African Video Movies and Global Desires. Carmela Garritano

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СКАЧАТЬ ideologies of anticolonialism and cultural nationalism. As Chris Hesse explained, the company’s aim was to educate and “boost our cultural heritage” (personal communication). Simon Gikandi’s claim about “the key motivations” for the creation of a modern African literature applies with equal validity to the genesis of film production in Ghana. Its driving force was the restoration of “the moral integrity and cultural authority of the African in the age of decolonization” (Gikandi 2004, 381). Likewise, the central paradox confronted by this first generation of African writers, intellectuals, and filmmakers was that in order to oppose colonial domination and assert the rights of Africans they had to “turn to a recently discovered European language of tradition, nation, and race” (382).

      Incorporating codes and conventions affiliated with West African oral traditions, the earliest features produced by GFIC represent attempts to Africanize film. The company aspired to the articulation of a distinctly Ghanaian national cinema. To again borrow a particularly apt phrase from Phil Rosen, GFIC mobilized “a culturally rooted stylization” of narrative and address in order to “collectivize” its Ghanaian audience (2001, 297). This objective is perhaps most pronounced in the first production of the newly independent company, No Tears for Ananse (1965). Based on the play Ananse and the Gum Man (1965) by Ghanaian playwright Joe de Graft, who from 1961 to 1969 served as head of the drama division of the School of Music and Drama at the University of Ghana, and written and directed by Sam Aryeetey, the film re-creates the performance of an Anansesem, or a tale of the trickster Ananse. It intends to celebrate the richness of Akan oral tradition and, like the first modern African literary texts, to illustrate in the famous words of Chinua Achebe that “African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans” (Achebe 1975, 8).

      As much as Aryeetey’s film taps into a reservoir of cultural knowledge in its incorporation of oral tradition, it also exploits the narrative and theatrical capacities of cinema to produce a sense of national identity based in the articulation of a shared culture and the organization of a national space. Ravi S. Vasudevan (2001) has described the new and emergent forms of subjectivity constituted in Hindi commercial cinema during the first decade after Indian independence, suggesting that the mixed modes of address and systems of narration that structure these films outline new forms of subjectivity and national identity. No Tears for Ananse, like several of the Indian films Vasudevan examines, incorporates a mixed address. In this case, it combines the “character-driven codes” (Vasudevan 2001, 149) associated with Hollywood and codes and conventions affiliated with African storytelling. Most notable among these techniques is the use of audience direct address. Direct address refers to the sequences where the film overtly addresses the spectator and ruptures the closed-off world of the narrative space, or the diegesis. The first instance of direct address in No Tears for Ananse occurs in the film’s opening as the introductory text quoted below scrolls down the screen:

      Story-telling is a form of entertainment very popular among Ghanaians. Of the many stories that one may hear, there is a particular cycle that has come to be identified with the fictitious character Ananse, the spider-man or man-spider. These are the stories known as Anansesem, the stories of Ananse. Kweku Ananse symbolizes shrewdness and cunning. In Akan mythology, he is the younger brother of Nyankopon, the great god of the sky. Unlike his brother, however, Kwaku Ananse is more earthy. His greed knows no end. A figure of fun, he seems at his best when engaged in some mischief. But like all mischief makers, he often ends up in trouble and disgrace, thus earning the laughter and scorn of mankind.

      Although identifying Ananse as an important character in Akan mythology, the intertitle claims Ananse as an important national figure, suppressing other ethnic identities, languages, oral discourses, and mythologies while claiming a shared national culture and oral literature. The reference to “Ghanaians” has a double function here. It is, to borrow a phrase from Homi Bhabha (1994), pedagogical and performative, asserting an ethnographic “truth” about Ghanaians and, in that, producing “Ghanaian” as a national identity. Ghanaians are doubly inscribed; described and addressed, their national identity is the subject and product of the enunciation.

