HYENAS (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1992)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

In German, Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s tragicomic The Visit of the Old Woman (Der Besuch der alten Dame, 1956) is a modern masterpiece. Its action, necessarily modified, has been transposed to a Senegalese village in Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyènes. Colobane, dried up after a run of prosperity, represents Africa beseiged by poverty, drought, exploitation, communal and regional strife, lack of enterprise. When Linguère Ramatou (Ami Diakhate, brilliant), a former resident who is now filthy rich, visits, the townfolk are enticed to help her in her plan of revenge against shopkeeper Dramaan Drameh in exchange for the wealth and goodies, including refrigerators and television sets, that she dangles under their noses. When she was a girl, Dramaan jilted her.
     Mambéty’s darkly comical fable brandishes the mirror-imaging of a parched landscape and Linguère’s parched soul. Colobanians are only too eager to allow their human folly to tumble out. Environment clarifies their conduct. In addition, the film’s satirical edge administers appropriate cuts to Western materialism. The embittered, withered hag that Linguère has become should discourage anyone from following her; but it doesn’t.
     The opening shot sets the humorous tone: a closeup of an elephant’s front feet moving at a lumbering pace. This image of African indolence yields to a wide-angle shot of the herd, with its suggestion of herd mentality. (School children being led in group recitation reinforces this impression.) A red monkey swaying to the beat of a village band’s music—what an image!—rounds out a portrait of defeatism: everyone and everything fiddling, as it were, while Colobane burns.
     It is fitting that enterprising, steadily contributing Dramaan should become the one that his neighbors rally against—neighbors, already quarrelsome, who need a target to give themselves some sense of purpose, unity and communal identity, however false that sense may be.

THE BLUE EYES OF YONTA (Flora Gomes, 1992)

Portuguese Guinea won independence, becoming Guinea-Bissau, in 1974. Vicente fought for it. In Bissau, the West African nation’s capital, he struggles to keep solvent his fish-exporting business, both for himself and the local fishermen who supply him with their catch. Vultures circle in the sky. One day he looks up and sees himself as one of the vultures.
     For Vicente’s generation, disillusionment isn’t hard to come by. The struggle for independence has passed into nostalgia; the dream of progress for everyone has failed to become reality. Electricity is a sometime thing in Bissau, threatening to rot Vicente’s stored fish; people and their possessions are being evicted from longtime homes. Meanwhile, a wedding celebration shows the pluck of the younger generation, who may be, however, whistling in the dark.
     A high school dropout who helps support her family, Yonta is oblivious to how she has had to adjust her own dreams in order to accommodate reality. Like Vicente, she keeps busy in order to nurture blindness; but the pathos of her vacancy as she sits alone by the sea, waiting for someone who will not show, sums up the wistfulness she suppresses. (She is too young yet to be able to name it.) Yonta’s parents are old comrades of Vicente’s, and Yonta is in love with her romantic notion of Vicente. In turn, Yonta has an unknown admirer who sends her love letters that wax poetically on the subject of her blue eyes. Yonta’s eyes are brown. The boy’s feelings are as idealized as once were Vicente’s hopes for his country.
     Flora Gomes’s Udjua azul di Yonta is concentrated and easy, jubilant and heartbreaking. Gomes is of Vicente’s generation. He finds that looking ahead casts an eye backward.
     Blue is the color of sky, sea, dreams.

THESE HANDS (Flora M’mbugu-Schelling, 1992)

