African dream

The films of Med Hondo at the HFA

by Chris Fujiwara

"AFRICAN PERSPECTIVES: MED HONDO," At the Harvard Film Archive April 28 through 30.

Mauritanian-born director Med Hondo could well say, with Samuel Fuller, that "the cinema is a battleground." Works of structural invention and sardonic irony, Med Hondo's films surround colonialism on all sides, dig underneath it, explode it in slow motion. The complexity of tone in his work expresses the filmmaker's mastery, his desire to be thoroughly equal to his enemy, the need to be free and uncontaminated by doubt in order to refuse evil. The Harvard Film Archive's tribute to Med Hondo includes screenings of five films and discussions with the filmmaker.

Med Hondo rose to prominence in 1970 when his first feature film, Soleil O (April 30 at 6 p.m.), became the sensation of the critics' week at Cannes. Made for no money over a year and a half, Soleil O chronicles the psychological journey the filmmaker and many of the actors made as immigrant workers in France: the mysteries of acculturation, the encounter with the other and with racism, learning to see one's self as other. After a surrealist-allegorical prologue in which newly baptized Africans turn soldier for the colonial powers, the film mostly follows a single immigrant in France (played by Robert Liensol) as he looks for a job, meets other immigrants and various whites, learns about how western capitalism manages the "black invasion," and finally struggles to awaken from his historical nightmare.

Soleil O is a bracing, exciting film. It has an original way of being very clear and abrupt in presenting situations that are absurd, didactic, or on the threshold between fiction and reality, between principle and example. The milieu of the characters is neither the Third World nor the First but an open zone where cultural struggle is waged in code. Few films convey such a sharp sense of disorientation; the murky feeling of coming home drunk has never been caught more vividly on film than in the scene where the protagonist stumbles home from a bar, a clock racing on the soundtrack, the camera dismally exploring his cluttered room. Neither is there a more shocking cinematic scene of eating than the one here in which two white bourgeois parents permit their young children to run amok in the presence of their traumatized African guest.

The sweeping Cinemascope epic Sarraounia (1986; April 29 at 9:15 p.m.) recounts events that took place in West Africa at the end of the 19th century. Raised on mare's milk and trained from childhood in archery and herbalism, Sarraounia (Aï Keïta), queen of the Aznas, becomes legendary as a sorceress and general. For the leaders of France's Central African Expedition, defeating her is a matter of prestige. In its early sequences, the film establishes the values and structures of African civilization in order to lay the groundwork for its devastating critique of the colonizers. The narrative keeps its heroine off screen for much of the film, building her up as a shimmering mythical image until she returns to rout her enemies. Sarraounia avoids both the clichés of magical realism and a strictly materialist approach to history: it becomes large-scale epic drama, de-lyricized but grand, both ironic and celebratory.

Med Hondo's latest film, Watani, a World Without Evil (1998; April 28 at 7 p.m. and April 30 at 8 p.m.), is an austere portrait of contemporary French society in collapse. The film interweaves the stories of two men -- a white bank executive and an African immigrant -- who lose their jobs and are abandoned by the system. The banker becomes a regular at a bar where he's adopted by a group of militant racist thugs who beat and murder lone Arabs and blacks at night. Meanwhile, the African and his family take refuge with a group of undocumented immigrants in a church. Watani was slapped with a restrictive classification by the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) on the ground it has "violent scenes . . . of a nature to disturb the sensibility of the young public." In fact, Watani eschews blood and gore to concentrate on the faces, gestures, and discourses of violence -- a focus that apparently made the film too hard to take for the CNC.

The Harvard retrospective also includes West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (1979; April 28 at 9:15 p.m.), a musical set aboard a slave ship, and Black Light (1994; April 29 at 7 p.m.), a thriller that shuttles between Paris and Mali.