The open-ended question – with the last digit intentionally left out – fills the final screen of Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s most recent film, Le Président (2013).  The question refers to the political tenure of the president of Cameroon, where the film has been banned at all locations, including at L’Institut Français Cameroun (IFC, The French Institute). The IFC plays an important role in providing a venue for film screenings in Cameroon, particularly since the closing of Yaoundé’s movie theatre, Abbia, in 2009. Around the time of the release of Le Président, another Cameroonian filmmaker, Richard Fouofie Djimili, was abducted and tortured for eleven days, allegedly in response to material in his film, 139… The Last Predators (2013, watch the trailer here). Djimili’s fictional film focuses on a 139-year dictatorship in an unnamed African country. According to Times Live, shortly before the filmmaker’s abduction, a friend of Djimili’s received a text message that read, “Tell your friend Richard Fouofie he is digging his own grave. His film is part of a destabilization plot that has already been unmasked. If he wants to play the patriot, he will be decapitated. Victory is near.” Reporters Without Borders has documented other cases of harassment, censoring and imprisoning of Cameroonian artists and journalists. On 6 November 2012, President Paul Biya celebrated 30 years in power and Bekolo has quipped that when Biya was minister in 1962, “Barack Obama was one year old.”  It is in this political context that Bekolo’s film explores a fictional African president’s last days in power.

Bekolo is troubled by and committed to transforming what he has called the “image problem in Africa”: The misrepresentation of African cultures and peoples in international media and film, which continue to present the subcontinent as solely poverty-stricken, HIV/AIDS-ridden, war-riddled, corrupt and failing. Bekolo works to alter this image by addressing the roots of dominant stereotypes. These ‘image problems,’ he argued in a video interview with David Murphy at the Africa In Motion film festival in Scotland in 2012, are founded in ‘reality problems.’ Seen in this light, Le Président is Bekolo’s intervention in the Cameroonian ‘reality problem.’ The film is an invitation to reinvent the present by revisiting the past. It challenges viewers to conceive of a new reality for the country upon the demise of the current president, Paul Biya (1933-), who has been the president since 1982.

In an interview for SlateAfrique, Bekolo explains, “It is the first time that a movie removes a President. Cinema always arrives afterwards, to tell us [about] the Arab Spring for example. Where was cinema before? Cinema must be forward thinking, open new doors and make the revolutions. I do not want to tell people what happened. I want to inspire those who will make it happen.” In this sense, the film is an anticipatory conversation of a coming political moment, one that poses the question: What will come about in the power vacuum of Biya’s eventual absence?

The film is set a few days before the presidential elections, the next of which is scheduled to take place in Cameroon in 2018. When the president mysteriously disappears, TV reporters speculate his absence and political prisoners discuss possibilities for the future. Through a series of intimate conversations including the fictional president’s internal monologues, dreamscapes and quiet life moments, Bekolo explores a president’s awareness of the approaching end of an era. This unadulterated access to the president’s intimate spaces challenges facile representations of the African dictator, namely those representations popularized in western films of a uniformly dangerous, irrational, womanizing, war criminal. So often in western films African presidents are reduced to tropes and are only seen through the gaze of the white hero. The Last King of Scotland, Blood Diamond and Machine Gun Preacher exemplify this tendency. Bekolo’s Le Président is instead an artistic exploration of the inner life of an ageing patriarch, a man who dreams of a rendezvous with his deceased spouse, and speculates upon the violent means of his eventual demise. “Has my chauffeur been hired to assassinate me?” He contemplates as he grapples with the destructive political policies that he has implemented.

What struck me the most about the film, in fact, was Bekolo’s humanizing of the ‘African dictator.’  Cameroon’s president rarely speaks publicly and is seldom seen, other than in the seemingly infinite campaign posters, billboards and fliers on prominent display across the country. With thirty-one years in power, it is little surprise that Jo Wood’ou, the Canal-D reporter in Bekolo’s film (a local news channel that follows the events in the film, based on Cameroon’s TV station, Canal2) comments, “no man votes for the president.” Wood’ou’s comment both naturalizes the president’s lifetime in power and simultaneously hints at the state’s repression of the democratization movement in the 1990s and the history of election rigging. As Wood’ou traces his life stages, he sardonically notes that Cameroon has had the same president throughout each stage.

It is the president’s deceased spouse, Jeanne (most likely inspired by the life of Jeanne-Irène Biya, Paul Biya’s first spouse who died in July 1992), who offers the most genuine and scathing criticism of the president’s lifetime of power. It is before her that he is most shamed. He admits to her, “I don’t know anymore… I got lost along the way.” Indeed, women play central roles in Bekolo’s films, including the protagonist known as ‘Queen of the Hood’ in Quartier Mozart (1992) and the two vampire sex workers, Chouchou and Majolie, of Les Saignantes (2005). In each instance, it is the woman who reveals or fights against the tendency of masculine power to corrupt. Likewise, in Le Président, Jo Wood’ou turns to the women who operate the country’s communications via call boxes (umbrellaed, street-side stands where customers can pay for cigarettes, candies and telephone calls by the minute) for knowledge of the president’s whereabouts after his disappearance. The women who manage the call boxes, Wood’ou declares, are the ‘pulse’ of the country.