Dedicated to women everywhere struggling to survive in poverty, Flora M’mbugu-Schelling’s documentary shows women from Mozambique in a sunbaked Tanzanian quarry relentlessly cracking rock into bits with stone hammers. With conversation among the laborers, but without voiceover or other commentary, that is to say, contextualization, the film thus proceeds until its last breath, at which point script appears to inform us that these refugees work for themselves. This is heartening insofar as they aren’t being directly exploited, yet worrisome as well, for, given the harshness and monotony of their toil, it seems evident that they would be doing other things instead if a choice were available to them. These immigrants and pioneers are starting at the bottom—a familiar kind of place for those in an unfamiliar land.
     The opening is extraordinary. A barefooted woman is sitting in a space of rock, hammering, both raw material and results in piling abundance between her separated legs: a complex image resonating with equal suggestions of barrenness and fecundity, stasis and productivity. Meanwhile, we hear a cacophony of the hammering, the sound of which continues as the camera follows another woman carrying a basket of stone chips on her head. A wide-angle shot shows an army of the refugees at work as the sound that their labor generates continues and continues. M’mbugu-Schelling’s film condenses a single day’s work, but it also conveys the impression that the activity is endless, that, for the moment at least, it defines these women’s whole existence.
     It does not. At one point, asserting her personality and her autonomy, one of the women stops working and breaks into dance, triggering a hand-clapping community of joy in the quarry. Spontaneity; humanity—and then, back to work. Not a regulated factory break, but their own break.

DANZÓN (María Novaro, 1991)

Julia Solórzano (María Rojo, radiant, heartachingly good), a single mother who works as a telephone operator in Mexico City, relaxes by dancing the highly formal danzón with Carmelo, an older gentleman whom she meets only on the dance floor. (The wide-rimmed white hat Carmelo always wears denotes his cheished privacy.) One night Carmelo doesn’t show up, and Julia uncharacteristically takes time off to go to Veracruz in search of him. While not finding him there, Julia experiences what working-class persons, especially women, rarely, if ever, get to experience: liberty. This includes friendship with a cross-dresser, whom she teaches to dance, and a love affair with a hardworking boy.
     Written by sisters Beatriz and María Novaro and directed by the latter, a former documentarian, Danzón opens with a closeup on Julia’s and Carmelo’s feet on the dance floor and ends quietly, jubilantly, with the pair dancing again. In between, the film follows Julia only, sparking their reunion with both wistfulness and a sense of new possibilities. How important Carmelo is to Julia doubtless reflects how important she also is to him. Novaro suggests how important all kinds of people are to us, both inside and outside of romance.
     The film pairs Julia in heartfelt conversation with other women and girls, including co-workers and Julia’s teenaged daughter, whom Julia helps adjust to her new job as operator while retaining a mother’s worry. (In San Juan, a phone operator was raped at her worksite.) Novaro’s delicious comedy owes something to Antonioni in its open sense of adventure and pays (in the tarot-reading scene) homage to Agnès Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962). It expresses our need for both structure and liberty, showing how structure can liberate, and how liberty, so hard for so many to come by, can enrich our lives.

CABEZA DE VACA (Nicolás Echevarría, 1991)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

An outgrowth of his earlier ethnological documentaries, Nicolás Echevarría’s most celebrated film is based on explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s 1542 report to Charles V about a 600-man expedition to the New World—the mission was to claim Florida for Spain—that only four others survived. In particular, the film explores the relationship between Cabeza de Vaca and, once separated from his shipwrecked group, native tribes he encounters. But the film departs from what Cabeza de Vaca wrote to the King; Echevarría pursues instead a what if? approach to the historical material. Indeed, Cabeza de Vaca weighs aloud the prudence of telling the King lies, so unbelievable has been the course of his adventures, against a desire to tell the truth.
     When indigenes take Cabeza de Vaca away, his comrades assume that he is headed for the roasting pot. Rather, as the fairest of the group, he would perhaps make the best slave. However, the tribe’s shaman takes the white man under his wing, and the Spaniard proves his worth by restoring the sight of a blinded chieftain. When Cabeza de Vaca, thus allowed his freedom, departs, the eyes of Malacosa, the armless dwarf who had once derided him, well up in tears.
     Cabeza de Vaca searches throughout America for his comrades. Eventually they reunite. The cannibalism that had seemed to be his destiny proved instead to be theirs, on the other end of the ladle. One of the group attributes his man-eating to “a Christian’s hunger”—an indication of how easily the “civilized” rationalize their own barbaric behavior.
     Echevarría’s wild, hypnotic, at times deliriously magical film ends with one of cinema’s most searing wide-angle shots: a gigantic Cross being carried across the landscape—colonial presumption, and the enslavement of indigenes and destruction of their cultures.