Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973)
The screening will take place the 27th of March at Bubblan, Fiskhamnsgatan 41B Kajskjul 46, Göteborg. Here you can find the Facebook event.
The screening will start at 7 pm and the venue will open at 5.30 pm. We will serve some food for reasonable price and play film music to get us In The mood For Cinema (pun intended).
The number of seats is limited so be sure to book by sending an email to: kuf.kontakt@gmail.com; Entrance fee is 60 SEK.
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To write about Djibril Diop Mambéty’s thunderbolt first feature, Touki bouki (1973), one of the most singular and striking debuts in the history of international cinema, is not an easy task. Critics and scholars who have engaged with this complex text tend to highlight how Touki Bouki, because of its daring experimental and surrealist aesthetics, distinguishes itself stylistically from the work of the great director Ousmane Sembène, also known as “the father of African cinema”, whose work is often described as Marxism inspired realism. At the same time, the two directors share many preoccupations about Senegalese society in particular, and African societies in general, in regard to the process of decolonization since “both directors, whether explicitly or opaquely, recapitulate Frantz Fanon’s belief that decolonization often breeds a paradoxical compulsion to mimic the behavior of the deposed colonizer”. Thus, although the stylistic differences are clear and apparent, it is at the same time reductive to make simplistic comparative reflections and getting caught in reductive binary modes of interpretations. This reductive approach can be found in another crucial topic often discussed in relation to this seminal work of Mambéty: the relation between indigenous African culture and cinema, and European modernism. Here it seems obvious to me that a simplistic binary endeavor is deemed to fail if we honestly want to understand the text and its complexity.
What Mambéty manages to do so cunningly is a layered process of “transculturation” (a concept described by Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz) as he employs techniques such as discontinuous editing, Eisenstein inspired montages, non-linear and fragmentary narrative structures and more, in order to create something that owns its inventiveness just as much to European modernism as to African oral tradition. The process as transculturation implies then that filmmakers like Mambéty are engaging in cultural material and re-inveting them (Snell, 2014). This is a crucial point in how we can understand the history of film and the particularity of 70s African cinema and directors such as Mambéty, Sembéne, Med Hondo, Cissé and Maldoror.
Touki Bouki has often been compared to the French New Wave and in particular the work of Godard. This is a legitimate comparison, but it has often come from a perspective that offer the impression that cultural materials only flow one way. But Francophone African cinema also helped shape the French New Wave (Felton, 2010) which is a complex phenomenon with many souls. It is important then to proceed with caution when comparing Mambéty’s work and Godard’s but not because of fear of getting caught in the wrath of political correctness’s pundits but because it is necessary in order to really comprehend with honesty the complexity of the history of cinema and cultural encounters, and to leave behind Eurocentric perspectives on both.
The other side of the Eurocentric approach in understanding non-European cinema in general and African cinema in particular, is to focus heavily on perceived ideas of authenticity. The work of the continent’s filmmakers is often reduced to examples of primitivism and incomprehensibility. Truth is, there is no such thing as “authentic Africa” as there is no such thing as an authentic “West” and as David Murphy points out (2021), this debate of reductive oppositions only hinders our understanding of these complex texts. It becomes evident how Membéty himself is aware of this in the way he interrogates binary oppositions and highlights contradictions embedded in Senegalese society (a master class in effervescent ambivalence).
During the film we shall see how a vast array of conflicts are presented for the viewer regarding how Senegal as nation is moving forward after decolonization. The relation between tradition and modernity, rural versus urban and the aforementioned Fanonian tension in postcolonial society where neocolonialism manifest itself not only in the ruthless mechanisms of the criminal International Monetary Found (IMF) and World Bank, but also in the mind of people and the new corrupted rulers.
Touki Bouki costed 30 000 dollars to make, Mambéty had only made two short films before and had no film-making training. He did not migrate to France to find work or study and even though he clearly was inspired by Soviet cinema he did not study at the Moscow film schools where many of his African peers went. Mambéty previous training was in acting but when it was time to make films, he just took a camera and shoot. And the result is quite extraordinary.
Touki Bouki is simply a film like no others, as it borrows and at the same time departs from the oral tradition and the griot narrative, it moves in many directions without respecting linear narratives, and feels like a dream. Indeed, Mambéty himself, when asked about the aesthetic inventiveness of the film, replied “it’s the way I dream”! Also, he would say that “my work is not based on premeditation or planning; it is based on the instant. The instant is motivated. It arises from the necessities of discourse. Well, I do not like the word discourse, so perhaps I should have said the instant is forced by the necessities of movement. Movement creates its own internal dynamic and the different effect of a film arise from this dynamic”. The result is a marvel of cinematic movement, rhythm and sound. Sound in particular is extremely rich in Touki Bouki, and Ashley Clark delves into the faceted aspects of the soundscape in the most fascinating way: “Touki bouki: Word, Sound, and Power”.
Mambéty shows a keen cinematic eye in the way he assembles images, images that for him are at the center of everything. He would say: “Cinema was born in Africa, because image itself was born in Africa. The instruments, yes, are European, but the creative necessity and rational exist in our oral tradition. To make a film, you must only close your eyes and see the images […] Africa is a land of images, not only because images of African masks revolutionized art throughout the world but as a result, simply and paradoxically, of oral tradition. Oral tradition is a tradition of images. What is said is stronger than what is written; the word addresses itself to the imagination, not the ear. Imagination creates the image and the image creates cinema”.
I can’t add much to these wonderful words and, as usual with the newsletter, I prefer to give some context to the picture rather than going too much into the details of the film itself which I want our viewer to discover directly.
As you can expect Touki Bouki is not an easy film but at Bubblan and at No Home Movies we do not ask you to try and understand but rather experience the beauty of the images, the audaciousness of the film-making and sound design. If the film leaves you disoriented, there might be a reason for that, and I cannot stress enough the pleasure of being left disjointed and fragmented by seemingly unreadable images. Be humble when looking and, as our friends at Mubi Podcast would say, “it’s big world, watch globally”!
P.S.
I am pleased to show Touki Bouki also because Cinemateket has screened a couple of weeks ago Sambizanga of Sarah Maldoror, and will screen Black Girl of Ousmane Sembène the 21st of May. It is indeed a very pleasant serendipity to have these three major works of African Cinema programmed together in Gothenburg!
Let’s conclude with some word by a fellow cinephile and World Cinema’s advocate Martin Scorsese, whose Film Foundation supported the restoration of the film in 2007.
Ashley Clark, Touki bouki: Word, Sound, and Power
Richard Porton, Touki bouki: Mambéty and Modernity
Heather Snell (2014) Toward ‘a giving and receiving’: teaching Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki, , Journal of African Cultural Studies
N. Frank Ukadike and Djibril Diop Mambéty (1998) The Hyena’s Last Laugh,, Transition, (1998)
David Murphy (2021) Africans Filming Africa: Questioning Theories of an Authentic African Cinema, Black Camera
Wes Felton (2010) Caught in the undertow: African francophone cinema in the French New Wave. Senses of Cinema 57
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Jay-Z and Beyoncé referred to Touki Bouki in:
as well as for their tour:
The heritage of Mambéty is carried by his much talented niece Mati Diop whose first debut feature was one of the best movies of 2019, Atlantics (you can see it on Netflix)
Also, Diop engages directly with Touki Bouki in one of her short films: