Film and Media

One of my favorite things to do every year in New York is attend its African Film Festival (the NYAFF). I have written about it a couple times before in this blog [here] and my other blog [here]. The festival has always had a Pan-African spirit, so it includes black films from across the world, not only filmmakers living in Africa, but also the African Diaspora in the Caribbean, North and South America, and Europe. Often, the films are followed by 30-minutes of Q&A time with the director and/or some of the actors so that people in the audience can ask questions or just express their opinion of the film.

If you’re unfamiliar with the structure of the NYAFF, there are actually three parts, the first part is the premier of mostly new films at Lincoln Center which hosts the filmmakers and includes the Q&A time and parties, etc. The second part is a focus on documentary at the Maysles Cinema in Harlem, and the third part at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) coincides with the African dance festival, and this part repeats some of the films from the previous year along with other films of interest, some old, some new. Unfortunately, I had to travel during the Maysles and BAM parts this year.

The new movies that I saw at Lincoln Center were Freda (directed by Gessica Généus, Haiti), Vuta K’Kuvute/Tug of War (directed by Amil Shivji, Tanzania), Abderrahmane Sissako, un cinéaste a l’Opéra (directed by Charles Castella, France), and Ayaanle (directed by Ahmed Farah, Somalia and Kenya). In addition to these new films, I also saw an old film made in 1982: Jom, the Story of a People (directed by Ababacar Samb-Makharam, Senegal.) I also attended a seminar with the Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima and another seminar about “social impact cinema” on the topic of water scarcity and climate change. In addition to the films I saw in the theater, this year, for the first time, the festival tried a hybrid format. This was something learned from the COVID pandemic lockdown. What this meant is that some films were streamed online instead of projected in theaters, and so, in the comfort of my own home, I watched Juju Stories (directed by Abba T. Makama, Michael Omonua, and C.J. Obasi, Nigeria) and The Gravedigger’s Wife (directed by Khadar Ayderus Ahmed, Somalia and Finland.) There were many films I didn’t have time to see, because, of course, I’m also a professor and it was in the middle of my school’s final exam week, but you can see the Lincoln Center schedule [here].

On Thursday at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, I watched the new Haitian movie Freda, and after the film, its director Gessica Généus was there to talk with the audience. This was the opening night for the festival, and the theater was packed. Some special guests were dressed up for the invite-only after-party. My friend and I were a bit star struck when we discovered also sitting in the audience was the glamorous Senegalese-French actress Aïssa Maïga, and we were somewhat disappointed that we weren’t going to attend the after-party. (But to be honest, I’m a little shy anyways.)

This film is about a young woman named Freda and her relations with her mother, sister, and boyfriend during a time of political protest in Haiti in 2018. Some shots of the political protest will feel shockingly real to the audience, and as the director later explained to us when she was asked about that, that’s because they are — these are not recreated dramatizations, but shots they took while they were there experiencing the protests. These political events and conversations Freda has with her fellow college students about them are only part of the context for the story. The film really centers the daily experiences of the three women as they do their best to manage their lives. Freda’s sister is a light-skinned beauty who seeks to marry a wealthy man, but sadly this man turns out to be abusive. Freda’s boyfriend is an artist who wants her to leave Haiti with him for a better life, while her mother struggles to save face and find spiritual salvation from a history of sexual violence. Meanwhile, Freda and her sister enjoy listening to hip hop and reggae music at the local club. The film layers the various dimensions of social reality and complex issues that affect their lives in a way that is beautiful and rewarding. One thing that I appreciated is how the film does not aim to judge or moralize, but allows us to appreciate and respect the difficult decisions that the characters have to make even if those decisions turn out to have unfortunate consequences. This includes a very sensitive exploration of the sadness and dilemma of Freda’s romantic, artist boyfriend. Freda is certainly a film to look out for, and I am confident that it will soon become available on some streaming platform.

The audience was deeply moved by this major achievement by a Haitian filmmaker, and when you attend the NYAFF, it’s always the case that the audience is global, coming from all over the world. One member of the audience from a different island in the Caribbean, exclaimed, “when I watch your film, I see my country in your country.” And truly, his comment epitomizes the soul of the NYAFF — comradery across cultures and nations among people of color from all over the world. The festival is a place where universal experience is discovered and rediscovered in films about unique situations.

The next night, Friday, I saw Tug of War, which is a beautifully composed, romantic historical drama set on the island of Zanzibar in the year 1954. It is adapted from the popular Swahili novel Vuta N’Kuvute by Adam Shafi. The film tells the love story between an African communist revolutionary named Denge, who is fighting to liberate Tanzania from British colonial rule, and an Indian-Zanzibari women named Yasmin, who is running from an abusive marriage with an older man. Their love reinforces the development of their political consciousness. The film is expertly shot, and the cinematography of some scenes may remind one of another period-piece drama, the famous film about Hong Kong in the 1960s by Wong-kar Wai, In the Mood for Love. The film also aims to be rooted in Zanzibari history, and as the director explained, they did a lot of archival research to truly capture the music and imagery of the 1950s. Since the colonial archive is biased from the perspective of the white male colonizer, the director explained how they needed to deconstruct that archive to excavate the stories and sounds of that time period from the perspective of ordinary people who found joy in their music and their society even as they also organized to change their world.

