It all depends

AFRIQUE SUR SEINE Paulin Vieyra, Mamadou Sarr, France 1955, OV, 21 min
COME BACK, AFRICA Lionel Rogosin, South Africa/USA 1958, OV/EnS, 84 min
MAN NO RUN Claire Denis, France 1988, OV/GeS, 107 min
and archive material from Bissau, Cairo und Khartoum

In their impressionistic film AFRIQUE SUR SEINE, Paulin Vieyra and Mamadou Sarr depict the lives of African men and women in Paris during the 1950s. Where is Africa, in Africa, on the banks of the Seine, or in the Quartier Latin? The film formulates the viewpoint of a generation of artists and students that set out to follow the traces of a trans-African culture and future in the French capital. ARIQUE SUR SEINE marks the beginning of one history of film – the film is considered the first independent work of African cinema. In 1957 the "Decret Laval" was in force, which forbade Africans and independent filmmakers from shooting in the French colonies. Which is one reason why the first film shot by Africans was made in Paris. This film was realized under the sponsorship of the Comité du Film Ethnographique du Musée de l'Homme (CFE) in Paris.

Lionel Rogosin, an US-American director, filmed COME BACK, AFRICA in the late 1950s in Johannesburg. The result was a film that is exemplary in its depiction of the black urban experience under Apartheid. The film tells the story of Zachariah Mgabi who leaves his rural home to find work in Johannesburg. As the film progresses Zachariah moves from job to job, working in the mines, as a domestic worker and at a car garage. In violation of apartheid’s racial pass laws, he is arrested by the police. Once out of prison, he finds out that his wife has been murdered.

The documentary MAN NO RUN accompanies the band Les Têtes brûlées from Cameroon on their first tour of France. The band plays traditional Bikutsi music in a wild, fast, punk-rock variant with electric guitars. The five musicians perform with shaven heads, white body paint and colorful rucksacks. The film shows gripping concerts with an audience going wild, but also the boredom between performances, daily routines, dreary highways, and the confrontation with the foreign, cold French environment, which leads to droll scenes.

Event date: November 22, 2013

Re-encounters with African cinema in joint film viewing sessions are a central component of the translocal research project Visionary Archive. On March 30, 2014 four South African artists will be our guests. They are currently resident artists of the Constanza Macras/Dorky Park's performance project "On Fire" in Berlin. The films MUEDA, MEMORIA E MASSACRE (Mozambique 1979), COME BACK, AFRICA (South Afrika/USA 1958) and MATSOGO (South Afrika 2013) will open up associative approaches to discuss body politics, working on history and the role of performance art in "stating the plurality of singularity" (A. Mbembe) in southern Africa, with Lucky Kele, Mmakgosi Kgabi, Zanele Muholi, Mamela Nyamza and Lerato Shadi.

MUEDA, MEMORIA E MASSACRE Ruy Guerra, Mozambique 1979, 35 mm, 75 min, OV/EnS
COME BACK, AFRICA Lionel Rogosin, South Africa/USA 1958, DCP, 86 min, OV/GeS
MATSOGO Lerato Shadi, South Africa 2013, Digital file, 5 min, without dialogue

Review by Brigitta Kuster
Review by Eckhard Weber

MUEDA, MEMORIA E MASSACRE was shown at the Berlinale Forum in 1981, is the only Mozambican film in the Arsenal archive, it is a clear milestone. It shows a piece of anti-colonial reminiscence work, a public reenactment staged by non-professionals of the massacre of Mueda (1960) carried out by the Portuguese. The event was regarded as triggering armed resistance in Mozambique in subsequent historiography and was remembered at regular intervals even before independence by means of popular reenactments. Ruy Guerra shot MUEDA with a clear documentary interest in this theatrical form of commemorative practice. Its subsequent marketing as the “first Mozambican feature film“ provided an initial taste of the interpretational conflict that was to follow, which resulted in a complicated history of censorship.

Lionel Rogosin, an US-American director, filmed COME BACK, AFRICA in the late 1950s in Johannesburg. The result was a film that is exemplary in its depiction of the black urban experience under Apartheid. The film tells the story of Zachariah Mgabi who leaves his rural home to find work in Johannesburg. As the film progresses Zachariah moves from job to job, working in the mines, as a domestic worker and at a car garage. In violation of apartheid’s racial pass laws, he is arrested by the police. Once out of prison, he finds out that his wife has been murdered.

