Reel Resistance: The Cinema of Jean-Marie Teno
Melissa Thackway and Jean-Marie Teno
(Melton,UK: James Currey, 2020)
xxvi + 237 pp.
Book Review by EL Hadji Diop
Jean-Marie Teno is the excavator par excellence of the archival ruins of history, a filmmaker adept like no other among his African peers at extracting the ore of suppressed collective memories from the piling rubbles of the colonial past, as in his unsurpassable Africa, I’ll Fleece You. Yet in more than one respect, Teno remains an unsung “hero” in many “pioneer” narratives of African cinema. A cursory glance at a bibliographical sampler is enough to take the full measure of this tendency to overlook, downplay, or simply ignore the Cameroonian filmmaker: one fleeting allusion in Frank Ukadike’s Black African Cinema (1), a couple of scattered remarks in Olivier Barlet’s Decolonizing the Gaze, and, in Boukary Sawadogo’s Les cinémas francophones ouest-africains, no mention at all. As far as published essays and articles, the number amounts to half the 16 films Teno has been able, against daunting odds, to release year in, year out, from Homage (1985) to Chosen/Le Futur dans le rétro (2018)(2). Sadly enough, the asymmetry between a significant body of works and a scant corpus of research is nothing unusual in the field of postcolonial African cinemas. However, this paucity of secondary material is felt more acutely in the domain of documentary filmmaking, though in terms of longevity and consistency of output, its practitioners often outdo their “auteur” counterparts in the prestigious realm of fiction. A similar state of affairs can be observed in the case of the late Samba-Félix Ndiaye, another marquee figure of the documentary in postcolonial Africa: like Jean-Marie Teno, “Mister Doc” boasts a sizeable filmography spanning almost four decades, whilst commanding little to no scholarly attention.
In more than one respect, then, this book on/with Jean-Marie Teno is long overdue. Ever since Frank Ukadike’s groundbreaking “African Cinematic Reality: The Documentary Tradition as an Emerging Trend,” Jean-Marie Teno has been stuck in the limbo of benign neglect. However, Reel Resistance is more than “a work of Film Studies, African Studies, a monograph of this prolific Cameroonian director’s oeuvre, and a critical dialogue between a filmmaker and [a] scholar,” wherein the main concern is less to “speak about” than to “speak to” and “speak with” the artist (3). Above all, it is a prime exemplar of solid scholarly research, a bona fide auteur study, not another eclectic digest or mishmash of festivalistic chatter and drawing-room speculations on African film and culture. Take any book-length study of an African filmmaker, say of the late Djibril Mambety, remove the hagiographic and ethnographic contents, and the resulting “lean” material would barely make the cut—just enough for an encyclopedic entry with hardly any insight into the intricacies of the creative process and the minutiae of filmmaking as a collaborative project, a “total social fact,” to use Durkheim’s apt phrase. By contrast, in Reel Resistance there is a refreshing approach to the material. As co-author Melissa Thackway’s cautionary notes in the introductory section suggest, the point lies not so much in engaging with a primary source or in tapping into an informant with firsthand knowledge that can serve to elucidate some ethnographic subject-matter, as in engaging with Jean-Marie Teno qua a complex subject and his cinema “as an ensemble” (31).
This musical trope of the ensemble captures, better than Anjali Prabhu’s notion of the repertoire (Prabhu 2014), the dynamic pas-de-deux between scholar and filmmaker that plays out in Reel Resistance: a wide array of references, critical discussions, and theoretical concepts, but all gravitating, in harmonious unison, around “Teno’s cinematic I,” to borrow the fitting title of a sub-section in “Critical Insights,” the long second chapter of Part I where, after situating African documentary practices in their colonial and postcolonial contexts, Thackway provides a richly illuminating framework for an informed engagement with Teno’s cinema. To this end, Thackway proposes a tripartite division into “assemblage films” (the trio Hommage, Africa, I’ll Fleece You, and Bikutsi Water Blues), “idea-based films” such as The Colonial Misunderstanding and Sacred Places, and “character-based testimonial films” such as Chosen and A Leaf in the Wind (32-3). This découpage – in the Bazinian sense of a regulative idea of montage that presides over the construction of cinematic temporality during and after shooting – raises quite a few issues, as it fails, among other things, to make room for an outlier like Clando. Still, it is an astute methodological gambit that can help readers, savvy or not, to chart a path through the forbidding terrain of Teno’s multifaceted oeuvre.
Part II is made up of interviews Melissa Thackway conducted over the years with the Cameroonian filmmaker, cut up and reassembled into dense interactive segments. The veteran documentarist’s “takes” on a wide range of interrelated issues often bear the unmistakable imprint of his “practical” insight as a man of the craft. On the topic of FESPACO, few would dispute Teno’s claim that once organizers lost touch with the event’s deeper roots as a social forum for film audiences, critics, and artists, they became, unwittingly or not, “the biggest gravediggers of African cinema” (130). On Nollywood’s “local rooting” and sui generis “funding processes,” Teno eschews rushed, spur-of-the-moment judgments, unlike many African filmmakers, especially in the Francophone region, who are all too often baited into firing off dismissive broadsides. Instead, he coolly restates the case for a cinema of both entertainment and enlightenment, not as the dogma of a militant filmmaker hardened into a defensive posture, but as a way for African filmmakers, including Nollywood’s industrious, resourceful practitioners, to be always ahead of the treacherous curveballs commercial cinema keeps throwing at them (195).