On Saturday, I attended a seminar about decolonizing cinema by the famous Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima, whose important film Sankofa (1993) was recently re-released on Netflix. For those familiar with Haile’s many published interviews and statements (i.e., see Tekletsadick Belachew’s annotated bibliography of them), he’s been making pretty much the same argument repeatedly since the early 1980s, but for those aspirating filmmakers encountering him for the first time, I can imagine how his energetically combative and humorously sarcastic speaking style would be inspiring. What was perhaps a special and unexpected treat for me was that in his seminar he showed us two of the first short films he made while a young film student at UCLA. These films have only recently become available because of the UCLA Film Archive’s efforts to preserve, digitize, and make accessible the films of what has been dubbed the “L.A. Rebellion” — those early black filmmakers in the 1970s who began to theorize and practice alternatives to the hegemonic Hollywood system. After this, I got some lunch and then attended a presentation of short films by the Let’s Talk about Water program and representatives from the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science (CUAHSI) who had partnered together to make films with community stakeholders in various African countries about water issues. The short films were illuminating, though two of them seemed somewhat problematic, one-sided representations of rather singular political viewpoints. After this stimulating event, I decided that instead of staying for more films, I should go home and run a few miles and take care of my own health.

Sunday, I returned to watch two films. First, Abderrahmane Sissako, un cinéaste a l’Opéra is a documentary film directed by Charles Castella about an opera being put together for the French stage by one of the most successful and respected African filmmakers (the only one to ever win an Academy award). The documentary explores Abderrahmane Sissako’s creative process, the challenges of the COVID pandemic, and his teamwork with other artists such as the rock musician Damon Albarn. Just a few weeks before the American premier of this movie at NYAFF, Sissako’s opera Le Vol du Boli was performed in France at the Theatre du Chatelet, and there is hope that the performance might travel to other countries. The opera engages with the history of the rapprochement between Africa and Europe told through the metaphorical concept of the “Boli” — the figure of a buffalo that for the Mandika ethnic group is a sacred symbol of spiritual and political power. The conversation with the audience after the film took a surprising turn. First ensued a debate about the question of translation and the use of the word “fetish” to describe the Boli. Second was one of the actors in the opera, Baba Sissoko, happened to be a real “griot” (traditional African storyteller), and whenever he was asked a question, he would answer through a poetic song. At one point, he spontaneously broke out in a moving song praising the organizer of the festival, Mahen Bonetti, who was there in the audience. The festival’s capable young translator deftly translated the song line by line for the audience.

The next film was one of two Somali films at the NYAFF, and this is significant since fall-out from the Somalia’s civil war in the early 1990s interrupted and hampered the development of Somali cinema. (A detailed history of Somali cinema can be found in the chapter by Daniele Comberiatti in the book Cine-Ethiopia: The History and Politics of Film in the Horn of Africa.) I believe this year was the first year the NYAFF has ever featured any Somali cinema, so it’s significant that it’s not just one film, but two. We might hope that the organizers of the the NYAFF or some other African film festival can find a way to have a retrospective screening of the earlier era of post-independence Somali cinema, such as the films of Abdulkadir Ahmed Said — The Somali Dervish (1983) and Sea Shell (1992) — as well as the film Dan Iyo Xarrago, by Idriss Hassan Dirie,1973. Such a retrospective, I might imagine, could also include Somali co-productions made at the end of the colonial era such as Horn of Africa (Hussein Mabrouk, 1961), Love ma yaqaan dhibaatooyinka hortaagan (Hussein Mabrouk, 1961), and Miyi Iyo Magaalo (Hajji Cagakombe, 1963).

The new film Ayaanle was made by an international team of Somalis currently living in Minnesota and Kenya. It focuses on the experience of Somalis who face discrimination from corrupt police officers in Nairobi, and in doing so aims to counter the stereotype of Somalis as violent terrorists that the toxic Hollywood cinema and western news media promotes. However, the movie’s story is essentially a spy thriller and case of mistaken identity, as an aspiring young Somali actor is mistaken for a real terrorist after filming himself pretending to be one. He is recruited by the Kenyan intelligence agency to go undercover and help uncover a real terrorist network, and so the thriller plot unfolds. It is a good film, but perhaps one weakness (pointed out by a member of the audience) is that a film that aims to counter stereotypes about the violent, terrorist Somali male is in effect a film about stereotypes of the violent, terrorist Somali male. Instead, might the film have done more to follow up on the opening scenes of the movie where it showed ordinary Somali people living their lives in Nairobi. Also, even though Somali women clearly have played a powerful role in the social and political life of Nairobi, for instance, in the organized protests against ethnic discrimination (which is briefly shown in the film), the perspectives of women in the film are a bit flat. Nevertheless, the genre of the film is a suspense, action thriller, and a good story for all that.

Completely different from Ayaanle is the other Somali film at NYAFF, The Gravedigger’s Wife, which I streamed at home. This cinematically beautiful movie is about the deep love between a husband and wife on the outskirts of Djibouti. The wife Nasra is dying of a kidney infection, and ironically her husband Guled makes a living as a gravedigger. When he is informed that she can be saved by an operation that will cost $5,000 USD, he and their son Mahad engage in a noble, though also heartbreaking, quest to raise the money. By foregrounding their love for each other and for their son, as well as Guled’s friendship with his coworker, this movie (perhaps more than Ayaanle) also counters the stereotype of Somalis that saturates American media. There are deeply touching scenes such as when Nasra convinces her husband to sneak into a wedding party so that they can enjoy a last dance together before she dies. On the other hand, one criticism of the movie is that both the backstory of their romantic love and the improbable quest narrative to rescue her too closely follows Hollywood-style prescriptions that are heavily individualistic and exceptionalist. Although I was touched by the story of Guled, Nasra, and Mahad, I also found myself wondering about the other characters and the society in which they live. I have more to say about this movie, but that would entail an entirely separate blog post or essay, so I would love to talk about it with others. Both movies left me hopeful for the future of Somali cinema and eager for different sorts of stories.