MATSOGO, a recent video work by Lerato Shadi, in which she crumbles a slice of chocolate cake with her fingers and then slowly rolls the crumbs together to form a triangular shape that resembles the original slice, eloquently asks the key questions of how we construct and perceive form and meaning. The final shape recalls a slice of cake, and is constituted of exactly the same elements, but it is also not a slice of cake.

Event date: March 30, 2014

On May 23, 2014 the exhibition "Regulado" by Filipa César und Suleimane Biai by opens at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) as part of the Visionary Archive project. In her films and installations, Filipa César explores the post-colonial constellations that were spawned by the recent history of Portugal. Since 2011, her research is focused on the film production in Guinea-Bissau, the beginnings of which were closely linked to the struggle for liberation.

In the "It All Depends" series at Arsenal, they will be presenting their film REDONDA QUADRADA and their project "From Boé to Berlin". Two films from our archive (POR PRIMERA VEZ by Octavio Cortázar, REASSEMBLAGE by Trinh T. Minh-ha) and a documentary by Sana na N'Hada from the early years of the independent Guinea-Bissau will lay out film historical threads for the discussion. (May 25, 2014)

REDONDA QUADRADA Filipa César, Suleimane Biai, Germany 2014, OV/EnS, 8 min
POR PRIMERA VEZ Octavio Cortázar, Kuba 1967, OV/GeS, 9 min
LES JOURS D’ANCONO Sana na N’Hada, Guinea-Bissau 1978, OV/EnS, 27 min
REASSEMBLAGE Trinh T. Minh-ha, USA 1982, OV, 40 min

REDONDA QUADRADA evaluates the differences of two house construction methods. Pragmatic and aesthetic considerations become an important factor, but also historical connotations and the politics of different rooms. The film was shot on the verge of the construction of a new assembly building in Birbam, Guinea-Bissau.

POR PRIMERA VEZ  is a document of the "audiovisual alphabetization" of Cuba in the 1960s: Cortázar records the screening of a mobile cinema in a remote mountain village and shows the reactions of the inhabitants upon their first encounter with film, which was Charlie Chaplin’s MODERN TIMES.

LES JOURS D’ANCONO shows everyday life in a village on the Bissagos Islands off the coast of Guinea-Bissau. Sana na N'Hada’s observations revolve around the girl Ancono. The challenges she faces while growing up reflect the issues that a country which has just been liberated from colonialism faces for the future.

In REASSEMBLAGE, filmed in Senegal, the director distills sounds and images from the everyday life of villagers and resists the ethnological need to explain the "other" by resorting to explicit attributions. The film is a critique of the ethnological viewpoint and documentary authority. Trinh T. Minh-ha also questions her position as a filmmaker as well as pointing out the impossibility of finding a neutral and objective narrative voice.

Event date: May 25, 2014

In October, the fourth edition of It all depends takes place as part of the Visionary Archive project. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s APPUNTI PER UN'ORESTIADE AFRICANA (Notes Towards an African Orestes, Italy 1969) will be screened on October 1. Narrated in the style of a cinematic notebook, Pasolini’s interest in adapting the ancient tragedy for the screen using African actors is mixed with a stubbornly colonial look at realities in Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia. The structure of the cinematic notebook and the cultural ideological charge it carries demand that Pasolini’s film be placed in context with two further films. In her video work NOTES ON PASOLINI'S FORM OF A CITY (Germany 2013), Sandra Schäfer examines Pasolini’s projections of Africa before the backdrop of his critique of modernity. We are showing the film on October 3 together with Haile Gerima’s radical social satire MIRT SOST SHI AMIT (Harvest, 3,000 Years, Ethiopia 1975), shot in Ethiopia at the end of Haile Selassie’s rule.

The configuration of the three different film narrations spanning the two evenings brings to light geographical and ideological relationships not without a certain critical tension, which becomes tangible in the images of the landscape, the city and its architecture. The intention here is to invalidate generalizations about African realities and enable cinematic images of concrete places, times and contexts to be talked about instead. The culmination point of the three films is the city of Addis Abeba and the image of what was left behind by Italy’s short colonialization of Ethiopia (1936–1941).