Lost before Jeanne, the president contemplates, “I feel like I am advancing towards an ocean or a desert… and I don’t recognize anything.” He gets out of his luxury car in the middle of the dense rainforest and begins to walk. The president returns to his village and seems awed by his surroundings. We see him eating les bâtons de manioc (boiled cassava, rolled into lengths and steamed in banana leaves) beneath an open-air roadside stand. Later, Jeanne laughs at the thought of him eating sandwiches, a food associated with foreignness, particularly the French former colonial power.  Food becomes a symbol for the distance that he has imposed between himself and his village, his people and his country land.

The film begins and ends with footage of benskiners (motorcycle taxi-men, also spelled bend-skin and bendskin) on the crowded roads of Douala, Cameroon’s industrial capital. The striking figure of the young benskiner at the conclusion of the film weaves in and out of traffic with careless ease, stretching, looking backwards and taking his hands off the throttle. This benskiner is striking in his orange-framed sunglasses, signifying the spread of a globalised hip-hop culture where the young people are known colloquially in Cameroon as les yo(s).

The benskiner is a complex symbol of resistance to state power, and adaptation to a lack of road infrastructure and resilience in an economy that would otherwise exclude him. He is a youthful, masculine figure who challenges authority.  Indeed, in Cameroon, the unification of benskiners has created a significant political force in urban and semi-rural areas. This political force has been one reason behind the banning of motorcycles in wealthy and administrative quarters such as Bastos in Yaoundé. The government has repeatedly tried to crack down on benskiners in Douala with sanctions and imposed tax payments but benskiners are notorious for their disrespect of such sanctions and are quick to mobilize collectively. By allocating such a prominent space for the benskiner in the film, Bekolo draws upon this powerful resistance force as an illustration of the fracturing of authoritarian power on-the-ground.

Yet, while the figure of the benskiner features so prominently, he is simultaneously silenced in his anonymity throughout the film. This silencing lends itself to alternate (and less empowering) interpretations of the Bekolo’s focus on the benskiner. Is he meant to illustrate the fatality of young people (particularly young men) in Cameroon, as he speeds in and out of vehicles with no apparent care for his own life? Is the beginning scene, which captures the traffic of a main thoroughfare, meant to show the chaos or misdirection of life and politics in the post-colony? I cannot help but wonder what the benskiner would have said in response to the film’s final question, “When will it end? 1982-201?” had he been asked.

A glimpse of the concerns of the youth comes through during the interaction between a well-known Cameroonian rap, hip-hop artist, Valsero (a.k.a. Le Général) and the film’s president. In the conversation, Valsero addresses the perpetual joblessness of Cameroon’s so-called ‘lost generation’ – those born in the 1980s onwards, as the country’s economy, politics and educational system suffered from the IMF and World Bank-imposed structural adjustment programs. The resulting economic stagnation and withdrawal of the Cameroonian state produced the context in which benskiners flourish. Valsero’s well-known songs Lettre au Président and Ce Pays Tue Les Jeunes voice the frustrations with corrupt political powers and an aging political body that marginalizes the youth, many of the same issues that are central to their conversation in the film. “I am young and I am strong and I am not dead,” Valsero sings at one moment in the film, pointing upward toward the future, toward the ancestors and toward a moment that might harbinger a recognition of the youth’s powerful potential; this in a country where forty per cent of the population is under fourteen years old (U.N Statistics Division, Country Profile for Cameroon 2011). Yet the (re)turn to Valsero – a man in his mid-thirties – as a voice for the youth is itself a powerful reflection of the state of politics in Cameroon, where even alternative voices (I am thinking for example of the long-time opposition leader Ni John Fru Ndi) are hesitant to cede power to younger generations.

Bekolo’s portrayal of the president is forgiving, complex, comprehensive and hopeful. The film provides an important counter narrative to the forecasts of potential political conflict and even genocide for Cameroon’s near future. It is the film’s honesty and lack of condemnation that makes its banning so unfortunate, illustrating the disparities between Cameroon’s real life political climate and the imagined space of the film. We have a sense that the president of the film, so reflective near the end of his political life, might have been grateful for the humanizing depiction offered by Bekolo in Le Président.

Note:  Le Président is banned in Cameroon but can be streamed from BuniTV. Watch the trailer here. 