Typically, the last day of the NYAFF at Lincoln Center is reserved for a retrospective on an older film. Often these films are not available on VHS, DVD, or streaming, so watching them at a festival such as NYAFF is the only way one can see them. For example, in previous years (before the COVID pandemic), I was able to see Ola Balogun’s Black Goddess (1978) and Med Hondo’s Sarraounia (1986).

This year, the film was Jom, the Story of a People, directed by Ababacar Samb-Makharam of Senegal in 1982. The main character of this film is a griot, who tells stories about heroes from Senegal’s history who exhibit the quality of “jom” which roughly translates as dignity, integrity, or courage. One of these historical figures is Dierri Dior Ndella, a Wolof prince who killed a French administrator in 1905 in open rebellion to colonial rule, and later, rather than submit, committed suicide. The second is Koura Thiaw, a celebrated dancer in the 1940s, who used her dance to lampoon the Senegalese bourgeoisie and express solidarity with the working classes. This segment of the film includes a wonderful scene of African dance. The context for the griot singing songs about the past is a present where the labor union is in the midst of a strike for better wages and protection of their rights. Some members of the union are being bribed to undermine the strike, but the leader of the union, as well as a collective of women in the community, exhibit the “jom” that Dierri Dior Ndella and Koura Thiaw possessed. As one might expect of films from this time period (e.g., the films of Ousmane Sembene), this film expertly blends traditional African narrative structures with cinematic form in a way that provocatively juxtaposes past and present to make a pedagogically political statement about the future direction of Senegal.

After watching the film, I did a little research and found a good review by Mohammed Mbodji [here] that explained the historical contexts that we see in the film. I also found some discussion of it in my copy of Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike’s classic book on Black African Cinema. Mbodji usefully points to some of the problems of the film that may help explain why it wasn’t as successful and well-known as it might have been. The problem, Mbodji argues, is that when a film cherry-picks details from history that are meant to have allegorical significance for the present, it leaves itself open to criticism that will bring up other historical information not in the film. In this case, the fact that Dierri Dior Ndella was a slave trader, and he was rebelling against the French administration because he wanted to maintain his trade in enslaved Africans. Moreover, the timing of the film was unfortunate, since the concept “jom” was then part of the campaign slogan of “jom, kersa, mun” (dignity, restraint, patience) for President Senghor, who had to resign his political position in 1980 just months before the film was released. The people of Senegal were perhaps interested in a new kind of story in 1981. Nevertheless, I felt lucky to be given the chance to see this film, as it represents a unique moment in African film history that was important for its development.

In sum, I had a wonderful time, and as always, my heart was inspired, and my brain was provoked to think.

This Friday, a couple friends and I went to see the opening night of Harriet, the new movie about one of the most iconic and celebrated abolitionists, Harriet Tubman. It has received many positive reviews, including the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, many of which point out that it’s not just a film about slavery but a film that also reflects on Tubman’s inner life, her romantic self-hood, her powerful relationship to her family, and gender roles. Indeed, signalling the centrality of such themes, the movie opens with Tubman having one of her sleeping spells that give her powerful visions, after which her family comes to get her so that they can present a legal petition for their freedom to their owner, which is of course rejected.  This scene is followed by a tender scene with her husband, as they think together about how to achieve freedom. Most of the movie then proceeds to tell the story of Tubman’s rise to heroic status, where her famously peculiar “spells” are not a disability for her adventures but give her something of a “super-ability” to predict the future and evade the dogs of slave catchers in action-packed chase sequences where she narrowly escapes or bravely confronts her pursuers. As we exited the theater, I  exclaimed to my friends that Tubman is a Jedi master, and awesomely so, but, as I discovered later on the internet, my humorous analogy is not actually that far off from the intention of the writers, directors, and actors who, in interviews, have compared her to super-heroes like Spider-Man and her “spells” to a “Spidey-sense.”

Although all of the usual media outlets are busy celebrating this movie as the first movie about Harriet Tubman, prefacing their praise with wonder why there hasn’t been any other movies made about her before now, it might be worthwhile to keep in mind that when magazine, newspaper, and TV reviewers (mostly white people) say, “oh, this is the first time there’s been a film about X or Y black subject,” what they often really mean is that it’s the first time for them. We can recall when reviewers were so excited about 12 Years a Slave being THE first movie to represent the horror of slavery, not noticing that exactly the same story (adapting the 1854 book by Solomon Northup) had been made before for PBS by the famous African-American director Gordan Parks in 1984 — all of which I wrote about back then on this blog [here]. It’s a bit like the statement that Columbus discovered America without noticing that there were people already there. So, the afternoon before we went to see the movie, I took a trip to the Lincoln Center branch of the New York Public Library and watched “Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad” directed by Paul Stanley, starring the sensational Ruby Dee as Tubman alongside Ossie Davies and Brock Peters, broadcast on CBS in 1965. Remarkably like the new feature-length movie, the old 1965 dramatization for television also focuses on Tubman’s inner life and family — precisely the things the new 2019 version is being praised for — this older 1965 version perhaps drawing inspiration from the Y.A. biography of her published in 1955 by the famous writer Ann Petry (thanks and shout outs to my friend Miles for teaching me about that work.) Conveniently for you, you don’t also have to go to the special research branch of the New York library, but can watch it here on YouTube.

