Two Burkina Faso filmmakers dominated the 1980s and 90s on an international level: Gaston Kaboré and Idrissa Ouedraogo. While the former went on to dedicate himself to training and teaching, the latter abandoned cinema to focus on television series and production. He passed away at age sixty-four, much too young, on February 18, 2018. We should shed some light on his significant contribution to film history as well as examine why he turned away from the medium.
Social Realism as a Foundation
In the 1960s, African cinema was an activist endeavor focused on recovering Africans’ sense of identity and lost spaces; this gave rise to social commentary in the 70s. African cinema began by posing questions about the founding values of a decolonized society. Even when narrating fictional stories, these films were about strong ties to the community. Confronted with the authoritarian tendencies of the “nation’s forefathers,” the filmmakers gathered in Niamey in 1982, seeking to disengage themselves from state control. Given the disillusionment that followed independence, the cinema of the 1980s turned introspective: it focused on questioning everyone’s responsibility in the face of a collective defeat. This cinema is close in form to the “novel”; it is about the “I” instead of the “we.” Though fictional, it presents opportunities for social change and a change in worldview.
This introspective cinema of the 1980s is based on a point of view deeply rooted in social realism. Ouedraogo’s short films prioritize reality: when images speak for themselves, what is the point in commenting on them? One hears the street sounds in Ouedraogo’s Ouagadougou, Ouaga, deux roues (1984), a ballet of images on the two-wheeled traffic of Burkina Faso’s capital. It is a wordless documentary, as are those works that celebrate traditional handicrafts, Les Ecuelles (1983) and Issa le tisserand (1984):Footnote 1 “These were impressions, shots, images driven by an idea, because at the time I was wanting to make film which was socio-educative in character, targeted at an audience that was 90 percent illiterate. That meant a style of cinema in which the image was preponderant, which could be easily understood by an audience speaking forty-two different languages.”Footnote 2 Easily? Does not Ouedraogo’s work already prefigure the current pursuit of a documentary form in which the absence of commentary compels viewers to provide their own interpretation?
If Ouedraogo’s goal was to incite his immediate audience to value their expertise and daily lives, Poko (1981), his first fictional film, recounts the unfortunately common drama of a mother in childbirth whose heavy burden drags her down while the midwife cannot help her. She dies while being carried to the town hospital on a donkey-drawn cart. Back in the village where life goes on, we see the precariousness of farmers’ lives and their unflinching courage that inspires Ouedraogo in this realistic approach to fiction. It ends with a shot of millet stems blown by the wind, a powerful reminder of the inescapable passage of time.
The Choice of a Fictional Mode
We see characters in their day-to-day lives, with little dialogue; there’s a village council. The film is mostly punctuated by the sounds of daily activities while Larlé Naaba’s violinists accompany the story with their instruments and chanting. As Jacques Attali reminds us, a society speaks more through its sound and music than through statistics. This way of listening is the most important element of Idrissa’s cinema and is part of the success of his first feature film, Yam Daabo (The Choice, 1986). This film is a reflection of society, yet it uses the subjectivity of fiction to portray the trials and tribulations of a Sahelian family looking for a better life in the south. The rhythm that emerges resembles the blues, along with movement and constant relocation as favored elements of the mise-en-scène. The “choice” in question is whether a family from a village in the Sahel should continue to wait for international food aid or move out to seek a better life in the south. Though there are many ordeals and sacrifices on the way, in the end they recover their joie de vivre and their love. Such a summary cannot do justice to the emotional impact of the film. Yet it is there, generated by a reserved visual style which merely hints at reality rather than showing it, not due to diffidence, but out of respect—as exemplified in the off-camera death of Ali, the family’s little boy, struck by a car in a city street.
The emotion and sensuality conveyed in this work of social realism give rise, in the second half of the 1980s, to the awareness of an international audience now able to access a cinema previously restricted to an initiated or local audience. On the world stage, it would be recognized as a contemporary creation, not limited to a vision of an “ancestral Africa,” and thus contemporary in the sense of participating in the actual cultural discourses of a world cinema and no longer marginalized. Yam Daabo won a prize at the Semaine de la Critique. The new films by Ouedraogo, Yaaba and Tilaï, won the Prix de la Critique of 1989 and the Grand Prix du Jury of 1990, respectively.Footnote 3
Ouedraogo acknowledges that he has “in no sense any pretensions to represent his people or African values. It’s easy to become pretentious when you set yourself up as a teacher or instructor… Sembène’s ‘night school’ isn’t fictional cinema! Why talk of African cinema giving in to every modish whim? When you decide to make a fictional film you take responsibility for that and admit you’re doing it for yourself, that it isn’t necessarily an indulgence, that it can enable young Africans to dream!”Footnote 4 Cinema provides an opportunity to delve into one’s origins: “Africa will not invent the themes. They already exist. They are part of human life. The love of two children for a grandmother is universal, but we won’t talk about it the same way.”
