vaudeville circuit, like a ghost of cinema’s past, using intentionally off-putting moments that remind us of the origins of black representation in cinema, probing how blackness has come to be seen by large viewing audiences, introducing historical questions of ethical concerns. 

Hale County is named in honor of Confederate officer Stephen Fowler Hale, established at the end of the Civil War, with whites controlling much of the economic and political power in the county, enforced early by violence and later by decades of disenfranchisement of black voters through a statewide imposition of Jim Crow laws that were not overturned until after 1965, leaving behind a legacy of segregation and economic stagnation, with more than 25% of the population today living below the poverty line, where most everyone seems to end up working in the refrigerated conditions of a catfish processing plant.  Poetically addressing the region’s shift in demographics and the power that lies within the community in purely human terms, Ross, whose presence is occasionally seen or heard, focuses his attention on two young high school students he met while working as a teacher and basketball coach, Quincy Bryant, a struggling young father, along with his wife Latrenda “Boosie” Ash, who is pregnant with twins, and their energetic young child Kyrie, and Daniel Collins, raised by his grandmother until he was 12, as his mother’s boyfriend had “an attitude problem,” who dreams of playing in the NBA, with only one of them making it to college, able to seek out new opportunities at Selma University, a historically black college, while the other finds himself saddled by the responsibilities of a growing family, with each flowing in and out of the frame.  Using onscreen intertitles, like chapter headings, they pose poetic and philosophically thoughtful questions that aren’t immediately answerable, but offer a literary provocation of setting a mood, like “What is the orbit of our dreaming?”  “How do we not frame someone?”  “Where does time reside?” Ross captures ordinary scenes in a series of tableaux shots, exposing brief vignettes in time, like a slow-motion drive down a heavily populated main street awaiting a parade, the camera fixed straight ahead, or a student’s perspective of a classroom discussion, the unbridled enthusiasm of a child gleefully running back and forth between the living room and hallway, the hypnotic singing and bodies swaying at church, basketball and cheerleading practice, storm clouds and rain, kids playing in the streets, a nose piercing, a birthing scene, the joy of shooting off fireworks, a smoke-filled burning of tires, watching the sunlight filtering through the trees, a bee turning in circles in the back of a truck, and even a fast food drive-through, where voices are heard in the background, but rarely seen, keeping viewers off-balance, accentuated by odd camera angles that are equally unexpected.  While a shocking tragedy occurs, it is viewed as part of the everyday moments of the human experience, receiving no extra attention, with Ross respectfully observing in an understated and minimally invasive manner.  A collection of jagged, fleeting moments, the black experience has rarely, if ever, been shown this way, as it never shows important decisions being made, with only a few impactful moments, so it doesn’t allow viewers to cast judgment on what they see, but it does allow them to feel the fragility of the interpersonal relationships, where one glaring observation is just how much this film emphasizes youth, making them an essential component of the community, as they represent the future.  These young protagonists are not yet adults, yet they’re already playing adult roles, growing up too soon, where Daniel’s mother Mary can actually be heard telling her son that he is spending too much time with her, that she’s tired from all her many obligations, and needs her own space.  This is simply not what we’re typically used to hearing, or seeing, but it offers a powerful reflection on what a hard life it is being black, as it wears you out, physically and emotionally, as you’re challenged and tested on a daily basis for your entire lifespan.  It may come as a bit of a shock, with no real success stories to speak of, instead there are shared moments that collectively have a value, where the impact is internalized, with this filmmaker envisioning a new way of seeing a connection to an identifiable black consciousness, providing some of the most intimate glimpses, with viewers slowly coming to the realization why they matter, with the music of Billie Holiday providing the final grace note over the end credits, Billie Holiday: Stars Fell On Alabama (1957) YouTube (3:50).