The post Review of Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s “Le Président” appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

The sequence offers a sense of space, time period and, in some ways, the transitory theme driving Sydelle Willow Smith’s short film. Smith is an award winning freelance photographer and filmmaker. A South African born in Johannesburg and based in Cape Town, Smith studied at The Market Photo Workshop and The University of Cape Town, focusing on Social Anthropology and Cinematography. She travels widely to produce her photographic works, which have been recognized in South Africa and beyond. Smith describes her artistic practice as focused on “memory, place and home making with a strong focus on migration” and “as intrigued with how people who are a minority, such as African ‘migrants’ in Barcelona, navigate the city” (Africaisacountry.com).

In Neighbours, Smith follows three African migrants as they navigate the urban space of Barcelona. The project was produced as part of an International Artist Residency in ‘Urban Creativity’, a program inspired by the idea of “establishing a creative and sustainable relation between neighbours in a district” (jiwarbarcelona.com). Smith’s stated theme comes in the form of a question: “How does one hold on to a deeply rooted sense of self, a cultural identity, and make new paths whereby lines of ethnicity, race, and nationality begin to shift and become malleable in order to adapt and make new forms of home?”. To address these issues by visual means, participants were offered disposable cameras, with which they made pictures of what they wanted to show in the city of Barcelona, Spain. This mode of image making and collection enables the participant to show—in terms of their unique personal experience of navigating and negotiating the city. Smith calls this working method ‘neighbourhood making’, part of an overall project that includes several working modes, including documentary portraiture and participatory photography.

This article takes the picture offered by Neighbours as a point of departure. It brings the participatory narrative into conversation with a politics of diaspora that works to disrupt links between nation and knowledge. The dynamics of this conversation may appear by asking: How may we understand the relationship between the black traveling self, the photographic and filmic image, and the dynamics of African diaspora? What happens when we linger on such images? In the context of a short film or brief essay like this, some features may be mentioned but not elaborated upon. However, the impact on understanding the complex conditions of black people everywhere may form grounds for cultural resistance.

Photographs and films are media through which complicated processes of desire, projection, and identification come into view. The mediums frame the embodied self in self-evidentiary ways and, at the same time, open it to interrogation.[1] In Neighbours, there are dynamics of difference, specificity, and belonging in operation. The participants share an investment in showing and seeing spaces of belonging—neighbourhoods, in this case—as both geographic spaces and as active ideas that may cover over less approachable issues of difference among peoples.

Dynamics of difference that include self-hood, culture, race and ethnicity are viewable through photographic and film-based media. In particular, documentary and participatory filmic modes provide a unique vantage point from which to consider issues of connection. In Neighbours, the focus is on collaboration among people of African descent living beyond African soil.

In Neighbours, three people of African descent now living in Europe are interviewed and filmed: Xumo Nunjo, a musician born in Cameroon; Mamadou Dia, a writer and educator born in Senegal; and Gelia Barila Angri, from Equatorial Guinea. These participants offer viewers an opportunity to consider notions of home and belonging in Black Europe.[2]

Neighbours features and follows people of African descent, framing its narrative around a real or symbolic return to Africa. In this way, the film invokes discourses of internationalism and coordination of the interests of peoples of African descent around the world. These are dynamics of black diaspora.

Neighbours registers a particular moment in the history of the African diaspora in Europe. The Africans pictured in the film describe their lives as they unfold on European soil. Noting these practices of everyday life troubles any nationalism and racial essentialism suggested by the film’s premise or narrative. It also piques my interest in the film—the short documentary indicates productive moments of tension in the emergence of racialised and ethnicised subjects.

Such moments of tension may be openings: windows through which articulations of black diaspora may be seen and explored. The three subjects that appear herein are Black, of African descent, and settled in European territory. The people here celebrate contemporary African diaspora in ways that challenge a viewer’s available markers of identity. Diaspora as a term of analysis allows for an account of black transnational formations that attends to their differences in make-up. Brent Hayes Edwards describes this as “the political stakes of the organization of the ‘African abroad.’ The accepted risk is that the term’s analytic focus ‘fluctuates.’”[3]

The present analysis is part of my thinking about what it would take to see black people as central to “the landscape of everyday life” in Europe and beyond.[4] A different view or filmic premise to that in Neighbours might show the three participants as central and internal to everyday life in Barcelona, not marginal, foreign, or aberrant. Such a view means giving more attention to the participant’s communities, exploring interactions between people and spaces of Barcelona, and featuring participants engaged fully and actively in authoring European everyday life. Neighbours does not have room to elaborate this alternate view.

Instead, Neighbours provokes its viewer to consider what it would take—that is, to make room for the possibility—that African diasporic experience is emergent. Cultural contact happens on different terms and contingent interests, and may take place independently of social, economic and political marginalization. A picture of what is required to realize this sort of cultural politics does not fit the frame of this film—in fact, such a picture is a different challenge to black African visual production than that presented by Neighbours. However, the participant’s comments underscore the possibility for just this different sort of scene. Xumo Nunjo warns African travellers must be “universal, you have to be planetary. Home is the cosmos, home is this planet. Don’t accept anything else.” Nunjo comments: “I feel comfortable here [in Europe]… at home with problems, but I am home.” Nunjo continues: “Today, many African people want to go to Europe, because with the propaganda, people think Europe is the place where the knowledge is happening… but it is not true.” Nunjo seems to struggle with conventional understandings of belonging and cultural identity, refuting the paradigm in which Europe is the “centre of knowledge.”