The Human Element as a Program
Yaaba [Grandmother] (Prix spécial du Jury au FESPACO, 1989, International Critics’ Prize, Cannes, the same year), which was a great international success, was indeed very much criticized by certain Africans and by the black diaspora in American universities. The plot involves two children, Bila and Nopoko, who defy the rules imposed by adults by befriending an old woman who is an outcast from the village, suspected of being a witch. When Bila calls an adult a “bitch,” the old woman retorts: “Do not judge; she has her reasons.” The Malian writer Manthia Diawara sees in this philosophy a “bourgeois humanist conception of tolerance” and even “a sort of French liberalism.”Footnote 5 The director answered him by saying that “the subject of the film” is indeed “that people can be changed if you listen to them, and also that you shouldn’t make arbitrary judgements.”Footnote 6 With its journey of initiation for two children learning to overcome prejudice, Yaaba calls for a new view of the world, free of ideological assumptions. When the Nigerian Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike denounces it as “‘elitist’ and ‘individualistic,’” asking whether it has “a clear vision of the African future” and if it “truly illuminates societal conflicts,” he is indeed referring to the necessity for an ideological vision.Footnote 7 Yet this fictional work also speaks of the dignity of Africa, as the Senegalese cineaste Djibril Diop Mambety stresses in the rare commentary he appends to his beautiful, personal images of the making of Yaaba in Parlons Grand-mère (1989): “Whether or not we are talking about film, the grandmother will take revenge for the child who is brought to his knees!” Much like Kaboré, Ouedraogo had to confront harsh criticisms regarding “calabash cinema,” village films supposed to meet the Western expectations of an age-old Africa that could not reflect the urban challenges of contemporary Africa. “I am in pursuit of man, my one-time brother,” wrote Sony Labou Tansi.Footnote 8
This is most likely where Ouedraogo’s answer would lie. In Tilaï, which won the Grand Prix du FESPACO in 1991, Ouedraogo once again takes up the call for tolerance which was evident in Yaaba, adding to this an examination of the theme of tradition. In this later film, Saga returns to the village of his birth after an absence of two years. His fiancée Nogma has become his father’s second wife. Saga and Nogma still love each other, and they make love. According to the village’s traditional law, this is incest, and Saga must die. Kougri, Saga’s brother, is appointed to kill him, but instead he makes him promise never to return. The day Saga learns that his mother is dying, he decides, regardless of consequence, to return to the village. He blows his horn three times, as tradition demands when one enters the village and comes under its rules. Taking him for a ghost, the villagers run away. The father chases Kougri off and, in frustration, kills Saga. “I hadn’t realized it, but it’s a Greek tragedy!” the director was to say later.Footnote 9 But in fact this matters very little, for, though the particular does indeed open onto the universal, it is African reality Ouedraogo is investigating, not the universality we believe we detect in his work. The film is part of a new take on history, which includes an investigation of human beings and their relations with tradition. There is no longer a simple battle between good and evil here. Things are by no means seen in black-and-white terms, and the old rules are criticized in the very name of the values which inform them. This is what gives the film the pathos of an existential cry, the cry of a creature in crisis.
The African cry
In A Karim na Sala (Karim and Sala, 1990), a film made for the French regional TV channel FR3 with Noufou Ouedraogo and Roukietou Barry, the two young actors from Yaaba, the exploration of love between the two main characters goes far beyond the ritualization of feelings. The two are brought close by great fluidity in their contact, a simplicity of attitude, a genuine warmth. Moreover, their evocation of complex family situations gives great depth to their relationship. The film takes us away from social documentary and into a serious consideration of human relationships. This is also the aim of Ouedraogo’s short film on AIDS, Afrique, mon Afrique (1994), in which the pedagogic intent is directed more toward the fictional psychology of the characters than to the physical solution (which is to use a condom). The accent here is more on the “African Cry”Footnote 10—a terrible cry uttered in close-up by Naky Sy Savané, whom the director calls on to articulate his own suffering and revolt, to the accompaniment of a piercing score by Ismaël Lô: “Africa, my Africa, is it you, this back bending and bowed beneath the weight of AIDS? No, no, pool of blood in your hands, pool of blood in your hearts. No!”Footnote 11
This message is conveyed with a great lack of subtlety, as it is also in Obi (Idrissa Ouedraogo, 1991). In this film, before poignantly recounting her fate as a woman driven from her home by her husband, with her four children in tow, and working in the Buda gold mines, the eponymous heroine stares directly at the audience and says, “Are you still there? I’m warning you, the last thing I’m going to talk about is my husband. If that’s alright with you, we can start!” At the end of her tragic story, Obi turns once again to the camera and snaps: “Let me get on with my work! You aren’t going to put food on my plate!”
Though it is built around a crime story (a man flees Ouagadougou after killing a garage-owner in a hold-up and takes refuge in his village with the loot), Samba Traoré (1992) does not so much guide the spectator through a Hollywood-style plot as invite him rather to identify with the thief, even though murder and theft are major transgressions. Although the hero, Samba, is presented as a good-hearted crook, the film neither pardons his act nor spares him; he will have to atone for his theft. Introspection here bears on the conscience of a man who is divided against himself. The setting is not an idealized Africa. Even if the action does take place among traditional village huts, this is a very real place. Samba is also a man driven by conflict, a man in a tailspin, another with an African cry inside him. He is a loser, a James Dean-style “rebel” furiously searching for inner peace, but with no time to find it, who is overtaken by the extent of his own malaise and then, finally, by the police.
What’s the point, then, in playing on suspense as Hollywood does? The problem is not to create tension in the audience by announcing in advance what the hero is to discover or what is going to happen to him. Even with a plot based on detection, such as the one which underpins Samba Traoré (1992), Ouedraogo prefers the surprise effect which grips the audience only during the action. If the few shots which show the policemen hunting for Samba clearly cast an air of menace over the calm of his newly rediscovered village life, this is more to emphasize the precariousness and ambiguity of the place he is seeking for himself than to stress the fear of hypothetical reprisals. The arrival of the policemen ends the film, but does not provide a resolution of its basic argument. The intention is not to facilitate identification with the hero but to offer a moral reflection on the state of crisis and on human behavior.