My point in bringing up this previous version is not to say that there’s nothing new about the new one. Because there is a lot new about the new one, and the acting, cinematography, and story-telling in the new one are all quite excellent, the way that Hollywood movies are so often technically excellent with their large budgets and resources. And the new one even offers us something very exciting, as I hope you will see in my concluding paragraph to my blog post. Rather, my point is to suggest that we can read Harriet in the context of all of the other movies about slavery that your average critic for whatever magazine, newspaper, or TV show will not bring up, because they probably haven’t seen them. For instance, another recent example of Tubman on the screen (that I haven’t seen mentioned in reviews of Harriet, surprisingly) would include episode six, season two of the show Underground, which aired in April 2017 and which was a truly remarkable piece of television since the entire episode was a single monologue by Tubman that inventively wove the issues of 1850s with the issue of the Trump-era today. Whatever it is you think you’ve seen on TV before, trust me, you’ve never seen anything like this — a 45 minute monologue ripping white America apart and declaring war by any means necessary on the institution of slavery by an iconic Tubman, all in a single camera take. But in addition to all of the innovative new television and film about slavery coming out in recent years (e.g., the movie Belle that I wrote about for this blog in 2013), there is also a long history of efforts by black and white writers and directors to dramatize for the screen the horrors of slavery and the awesome resilience of enslaved peoples, that I have been researching and first published an account of in my chapter on “Cinematic Slavery” in the book The Cinematic Eighteenth Century, published in 2017.

What struck me about Harriet was not its uniqueness, but precisely how it did exactly what one would expect it to do (if you had read my chapter on cinematic slavery, wink wink), considering Hollywood conventions about dramatizing slavery and how the genre of cinematic slavery has evolved over time in dialogue with the Marxism, Civil Rights Movement, and Pan-Africanism that blossomed in the 1960s as well as the Black Lives Matter and MeToo movements more recently.

So, I want to compare Harriet to some of these other films just to indicate what a story could be, in contrast to the way that Hollywood does it.

First, what do I mean by the Hollywood style. Put simply, the Hollywood style requires a rearrangement of history to maximize the individual heroism of the subject. As a summary by Slate and another summary by the Smithsonian of all the historical inaccuracies in the film suggests, the movie focuses on her exceptional super-abilities and unique heroism. For example, in the movie version, even the Fugitive Slave Act seems to have been passed because the South was frightened of Tubman’s ability to free slaves, when in fact, the passage of this law happened before she had freed more than a few. In Hollywood, all history is rearranged around the exceptional heroism of the main character in order to magnify their uniqueness and historical significance, making heroism the causal factor in the unfolding of history. In the movie, Tubman is able to accomplish all that she accomplishes because God speaks to her and because of her strength of will. Ironically, in a film presumably about the Underground Railroad, the role of the Underground Railroad is sometimes minimized — the vast network pops up here and there as a resource for Tubman, but for the most part the movie characterizes Tubman as someone who defies the Underground organization and instead accomplishes everything by herself — alone — rather than as part of a political network.

Some of the historical inaccuracies are telling about how Hollywood carefully aims to avoid offending white audiences, so, for example, her white former master (a character invented for the screen and not based in history) is given perhaps more screen time than almost any other character (more screen time than Janelle Monae’s character, whom I think we’d all much rather see, and more screen time than the iconic Frederick Douglass, who had scarcely a line); repeatedly, the audience is subject to this white man’s tortured feelings for her because of their childhood relationship, tortured feelings that for no apparent reason are made to seem… um… relevant?…Blah. We saw this before in the movie Belle about a biracial heroine whose black mother was taken out of the original script to be replaced by the producers with a incredibly sensitive white father… Gah. Also historically impossible would be the presence in the movie of gun-toting black men working as slave catchers below the Mason Dixon line; but in fact, the law prohibiting black people from owning guns was one of the very first laws passed in the British colonies of North America. Another curious detail is how a black church in Maryland occupies a special place on the Underground Railroad, a historical improbability since black ministers were not allowed to have their own churches at this time. All of these details serve to appeal to a white, middle-class viewing audience who want to see that there was some black-on-black violence, not just white-on-black violence, and that although the church may have been a bit imperfect at times, it was mostly for the good of us all, and that white people could be very conflicted emotionally about slavery, boohoo. Sorry, not sorry, for my sarcasm.

But most importantly for me is the issue of whether Harriet is some kind of exceptional super-hero accomplishing incredible feats on her own or part of a larger political movement and complex social network. This is a more complicated question that, I think, requires us to situate the new movie in cinema history. Certainly the real Tubman was exceptional and incredible, I don’t mean to express doubt about that, but also just as certainly, she was part of a broad social movement and sophisticated political organization.