      In No Tears for Ananse it is the direct address of a traditional storyteller, played by Ernest Abbeyquaye, that frames the Ananse story and invites the film audience into “a familiar community of meaning” (Vasudevan 2001, 149). The architecture of these opening and closing segments theatricalizes space to reenact a storytelling event for two audiences: the diegetic audience (the audience within the world of the film) seated around the storyteller and the film audience located in the film theater. Placed in a position external to the Ananse story he will tell, centered frontally, and standing among a large group of rapt listeners, the storyteller looks directly into the camera when he introduces his tale. An ensemble of traditional drummers and dancers, located behind him and to the side, punctuates his address. The camera, tilted slightly upward, places the film audience among the crowd of listeners, who appear in a brief cutaway sequence. Here the camera pans across the faces of the listeners as they laugh, nod, and smile, representing the audience as the nation, heterogeneous, including the old and young, men and women, and happily unified around this cultural performance. The film’s creation of a storytelling event, a culturally familiar and culturally coded arena of meaning, opens a national space, shared by Ghanaians within and external to the film, that, significantly, affirms the idea of community found in the Ananse narrative.

      The mode of spectatorial address shifts with the actual telling of the Anansesem. Rendered through Hollywood-style narration that uses continuity editing to invoke the grammar of realism, the narrative of the Ananse story positions the spectator fully within the story’s “real” world. Set in an unspecified past, the narrative moves between the perspectives of Ananse and his son Kwaku Tsin. It chronicles the avaricious Ananse’s ploy to trick his wife Okonnor, his son, and their village into believing that he is dead so that he can harvest and eat all of the food grown on the family farm. Ananse, feigning sudden sickness, asks his wife, upon what he claims is his approaching death, to grant him a last wish: “When I die, don’t bury me in a grave. Lie me on a pyre on the farm and build a hut around my body.” Ananse dies in Okonnor’s arms, and in the following days, the entire village mourns and partakes in the funeral rites and festivities. Taken to his farm on the pyre and left to meet his ancestors, Ananse, very much among the living, sneaks out of his hut each evening to pick ripe tomatoes, ground eggs, and cassava and prepare for himself a plentiful feast. While enjoying a large bowl of soup, he remarks, “How I pity all family men who have to share their food and never get the chance to put on a bit of fat.” When Okonnor and Tsin return to the farm several weeks later, they find their plants picked clean. Furious, Tsin vows to find the “scoundrel” who has been “feeding fat” on his father’s farm and devises an elaborate ploy to capture the thief. Kwaku Tsin carves a human figure from a large piece of wood, paints the statue with a thick and sticky sap, and places it on the farm, where he is certain the thief will find it. The foolish Ananse sees the figure and, mistaking it for a man, attempts to slap and kick it. When he makes contact with the sappy glue, of course, he sticks. Unable to free himself from the figure, he is captured by Tsin, who returns the next morning with his mother to check the trap he has set.

      After Tsin captures the thief, he immediately informs the entire village, whose members run to the farm to find Ananse caught in his own son’s trap. Point-of-view editing again aligns the camera with the crowd whose members heckle Ananse, and in the final scene, when the storyteller returns to impart the story’s lesson to his listeners, Ananse’s exposure and his shame, and therefore the story’s moral, are linked to Ananse’s “suffer[ing] in the eyes of his own wife and child,” and, importantly to the disapproval and sanction of the community. The storyteller, looking into the camera, imparts the film’s lesson: “Thus, Kwaku Ananse was exposed. And his greed brought upon him greater shame than any other man ever suffered in the eyes of his own wife and child. Take heed then to all who will listen.” The architecture of the film aligns, in censure, the gazes of the Ananse’s family, his community, the storyteller and his audience, and, significantly, the film spectators in the dark film theater. In this way, it organizes “a circuit of imaginary communication, indeed, a making of audience into imaginary community” (Vasudevan 2001, 149). The mixed modes СКАЧАТЬ