Fictional work explores the dizzying whirl of modern life. It is not in any sense surprising, then, that Ouedraogo’s latest film is called Le Cri du Coeur (1994). Moctar, a young African immigrant to France, is obsessed with a hyena which he thinks he sees roving around the streets of Lyon. His parents become worried and take him to a psychologist, afraid that he will bring them trouble. His meeting with a drifter, played by Richard Bohringer, opens up another way of understanding his condition, not as some personal defect but as his unconscious mind intervening: “There are millions of people who believe in the virgin Mary; there are even some who’ve seen her! You just see hyenas!” In the end, the drifter, too, sees the hyena when Moctar opens the circle of fire in which he has captured it. Before it disappears, the hyena, which symbolizes the child’s contradictory relationship with Africa, takes on the features of his grandfather.
Ouedraogo is doubtless referring to the same perspective [regard] that Moctar speaks of when he tries to explain the nature of Africa to his cousin, a perspective which could sum up the approach of Ouedraogo’s cinema: “When you look [regarde], you see further.” In between this certainty of the relevance of humanity from a perspective [regard] drawing on African values and the affirmations of an African in crisis, Ouedraogo looks for ways to reconcile this discrepancy.
The Risk of Fetishism
This question arose in Kini & Adams (1997), filmed in English in Southern Africa. Ouedraogo staged two farmers trying to survive and dreaming of going to the city, but jealousy, ambition, and rivalry drive them to opposite sides. It is this wall Ouedraogo is interested in, the wall that builds up inside everyone in a society that is torn between what it is becoming and what it has been, the surfacing of a new individual fascinated by the consumer lifestyle but anxious about the emptiness and abnormality of the values implied by this mentality, which is vested in profit and the exclusion of the weak. It is this gulf he shows us, one that will lead to the end of a friendship and to tragic consequences for a man who cannot accept the impoverishment he faces. We are miles away from the cowboy hero who has free will, relieved of the weight of custom, freed from state control, who is fully ready for a destiny he has the power to define and magnify if he desires to. If Kini and Adams, in their social ambition, are looking, each in his own way, to assert themselves individually, they eventually express their longing/search for individuality through a refusal of individualism.
And yet, there’s an ambiguity. In writing about Kini & Adams (Burkina Faso, 1997), I highlighted how Ouedraogo attempted to explore humans in crisis in order to better assert, almost obsessively, the idea of humanity. The result is a certain theatricality and, above all, the systematic orchestration of reconciliation. Kini & Adams is the story of a never-ending reunion. But in extremity, in death, the two friends become close again, to the backdrop of the same recurring image—the sunset—whose banality reflects the fetishization of the theme. Their conflicts were just for show, a comédie humaine, repeatedly resolved as the bond between them became ever stronger. So much so that, rather than confronting humanity head-on to help prevent its dislocation, the film falls into the trap of endorsing a conservatism of lofty sentiments. Ouedraogo, bitterly criticized first for indulging in folklore and, subsequently, for trying to make European cinema, concludes: “I’ve come to the end of a line of argument. Perhaps we should now go back to our ancestors, back to a sort of historical epic, with far-seeing heroes.”Footnote 12 He is doubtless referring to the same “seeing” that Moctar speaks of when he tries to explain the nature of Africa to his cousin, a seeing which could sum up the approach of African cinema: “When you look, you see further.”
Ouedraogo, however, lacks the identity mark that will be at the heart of his successors’ cinema, the filmmakers of the 2000s, for whom identity is a work in progress and cannot be tied (down) to one place only. Indeed, a new cinema surfaces at the turn of the century, with films such as Life on earth (La Vie sur terre) from Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako (1998) or Bye bye Africa, from Chadian Mahamat Saleh Haroun (1999), symbols of a new type of writing able to take risks in form as well as content, to ask unanswered questions, to uncompromisingly explore mankind.
Hybridity as an Intuition
Ouedraogo brings this intuition to his films. As Alain Gomis did in L’Afrance (2001), with Le cri du coeur he overturns the intention behind L’aventure ambiguë (Cheik Amidou Kane), which suggests that hybridization is deadly, and claims that people do not die from an encounter with the Western world. His musical choices follow the same logic. If Ouedraogo turned to the Cameroonian composer Francis Bebey to write the music for le Choix/Yam Daabo (1986) and Yaaba (1989), he did so to contribute to the emotional dimension of those narratives.Footnote 13 On the other hand, for Tilaï (1990), he used music of the South African Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) to achieve a jazz ambience, opening the film to interrogations about traditional lawa.Footnote 14 This opening affects the great films of Africa that refuse to be attached to strictly territorial expressions in order to lay claim to Africa’s inscription on the world. Even Sembène ended Moolaade by replacing the traditional ostrich egg that rests on top of the mosque’s minaret with a TV aerial in the film’s final image. Mature people know how to sort good from bad influences; there is no point in cutting oneself off from the world.
