The indocile image: cinema and history in Med Hondo's Soleil O and Les Bicots-Nègres, Vos Voisins

Abstract

The project of this article is to engage the field of cinema and history (a field that has traditionally been theorized from a primarily Euro-American perspective) by taking Africa as a point of departure, and, more specifically, the cinema of Med Hondo, one of the major film directors on the continent whose work is arguably obsessed with history. Through a case study of his first two masterpieces, Soleil O (1970) and Les Bicots-Nègres, Vos Voisins (1974), the article explores the ways in which the director has succeeded in producing what has been referred to as an indocile image, one that is agnostic vis-à-vis orthodoxies in cinema and history alike. He does so by not only critically deploying many of the categories of the historiographical operation, but also by formally exploring new ways of engaging history with film. It may be argued that some of the avenues he opened four decades ago are yet to be fully used or surpassed.

Keywords::

• Med Hondo
• African cinema
• cinema and history
• historiography
• Soleil O
• Les Bicots-Nègres
• Vos Voisins
• indocile image

Notes

^1. Unpublished interview with the author. (Sanogo 2012).

^2. Dixit Rosenstone: ‘ This opening section, then clearly involves my thesis, one I will argue in the pages ahead- that the familiar, solid, world of history on the page and the equally familiar but more ephemeral world history on the screen are similar in at least two ways: they refer to actual events, moments and movements form the past, and at the same time, they partake in the unreal and the fictional, since they are both made out of a set of conventions we have developed for talking about where human beings have come from (and where we are and where we think we are going, though this is something most people concerned with the past don't always admit)’ (Rosenstone 2006, 2).

^3. Indeed many historians and philosophers of history have denied the fact that Africa belongs in history as such, and claimed that it is impervious to history. Perhaps the most famous of all is German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel (Hegel 1956). Both Joseph Ki-Zerbo and J.D. Fage summarize this debate very well. (Ki–Zerbo 1972, 1981). This moribund line of thought has surprisingly had political fortune in recent years in particular in the infamous 2007 speech by former French President Nicholas Sarkoky entitled ‘Le Discours de Dakar’ to which African historians offered a published rebuttal (Konaré 2008).

^4. The agnostic relationship referred to here is almost akin to distanciation, the distancing that comes out of an awareness of a record of exclusion. It is analogous to a disbelief in the claims of history, having been the victim of it, having been cast out of it. It is thus not a relationship of relatively uncritical embrace that might exist in other contexts.

^5. The reader will note that the term ‘history’ in this article is deployed in three major acceptations:

	(a) History as the past
	(b) History as a retelling of the past. Here it is closer to the term ‘historiography,’ which is arguably one of its modalities.
	(c) History as time, i.e., encompassing past, present and future and irreducible to either. Here the term might be spelled with capital H: History. A deliberate move was made not to specify each use of the term in the article in order to inscribe within the text itself the same kind of reflexivity that might be found in the cinema of Med Hondo. It is hoped that this foregrounding of semantic indeterminacy might also induce reflexive reading.

^6. Western Saharan is a former Spanish colony from which Spain departed in 1974 toward the end of the Franco regime. Its desire to self-determination was initially frustrated by both Morocco and Mauritania which exercised claim on its territory (two third and one third respectively). Mauritania has since renounced its claims and Morocco has occupied most of the territory since and stalled any referendum on independence. The Western Sahara independence cause has been primarily embodied by the Polisario Front which has proclaimed a Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in 1976. Currently Western Sahara is a member of the African Union and is considered by the United Nations as a non-self-governing territory. Med Hondo directed two films in support of the Saharawi calls for self-determination: Nous aurons toute la mort pour dormir (1977) and Polisario, un people en armes (1979).

^7. To be more precise, historians of the major colonial powers were among the first to write relatively comprehensive histories of the world. While their writings could be perceived as transparent, ‘objective’, ‘scientific’ to their compatriots, they were immediately perceived as fraudulent by the colonized as they often denied history to the latter. The colonized always knew they had a history. That they were part of history, and in some cases that history (that is the birth of humanity, its spread across the world, the use of language, the birth of the disciplines, etc.) arguably started with them (Africans in particular). The colonized arguably/may have perceived earlier the perspectival dimension of European historiography as it was in part experimented and actualized on their very bodies, cultures, modes of organization, etc.

^8. It is important to note that the literature on the deconstruction of history is much larger than this and must include the works of Rancière (1994), Farge (1997), Munlsow (1997), Ankersmit (2002), and Jenkins (2003), among many others.

^9. Roger Chartier offers a compelling account of Ricoeur's intervention in the debate in an interview. De Baecque and Delage (1998, pp. 22–44).

^10. See Joseph Ki-Zerbo (Ki-Zerbo 1981, 11).