As a term for knowledge production, the use of diaspora comes out of Pan-Africanism and black Internationalism. This discourse of internationalism aimed generally at the cultural and political coordination of the interests of peoples of African descent around the world. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1933: “Pan-Africa means intellectual understanding and co-operation among all groups of Negro descent in order to bring about at the earliest possible time the industrial and spiritual emancipation of the Negro peoples.”[5] Du Bois’ interest was part of an ideological “return” to the figure of Africa, as a figure for the question of origins. The problematic of return and cultural retention has, since then, animated a series of black ideologies. If Neighbours does not initially aim to theorize black Internationalism, it does so in its assembly of participants from across the continent.

One participant, Mamadou Dia, notes the impulse to move, to walk, to discover and to explore is human, but in reality, people travel for a better future. Filmed while on a beach, Dia appears in a red jersey sweater with two white stripes and blue jeans, strolling along the shore. He recounts, in brief, his experience of traveling to Europe—a precarious and traumatic boat journey across the Atlantic during which he lost many brothers. It is an elegiac narrative that recalls his experiences, but also his sense of being-in-the-world. Dia calls for justice, equal opportunities, equal rights. Dia describes his life, including his 3052 km long journey to Europe, as a life of practice, little theory. Dia’s life practice is described as one of integration, encounter and learning in order to be part of a community and culture encountered on arrival.

In some ways, the film motivates a desire to explain, challenge, or consider the racialised experiences of individuals like the three participants pictured herein. In the film, black Africanity dictates their appearance and belonging, and thereby chart their life’s course. More than a document that works as evidence, the film asks the viewer to question its subject’s humanity in terms of racial and ethnic authenticity. What is more, it urges a search for tools that dispute the participant’s lives as they take shape in Europe. The basis for the dispute depends upon our (the viewer’s) own ability or inability to see her/him as European and thereby evaluate the legitimacy of her/his claims to racial victimization. How might we register this particular moment where black Africans appear, impossibly, as Europeans? How might viewers come to terms with a national idiom that shows the black participants as undeniable members of European society?

What emerges in the short film Neighbours is a subject that simultaneously rearticulates european-ness, blackness, and diaspora.[6]

The images in the film work together with biographic detail and the viewer’s own understanding of what constitutes human being. Black, African, European converge in the participants pictured herein.

Gelia Barila Angri explains she travelled to Europe to “fight for [her] future, to make a better future,” and debunks the negative views of Africa that appear in the media. Angri arrived in Europe to study. In the first year she felt alien and alienated—until she formed her own circle of friends. While she accepts and believes racism exists where she lives, she claims to have never experienced racism. Like Dia and Nunjo, Angri also feels at home living in Europe, and she is able to experience daily life without a sense of loss. She remembers her birthplace, but is able to live, feel and make meaning beyond such boundaries.

The folks interviewed and pictured in Neighbours are shown on the margins of society, at the seaside or on a rooftop, on a street corner or in appearing as reluctant and inauthentic members of groups that can only be poor substitutes for remembered (or imagined) communities in Cameroon, Senegal and Equatorial Guinea. Basic facts of birth and the circumstances of travel act as historical captioning that attempt to make sense and meaning of the lives pictured.

The fifth minute of the film shows young black males selling faux designer handbags. The bags are displayed in rows, placed on a sheet. The four men stand close to each other, each holding a set of stings, displaying their wares to passers by. In a crucial moment, they yank the strings they hold in their hands, an action that gathers together the four corners and edges of the cloth. In an instant, this pull brings the full stock of handbags together within the sheet, which is slung over a shoulder and quickly carried away—all in the moment before a Spanish police officer arrives on a motorcycle.

The viewer watching Neighbours is given license to question the participant’s ethnic, racial and national identity, to juxtapose European being and African existence, and evaluate the participant’s claims—to community or autonomy, to being at home or feeling irredeemably estranged, to a right to earn a living. As I suggested earlier, the strength of the film may be the pressured challenge it presents to conventional terms of identity and to analyses of diaspora, even as it puts those analytical tools to use.

Featured image credit:  Screen capture from Neighbours. Director: Sydelle Willow Smith

The post Vecinos. Neighbours. Film Review: “Home is the planet, don’t accept anything else” appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Internationally famous for her wide and varied oeuvre, Nobel Laureate in Literature Doris Lessing’s early work is strongly autobiographical. The Grass is Singing is her first novel. Lessing chose the title from the fifth section of T.S. Eliot’s famous poem The Waste Land: which is entitled,  “What the thunder said”:

• If there were rock
• And also water
• And water
• A spring
• A pool among the rock
• If there were the sound of water only
• Not the cicada
• And dry grass singing…

Water in Africa is always a sign of hope, of fertility. Here the dry grass and the singing cicada hint at the weaknesses in the colonial system, which Raeburn’s film explores with restrained subtlety.