But Ouedraogo stops short of breaking with the next generation. When he conferred on Abderrahmane Sissako the Golden Stallion Award at FESPACO in 2003 for Heremakono, Sissako was hurt by the request made by Ouedraogo, then President of the Jury, to “come back to us.” “I answered that to come back, you first have to have left and that I never left.” In La Colère des dieux / Anger of the Gods (Burkina Faso, 2003) Ouedraogo wanted “a modern music that draws on traditional sources,” and he asked Manu Dibango to write it. In the end, he retained only one jazz composition from the many that Dibango composed “to tip the film into the modern era with the arrival of the white man.”
Historical Realism
Obsessed with finding purely African images against a torrent of outside images, Ouedraogo makes one last attempt by diving into history. Sembène tried all his life without ever finding the funding to make a film about Samory Touré, the Mandingue sovereign of Wassoulou, who fought against colonization. Ouedraogo ended up renouncing his desire to make a film about Boukari Koutou (aka Ouobgho), brother of Naba Sanem, who refused to sign the treaty proposed by Binger in 1891, leading a guerrilla offensive against the French until 1898. After looking for funding for ten years, he instead made La Colère des dieux / Anger of the Gods in 2003, before deciding to give up making big feature films altogether. As a result, the subject of this film is not resistance, but the reasons for the defeat of the resistance fighters, of Africa before the onslaught of the invaders, and of Africa in the world today. Divisions and internal power struggles have undermined Africans’ capacity to resist, and can only result in stirring the anger of the gods. (2809) “For the new generations, the hero isn’t necessarily the one who resists,” claimed Ouedraogo. “You can’t go on resisting guns with arrows and spears. When we see the great hero Lumumba with Mobutu, we see someone who was politically naive; he did everything to get himself killed! You have to be extremely careful with the images that represent our past to not fall into the trap of conveying the opposite of what we want to express.”
It would thus be illusory to confine resistance to valiant heroes: “Everybody knows that if the white man conquered easily, it was because he benefited from a lot of complicity,” Ouedraogo adds. We have to have a different mindset. The old people sought the protection of Gods by taking their powers in all kinds of rituals and charms; contemporary people, who live in a world no longer sacred, have to work under their own power to fit back into the world.
The Retirement
There were two factors that drove Idrissa Ouedraogo to stop trying to make great motion pictures. The first one is that it was more and more difficult to find enough funding, resulting in the ultimate frustration of not being able to make the film he wanted or of the film being too limited in its form. Another cause often invoked to explain the lack of audience is that the African public does not have access to African films. Idrissa Ouedraogo himself exclaimed: “My public exists, but cannot see the films. If I don’t develop television distribution on digital screens, I have no audience! I only have a potential audience! We are lying when we say we have a public!”
“I will no longer make fiction films under these conditions of extreme deprivation,” he said. “People forget we’ve been at Cannes, that we’ve received great awards, that we’ve pushed African cinema, and so we make television movies for our people! It’s as though there are no true creators in Africa. We still haven’t realized that it is also possible to create with just a small tool. Trying to find funding for five or six years before making a film is terrible.” He criticizes the policy of scattering small allocations of funding and calls for aid based on sound values. “It doesn’t help them grow and it doesn’t help us grow,” he shouts. “We have to talk about it and stop this cycle that contains more frauds than real directors and producers in the film industry! Tomorrow will be harder on the Continent but many know the way we must go: democratization through digital technology.”
There is another reason, though: “Every time a producer deals with an African, there are issues of cultural differences!” The relationship with the North is brutal. Producers dictate what they want, technicians don’t understand Africa, the audience often imagines it before even seeing the film. Some critics blame Ouedraogo for not continuing on the path of his early days, with the films that “seduced” them. Why were there errors in France or in Southern Africa?
The answer could be seen with his turning to local sources, with what was available thanks to the solidarity of filmmakers. That’s how Ouedraogo was able to produce Guimba (Cheikh Oumar Sissoko, Mali, 1993) and the first films from his young fellow countrywoman Apolline Traoré, Kounandi (2003) and Sous la clarté de la lune (2004).
“Even though Kini and Adams had a small budget of 8 million French francs, it wasn’t too bad! What a waste, our audience hasn’t seen it. That’s why I think we should use different platforms.” To compete with the satellite television invasion of images that don’t feature Africa, he directed, in 1999, a sparkling hit TV show, Kadi Jolie. Eighty episodes of twelve minutes each about the pretty Kadi (Aminata Diallo Glez), who makes a mockery of men who get too close to her, “because it doesn’t matter if it’s celluloid or digital, all that matters is that the image is made, as a counterweight to the invasion of images from other places,” he explained.
As he went through many performances and projects, from producing to distribution, from commissioning short films to staging The Tragedy of King Christophe at the Comédie Française, little by little Ouedraogo lost his authorial aura. But he never stopped wondering about the ways to make images “by ourselves and for ourselves.” “Because there was a denial of our culture, we are always thinking of how the other is going to judge us.” This attempt to find empowerment could only result in work: “Young African filmmakers aren’t aware of their own history of cinema, they don’t know what has been made, they haven’t seen all the films, they could have learned by criticizing and avoided the pitfalls of youth, and taken the wonderful things we made in the 1980s and 1990s.”
Yes, this cinema was wonderful and Idrissa Ouedraogo remains one of the most influential African filmmakers of his generation. The contradictions he tried to explore have helped the audience to find their places in their contemporary world, and helped his successors to establish the foundations of a new cinema, providing, appropriately, both continuity and rupture.