So, how might a Pan-African filmmaker tell the story of Tubman? Pan-African films such as Sankofa by Haile Gerima, Ceddo by Ousmane Sembene, and Black Goddess by Ola Balugun (which I’ve written about [here] in another blog) tend to focus on the support systems and deep cultural resources of the black community. One of the key differences between a Hollywood film and a Pan-African film would be the characterization of religion. So, while in the Hollywood Harriet, the Christian church is an ally for her escape, in the Pan-African Sankofa it is African spirituality and culture that is the ally, while the church is what betrays the rebellion. Likewise, Marxist cinema such as the classics Burn! by Pontecorvo and Last Supper by Alea paint the church as a hypocritical institution. It is probably worth mentioning that Harriet Tubman’s fellow abolitionists in the 1850s, Fredrick Douglass and Martin Delany, were closer to the Marxist viewpoint in their own direct analysis of the problematic double-role of the church as on the one hand serving the interest of the power structure while on the other hand preaching salvation to the slave. It is to the credit of the movie Harriet that it subtly indicates the complicated position of the church in relation to slavery. Historically, both scenarios were possible — sometimes the church was a resource for slaves, but other times it was the church that served as a source of intelligence for the white master in order to maintain control of his slaves through soft, indirect ways that supplemented the raw brutality of domination. Hollywood movies, including Harriet, tend to lean far in one direction in its representation, while Pan-Africanist and Marxist cinema tend to lean far in the other direction. Moreover, what Marxist and Pan-African cinema will emphasize instead of the heroic individual is the heroic community struggling to maintain solidarity and a unified voice. One might guess why Hollywood would shy away from the kinds of stories preferred by Pan-Africanists and Marxists, since the story of an empowered community of black people in mass revolt is a whole lot more scary to the white establishment than the story of an exceptional individual with superpowers constantly in a state of anxious flight.

I mention these other films not to say that Harriet is bad, because I do really think it’s good, but just to remind viewers that other stories are possible. Speaking for myself, I rather enjoyed watching a superhero Tubman, constantly in motion, as if running to the theme song from Chariots of Fire. But my point is that you wouldn’t know that other stories are possible if you only watch Hollywood stuff and read the reviews in American media. You also won’t really appreciate what is unique and interesting about Harriet.

What I think is actually great about Harriet is precisely the scenes with the other members of the Underground Railroad — how the many men and women work together. Although the central story of the film is Harriet the superhero, at the same time, here and there, are scenes of solidarity, cooperation, and intelligence. And this is what I think Hollywood has actually been learning from the Marxist and Pan-Africanist cinema of the past, now that more men and women of color are gaining positions as writers, directors, and producers in the film industry and can build upon the work of past black artists and activists to come up with a better, more innovative, and more multi-voiced vision of their art. I say this because there is no doubt that Harriet is a much better film than Stephen Spielberg’s Amistad and Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace, both of which focus on the exceptional heroism of white men on behalf of enslaved people rather than on the political solidarity and cultural resources within the black community. In addition, in many ways Harriet is a much better movie than Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis’s 1965 production, not just because it has a bigger budget and fancier cinematography, but also precisely because now black writers and directors can imagine (and not be prohibited from imagining by the production companies) such complicated political networks and cultural forms of solidarity, while the 1965 film was limited to dramatizing Tubman’s relationship to her family. I think we can appreciate Harriet in the context of cinema history as so many young and amazing artists, writers, and directors, now more of them women of color than ever, are able to lend their artistic vision to how the past informs our movement into the future.

Go see it for yourself, and then please comment on my blog if you think I’m wrong or have missed something important. Moreover, now that the American media industry is congratulating itself on finally making a movie about Harriet Tubman to prepare the way for her face on the 20-dollar bill, can they get to work on making movies about Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells…?

One of the things I love about living in New York is its annual African Film Festival, hosted by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center, and Maysles Cinema every year in May. One of the many movies that I enjoyed this year was a new Kenyan film directed by Likarian Wainaina: Supa Modo, a heartwarming story about a young girl named Jo with an incurable disease and only a month to live who loves superhero comics and movies. After Jo’s sister and mother argue with each other about whether to indulge her fantasy about having super powers during the final weeks of her life, the town ultimately comes together to make their own superhero movie with Jo in the starring role. It is a film not just about the importance of fantasy and story-telling in our lives, but also about how communities come together around stories. In a sense, the real superhero for the town ends up being the town itself.

At a moment in time when the Marvel and DC comic book universes are churning out productions each costing more than $300 million apiece, such as the never-ending Avengers series, what is also remarkable about Supa Modo is its showing us the joy of low-budget film-making. And it reminded me of another low-budget black superhero movie I saw a month earlier, Fast Color, directed by Julia Hart, about a young woman with a troubled past who can’t control her super powers in a post-apocalyptic, rural American landscape suffering from drought, where water has become the most precious commodity. It alludes to the deep inter-generational knowledge passed from mother to daughter as the family tries to evade those who want to appropriate and weaponize her super powers. It dramatizes the ways in which a “super ability” can also be experienced by the individual who has it as a “disability.” What both of these films offer is an alternative kind of black superhero, not one in which high-tech special effects unleash seemingly unlimited destruction, but one in which both fantasy and human community can play a hopeful and creative role in positively transforming the mundane realities of ordinary suffering and a character’s inner psychology.

And so I wanted to write about these two movies (and encourage everyone to see them) in the context of the most well-known black superhero movie. You know what I’m talking about. Unless you live under a rock, you remember how in February last year (2018), you and probably everyone you knew was going to see the Black Panther movie, not just once, but twice, or maybe even three times. It broke box office records worldwide. And if you happen to live in a culturally diverse city such as New York (like I do), it was also a cultural event, where people dressed up to go see it, and I don’t just mean “dressed up” like they put on a nice shirt and slacks or a pretty dress. I mean they dressed up to represent — perhaps representing their heritage or perhaps styling themselves towards a futuristic aspiration, blending a little sci-fi with that heritage. My wife proudly donned the traditional clothes of the Wollega region of her own Oromo people in Ethiopia when we went to go see it. And you may also remember how, in March of that year, complete strangers on the street or colleagues at work gave you the Wakanda Forever salute, crossed arms across their chest. It was a moment of black pride, the first blockbuster movie with an African superhero presenting a positive image of Africa — a futuristic image of an alternative African history, imagining perhaps what Africa might have been all along on the silver screen had it not been colonized and had not the racist stereotypes of that continent so thoroughly saturated global popular culture. Meanwhile, across Africa, moviegoers from Accra and Lagos to Nairobi and Addis Ababa debated how the movie had appropriated or represented aspects of their ethnic groups or cultural histories.