Lessing’s novel reflects much of the experiences of her childhood growing up on an isolated farm in Mashonaland, in the former Rhodesia, where her English parents had settled after her father was wounded during World War I. From the outset Lessing’s fiction is critical of the society in which she grew up, the arid, self-satisfied colonial culture which, even as a young woman, she found suffocating. She was deeply questioning too of the dispossession of Africans. Rhodesia had been named after Cecil Rhodes, a mining magnate and politician who, in 1889 had formed the British South Africa Company and had fought and wheedled his way into the lands of the Mashona and the Matabele.Lessing’s novel was understandably attractive to the film director and writer Michael Raeburn who has built his career analysing the social and economic upheavals of post-colonial Africa, particularly of Zimbabwe where he has not always been welcomed. Raeburn shot The Grass is Singing in Zambia, in the National Park where the immense, open landscape, across which the eye is immediately drawn towards the distant mountains, is typical of much of southern Africa. This is not the Hollywood image of the luxury safari, but the Rhodesia of the period shortly after the Second World War when some white farmers were making fortunes in maize and tobacco amid the murmurings against colonial rule blown by winds of change that, at the time, were almost as silent as the surrounding bush.

In the opening frames of the film, the camera focuses on what are obviously African artefacts swinging from a tree in the wind, among them the fetish of a white doll pierced by an assegai (spear). This is a dark film in every sense, a film in which the characters do not speak a great deal and the viewer is always aware of the presence of Africa in the changing seasons: the rain, the wind, and the shifting clouds which form a backdrop to the group of black men at work on the farm. Silence and, at times, the evocative music of Lasse Danberg, Björn Isfällt and Themba Tana, play an important part in creating mood and tension. Raeburn has taken much of what sparse dialogue there is straight from Lessing’s novel. The language of white people in the period, casual remarks about the laziness of kaffirs, comments on the untrustworthiness of the “educated native” and the general stupidity of “blacks” will shock contemporary audiences.

The depressing brick farmhouse where the central drama unfolds is in strong contrast to the brief scenes of family life in the adjoining compound, where the labourers and their families live. The visual impact of this film is strong, from the vivid sequence showing workers fighting a veld fire, a common hazard in Africa, which threatens the crops and the cattle, to the casual shots of buck drifting silently through the bush, oblivious of what might seem to them to be the lunatic activities of humans.

The story line is very simple. Mary Turner (Karen Black), a white farmer’s wife, has been murdered. Nobody seems to know any details and the film moves in flashback to an account of Mary’s life as a vivacious but sexually cold secretary working in a nearby town. One day she overhears friends gossiping about her. They remark that she has reached her thirties and shows no sign of marrying because, someone adds, she “is not like that”. These comments throw Mary into a state of confused introspection so rapidly that the viewer finds her reactions scarcely credible. Mary marries a diffident young farmer, Dick Turner (John Thaw) who has been struggling for some years to turn a profit from his thousand acres of land mortgaged to the government. Dick is honest with Mary. He explains his relative poverty and the primitive conditions in which he lives. However the reality is a shock to his wife who is used to the normal comforts of town life. She finds that his three-roomed house with its corrugated iron roof has no ceilings, so that it turns into an oven in the summer. The curtains are made of grain sacks and there is no mosquito netting on the windows. From her small savings she buys material, makes curtains, and does her best to improve her home. Later she whitewashes the walls herself, an activity almost unthinkable for a white Rhodesian woman.

Mary is afraid of Africans. She thinks of them as savages who stink like animals. From the outset, Mary’s behaviour to one house servant after another is cold, at times even cruel and abusive. She stubbornly refuses to listen to Dick’s attempts to broaden her understanding and change her behaviour. One by one, she either dismisses the men or they ask to leave. Her attitude does not begin to change until her husband, in despair at the constant rows, introduces his best worker, Moses (John Kani) into the household, to be trained as a domestic servant.

John Kani is a celebrated South African actor, playwright and dramatist who has won many awards and who, from his collaboration with Athol Fugard in Sizwe Banzi is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973) onwards, did much for protest theatre during the apartheid years. His performance as Moses is moving and thought-provoking.

Karen Black’s notable career in films from her early success in Easy Rider (1969) and during the succeeding decade when she became almost a cult figure, particularly for her representation of women on the edge of sanity, made her an excellent choice for this role. The entire drama is dependent upon the slow degeneration of this obstinate woman whose irrational anger at black people is part of her cultural inheritance rather than innate viciousness. Mary is driven by fear; a fear fanned by the white colonizer’s horror of miscegenation, a horror expressed by Charlie when he notices the signs of intimacy between Moses and Mary in the scene where he stays for supper.