Two Burkina Faso filmmakers dominated the 1980s and 90s on an international level: Gaston Kaboré and Idrissa Ouedraogo. While the former went on to dedicate himself to training and teaching, the latter abandoned cinema to focus on television series and production. He passed away at age sixty-four, much too young, on February 18, 2018. We should shed some light on his significant contribution to film history as well as examine why he turned away from the medium.
Social Realism as a Foundation
In the 1960s, African cinema was an activist endeavor focused on recovering Africans’ sense of identity and lost spaces; this gave rise to social commentary in the 70s. African cinema began by posing questions about the founding values of a decolonized society. Even when narrating fictional stories, these films were about strong ties to the community. Confronted with the authoritarian tendencies of the “nation’s forefathers,” the filmmakers gathered in Niamey in 1982, seeking to disengage themselves from state control. Given the disillusionment that followed independence, the cinema of the 1980s turned introspective: it focused on questioning everyone’s responsibility in the face of a collective defeat. This cinema is close in form to the “novel”; it is about the “I” instead of the “we.” Though fictional, it presents opportunities for social change and a change in worldview.
This introspective cinema of the 1980s is based on a point of view deeply rooted in social realism. Ouedraogo’s short films prioritize reality: when images speak for themselves, what is the point in commenting on them? One hears the street sounds in Ouedraogo’s Ouagadougou, Ouaga, deux roues (1984), a ballet of images on the two-wheeled traffic of Burkina Faso’s capital. It is a wordless documentary, as are those works that celebrate traditional handicrafts, Les Ecuelles (1983) and Issa le tisserand (1984):Footnote 1 “These were impressions, shots, images driven by an idea, because at the time I was wanting to make film which was socio-educative in character, targeted at an audience that was 90 percent illiterate. That meant a style of cinema in which the image was preponderant, which could be easily understood by an audience speaking forty-two different languages.”Footnote 2 Easily? Does not Ouedraogo’s work already prefigure the current pursuit of a documentary form in which the absence of commentary compels viewers to provide their own interpretation?
If Ouedraogo’s goal was to incite his immediate audience to value their expertise and daily lives, Poko (1981), his first fictional film, recounts the unfortunately common drama of a mother in childbirth whose heavy burden drags her down while the midwife cannot help her. She dies while being carried to the town hospital on a donkey-drawn cart. Back in the village where life goes on, we see the precariousness of farmers’ lives and their unflinching courage that inspires Ouedraogo in this realistic approach to fiction. It ends with a shot of millet stems blown by the wind, a powerful reminder of the inescapable passage of time.
The Choice of a Fictional Mode
We see characters in their day-to-day lives, with little dialogue; there’s a village council. The film is mostly punctuated by the sounds of daily activities while Larlé Naaba’s violinists accompany the story with their instruments and chanting. As Jacques Attali reminds us, a society speaks more through its sound and music than through statistics. This way of listening is the most important element of Idrissa’s cinema and is part of the success of his first feature film, Yam Daabo (The Choice, 1986). This film is a reflection of society, yet it uses the subjectivity of fiction to portray the trials and tribulations of a Sahelian family looking for a better life in the south. The rhythm that emerges resembles the blues, along with movement and constant relocation as favored elements of the mise-en-scène. The “choice” in question is whether a family from a village in the Sahel should continue to wait for international food aid or move out to seek a better life in the south. Though there are many ordeals and sacrifices on the way, in the end they recover their joie de vivre and their love. Such a summary cannot do justice to the emotional impact of the film. Yet it is there, generated by a reserved visual style which merely hints at reality rather than showing it, not due to diffidence, but out of respect—as exemplified in the off-camera death of Ali, the family’s little boy, struck by a car in a city street.
The emotion and sensuality conveyed in this work of social realism give rise, in the second half of the 1980s, to the awareness of an international audience now able to access a cinema previously restricted to an initiated or local audience. On the world stage, it would be recognized as a contemporary creation, not limited to a vision of an “ancestral Africa,” and thus contemporary in the sense of participating in the actual cultural discourses of a world cinema and no longer marginalized. Yam Daabo won a prize at the Semaine de la Critique. The new films by Ouedraogo, Yaaba and Tilaï, won the Prix de la Critique of 1989 and the Grand Prix du Jury of 1990, respectively.Footnote 3
Ouedraogo acknowledges that he has “in no sense any pretensions to represent his people or African values. It’s easy to become pretentious when you set yourself up as a teacher or instructor… Sembène’s ‘night school’ isn’t fictional cinema! Why talk of African cinema giving in to every modish whim? When you decide to make a fictional film you take responsibility for that and admit you’re doing it for yourself, that it isn’t necessarily an indulgence, that it can enable young Africans to dream!”Footnote 4 Cinema provides an opportunity to delve into one’s origins: “Africa will not invent the themes. They already exist. They are part of human life. The love of two children for a grandmother is universal, but we won’t talk about it the same way.”
