African Video Movies and Global Desires. Carmela Garritano

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СКАЧАТЬ Ghana Film Industry Corporation released Hamile the Tongo Hamlet (1964), a Ghanaian retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Set in the village of Tongo in northern Ghana among the Gurunsi, the film, made in English, adheres closely to the original text. Only the location and characters’ names have been changed: Hamlet has become Hamile, played by Kofi Middleton-Mends; Ophelia is Habiba, played by Mary Yirenkyi, and Polonius is called Ibrahim and acted by Ernest Abbequaye. The film features performers from the University of Ghana School of Music and Drama, many of whom appeared in No Tears for Ananse and other GFIC releases. Its screenplay was written by Terry Bishop, an English national who was a close friend of Sean Graham’s, and the film was produced by the Ghanaian writer Joe de Graft, who throughout the course of his career directed many Shakespearean plays.

      Based on a stage performance premiered earlier in the year, Hamile was made for inclusion in the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival in London and was de Graft’s first attempt at adapting one of Shakespeare’s major plays to a Ghanaian context (Agovi 1992, 5). As explained by Kofi Ermeleh Agovi, “De Graft was attempting to extend the dimensions of the Ghanaian theater to accommodate a universal experience in a distinctly Ghanaian setting” (5). Like similar assimilations of Shakespeare produced by first generation Africa writers in many former British colonies, the Africanizing of Shakespeare by well-educated members of the African elite was meant to demonstrate Africa’s civility and humanity (Johnson 1998; Gikandi 2004). It grew out of and reproduced the colonial idea that British literary culture represented a shared humanity. The re-creation of Shakespeare in Ghana, as in other parts of British colonial Africa, was bound up with the assertion of a national identity and culture. Gikandi explains: “To the extent that African nationalism justified its political claims through the invocation of the essential humanity of the colonized, the production of a literary culture was conceived as an important step in sanctioning the case for African rights and freedoms” (2004, 387). The film received a tepid response from the local press and local audiences. The Weekly Spectator, for example, described the film as “a bit high-browed” and criticized it for being unlike The Boy Kumasenu, which is reported to have “gone down well with the public” (June 4, 1966).

      With little revenue, diminishing resources, and no prospect of new government investment, the beleaguered film company was unable to sustain the promise offered by these first films. It was not until 1970 that the next feature appeared, I Told You So (1970) directed by Egbert Adjeso. Like No Tears for Ananse, Adjeso’s production combines the codes of narrative cinema with a Ghanaian performance tradition, in this case, the concert party. Adapted from a stage play by concert party artist Bob Cole, I Told You So tells the story of a poor girl whose mother pressures her to marry a rich stranger, who, in the end, is revealed to be a diamond smuggler. The film’s close affiliation with the popular concert party theater and its incorporation of highlife music and performances by Bob Cole and the African Brothers Band undoubtedly accounted for its wide appeal. Music figures even more prominently in Bernard Odjidja’s Doing Their Thing (1972). The first color film made in Ghana, Doing Their Thing features The El Pollos and Kwanyako Brass Bands, two popular highlife bands that performed widely in the 1970s. In 1975, Aryeetey embarked on several unsuccessful coproductions, including Contact: The African Deal (1973), which was directed by Giorgio Bontempi and produced with Ital Victoria, and The Visitor (1979), a musical tour coproduced among GFIC, the Musicians Union of Ghana, Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac, and Micky Shapiro. The films were, by every measure, unsuccessful, and Aryeetey was widely criticized for his decision to look abroad for coproducers and directors (Diawara 1992; Ukadike 1994).

      The production of two family dramas, Genesis Chapter X (1979) and Aya Minnow (1987), indicated a shift in the form and content of the national film company’s productions. These films rely exclusively on the conventions of Hollywood narrative cinema and move away from the incorporation of indigenous performance forms and the mixed modes of spectator engagement described previously.29 Here the narratives are focalized through individual characters and plots driven by private, family conflicts. Each of these films constructs closed story-worlds and, through the use of continuity editing, place spectators within this “hermetic universe on-screen” (Vasudevan 2001, 151). Both explore broken or failed nuclear families and detail the negative repercussions those failures have on children. In Genesis, Zaria Garba, who works as a doctor in England, travels back home to Ghana to find the mother he was taken from as a child. As the plot unravels, Zaria uncovers the truth of his past, that his mother, Hawa, had an adulterous affair with her current husband, Adamu, while she was married to Garba’s father. The affair lead to the murder of Zaria’s father, for which Hama was put in jail, and her then very young son, Zaria, was taken away. In the second feature, the death of Aya Minnow’s mother during her birth casts a long shadow on Aya’s life as portrayed in Aya Minnow. Controlled by an overprotective father, Aya fights to find love without her father’s interference, and only after he dies does she seem to have real hope for a happy life with Kobi.

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