However, Mary’s first encounter with Moses had been far more amicable. When Dick collapses with a severe bout of malaria, Mary is forced to go down to the lands (fields) to supervise the workers who have taken the opportunity to enjoy some well-earned rest. At first Mary cannot bear the sight of the men whom she treats with the utmost contempt, scarcely able to recognize them as human beings with normal human needs. Karen Black creates a woman in whom fear of Africans paradoxically begins to feed a sense of power in her new role as overseer. Moses, who is a powerfully built man, catches Mary’s attention for the first time when he stops working and helps himself to a mug of water. When she orders him back to work, Moses replies casually that he needs a drink. Mary finds his attitude so provocative that, almost without realizing what she is doing, she lifts the sjambok she carries and slashes him across the face. For a moment Mary fears the man will attack her but, surprisingly, he restrains himself and returns to work. Significantly, Mary does not tell Dick about this incident, an incident which reverberates even more powerfully in the novel than it does in the film where the sjambok looks more like a thin stick than the destructive weapon it is.

Karen Black’s depiction of Mary’s gradual metamorphosis into a deranged woman who meets a tragic end is thoroughly convincing. Apathy creeps over her. She scatters grain among the hens, apparently unaware that they are dying. It becomes difficult to sympathize with this woman because the dignified bearing and restrained responses of John Kani’s Moses to Mary’s vindictive outbursts demand respect.  Black’s Mary, though convincing in her sad decline, is not perhaps as easily understandable as the Mary of the novel where the reader is given a detailed account of her unhappy childhood, an account which does much to explain, for instance, her inability to respond sexually to her husband, a reluctance which is, however, made clear in the film.

The core of the plot is the total reversal of power acted out between the African house servant and the white woman. It is the breakdown of the mistress/servant relationship with its manifold invisible boundaries and the slow development of a human interchange between Moses and Mary. When Dick collapses with another bout of malaria, Moses insists on nursing him so that the ill and exhausted Mary gets some sleep. When Mary stops ordering meals, Moses brings food on a tray and persuades her to eat. His attitude to the sick woman is almost paternal; he even tucks her up at night. Mary drifts zombie-like through the house shadowing Moses on whom she becomes totally dependent. He even combs her tangled hair and helps her to dress.

In the meantime Dick, forced by circumstances to sell his farm to Muller in an arrangement which allows him to stay on as farm manager, is heading for a total breakdown. John Thaw’s creation of Dick as a thoroughly decent, somewhat idealistic man lacking the ruthlessness, or the strength, to manage either his personal life or his land, is a foretaste of Thaw’s later successful career on stage and screen, perhaps most memorably as Inspector Morse in the British television series which established him as a National Treasure.

Eventually, Tony Marston (John Moulder Brown), a young Englishman new to the Colony, arrives to manage the farm so that Dick, now recovered, can take his sick wife on holiday. Unnerved by glimpses of intimacy between Mary and her house servant, Tony confronts the couple. The distraught Mary, who has been clinging to Moses, suddenly flings herself into the arms of the young white man, almost a complete stranger to her. Tony dismisses Moses on the spot. Later on, Moses stabs Mary, who practically offers herself up to his knife, on the veranda.

Significantly, Raeburn then departs from Lessing’s text, inserting a brief exchange between Moses and a black woman, presumably his wife, in their own language, which is not subtitled. We then see Moses engaged in a fleeting encounter with a witchdoctor, also not subtitled. The film then shows the tree with its ominous speared white doll fetish. The final shot is of the impassive face of the handcuffed Moses walking calmly behind Muller’s farm truck into which Mary’s body has been loaded.

Is this a simple revenge tragedy, payback for his slashed face and the numerous indignities he has suffered? I think not. Raeburn’s fetishes swinging from a tree, which frame the entire film, might be taken to imply that Africa will always be primitive and dangerous. Such an interpretation would make nonsense of Lessing’s novel, and of Raeburn’s film. Instead, this deliberate flashback to these ominous African artefacts could be thought to emphasize the latent power of Africa and its people, despite colonial subjugation. Moses kills as a matter of pride because the white woman has refused in the end to acknowledge him as a fellow human being.

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La más reciente edición de los Premios Goya organizada por la Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España vuelve a poner al cine caribeño en la mirilla. El filme Juan de los muertos (2012, Alberto Brugués) se hizo en la noche del 17 de febrero de 2013 con el Goya a la mejor película iberoamericana. La historia se sitúa en La Habana, poco más de cincuenta años después de la Revolución, específicamente durante “la cosa ésta que vino después” del Período Especial, como explica el protagonista, Juan (Alexis Díaz de Villegas). La imposibilidad de definir el momento actual en la sociedad y la política cubana pronto encuentra su equivalente en la aparición de seres extraños que pululan por mar y tierra. Son los zombis que han tomado el control del país y que, como el contexto sociopolítico cubano, no se pueden definir: ¿muertos o vivos?, ¿disidentes o compañeros? La explicación es doble: mientras que para los habaneros se trata de una verdadera arma de destrucción masiva que impide la convivencia en la ciudad, para el gobierno cubano, en cambio, son un nuevo intento de los anarquistas, apoyados por el gobierno yanqui, de derrocar al otro gran muerto-vivo que es el gobierno castrista.