The Human Element as a Program
Yaaba [Grandmother] (Prix spécial du Jury au FESPACO, 1989, International Critics’ Prize, Cannes, the same year), which was a great international success, was indeed very much criticized by certain Africans and by the black diaspora in American universities. The plot involves two children, Bila and Nopoko, who defy the rules imposed by adults by befriending an old woman who is an outcast from the village, suspected of being a witch. When Bila calls an adult a “bitch,” the old woman retorts: “Do not judge; she has her reasons.” The Malian writer Manthia Diawara sees in this philosophy a “bourgeois humanist conception of tolerance” and even “a sort of French liberalism.”Footnote 5 The director answered him by saying that “the subject of the film” is indeed “that people can be changed if you listen to them, and also that you shouldn’t make arbitrary judgements.”Footnote 6 With its journey of initiation for two children learning to overcome prejudice, Yaaba calls for a new view of the world, free of ideological assumptions. When the Nigerian Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike denounces it as “‘elitist’ and ‘individualistic,’” asking whether it has “a clear vision of the African future” and if it “truly illuminates societal conflicts,” he is indeed referring to the necessity for an ideological vision.Footnote 7 Yet this fictional work also speaks of the dignity of Africa, as the Senegalese cineaste Djibril Diop Mambety stresses in the rare commentary he appends to his beautiful, personal images of the making of Yaaba in Parlons Grand-mère (1989): “Whether or not we are talking about film, the grandmother will take revenge for the child who is brought to his knees!” Much like Kaboré, Ouedraogo had to confront harsh criticisms regarding “calabash cinema,” village films supposed to meet the Western expectations of an age-old Africa that could not reflect the urban challenges of contemporary Africa. “I am in pursuit of man, my one-time brother,” wrote Sony Labou Tansi.Footnote 8
This is most likely where Ouedraogo’s answer would lie. In Tilaï, which won the Grand Prix du FESPACO in 1991, Ouedraogo once again takes up the call for tolerance which was evident in Yaaba, adding to this an examination of the theme of tradition. In this later film, Saga returns to the village of his birth after an absence of two years. His fiancée Nogma has become his father’s second wife. Saga and Nogma still love each other, and they make love. According to the village’s traditional law, this is incest, and Saga must die. Kougri, Saga’s brother, is appointed to kill him, but instead he makes him promise never to return. The day Saga learns that his mother is dying, he decides, regardless of consequence, to return to the village. He blows his horn three times, as tradition demands when one enters the village and comes under its rules. Taking him for a ghost, the villagers run away. The father chases Kougri off and, in frustration, kills Saga. “I hadn’t realized it, but it’s a Greek tragedy!” the director was to say later.Footnote 9 But in fact this matters very little, for, though the particular does indeed open onto the universal, it is African reality Ouedraogo is investigating, not the universality we believe we detect in his work. The film is part of a new take on history, which includes an investigation of human beings and their relations with tradition. There is no longer a simple battle between good and evil here. Things are by no means seen in black-and-white terms, and the old rules are criticized in the very name of the values which inform them. This is what gives the film the pathos of an existential cry, the cry of a creature in crisis.
The African cry
In A Karim na Sala (Karim and Sala, 1990), a film made for the French regional TV channel FR3 with Noufou Ouedraogo and Roukietou Barry, the two young actors from Yaaba, the exploration of love between the two main characters goes far beyond the ritualization of feelings. The two are brought close by great fluidity in their contact, a simplicity of attitude, a genuine warmth. Moreover, their evocation of complex family situations gives great depth to their relationship. The film takes us away from social documentary and into a serious consideration of human relationships. This is also the aim of Ouedraogo’s short film on AIDS, Afrique, mon Afrique (1994), in which the pedagogic intent is directed more toward the fictional psychology of the characters than to the physical solution (which is to use a condom). The accent here is more on the “African Cry”Footnote 10—a terrible cry uttered in close-up by Naky Sy Savané, whom the director calls on to articulate his own suffering and revolt, to the accompaniment of a piercing score by Ismaël Lô: “Africa, my Africa, is it you, this back bending and bowed beneath the weight of AIDS? No, no, pool of blood in your hands, pool of blood in your hearts. No!”Footnote 11
This message is conveyed with a great lack of subtlety, as it is also in Obi (Idrissa Ouedraogo, 1991). In this film, before poignantly recounting her fate as a woman driven from her home by her husband, with her four children in tow, and working in the Buda gold mines, the eponymous heroine stares directly at the audience and says, “Are you still there? I’m warning you, the last thing I’m going to talk about is my husband. If that’s alright with you, we can start!” At the end of her tragic story, Obi turns once again to the camera and snaps: “Let me get on with my work! You aren’t going to put food on my plate!”
Though it is built around a crime story (a man flees Ouagadougou after killing a garage-owner in a hold-up and takes refuge in his village with the loot), Samba Traoré (1992) does not so much guide the spectator through a Hollywood-style plot as invite him rather to identify with the thief, even though murder and theft are major transgressions. Although the hero, Samba, is presented as a good-hearted crook, the film neither pardons his act nor spares him; he will have to atone for his theft. Introspection here bears on the conscience of a man who is divided against himself. The setting is not an idealized Africa. Even if the action does take place among traditional village huts, this is a very real place. Samba is also a man driven by conflict, a man in a tailspin, another with an African cry inside him. He is a loser, a James Dean-style “rebel” furiously searching for inner peace, but with no time to find it, who is overtaken by the extent of his own malaise and then, finally, by the police.
What’s the point, then, in playing on suspense as Hollywood does? The problem is not to create tension in the audience by announcing in advance what the hero is to discover or what is going to happen to him. Even with a plot based on detection, such as the one which underpins Samba Traoré (1992), Ouedraogo prefers the surprise effect which grips the audience only during the action. If the few shots which show the policemen hunting for Samba clearly cast an air of menace over the calm of his newly rediscovered village life, this is more to emphasize the precariousness and ambiguity of the place he is seeking for himself than to stress the fear of hypothetical reprisals. The arrival of the policemen ends the film, but does not provide a resolution of its basic argument. The intention is not to facilitate identification with the hero but to offer a moral reflection on the state of crisis and on human behavior.
