African cream

The cresting of a new wave?

by Peter Keough

"NEW AFRICAN CINEMA", At the Museum of Fine Arts, January 9 through 24.

What's wrong with the American movie? Perhaps it needs to have some of the disasters it so masterfully creates on the screen take place in real life. Most dynamic cinema springs from political and social turmoil. The Russian Revolution gave birth to the basics of montage. World War I engendered German Expressionism; the Depression led to the Golden Age of Hollywood. The ruins of postwar Italy nurtured neo-realism, and the seeds of the French New Wave were sown in the political beds of Algeria and Indochina.

The pattern persists to the present day. The richest and most promising cinemas now thrive in such hot spots as China, Iran, Ireland, and even the former Yugoslavia. And over the past decade, creative strength and innovative vision have mounted in the continent that has given us the horrors of Somalia and Rwanda -- Africa.

Over the next two weeks the Museum of Fine Arts will present a series of the best of recent African cinema -- eight films from eight different countries, each distant enough from the worst chaos to be able to reflect it with passion, detachment, depth, and poetry. If the three I got to preview are an indication, these films are as rich in tradition and myth as they are rife with contemporary problems: they combine the two realms with exhilarating grace.

Tradition and myth weigh heavy in Raymond Rajaonarivelo's Quand les étoiles rencontrent la mer ("Where the Stars Meet the Sea," from 1996; screens January 23 at 6 p.m.) -- that and the uncanny landscape and architecture of his native Madagascar and the cultural legacy of its former French colonial rulers. In a haunting opening segment, a man places a squawling newborn in a cattle pen as the moon eclipses the sun. As the eclipse reaches totality, he beats the stockade rails, stampeding the herd. His purpose is foiled, however: a young girl rescues the infant, who's crippled in the incident, and raises him as her own.

She names him "Kapila" (the "lame one") and what follows is a harshly naturalistic depiction of a childhood spent collecting bottles amid the stark squalor of an inland city. Kapila grows up into a youth of raven-like intensity haunted by recurring dreams of the sea and the stampede. Goaded by the appearances of a cackling blind crone who impels him to his destiny, Kapila demands that his stepmother tell him about his past. Reluctantly, she relates that for those dwelling in the primitive village of his birth, a child born during an eclipse -- when the powers of darkness and light do battle -- is ill-omened and must be killed. After his only friend is murdered, Kapila hobbles off to find his father and confront his fate.

Clearly Rajaonarivelo has his head full of such Western figures as Oedipus, Moses, and Jesus Christ, not to mention the philosophy of such writers as Sartre and Camus. Fortunately, though, his senses are permeated by the eldritch terrain and culture of his native land, and at times his film achieves the oneiric power of Pasolini's The Gospel According to Saint Matthew and, of course, Oedipus Rex. Until he stumbles near the end with over-busy symbolism and magical realism, that sensibility and the luminous performances prevail.

A different kind of landscape dominates the first scenes of Senegalese director Mousse Sene Absa's Tableau Ferraille ("Scrap Heap," from 1997; screens January 9 at 8:15 p.m. and January 24 at 11 a.m.) -- a beach littered with debris, including rusty barrels of radioactive waste. In a brilliantly structured achronological narrative, Tableau tells the tale of Daam (the Afropop star Ismaël Lô), an idealistic politician who is seen bandaged, hung over, and disconsolate, being borne on a horse-drawn cart from his home. With him is his strikingly beautiful wife Gagnesiri (Ndèye Fatou Ndaw), who insists on stopping and visiting the grave of her old neighborhood friend Anta (Isseu Niang).

From the gravesite Gagnesiri indulges in a series of flashbacks that work from Daam's rise as a dewy-cheeked liberal seeking "to avoid chaos" to his downfall as a vacillator unwilling to confront his corrupt local cronies -- significantly named Président, Dollar, and Civilisé. Daam's doom proves inevitable when, after failing to impregnate the traditionally inclined Gagnesiri, he takes on the "emancipated and educated" Kiné (Ndèye Bineta Diop) as his second wife. She of course betrays him, but what could be read as a reactionary political allegory is transcended by the director's uncompromising regard for human complexity and his thrilling mastery of composition, imagery, pacing, and precise detail -- not to mention the soaring soundtrack by Maadu Diabate.

A more revolutionary, if not more optimistic, viewpoint propels Jean-Marie Teno's Clando (1996; screens January 16 at 5:45 p.m.). Again the narrative is chronologically skewed, and the film thrusts us unprepared into the precarious urban flux of Sobgui, a "clando" or clandestine (i.e., illegal) cabdriver in the desolate streets of Douala in Cameroon. Harassed by the cops, and as impotent with his wife as he is with the authorities, Sobgui finally calls it quits when he's implicated in a brutal murder by a radical political group.

Chamba, his mentor and an elder in his village, gives him a break by sending him to Germany on business for his car dealership. In return, Sobgui is to track down Chamba's son, who made his fortune in Europe but then collapsed into alcoholism. Along the way Sobgui hooks up with Irene, a pretty German activist, and to her he relates his story, which we've glimpsed up until now in feverish, fragmented flashbacks.

A successful computer technician, Sobgui made the mistake of abetting pro-democracy groups. He was kidnapped, grotesquely tortured, and imprisoned. Now in exile, he must decide whether to wait for change in his country or foment it, perhaps violently, himself.

Admirably ambitious, Teno seems to have packed his Clando with too much political and philosophical baggage. Still, it achieves moments of stunning, unforgettable poetic and political clarity. Dragged from his prison cell, Sobgui is dumped on a busy city corner and told to wait there for his warders' return. A former colleague, barely recognizing him, asks him why he's dressed in rags. "This is Sunday best for prison." Sobgui replies. Then why, his friend asks, is he here? "This is my prison," he replies, indicating not just the street corner but all Cameroon, and perhaps the world. Set though it is in the intricacies of one nation's politics, Clando suggests that whether any country will be prison or a paradise depends on the imaginations of those who dwell there.