What I remember thinking back then, however, is that this Hollywood movie about Africa might once again so overwhelm the market that, ironically, it would make it even harder for the local film industries in African countries to compete with Hollywood’s hegemony. If you think back to ten or twenty years ago, local industries across the continent from Nigeria and Cote I’voire to Kenya and Ethiopia had finally started to emerge and develop a solid audience base. The movie industry that I participate in, and have written about, is Ethiopia’s, which produced only a handful of movies back in 2005 but was producing roughly 100 movies per year by the time Black Panther hit the scene. The movie theaters in Addis Ababa that two decades ago showed mostly Hollywood and Bollywood movies were now showing almost exclusively locally produced movies when I lived there and taught in the new masters program in film at Addis Ababa University in 2016. One of the big selling points of local black cinema is that it actually features characters and tells stories that resemble their audiences. It expresses not only their culture, but often, as in the case of Supa Modo — which is a movie about our relationship to movies — also expresses the positionality of their local culture (i.e., Kenyan or Ethiopian movies) in relation to the hegemony of the more dominant global culture (Hollywood movies). All the hype about Black Panther being this amazing representation of Africa would, I feared, not encourage people to take real African cinema seriously but might even distract African viewing publics from watching their own cinema.

After all, we can think of other African superhero movies or what is sometimes referred to as “Afrofuturism.” Afofuturism has a long history. For example, Yeelen, directed by Souleyman Cisse from Mali in 1987, ranks highly as a classic of world cinema. It was, in my view, unfortunate that all the mainstream American media hype about the achievement of Black Panther didn’t recommend Americans to also go watch Yeelen. Based on a Bambara epic about a conflict between father and son over the future of their people, its “universal” mythological structure in some ways resembles Star Wars, as this video mash-up of scenes from Yeelen overlaid with the music from Star Wars suggests.

As much as I enjoyed Black Panther (and clearly, I did, since I saw it twice in the movie theater when it came out and will definitely see it again), Supa Modo and Fast Color were emotionally more satisfying. After all, there were many aspects of Black Panther that frustrated critics. For example, many wondered, as this Boston Review article did, why the ultimate “bad guy” in a film about black solidarity was the African-American male (and not a white colonizer). The movie’s representation of the Black Panther political party and the history of black liberation struggle of the 1960s and 70s was superficial at best. At worst, it sometimes seemed that the history of Pan-African solidarity was intentionally replaced in the movie by a benevolent king whose wealth is extracted from a unique natural resource. This is a problematic notion to be sure considering the current political conflicts across Africa as factions fight for control of exactly such mineral wealth in the service of European and American multinational corporations whose industries depend on them. Considering historically the role of the American C.I.A. in overthrowing democratically elected African leaders and propping up warlords in the service of such neo-colonial corporations, it is problematic, to say the least, that in the Black Panther movie the hapless C.I.A. agent in the film (Everett Ross) is the ally of Wakanda while the orphaned descendant of the Black Panther Party (Killmonger) is its enemy. The fantasy of the movie reverses the polarities of history.

Moreover, as Gregory Pierrot has shown, in many ways the movie taps into an earlier 500-year history of European fantasy about African royalty and heroism that has always had a curiously fraught and problematic relationship to the discourse of slavery. The concept of the Black Panther was, after all, originally invented by a white guy in the context of white superheros and popular Hollywood stereotypes about Africa in the 1960s. The new comic books by Ta-Nehisi Coates — more clearly and directly than the movie — confront the inherent contradiction at the heart of the Black Panther story between cultural stereotypes of African royalty and the desire for more democratic forms of representation.

Movies such as Supa Modo and Fast Color are self-conscious of their position in relation to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but not in a simple way. In Supa Modo, for the main character Jo, the Hollywood superheroes are not white or black. In other words, Superman does not represent the “American way” for Jo. Rather, they are what the scholarly field of semiotics calls “floating signifiers” evoking for varying contexts the fantasy of empowerment and the aspirations of our shared humanity. It is not that Jo as an individual overcomes her biological limitations by appropriating American culture. It is the African community who reflects on its values and reconsiders how it organizes itself as they come together to make their own superhero movie.  Moreover, the movie wisely evades the cheap sentimentalism of a stereotypical disabled character when Jo reveals her awareness of her sister’s attempt to indulge her fantasy life.

Likewise, in Fast Color, the main character Ruth has spent a good part of her adult life trying to suppress and deny her super-ability through drug abuse. Her mother had also  hidden her abilities from the world for fear of how the public would treat her and the risk it would pose to her family. Here, the movie hints at the history of discrimination and oppression of black women. Meanwhile, the world around them seems to be caught in a terminal spiral of environmental decline, and this is not because of any singularly evil character. The movie is not a simplistic and shallow fight between good and evil where the complicated troubles of humanity are displaced onto a monstrous individual. The real “enemy” in the background of this film is climate change. And the solution, it seems, is the hidden wisdom possessed by black women.

And this hidden wisdom neither is a fantasy nor is it hidden. We should recall the very real philosophy and environmental feminist activism of Wangari Mathai in Kenya, the leader of the Greenbelt Movement and winner of the Nobel Peace prize. And considering the Greenbelt Movement’s practice of planting trees and using traditional cultural forms of maintaining nature in response to the social problems caused by deforestation, we might enjoy another “Afrofuturist” short film that I first experienced at the New York African Film Festival several years ago, “Pumzi” (directed by Wanuri Kahiu) about the role of imagination to confront deforestation and climate change.