Fictional work explores the dizzying whirl of modern life. It is not in any sense surprising, then, that Ouedraogo’s latest film is called Le Cri du Coeur (1994). Moctar, a young African immigrant to France, is obsessed with a hyena which he thinks he sees roving around the streets of Lyon. His parents become worried and take him to a psychologist, afraid that he will bring them trouble. His meeting with a drifter, played by Richard Bohringer, opens up another way of understanding his condition, not as some personal defect but as his unconscious mind intervening: “There are millions of people who believe in the virgin Mary; there are even some who’ve seen her! You just see hyenas!” In the end, the drifter, too, sees the hyena when Moctar opens the circle of fire in which he has captured it. Before it disappears, the hyena, which symbolizes the child’s contradictory relationship with Africa, takes on the features of his grandfather.
Ouedraogo is doubtless referring to the same perspective [regard] that Moctar speaks of when he tries to explain the nature of Africa to his cousin, a perspective which could sum up the approach of Ouedraogo’s cinema: “When you look [regarde], you see further.” In between this certainty of the relevance of humanity from a perspective [regard] drawing on African values and the affirmations of an African in crisis, Ouedraogo looks for ways to reconcile this discrepancy.
The Risk of Fetishism
This question arose in Kini & Adams (1997), filmed in English in Southern Africa. Ouedraogo staged two farmers trying to survive and dreaming of going to the city, but jealousy, ambition, and rivalry drive them to opposite sides. It is this wall Ouedraogo is interested in, the wall that builds up inside everyone in a society that is torn between what it is becoming and what it has been, the surfacing of a new individual fascinated by the consumer lifestyle but anxious about the emptiness and abnormality of the values implied by this mentality, which is vested in profit and the exclusion of the weak. It is this gulf he shows us, one that will lead to the end of a friendship and to tragic consequences for a man who cannot accept the impoverishment he faces. We are miles away from the cowboy hero who has free will, relieved of the weight of custom, freed from state control, who is fully ready for a destiny he has the power to define and magnify if he desires to. If Kini and Adams, in their social ambition, are looking, each in his own way, to assert themselves individually, they eventually express their longing/search for individuality through a refusal of individualism.
And yet, there’s an ambiguity. In writing about Kini & Adams (Burkina Faso, 1997), I highlighted how Ouedraogo attempted to explore humans in crisis in order to better assert, almost obsessively, the idea of humanity. The result is a certain theatricality and, above all, the systematic orchestration of reconciliation. Kini & Adams is the story of a never-ending reunion. But in extremity, in death, the two friends become close again, to the backdrop of the same recurring image—the sunset—whose banality reflects the fetishization of the theme. Their conflicts were just for show, a comédie humaine, repeatedly resolved as the bond between them became ever stronger. So much so that, rather than confronting humanity head-on to help prevent its dislocation, the film falls into the trap of endorsing a conservatism of lofty sentiments. Ouedraogo, bitterly criticized first for indulging in folklore and, subsequently, for trying to make European cinema, concludes: “I’ve come to the end of a line of argument. Perhaps we should now go back to our ancestors, back to a sort of historical epic, with far-seeing heroes.”Footnote 12 He is doubtless referring to the same “seeing” that Moctar speaks of when he tries to explain the nature of Africa to his cousin, a seeing which could sum up the approach of African cinema: “When you look, you see further.”
Ouedraogo, however, lacks the identity mark that will be at the heart of his successors’ cinema, the filmmakers of the 2000s, for whom identity is a work in progress and cannot be tied (down) to one place only. Indeed, a new cinema surfaces at the turn of the century, with films such as Life on earth (La Vie sur terre) from Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako (1998) or Bye bye Africa, from Chadian Mahamat Saleh Haroun (1999), symbols of a new type of writing able to take risks in form as well as content, to ask unanswered questions, to uncompromisingly explore mankind.
Hybridity as an Intuition
Ouedraogo brings this intuition to his films. As Alain Gomis did in L’Afrance (2001), with Le cri du coeur he overturns the intention behind L’aventure ambiguë (Cheik Amidou Kane), which suggests that hybridization is deadly, and claims that people do not die from an encounter with the Western world. His musical choices follow the same logic. If Ouedraogo turned to the Cameroonian composer Francis Bebey to write the music for le Choix/Yam Daabo (1986) and Yaaba (1989), he did so to contribute to the emotional dimension of those narratives.Footnote 13 On the other hand, for Tilaï (1990), he used music of the South African Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) to achieve a jazz ambience, opening the film to interrogations about traditional lawa.Footnote 14 This opening affects the great films of Africa that refuse to be attached to strictly territorial expressions in order to lay claim to Africa’s inscription on the world. Even Sembène ended Moolaade by replacing the traditional ostrich egg that rests on top of the mosque’s minaret with a TV aerial in the film’s final image. Mature people know how to sort good from bad influences; there is no point in cutting oneself off from the world.