Juan, acompañado de su amigo apropiadamente llamado Lázaro (Jorge Molina), pronto descubre en esta situación una nueva oportunidad para comprobar que es un sobreviviente. Si sobrevivió “a Mariel, a Angola, al Período Especial, y a ésta cosa que vino después,” entonces también es capaz de sobrevivir y hasta de combatir la plaga infecciosa de los zombis. Es así que nace el negocio de asesinar por encargo a los “seres queridos” que se han transformado ahora en, literalmente, portadores de “gusanos”. Irónicamente, el paisaje a partir de ese momento se hace más homogéneo: si los edificios de la ciudad muestran constantemente su cara deteriorada que resiste como puede los embistes del tiempo y la falta de restauración, ahora la ruina se hace visible en los propios habitantes, aun cuando, en principio, todos parecen tener el mismo aspecto monótono de siempre, como observa una futura víctima ante la horda de zombis marchando por las calles: “Yo los veo igual que siempre”.

Juan de los muertos es una combinación de humor con elementos del cine de horror, algo que ya se había visto en 1985 con Vampiros en La Habana, película de animación del cubano Juan Padrón. En el filme de Padrón, sin embargo, la invasión proviene del exterior cuando los vampiros de Europa del Este descubren que un científico cubano posee la fórmula que les permite soportar la exposición al sol sin peligro de muerte. No obstante, a pesar del precedente de Padrón, no es hasta estos últimos dos años que el cine del Caribe hace su incursión de modo más sistemático y formal en el oscuro mundo del horror y del terror.

El horror visceral, no obstante, aparece ya desde el 2005 con el estreno de Andrea del dominicano Rogert Bencosme. El filme es la historia de Andrea (Any Ferreiras), una adolescente que inocentemente roba una cruz de un sepulcro para colocarla en la tumba de su reciente fallecida madre. Este hecho provoca la ira del espíritu que se libera y reclama lo que le ha sido arrebatado. Andrea es poseída por el espíritu que en vida había sido amigo de la infancia de Flora (Elvira Grullón), abuela de Andrea. En el pasado, cuando la joven Flora rechaza la propuesta amorosa de su amigo, éste se suicida y permanece encerrado en la tumba durante años hasta que es liberado en el presente de la narración por la joven protagonista. El padre de Andrea, Manuel (Hensy Pichardo), quien al comienzo de la película regresa del extranjero después de un largo período ausente, debe salvar a su hija por lo cual recurre a la ayuda de espiritistas. Aun a pesar del bajo presupuesto de la película, la misma recibió el Premio del Público del New York International Independent Film and Video Festival. La historia, alegan sus creadores, está basada en hechos reales ocurridos en Moca al norte de la República Dominicana.

Poco después del estreno de Juan de los muertos, aparecen dos filmes puertorriqueños que se valen de elementos propios del gótico clásico y que, podría decirse, contribuyen, junto con el filme de Brugués, a una nueva tradición cinematográfica: Los condenados (2012) de Roberto Busó-García y Under My Nails (2012) de Arí Maniel Cruz. El primero hace eco del más clásico cine de terror y suspenso: un pueblo remoto, una familia que guarda secretos, una casa presuntamente embrujada. Ana Puttnam (Cristina Rodlo), junto con su padre, vuelve desde México al ficticio pueblo de Rosales para reivindicar la imagen de éste, un médico estadounidense altruista que se encuentra, como si de un personaje de Poe se tratase, en estado catatónico. Ana planea convertir la casona familiar en un gran museo en el cual se pueda preservar el legado científico de su padre. Sin embargo, una vez en Rosales, la protagonista tendrá que descubrir los terribles secretos que oculta su familia y el pueblo. La clásica relación entre ciencia y horror que aparece en el siglo XIX vuelve en la película de Busó-García para presentar los crímenes cometidos contra la inocencia, la de los niños y la de un pueblo sometido al escalofriante y destructivo progreso científico.

