The colonial narrative

I sense some tension in the group around whether or not we can take melodrama seriously. This is a pity since it is an important issue when considering films made by western filmmakers about stories set in African countries. Chocolat creates a familiar colonial narrative about the relationship between a white woman (the coloniser) and a black man (the colonised). This is the basis for the colonial melodrama which focuses on the emotionally explosive mix of sex and race. Interestingly, it more often features a white woman and black man than a black woman and white man -- perhaps because the former is more threatening to the colonial/settler family. I'm not suggesting that Claire Denis sets out to make a colonial melodrama, but she consciously chooses its narrative and works to oppose it stylistically from what I saw in the extracts. In the films I have seen by African filmmakers, the colonial relationship is not dealt with as an emotional relationship -- the colonists are simply there as representatives of oppression. There are several African films (mostly made by men, I've only seen one film by an African woman) which focus on the women as central characters and these are often careful to explore the status of women within distinct local communities.

Kim Longinotto attempts not to impose her sense of narrative on the events she records, even if she has to select and edit from her material. The melodrama that I found inherent in the court proceedings seemed to me to come from the performances of both the lawyers and their clients. Longinotto's feel for the universal human stories she witnessed is certainly impressive, but I wonder how much her film was still an outsider's view. I thought that the Denis and Longinotto extracts were very useful in posing questions about how women are presented in 'African stories'.

If anyone is interested in the kinds of films which circulate in West Africa as part of Nollywood, there is an interesting UK centre for 'Nollywood Studies' which offers a number of fascinating links.

Women and Documentary: Kim Longinotto

Divorce Iranian Style can be found at the Channel 4 On Demand site. Go here to play the film.

You may not have heard of Longinotto. She has been making documentaries for a number of years, building up a body of work that addresses controversial, even harrowing, topics: female circumcision in The Day I will Never Forget (2002), the difficulties of divorce within the Iranian system in Divorce Iranian Style (1998) or tackling domestic abuse in Cameroon in Sisters-in-Law (2005). Her latest documentary, Hold me Tight, Let me Go (2007), returns home, examining the relationship between staff and pupils in a school for traumatised children in Oxford.

A signature style is the intensity of the "performances" she obtains from her subjects. In Divorce Iranian Style, we follow a number of women through the cruel bureaucracy of a Tehran divorce court. Women seeking separation from unhappy or abusive relationships, demonstrate several, separate acts of resistance and "individual" solidarity, since they, somehow, separately stand together in the same battle. They have few rights under the law, but their emotion and determination is used to powerful effect. What emerges, I think, is the humanness (but constrained humanity) of those there, both men and women. The women's spirit is undaunted.

Longinotto's style in this is neither obtrusive or absent. In Divorce, the filmmakers are often applied to for opinions, both by the women and by the judge. However, she tends to use a self-effacing style of camerawork, avoiding a variety of shots, she tends to use the middle distance to show all the interactions whilst keeping us at a spectator's distance. Commentators have spoken of her "restrained gaze" that can still "radiate such warmth" (www.redpepper.org). Longinotto also states that her aim is not to lead with argument; instead, to allow viewers to find their own way through the material.

In interviews, Longinotto cames across as being incredibly humanistic and focussed on the subject matter. She makes an interesting comparison with fiction narratives: "I like it when documentary has the same constraints as fiction, when it doesn't have to give you a lesson or teach you what to think it's just an emotional experience." (imdb.com)

Longinotto won Screen International magazine's British documentary competition at Britdoc (UK documentary festival), with Hold me Tight, Let me Go. Sisters-in-Law, from which we will watch extracts, won the 'Prix de Art et Essai' at Cannes Film Festival. Stunning that no significant attention was paid by our prize-obsessed media.

Sisters-in-Law and Divorce Iranian Style are very similar in structure, following three/four stranded narratives. My final quote could apply to both: "Longinotto's deeply humane, but quietly unsensational portait of African women struggling for self-determination defies received notions about ... women."
(www.moviesgoa.org)

The name game

I blogged my reactions to The Namesake when I first saw it in May this year. You can check out the blog here. On a second viewing it worked just as well, but I got even more from it. I've softened a little on Kal Penn's performance, but I'm now an even bigger fan of Tabu and Irrfan Khan (the star of Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart, despite Angelina Jolie's top billing).

This time I was more conscious of how clever the script is with the references to names and naming and also the extent to which Mira Nair pays hommage to Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak (and makes Bengali jokes). The central question is, I think, how the film creates a delicious tension between its focus on Ashima as against the father-son relationship. I'm still not sure who is at the centre of the story. What does anyone else think?

Beau Travail - by women about men

Tonight we discussed the history, the institutional context of women within the film industry. We looked at the idea of the woman's picture, whether it is possible to identify particular themes and content that could indicate a film is targeted for a female audience. We wondered whether it is useful to employ some of the cine-psychoanalytical approaches that would argue for a gendered gaze - in particular, whether it makes a difference that a man or woman are behind the camera (as director/cinematographer) or are part of the writing.

Thinking about the clip 'Beau Travail' - is it helpful to consider it as reflecting the gender of the filmmaker? Using the ideas we collected around 'The Piano', I would argue there is an amusingly ironic play of the private/domestic (stereotypically female) activities with our ideas of the French foreign legion. The soldiers' beautiful bodies are on display, but are domesticated - we see their private, ordinary interactions (as the Russian soldier learns French through naming the washing). This is juxtaposed with Rahel, a local girl, hanging out her own washing - more brightly coloured, less uniform. Has Claire Denis taken an archetypal male domain and somehow made it feminine?

Is it equally relevant that Denis spent her first ten years in West Africa (where her father was serving as an administrator in the French colonial services)? Her first feature 'Chocolat' drew directly on this experience and 'Beau Travail' continues this engagement withh French postcolonial identity.

Some of us talked about the sensory experience of these films, for example, the strong emphasis on touch in 'The Piano' - as it starts with that x-ray shot of her fingers. Denis, for me, is visually really striking - creating sensations of that world just through the light and colour on display. Some women film critics have argued for touch to be a particularly appealing to female audiences and filmmakers. Do you agree?

Some of this, and our discussion, focussed on the form (camera shots etc) rather than the content. But what do you see as the most relevant questions to ask - about form, about the content of the films or about the context of the filmmaker?