But Ouedraogo stops short of breaking with the next generation. When he conferred on Abderrahmane Sissako the Golden Stallion Award at FESPACO in 2003 for Heremakono, Sissako was hurt by the request made by Ouedraogo, then President of the Jury, to “come back to us.” “I answered that to come back, you first have to have left and that I never left.” In La Colère des dieux / Anger of the Gods (Burkina Faso, 2003) Ouedraogo wanted “a modern music that draws on traditional sources,” and he asked Manu Dibango to write it. In the end, he retained only one jazz composition from the many that Dibango composed “to tip the film into the modern era with the arrival of the white man.”
Historical Realism
Obsessed with finding purely African images against a torrent of outside images, Ouedraogo makes one last attempt by diving into history. Sembène tried all his life without ever finding the funding to make a film about Samory Touré, the Mandingue sovereign of Wassoulou, who fought against colonization. Ouedraogo ended up renouncing his desire to make a film about Boukari Koutou (aka Ouobgho), brother of Naba Sanem, who refused to sign the treaty proposed by Binger in 1891, leading a guerrilla offensive against the French until 1898. After looking for funding for ten years, he instead made La Colère des dieux / Anger of the Gods in 2003, before deciding to give up making big feature films altogether. As a result, the subject of this film is not resistance, but the reasons for the defeat of the resistance fighters, of Africa before the onslaught of the invaders, and of Africa in the world today. Divisions and internal power struggles have undermined Africans’ capacity to resist, and can only result in stirring the anger of the gods. (2809) “For the new generations, the hero isn’t necessarily the one who resists,” claimed Ouedraogo. “You can’t go on resisting guns with arrows and spears. When we see the great hero Lumumba with Mobutu, we see someone who was politically naive; he did everything to get himself killed! You have to be extremely careful with the images that represent our past to not fall into the trap of conveying the opposite of what we want to express.”
It would thus be illusory to confine resistance to valiant heroes: “Everybody knows that if the white man conquered easily, it was because he benefited from a lot of complicity,” Ouedraogo adds. We have to have a different mindset. The old people sought the protection of Gods by taking their powers in all kinds of rituals and charms; contemporary people, who live in a world no longer sacred, have to work under their own power to fit back into the world.
The Retirement
There were two factors that drove Idrissa Ouedraogo to stop trying to make great motion pictures. The first one is that it was more and more difficult to find enough funding, resulting in the ultimate frustration of not being able to make the film he wanted or of the film being too limited in its form. Another cause often invoked to explain the lack of audience is that the African public does not have access to African films. Idrissa Ouedraogo himself exclaimed: “My public exists, but cannot see the films. If I don’t develop television distribution on digital screens, I have no audience! I only have a potential audience! We are lying when we say we have a public!”
“I will no longer make fiction films under these conditions of extreme deprivation,” he said. “People forget we’ve been at Cannes, that we’ve received great awards, that we’ve pushed African cinema, and so we make television movies for our people! It’s as though there are no true creators in Africa. We still haven’t realized that it is also possible to create with just a small tool. Trying to find funding for five or six years before making a film is terrible.” He criticizes the policy of scattering small allocations of funding and calls for aid based on sound values. “It doesn’t help them grow and it doesn’t help us grow,” he shouts. “We have to talk about it and stop this cycle that contains more frauds than real directors and producers in the film industry! Tomorrow will be harder on the Continent but many know the way we must go: democratization through digital technology.”
There is another reason, though: “Every time a producer deals with an African, there are issues of cultural differences!” The relationship with the North is brutal. Producers dictate what they want, technicians don’t understand Africa, the audience often imagines it before even seeing the film. Some critics blame Ouedraogo for not continuing on the path of his early days, with the films that “seduced” them. Why were there errors in France or in Southern Africa?
The answer could be seen with his turning to local sources, with what was available thanks to the solidarity of filmmakers. That’s how Ouedraogo was able to produce Guimba (Cheikh Oumar Sissoko, Mali, 1993) and the first films from his young fellow countrywoman Apolline Traoré, Kounandi (2003) and Sous la clarté de la lune (2004).
“Even though Kini and Adams had a small budget of 8 million French francs, it wasn’t too bad! What a waste, our audience hasn’t seen it. That’s why I think we should use different platforms.” To compete with the satellite television invasion of images that don’t feature Africa, he directed, in 1999, a sparkling hit TV show, Kadi Jolie. Eighty episodes of twelve minutes each about the pretty Kadi (Aminata Diallo Glez), who makes a mockery of men who get too close to her, “because it doesn’t matter if it’s celluloid or digital, all that matters is that the image is made, as a counterweight to the invasion of images from other places,” he explained.
As he went through many performances and projects, from producing to distribution, from commissioning short films to staging The Tragedy of King Christophe at the Comédie Française, little by little Ouedraogo lost his authorial aura. But he never stopped wondering about the ways to make images “by ourselves and for ourselves.” “Because there was a denial of our culture, we are always thinking of how the other is going to judge us.” This attempt to find empowerment could only result in work: “Young African filmmakers aren’t aware of their own history of cinema, they don’t know what has been made, they haven’t seen all the films, they could have learned by criticizing and avoided the pitfalls of youth, and taken the wonderful things we made in the 1980s and 1990s.”
Yes, this cinema was wonderful and Idrissa Ouedraogo remains one of the most influential African filmmakers of his generation. The contradictions he tried to explore have helped the audience to find their places in their contemporary world, and helped his successors to establish the foundations of a new cinema, providing, appropriately, both continuity and rupture.