The Voice in the Wood. - movie reviews

National Catholic Reporter, May 21, 1993 by Joseph Cunneen

The movie event of the year was "Modern Days/Ancient Nights," a celebration of 30 years of African filmmaking presented at the Walter Reade Theatre in New York's Lincoln Center, April 2-30.

Thirty-eight movies were shown in this crash course, 10 by Senegal's 70-year-old Ousmane Sembene, the father of African cinema, to whom the program was dedicated.

The premiere of Sembene's new film, "Guelwaar," was naturally a highlight, of the program; this brief notice is a wake-up call on its forthcoming national release. Typically, it looks closely at a small central incident, illuminating the religious and class divisions of the broader society.

Here, the burial in a Muslim cemetery of the political activist title character, a baptized Catholic, also reveals bureaucratic stupidity and a corrupt political system built on foreign aid.

Sembene clearly wants the warring factions to rediscover their sense of community and shared moral values; it is not by chance that he was the first director to have his characters speak an African language (in his case, Wolof).

A shrewdly humanist observer who works to correct a Europeanized view of African history (Europe is not my point of reference), Sembene mixes cutting satire and close observation of daily life with a feeling for African symbols and ritual speech. His movies are critiques of traditional patriarchy and show sympathetic understanding for the plight of women.

An internationally known novelist, Sembene has already begun to influence African-American directors; his artistic and political vision is rewarding, and upsetting, for any of us who want to correct our ignorance of African reality.

If he is harsh on its European heritage, he is perhaps even more critical of post-Independence African political leaders who have left the continent dependent on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Another important coming release shown during the African festival was "Samba Traore," directed by Idrissa Ouedraogo of Burkina Faso.

Ouedraogo, who scored an international success in 1989 with "Yaaba," is more lyrical than political. The new movie studies the slow recognition of guilt by its title character, a former robber who has returned to his native village to build a new life. Developing this elemental theme with the clear lines of a master, the director conveys a simple dignity that is as classical as it is African.

The program also included a generous sampling of already-established African films not readily available in the United States, including the beautiful and mysterious "Yeelen," directed by Mali's Souleymane Cisse, which Film Comment called the best African film ever made.

"Yeelen," which tells the story of a struggle between two magicians, father and son, defeats our analytic sense of understanding but will reward anyone prepared to surrender to its stylized splendor and mythic oppositions.

Not every movie I saw was masterly, but none were without rewards. "Niwan," a first feature by Clarence Delgado based on a Sembene short story, follows a young couple with a desperately sick infant, from the village to the hostile and unfamiliar city. Delgado does not sentimentalize the situation but leaves some awkward jumps in the narrative.

African films often have a leisurely pace, but the central sequence, in which the husband takes the blanketed body of his dead child on a long bus ride to the cemetery, seems to wander without a clear sense of direction.

Nevertheless, Delgado caught the rich mixture of casual cruelty and instinctive generosity among the bus passengers, suggesting many parallels to life in New York subways. When he appeared at a brief post-showing interview, responding unpretentiously to misguided criticism and saying he'd made the movie for $56,000, I couldn't help but root for him to get enough support for his next project.

Even less pretentious but more immediately rewarding was "Rabi," by Gaston Kabore, also from Burkina Faso. Nine-year-old Rabi feels a sense of dislocation in his native village and is criticized by his father for spending too much time with a turtle his father had brought home. The father takes the turtle back to the fields, but Rabi finds one of his own, much larger, which becomes his pet.

Gradually, however, helped by the wisdom of his aged grandfather, be takes his pet on a long expedition into the countryside and gives the turtle its freedom. Although Kabore doesn't turn Rabi, the grandfather or the turtle into Walt Disney figures, his relaxed storytelling conveys a message about freedom and nature even to urban Americans.

Finally, let me mention a special favorite, a 26-minute documentary by Issiaka Konate, "The Voice in the Wood," that would make a wonderful prologue for any film program on Africa.

This short film is a portrait of Mahama Konate, a well-known Burkina Faso musician, as he constructs a native instrument, the balafon, and teaches his son how to play it. Listen to the wood, he tells the child, hearing nature, his ancestors and the spirit already present in it.