Under My Nails, por su parte, es un thriller que presenta la figura del asesino perverso y de las mujeres que están a su merced. Filmada en Nueva York, la película sigue el día a día de Solimar (Kisha Tikina Burgos), una mujer puertorriqueña en el Bronx cuyo pasado está marcado por el abandono de su madre y el suicidio de su padre, y su vecino, Roberto (Iván Camilo), un dominicano que vive con su madre y que mantiene una violenta y masoquista relación con Perpetue (Dolores Pedro), una dominico-haitiana. La curiosidad que Solimar siente hacia Roberto y Perpetue la lleva a espiar (siempre a través de rendijas, agujeros mínimos o espacios reducidos) a Roberto y Perpetue y, finalmente, a presenciar el crimen violento de ésta. Solimar también desarrolla una morbosa obsesión sexual con el presunto asesino de quien parece enamorarse. Como en Los condenados, en Under My Nails la vivienda también es personaje porque es la que esconde amenazas, misterios y, posiblemente, cadáveres. Pero el terror en Under My Nails no sólo es el que genera la violencia y el crimen, sino también el que nace del abandono y la soledad. Solimar es un personaje solitario y apagado y su única relación es la que mantiene con Amalia (Antonio Pantojas), su amigo homosexual que actúa como una especie de madre y cuya pareja, además, tampoco habla porque se encuentra en estado vegetativo. Under My Nails, por lo tanto, es la historia de los “desplazados e inclasificables” –los emigrantes caribeños, los nuyoricans, los dominico-haitianos, los homosexuales, los enfermos. El terror de la ciudad y en la ciudad engulle a los más desprotegidos.

Si la película Andrea se estructura como un viaje que va de la realidad a la ficción, es decir, el hecho “real” adaptado al cine, en la película Desconocidos (2012, Andrés Ramírez), los personajes principales –un grupo de actores desconocidos contratados para realizar una película dentro de la película– hacen el recorrido inverso dentro de la trama. Sin saberlo, los actores son contratados para protagonizar una película “snuff”; los hechos que creen estar actuando, realmente ocurren; la ficción se convierte en realidad. Dos caras del terror, de esa forma, van desde Andrea hasta Desconocidos: la representación ficticia de algo que pudo haber ocurrido en el pasado y la representación de algo que podría llegar a ocurrir en el futuro. El terror se vuelve ineludible y omnipresente.

Finalmente, este año se estrenó Se vende del cubano Jorge Perugorría. El contexto de la película es el de la Cuba más reciente, durante el proceso de apertura iniciado por Raúl Castro. Los personajes tienen celulares, hay internet –aun cuando limitado–, y los cubanos de Miami vuelven para comprar antiguas propiedades (¿casas embrujadas?) de la Habana Vieja. Nácar (Dailenys Fuentes), la protagonista, aconsejada por el espíritu de su madre (Mirtha Ibarra), decide vender la bóveda familiar del cementerio para poder conseguir un poco de dinero. Cuando su compañera de trabajo la convence de que también venda los huesos de los difuntos, Nácar le pide ayuda a Noel (Jorge Perugorría) a quien había conocido poco antes y con quien inicia un romance. La película, como aclara el propio Perugorría, es un homenaje a los directores Tomás Gutiérrez Alea y Juan Carlos Tabío a quien considera sus maestros del cine (Cubadebate). Las alusiones a Muerte de un burócrata (1966, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea) o a Fresa y chocolate (1993, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea y Juan Carlos Tabío) no son escasas. Entre ellas, la mezcla de humor con ironía que en Se vende pasa por una puesta en escena de momentos propios del cine de terror, como la exhumación de una tumba o el entierro en vida de uno de los personajes. En una Cuba más abierta al mercado exterior, el terror también se vende y se compra; se vuelve mercancía. El aura misteriosa que cubre a la muerte como idea pasa a ser el aura del arte, la singularidad del objeto artístico, hacia el final de la película cuando el cadáver momificado del padre es exhibido como una escultura en un museo de la ciudad. Si durante el Período Especial, toda la infraestructura cubana –carros antiguos y casas destruidas– se fue tornando en museo abierto, en Se vende, el arte vuelve al interior del museo y junto con éste, entra también lo macabro. Tanto Juan de los muertos como Se vende presentan, entonces, la posibilidad de lucrarse con los cuerpos de los seres queridos y ese lucro es el que ambas películas transforman en arte a través del género de terror.

Zombis, vampiros, casas siniestras, asesinos psicópatas, espíritus… todos pertenecen al género gótico. Como el personaje de Solimar que se encuentra entre dos polos –deseo y rechazo; sol y mar– el gótico muestra una actitud ambivalente ante los cambios acaecidos en la sociedad europea del siglo XVIII como el paso del feudalismo a la industrialización, la migración del campo a la ciudad, la sustitución de la religión por la ciencia, de lo primitivo por lo moderno (Punter). Todo lo residual del pasado se expresa como una presencia monstruosa o fantasmal que se cuela en el interior de la vida doméstica y civilizada del presente pero que, a pesar de amenazar con destruir todo a su paso, no deja de generar fascinación y morbo en quien lo percibe. De ahí que la literatura gótica, desde sus inicios, y el cine de horror y terror, ya en el siglo XX, hayan sido y permanezcan siendo géneros muy populares. Era de esperarse, entonces, que el Caribe terminara por sumarse con fuerza a la lista de geografías amenazadas por los muertos-vivos, los fantasmas, los monstruos y los zombis. El paraíso tropical de las Antillas esconde secretos oscuros que su cine comienza ahora a develar.

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