Fang: An Epic Journey

African Arts, Winter, 2004 by Paul Stoller

Fang: An Epic Journey Written and directed by Susan Vogel. Prince Street Pictures, Inc., email: prinstpic@igc .org. 2001.8 minutes, Black and White and Color; NTST/PAL.

Living Memory Directed by Susan Vogel; produced by Susan Vogel, Samuel Sidibe, Eric Engles, and the Musee Nationale du Mali. First Run/Icarus Films (718-488-8900; 800-8761710); Web www.frif.com; Email: mail@frif.com. 2003. 63 minutes, Color

In the representation of memory, scholars, artists, or storytellers can easily lose their way. Memory, after all, is an exceedingly slippery slope of partial reminiscences that individuals continuously negotiate and renegotiate. The inchoate character of memory makes it difficult to know what is important about the past or, for that matter, what role the past plays in the present. With its pacing and capacity to create montage, film is an especially apt medium to represent the elusive issues associated with memory.

Using the medium of film, Susan Vogel enters the murky space of memory with great skill, for she has created two wonderfully evocative---and provocative--films about how African cultural productions evoke variously situated perceptions and memories. In Fang: An Epic Journey, a fictional film based on real events, Vogel demonstrates with economy and power the capacity of objects to evoke sweeping histories. In eight image-soaked minutes, she directs our attention, through the historical journey of one Fang statue, to some fundamental aesthetic issues that have long been debated but never resolved. What constitutes art? How are aesthetic categories created? Why do these categories change over time? How are aesthetic categories transformed into economic value? Are these transformations arbitrary? Moving us from the brutality of the Fang object's acquisition when a French military officer "cannibalized" it in Cameroun in 1904, through its sale in Paris in 1907 and 1917 to Berlin in 1937, Vogel situates the image in the sweep of European cultural history to reconstruct aesthetic eras and underscore how primitive nostalgia eventually increases the object's value. So that it would not be confiscated in Hitler's Germany, the then-owners of the Fang statue sawed it in half and shipped the top half to New York City. Following World War II, the custodian of the top half of the statue received a mysterious package: a lamp, the bottom of which was, in fact, the bottom of the Fang object. This reunion pleased Dr. Alain Locke, the African American art historian and early expert on African art. Once reconstituted, the object's new owner loaned the piece to a traveling exhibition, increasing its market value. In this potent film, Vogel skillfully weaves together the important interconnections among materiality, history, and embodiment--a significant contribution that profoundly increases our understanding of aesthetic intention.

In Living Memory, Vogel employs montage to demonstrate the copresence of past and present in contemporary Mali. This copresence is brilliantly realized in the person of Salif Keita, a world-renowned griot, who employs contemporary technology and instrumentation to glorify the Malian past. His opening song is intercut with scenes of traditional life as well as glimpses of urban modernity. Using Salif Keita as a kind of framing device, Vogel takes us on a journey of past and present, of memory and pride, of beauty and creativity. No domain of Malian cultural production is overlooked. We see glimpses of past and present in the performance of a Chiwara harvest ritual in rural Mali. We are witness to the display and marketing of Malian ritual objects. We marvel at the range and sophistication of stylistic display during the celebration of a Malian wedding. We experience the architectonics of Malian architecture as we watch hundreds of Djenne residents participate in a ritualized annual resurfacing of the mud walls of their world-famous mosque. These forms, one Djenne resident says, pointing to the wooden scaffolds and mudbrick peaks of the Djenne mosque, reinforce our pride in the past. To her credit, Vogel does not bypass contemporary arts, including Malian painting, films, photography, and textiles. As is evident through Vogel's presentation, these modern productions combine elements of past and present to create vibrant works that, through the fusion of motifs, speak to the cultural dilemmas of contemporary Mali. Finally, she addresses music, both in traditional forms and more modern examples. Through a montage of musical images and sounds, Vogel shows how sounds hone in on the tensions generated by the pull of the past in the push of the present.

In the very best tradition of documentary filmmaking, Vogel's sensuously contoured films tell stories. "Stories," as the novelist Tim O'Brien wrote in his magnificent novel, The Things They Carried (1990), "are for joining past to the future. Stories are those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story." Given her sure hand, sharp eye, and narrative focus, I eagerly await Susan Vogel's next cultural production.