In this blog post I’m going to try something a bit unusual and think critically about my own work. A few months ago, my colleague Srividhya Swaminathan and I published a collection of essays that we co-edited together entitled The Cinematic Eighteenth Century: History, Culture, and Adaptation for Routledge. The book includes eleven essays on various topics including one by my co-editor and one by me. Some of the ideas for my essay, “Cinematic Slavery and the Romance of Belle” were actually first expressed in this blog — in the three reviews I did of the movies Lincoln, 12 Years a Slave. and Belle. After writing those reviews and after receiving some positive feedback from colleagues, I was inspired to go do more thorough research on the topic, audit a class on African Cinema at NYU, and teach an undergraduate class on it… and voilà.

Here’s what I think our book does that’s groundbreaking. We put together some terrific essays by brilliant scholars, and one could read each one individually, but I think reading them all together is the real pay-off, because then you get a sense of the rich diversity of the eighteenth century and how different issues connect. As the chapter by Jodi L Wyett aptly demonstrates, adaptations of Jane Austen novels such as Sense and Sensibility are remarkably varied in how they represent gender relations. But I think we might also think about gender and feminist ideas in terms of other issues such as piracy or slavery or the Declaration of Independence. Of course, Jane Austen would have been aware of all those other issues also, so our hope is that after reading our book one will take away richer sense of the interconnections among these different subjects and a fuller appreciation for real potential of the eighteenth century for film and for popular culture today. An essay by Ula Lukszo Klein tackle subjects such as homosexuality in movies such as The Duchess; essays by Dorothée Polanz and Elizabeth Kraft give a historical view of the centuries of commodification of the celebrity figures Marie Antoinette and Charles II; and Jennifer Preston Wilson analyzes how the camera techniques depict the mental illness and treatment of King George III. My own essay looks at the movie Belle, which is a film that takes the plot structure and setting of a Jane Austen novel, inserts a bi-racial heroine, and brilliantly uses that form to narrate complicated debates about the insurance industry’s relationship to slavery.

Other essays in the book do interesting things with genre. In a lot of scholarship, adaptations of novels to the screen are analyzed in one place while historical period dramas are analyzed in another place. But although scholars may categorize movies this way, I don’t think people who go to theaters always think like that. My colleague Srividhya Swaminathan’s essay on pirates theorizes the concept of the “transcoded mosaic” to show how the new TV shows Crossbones and Black Sails actually mix and mash together a little adaptation here, a little historical fiction there, with a lot of inventive storytelling to add more diversity to the characters. The chapter by Kyle Pivetti looks at how a sci-fi movie The Martian adapts Robinson Crusoe to twenty-first century economic ideologies; the chapter by Courtney Hoffman analyzes how the TV show Outlander uses time travel to prompt critical reflection on women’s history. Likewise, National Treasure uses the detective thriller form to portray the history of the Declaration of Independence (in highly inaccurate and politically misguided ways, of course, as the essay by Colin Ramsey in our collection explains.) And of course, lest we only think of the eighteenth century as something a bit stodgy or serious, another essay by Sarah Stein and Robert Vork shows how the TV satire Blackadder mocks the whole enterprise of making films about the eighteenth century. Point being, the different essays in our book speak to each other.

Nevertheless, since our book has been published, I’ve been thinking more about some of the issues we raise, including what the eighteenth century signifies globally in world cinema and what sorts of genres of film encode the different time periods. For example, the “pirate movie” is usually about the time period roughly 1680 to 1730 (the so-called “golden age of piracy”) while the “western” is usually about the 1860s to 1890s, and kung-fu movies are seen as having a different geography and temporality altogether. But let’s take the movie Sense and Sensibility directed by Ang Lee in 1995. This movie is usually talked about in relation to other Jane Austen adaptations. But Ang Lee’s other most famous film is a kung-fu movie (a.k.a., the Wuxia genre), Couching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (produced in 2000) one of the most successful kung-fu movies of the twenty-first century and famous for encouraging more international collaborations in an increasingly global movie industry. We might note that the setting for Sense and Sensibility is England in the 1790s, and the setting for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is China in 1778 — remarkably the historical moments are just a few years apart from each other, but in terms of geography and genre, they seem worlds apart. And yet, Ang Lee’s two films are not so different from each other. Both movies foreground friendship and equality against cultural expectations of marriage and class distinction.

What might it do for us to reconsider a Jane Austen adaptation in relation to other film genres and other contexts? Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was a popular hit, but we might think more globally, as one of the contributors to our collection Dorothée Polanz remarked during an eighteenth-century studies conference in Toronto this past October that a lot of Japanese manga appropriate literary and historical figures from eighteenth-century Europe for their stories.

I think there’s a lot more to say about genre in a global context than we did in our book, so I’m hoping some new scholars will come along and pick up where we left off. The thing about genre is that it always must fulfill the audience’s expectations in some way, but the formula is not actually so rigid as one might think. Truly, the delight for the audience is in the innovation — how a movie, TV show, comic book, video game, or YouTube sketch might play with those expectations and perhaps uses the conventions of one genre to shed light upon another.

I’m curious what other examples people might know of such genre-mixing that pertains to an international eighteenth century. Please feel free to comment on this blog post to share some examples and your thoughts about them.