Teno also recounts many episodes in his eventful artistic journey, like his early career as a video technician at France 3 in the 80’s, his organizational experiences during this Parisian stay, or the pivotal “encounter with [Souleymane] Cissé that really pushed me to start making films” (132). Whereas Cissé sensed great potential in the young journalist then attending his first FESPACO in 1983, Sembène Ousmane “sent him packing” (132), as though he were some pesky gadfly. Yet more than the personal revelations, amusing anecdotes, and other biographical tidbits, such as his brief stint as a door-to-door salesman selling select passages of Mao’s Little Red Book in the streets of Yaounde, what stands out, in Part II, is the concern to showcase Teno’s unique voice. It is as though Thackway were taking a cue from Teno himself, a filmmaker known to muster oral storytelling methods and modernist collage techniques in order to craft a specific brand of voiceover narration that lets a distinctly African “first person plural” come through in his documentaries. Indeed, the tangled issue of the voice in documentary is addressed head-on at some point, but Teno spells out his argument with a disconcerting ease; he details his filmic procedures with such clarity (162-3) that after reading his statements, one comes away better informed, and with a firmer grasp on the matter than is usually the case after digesting massive amounts of film theory. The same can be said of Teno’s discussion of his differential use of the archival footage, the “archiveological” dimension of his films, to borrow Catherine Russell’s recent conceptual tweak in Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. Usually, most filmmakers evince a keener sensitivity to the granularity of the moving image than to the modularity of time, or vice-versa. Few can attend to both, consistently. Teno does, as he explains in the two interview segments that I found the most insightful, as far as his conception of the cinematic chronotope: “(Hi)stories, Memory” and “Decolonizing the Film Library” (170-185).
Part III, the final section, consists of two appendices on Teno’s writings and films, respectively. Of particular significance is the inclusion of “Writing on Walls,” one of the most articulate and thought-provoking essays on documentary filmmaking from the margins, but also a manifesto of minoritarian cinema on the same scale as Getino and Solanas’s “Toward a Third Cinema”—hence its deserved status as the only Francophone text anthologized in Jonathan Kahana’s The Documentary Film Reader.
By and large, Reel Resistance is a timely addition to the growing body of critical studies of African filmmakers published over the last three decades, dating back to Françoise Pfaff’s The Cinema of Ousmane Sembène, A Pioneer of African Film (1984) and Twenty-Five Black African Filmmakers (1988). The prose is less crisp than in Thackway’s earlier Africa Shoots Back, there are far too many sprawling digressive footnotes, and in Part II there is a certain academic gravitas in the rounds of “informal talks” with Teno that tends to make the latter, well-known for his conversational levity, sound like an Oxbridge don pontificating to an audience of devoutly captivated followers. Still, this takes nothing from the overall significance of this monograph as a compass film and media scholars of an interdisciplinary bent can count on to embark on a journey of discovery of this key transitional figure in the short history of African postcolonial cinemas.
El Hadji Diop is a Visiting Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Macalester College, in Saint-Paul (Minnesota). His ongoing research focuses on cross-media analysis and translation in postcolonial contexts, with an emphasis on contemporary francophone Africa. Diop has published essays and articles on African film and literature, both in French and English, and has completed several translation projects in French, English, and German, on the abovementioned fields of academic research.
Notes
(1) In 1995, Frank Ukadike put Teno, along with David Achkar, on the map of critical film discourse with his essay “African Cinematic Reality: The Documentary Tradition as an Emerging Trend,” and it is worth pointing out that this seminal study of Ukadike’s, slightly revised and republished in 2004 as the more familiar “The Other Voices of Documentary: Allah Tantou and Afrique, je te plumerai,” is not only, and oddly enough, never discussed in Reel Resistance, but also conflated with the revised article featured in Françoise Pfaff’s Focus on African Films (Pfaff 2004).
(2) See the very short list of articles and chapters on Teno in the bibliography, on page 223.
(3) The lone monograph on Ndiaye came out a decade and a half ago, in French (Imbert 2007). As far as essays and articles, only Moussa Sow’s study of Ndiaye’s late ecocinematic films meet the standards of rigorous scholarly research a bit lacking in articles on Ndiaye published in reviews like the Paris-based Africultures (Sow 2013).
(4) There are some exceptions, such as Sada Niang’s engaging critical biography, but for the most part genuine auteur studies are a rarity, while journalistic or academic griottages are still all too common.
References
Barlet, Olivier. African Cinemas. Decolonizing the Gaze (London: Zed Books, 2000)
Imbert, Henri-François. Samba Félix Ndiaye, cinéaste documentariste africain (Paris : L’Harmattan, 2007)
Kahana, Jonathan (ed.). The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, 2016)
Pfaff, Françoise. The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene, A Pioneer of African Film (Westpor, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984)
_____________. Twenty-Five African Filmmakers: A Critical Study, with Filmography and Bio-bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988)
____________ (ed.). Focus on African Films. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Prabhu, Anjali. Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)
Russell, Catherine. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018)
Sawadogo, Boukary. Les cinémas francophones ouest-africains (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013)
Sow, Moussa, “Ecocinema in Senegalese Documentary Film,” Journal of African Cinemas 5:1 (2013): 3-17.
Thackway, Melissa. Africa Shoots Back. Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007)
Ukadike, Frank. Black African Cinema. (Berkeley: California University Press, 1994)
____________. “African Cinematic Reality: The Documentary Tradition as an Emerging Trend.” Research in African Literatures, 26:3 (1995): 88-96
