Space and Time in African Cinema and Cine-scapes

In Space and Time in African Cinema and Cine-scapes, African cinema scholar Kenneth W. Harrow innovatively introduces the basic notions of contemporary physics into the African film studies, and contemplates the question of space and time in cinema beyond the conventional postcolonial framings. This book features a series of case studies on the films set in Africa, examining how space and time are created in them from the perspective of relativity and quantum mechanics, as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Stephen Hawking and other physicists have continuously debated over this basic question. In this sense, Harrow breaks with the narrow, accepted notions of space and time as something always already there, and thus pushes the boundaries of cinema studies, especially that of African cine-scapes, by encouraging an interdisciplinary research.

In Newtonian classical physics, motion inevitably means an understanding in three-dimensional space, with a fixed idea of time as absolute, unchanging and independent of circumstances. Yet by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the notions concerning motion, space and time, or the world of absolutes, began to undergo fundamental changes. After Einstein, with time itself being the fourth dimension, the reality is to be seen as four-dimensional and then “the relationship between frames” becomes the key to understanding space, time and motion. Space and time exist as no longer objective but relative and constructed reality. This book is an attempt to capture the African filmmakers’ creative cinematic temporalities and their cultural or social locality that contributes to the construction of creative thought.

Correspondingly, the book consists of two major parts, namely, space and time. The first section considers how space is produced in terms of relationality in specific films. Within this section, chapter 1 proposes a scientific reading of Ousmane Sembène’s “Borom Sarret” through Karen Barad’s notion of “intra-action.” In contrast to “interaction,” which relies on a metaphysics of individualism, Barad uses the term “intra-action” to emphasizes conjunction, ontological inseparability between separate entities, the entangled way things and objects come to be understood in their motions. Crucially, then, “as a matter of principle, there is no unambiguous way to differentiate between the ‘object’ and the ‘agencies of observation’. No inherent/ Cartesian subject-object distinction exists.” (Barad 115) Following Barad, Harrow views the apparatus of cinema in intra-actional “encounters.” Different from the classic reading of “the foot and hand” image as a Fanonian colonial demonstration of power and repression, Harrow makes it a rich moment of encounters between two temporal framings of modernity and this interpretative presence is also a constituent element working outside the frames in film. (57)

Chapter 2 concerns John Akomfrah’s diaspora consciousness, experimental aesthetics and temporality in Nine Muses. This film combines archive imagery with the striking wintry landscapes of Alaska to present the Windrush Generation’s experience of being black in England. The image and voice in the film never lead to a procession of sequential moments but exist in juxtapositions. For Harrow, with each juxtaposition comes “not only the relationship between parts, constituting montage, but also ontological encounters.” (68) The encounters imply the moment of “entr’acte” between the observer and the observed. Harrow gives an example by parallelizing the epic lines from Milton, Homer and the optical situation of illogical shift into undefined time and space with faceless parka figures. In such a spacetime, the observer’s value system is shattered, and all relations become Deleuzian “non-localizable” and thus direct presentations of time. As a result, by foregrounding the “optical and sound situations” rather than “sensory-motor situations,” Akomfrah challenges the documentary mode of realism and the ideological frame of racial expectations.

In Chapter 3, Harrow explores the characters’ diaspora journeys in Dyana Gaye’s Des Etoiles in the light of quantum entanglement. Einsteinian “spooky action at a distance” is suggested by the camerawork in crosscut patterns that inexplicably link different figures in their individual diaspora moments in the film. (Harrow 95) For instance, Harrow thinks Sophie and Abdoulaye are entangled when walking down the street in Turin and NYC, respectively. And another correlation to entanglement is that the plots in the three locations unfold in a similar manner at the same time without any causative connection. With this logic, Harrow questions the unitary worldview of lost history, culture, trauma and enslavement that has dominated the African studies for so long.