Last Friday, my wife and a couple of my students went to a New Negress Film Society event at the Made-In-New-York Media Center in Brooklyn, where we saw five short films and then participated in a conversation between the directors and artists and the audience about their work. The name “New Negress” alludes to Alain Locke’s seminal book The New Negro, published in 1925, that perhaps more than any other single book defined the Harlem Renaissance as it was happening. Locke’s purpose was to overturn the prejudicial paradigm assumed by politicians, social scientists, poets, and artists who understood the “negro” as an uneducated former slave or as a “social problem.” Against this assumption, Locke’s book instead reveals the rich culture of intellectual and artistic achievement. His dialectical argument draws attention to the historical forces that transform society, most especially the migration of black people from the rural south and Caribbean to cities where they could develop a community identity and support each other’s art. No longer was art and literature created with a white audience in mind, as if the purpose of art was merely to justify black’s humanity to the white hegemony. In the 1920s, in New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, and other cities, they were creating for each other, forging a dynamic artistic culture in order to engender a new, vibrant, community whose understanding of its blackness was diverse and innovative.

The New Negress Film Society creates a space where black women filmmakers can make movies for each other, rather than submit their artistic vision to the demands of a film industry dominated by the white, male gaze. As Nsenga Burton wrote in an article for TheRoot.com, and as Spike Lee suggests in his satirical movie Bamboozled, the Hollywood industry limits the potential of black actors and artists in the film industry either to absurd caricatures of black identity such as Tyler Perry’s Medea or to historical dramatizations of “social problems” usually set in the past (because the past is not so threatening to our present), such as Ava DuVernay’s recent movie Selma. Although Jacqueline Bobo has chronicled the long history of achievement in her book Black Women Film and Video Artists, I think what the New Negress Film Society does that is new is create a space where such artists can form a community that nurtures an aesthetic that truly speaks to the diversity of black women and is liberated from the burden of having to explain the black experience — as if there were only one — to the white men who dominate the industry. You can read an interview with two of the members of the New Negress Film Society and watch some of their movies [here].

One of the films that we saw, “savage” by Kumi James, is about a white teacher trying to make a difference in an urban, mostly black high school. I think everyone in America is familiar with the way that Hollywood has told this story over and over again, in which the troubled teenagers are rescued by the inspiring teacher, such as Michelle Pfiefer’s role in Dangerous Minds. Such movies pretend to be about black communities, but in actuality they repeat stereotypes of urban life as a background for affirming the heroic role of the white protagonist. The formula for such movies almost always includes a pivotal scene where the teacher shows up at the student’s house and has a transformative heart-to-heart conversation with the family. Of course, whenever I discuss such films with my students, the ridiculousness of such cinematic fantasy is quickly and easily revealed whenever I ask my students, “how would you feel if your teacher suddenly showed up at your doorstep?” The students always respond  to my question along the lines of, “ew, gross, weird, creepy.” What is brilliant about James’s movie is how it flips the script, by exposing the somewhat creepy desire behind that Hollywood fantasy. In an important scene, James reverses the standard movie plot line and has the student show up at the teacher’s house, which of course unsettles the teacher. You can watch the entire movie [on Vimeo], and below is a “teaser”:

But in addition to reversing the Hollywood gaze, films by black women filmmakers also focus inward on the complexities of daily life. The Haitian-American filmmaker and educator Stefani Saintonge focuses on the experience of teenage girls in her film “Seventh Grade,” which won an award from Essence magazine. As she remarked during the Q&A, her movie is intentionally wishful thinking — imagining how she wished she had responded to questions about sexuality and social stigma experienced she experienced as a teenager. In a way, it seems to me that the film first holds up a mirror to that experience, and then imagines a realistic response to that experience in order to provide an empowering paradigm for audiences. You can watch the whole film below:

The Ghanaian filmmaker Frances Bodomo showed her cinematically luscious film “Boneshaker” about an African family searching for a faith-healer in the wilderness of Louisiana in order to release their daughter from spiritual possession. When they get lost in the wilderness and encounter a group of white men wearing camouflage and carrying guns, one expects a moment of racist conflict, but there is none, and instead the men just give the family directions. After the family finds the church in the middle of the wilderness, the daughter stubbornly resists the faith-healer, and they leave. What the family ultimately finds instead is unexpectedly beautiful. Here is a trailer:

I’d seen Bodomo’s work before at New York’s African Film Festival in 2014 when she showed her short film “Afronauts,” which she is currently developing into a feature-length drama. Here is the trailer for “Afronauts”:

Other filmmakers created experimental films that worked through the symbolism of black identity. Ja’Tovia Gary pursued her interest in what she calls “Afrosurrealism” to explore the complexities of human psychology and black female subjectivity in her poetic film “The Ecstatic Experience.” I wasn’t able to find a clip of that film on the internet, but below I’ve included a documentary film that she did on “Cakes Da Killa” — this film a straightforward documentary, quite different than the more surrealist work she showed us at the event:

Likewise, making full use of her talents as a sound-artist, Dyani Douze collaborated with Zimbabwean graphic designer Nontsikelelo Mutiti to render a poetic sound-image “Pain Revisited” that layers recorded speech and music over a collage of artistic and journalistic imagery to meditate on black identity.

https://vimeo.com/121950877

One thing I appreciated is the formal diversity in terms of their style, aesthetics, and vision as well as the diversity of what identities and backgrounds they bring: California, Texas, Louisiana, Ghana, Zimbabwe, New Jersey, and of course, my new home borough of Brooklyn. It reminded me of what I love about Brooklyn as a space where artists and writers from such different cultural locations come together to share the love and inspire each other. I look forward to future exhibitions of their work.