Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics by Adesokan Akinwumi

Author:Adesokan, Akinwumi
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780253005502
Publisher: Indiana University Press

The gangsters pose in front of the New Africa cinema. Aristotle’s Plot, directed by Jean Pierre Bekolo, 1996.

ET finds a seat in the hall, despite the gangsters’ attempts to intimidate him. But he, with his travels, his training, and his pride as an African intellectual, finds their Hollywood-derived fantasies offensive. His loud condemnations of the film being shown clash with the gangsters’ own catcalls. It is hard to watch this scene and not be reminded of the global pervasiveness or dominance of American mass culture, and Bekolo’s strategies in this scene require a closer examination. Just as the voice-over admits that the story is on track, and as soon as the sergeant embarks on his assignment, we are also informed that it is difficult to take The Poetics as an artistic model, because its second part, on comedy, is missing. Aristotle was interested in comedy as a supplementary form, but it is conceived of differently in African cinema, where the form (and allegory) is seen as corrective to explicit didacticism. But for Bekolo, who is somewhat aligned with the school of thought that values the imaginative potential of comedy, this moment provides an opportunity to venture into the realm of representational and political conundrums. He muses in the voice-over,

As I went deeper, I had more and more questions. Why had the second chapter of Aristotle’s Poetics disappeared? Why is the Sphinx’s nose locked in the British Museum? … Why do they prefer the Cro-Magnon man to his colleague of Grimaldi? Why are we still talking about Thales or Pythagoras [i.e., rather than Aristotle]? Why did Bokassa proclaim himself emperor like Napoleon? Why are African filmmakers always asked political questions? … Why is an African filmmaker always a young, upcoming, promising filmmaker until he reaches eighty years old, and then he becomes the ancestor, the father, the wise man?

This stream of questions represents one of the devices Bekolo uses to foreground the tension between imagination and reality in art. Although he often leans toward the former, suggesting his opposition to the dominant trend of realism in African as well as contemporary global cinema, there are moments in this film when the question of aesthetic choice is far from soluble. Before concluding that cinema as a form is undermined by conventions of realism, he comments on those conventions:

Because a plot is made of a series of events that have a beginning, I started suspecting that my invitation to be part of the British Film Institute celebrating one hundred years of cinema could only be a plot twenty-three centuries old. Aristotle’s plot. Even if I was trying to avoid it, I was already trapped in the formula, the “how-to.” Today, Aristotle’s formula produces gangsters, magicians, corrupt governments, suffering artists, forgers …

Here is an interesting moment in the layers of irony and self-mocking that structure the commentaries. The sergeant’s assignment may seem simple, but it is a profound interrogation of mimesis, and is one of the complicated (one might even say confounding) attempts in the film to sustain different simultaneous discourses.

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