The second section of the book includes the remaining four chapters and primarily demonstrates how time functions in film, especially in the non-classical sense. Chapter 4 illustrates William Kentridge’s refusal of Newtonian or the Classic Arrow of Time, which denotes a linear passage, an inevitable moving forward of time. For Kentridge, time is no longer absolute but something in play. In his best-known animation “Felix in Exile,” Kentridge presents a kind of resistance summed up as “anti-Entropy.” The “anti-” in “anti-Entropy,” according to Harrow, “asks how to perform the impossible reversal of time’s passage toward death.” (135) In the film frame of black labour, death, corpses, many kinds of time are created, such as geological, historical and emotional, but all go to the end of tragedy, sadness and loss.

Chapter 5 turns to Chris Marker’s contemplation on time and memory through his radical reshaping of the documentary genre in Sans Soleil. Memory as testimony of the past is usually what assures us the reality of the Arrow of Time. Yet, Harrow thinks that Marker reveals the fictional constructedness, imperfections of memory and then demystifies this false identification, because memory is created, like film, with its frames and recordings of the past, and thus memory only exists as temporal construction of reality. The dominant trope in the film is “the spiral of time,” and it signifies the return of the same to another location, or more precisely, time’s non-presence. This inability of memory to capture its time and context can also be testified in Marker’s ambiguous opening citation for the film from T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday,” “Because I know that time is always time/and space is always and only place,” and the real message he actually intends to convey is “what is actual is actual only for one time/ And only for one place.” (Eliot 83)

Chapter 6 shows how Abbas Kiarostami resists three-dimensional representation and redefines the boundaries of cinematic temporalities in ABC Africa and 24 Frames. In ABC Africa, Kiarostami turns away from the conventional documentary appeal for emotions, meaning, and simply records many different faces which impose no temporal order on the sequences. This is, as Harrow suggests, where a camera functions as an apparatus in capturing the invisible time. (Harrow 171) However, compared with the motion set in the Classical Arrow of Time in ABC Africa, 24 Frames highlights “the present moment,” a static and frozen moment. After reworking an original still image with inserted changing elements, Kiarostami provides us with a static image in movement. “Now” becomes a cinematic present with its temporality, and therefore viewers are always in the presence of a static Now and a changing Now, of invisible time and visible time. Thus, Harrow believes that Kiarostami accomplishes what Kentridge has sought to do with his refusal of classical time in that he makes time visible by slowing it down rather than resisting it. (176) In relativity’s multiple frames, Kiarostami places us on the threshold of a new perception of time, that is, a spacetime in Deleuze’s time-images.

With reference to special relativity, Chapter 7 addresses Mati Diop’s framings of temporalities in his film Mille Soleils. Based on a replay of the film Touki Bouki, 40 years after it was made, Mille Soleils concerns the story of Magaye who played Mory in that film, asking what has happened in the 40 years since. This return to the original poses Magaye in the present against Mory in the past, and two frames are placed into a juxtaposition relationship. In fact, the time captured in Touki Bouki could never be repeated in the contemporary present except for observers’ framing in the act of watching. What interests Harrow is how observation disrupts what is being measured when time no longer exists as an objective entity outside the relationship of observer to moving target. In this way, Harrow also makes us caught in the “entr’acte,” inevitably being an apparatus in a particular spacetime, as John Akomfrah does.

Generally, this book is a groundbreaking work with its great effort in bringing a new perspective into the field of African cinema studies. Grounded in the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, it refutes the received notions of space and time, or to be more precise, unmasks the potential of resistance against the ultimate telos of the classical passage of time, which is death for us. Therefore, for both the academic researchers and common readers, Harrow raises a very significant issue, that is, the standpoint ontology and epistemology of the human race. Though not with its flaws, for instance, Harrow actually does not make as clear as he claims a distinction between his physical understanding of observer’s interference in meaning creation and the psychological experience of Bergsonian durée, this monograph is still a valuable guide for film studies, especially African and African diasporic film studies. Beyond the post-colonial cliché, Harrow’s extraordinary explication of space and time would inspire new interpretations and further expand the humanities studies in an interdisciplinary direction.

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Funding

This review is supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (Grant ID: 22AZW003) and Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (Grant ID: 2023SKZD15).