^11. Many of the terms deployed here are taken from historians. Both White (1988) and Rosenstone (1995) discuss condensation, Rosenstone takes up the notion of the ability of the cinema to make arguments (1988), White (1988) also discusses character types which could be related to typage (a Soviet-initiated technique in which an actor is figured as representing a class through readily identifiable physical and/or psychological traits), De Certeau (1988) discusses narrative closure and Dosse in Delacroix et al. (2010) discuss the event. Permutation, dispersal and anticipation are also aesthetic explorations Med Hondo engages with, with an anchoring in history/historiography.

^12. As Med Hondo put it himself:

How could I translate what Joseph Ki-Zerbo referred to as the three Ms? The missionaries, the merchants, the military? How could I translate this cinematically? I had a cross. There was already blood on the cross. I had to find, as in the theater, how to express this symbolic, how to translate this brutality. There was no need or space for thesis and antithesis. I had to create an impactful image that could generate discussion. So, I had my characters turn the cross upside down into a sword. This is what I refer to as communicative symbolism. (Interview with the author, 2012)

^13. Homofilmic reflexivity refers to mise en abyme in a film. Here the fact that we have a fictional scene which becomes documentary by virtue of a racial economy of the gaze creates a modal reflexivity that takes place within the film itself, not in reference to other films (heterofilmic). See Limoges (undated).

^14. Christian Delacroix discusses the changing fate of the actor in historiography. He argues that in order to escape the illusions of transparent subjectivity, the prominence of actors in the historical narrative came under duress around the early 1900s. It ensued a de-biographization concomitant with a new emphasis on collective actors in particular through the Marxist, psychoanalytic and structuralist interventions among others. There seems, however, to be in recent year a critical return to the actor. (Delacroix et al. 2010, 654).

^15. Some of the most notable European films exploring African migration in recent years include La Promesse (1996) and Rosetta (1999) by the Dardenne brothers, Le Havre (2011) by Aki Kaurismäki, L'envahisseur/The Invader(2011) by Nicolas Provost and Terraferma (2011) by Emanuele Crialese.

^16. Hayden White's term ‘historiophoty’ is simply too inelegant to adopt at this point in our research.

^17. Here cinematic overdetermination refers to the impossibility to represent the condition of migrant workers without referring to the capitalist structures in which they are inserted and interpellated, to the colonial past, to the unequal arrangement of power in the neocolonial present, to the difficult living conditions in their home country, etc. All these overdetermine the account of the living conditions of the migrant worker in the European metropolis. The use of the term ‘new cinema’ refers to the period in the 1970s and 1980s where Africans were increasingly making their own films. Indeed in one of the film's final scenes, a meeting takes place between workers in an office which has posters of various African films in the background (a response to the opening scene) including Timité Bassori's La Femme au Couteau (1969), Ridha Behi's Soleil des Hyènes (1975), Fadika Kramo's Djeli (1981), Paulin Soumanou Vieyra's En Residence Surveillée (1981), Ababacar Samb Makharam's Jom (1982) and Med Hondo's own Soleil O (1970) and West Indies (1979) and among others.

^18.Dominatio here refers to the ‘order of things’ between former colonies and for colonizing powers which is founded on a vertical relationship that makes the ressources and political power of the former available, manipulable, and controllable by the latter.

^19. Dixit Med Hondo: ‘The film was made at a time when workers’ hostels were burning around Paris. It was made with the participation of workers, with my theoretical proposal to generate discussions. We decided that we would film as we grew up in consciousness. The film was meant to be reshot. It was initially 3–4 h long and was supposed to be extended. The current ending of Les Bicots-Nègres was shot in 1988 while another ending was shot in 1975' (Interview with the author, 2012).

^20. At stake here is the status of the film as a discrete object, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The various endings of the film, which are subtracted in each version and replaced by the latest ending, do ipso facto change the film since the film seen by the 1988 audience is different from the one seen by the 1974 audience.

^21. Franco-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard is credited with the following quote.‘A film should have a beginning, a middle and an end but not necessarily in that order.’ Here Med Hondo does not revert this order, but defers his ending, or rather does not have a definitive ending, thereby putting the ending under erasure.

^22. This is congruent with Med Hondo's cinematic project which is invested in generating discussion with the audience.

^23. The profilmic space is the space before the camera, that which was in front of the camera and was filmed.

^24. Dispositif/apparatus refers to the ensemble of institutions, mechanics/mechanisms and discourses of, on and around the cinema: everything that constitutes the world of the cinema.

^25. Here destruction is meant in both literal and figurative terms. The literal destruction of the film posters is an attempt to syndechocally destroy a representationally retrograde dominant cinema. The formal propositions offered by Med Hondo in the two films also participate in the same gesture.

Additional information

Funding

This work was generously supported by the Insight Grant awarded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for research on and writing of a book on the cinema of Med Hondo.

Notes on contributors

Aboubakar Sanogo

Aboubakar Sanogo is an Assistant professor in Film Studies at Carlton University. His research interests include African cinema, documentary, world cinema, colonial cinema, cinephilia, and the relationship between film form, history and theory. His writings have appeared in academic journals, anthologies and journalistic outlets. He is currently preparing a monograph on the cinema of Med Hondo.