Wed, Oct 1, 8 pm, Arsenal Cinema 2
Guests: Sandra Schäfer, Moderation: Marie-Hélène Gutberlet, Tobias Hering
APPUNTI PER UN'ORESTIADE AFRICANA (Notes Towards an African Orestes), Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy 1969, OV/GeS, 73 min

In the style of a cinematic notebook, Pasolini tries his hand at transposing Aeschylus' Orestes to modern-day Africa and visualizing the parallels between the ancient legend and the young democracies of the African continent. "Africa has arrived at the same turning point in history as Argos in the time of Orestes: at the point of transition from an archaic civilization to democracy" (PPP). Pasolini’s themes and idiosyncrasies become transparent to a greater degree here than in almost all of his other films, as does the occasional blind passion for a "structure that would like to be another structure", which is how Pasolini once characterized this form of script.

Fri, Oct 1, 7.30 pm, Arsenal Cinema 2
Guests: Sandra Schäfer, Moderation: Marie-Hélène Gutberlet, Tobias Hering
NOTES ON PASOLINI'S FORM OF A CITY, Sandra Schäfer, Germany 2013, OV/EnS, 25 min
MIRT SOST SHI AMIT (Harvest, 3,000 Years), Haile Gerima, Ethiopia 1975, OV/GeS, 138 min

Sandra Schäfer borrows Pasolini’s cinematic notebook approach in order to make a sketch of her own on the form of the city by drawing on Pasolini’s APPUNTI PER UN'ORESTIADE AFRICANA. She re-edits excerpts from Pasolini’s films, comments upon them and expands upon them by adding new material. In Pasolini’s APPUNTI, African students in Rome criticize how Pasolini transposes the Greek Orestes’ understanding of democracy to contemporary Africa. Pasolini traces the interwoven processes of modernization and shows his increasing disappointment about the effects of global capitalism, which in his opinion succeeds in creating uniformity and erasing difference even more radically than Italian fascism.
Haile Gerima emigrated to the US in 1967 and studied at UCLA in Los Angeles together with Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Larry Clark. MIRT SOST SHI AMIT, the first film he shot in Ethiopia, takes place during the period of transition between the end of the regime of Haile Selassie and Mengistu Haile Mariam’s rise to power. He uses scenes from the everyday life of a farming family and weaves them together to form a dense picture of the exploitation carried out by the ruling class. Gerima connects here a radical, Frantz Fanon indebted critique with a unconventionally virtuoso visual language which makes the social situation tangible that is brought to life with characters who run the gamut from tragic to insane.

Event date: Oct 1 and 3, 2014

Flora Gomes’ sensational feature film debut "Mortu Nega" (1988) was long considered considered the beginning of cinema in Guinea-Bissau, and the director has remained one of the industry's most important actors. His early work as a documentarist of the Guinean liberation struggle is less known - it is a collective film oeuvre interwoven with the decolonization process that has come back into focus thanks to Arsenal's "Visionary Archive" project.
The cinema evening on 17.2 gives an opportunity to see and discuss two films with Flora Gomes: his feature film PO DI SANGUI (1996) about an exodus from a drought-threatened village community, and the last film by the Senegalese visionary of cinema Djibril Diop Mambéty - LA PETITE VENDEUSE DE SOLEIL (1999).

PO DI SANGUI, Flora Gomes, Guinea-Bissau 1996, OV/GeS, 95 min

In the village where PO DI SANGUI takes place, the essential opposition of our being, the one life-affirming, the other life-threatening, cross paths. In Amanha Lundju a tree is planted at every birth. This tree grows up with the child, growing even taller, surviving the child and becoming his or her soul. When Dou returns to the village after a long absence, he finds out that his twin brother Hami has died. While Dou's own tree is wasting away, his dead brother's tree is strong and teeming with life. Its sap is blood red: a blood tree (po di sangui) that becomes a silent advisor to Dou.
Flora Gomes's visually gripping narrative not only contains a mysticism that is seemingly timeless, it is also charged with a dense subtext of cultural and political connotations. It's about ecological and social questions such as the threat of water shortage, the depletion of tropical timber, and the emigration of the young generation, but also about the still palpable repercussions of the long struggle for independence from Portuguese colonialism. The exodus, which the village community eventually decides on, becomes an emblem, not as the solution to the problem, but as a necessary passage into a still open future.

LA PETITE VENDEUSE DE SOLEIL (The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun), Djibril Diop Mambéty, Senegal 1999, OV/GeS 41 min

LA PETITE VENDEUSE DE SOLEIL: In Dakar, selling newspapers on the street is actually always done by boys, but Sili challenges that exclusive rule. She's perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, walks with a limp, and lives with her blind grandmother, who goes into the city with her each day to beg. After a bad clash with the gang of paperboys, she decides not to put up with such attacks and, despite all the hardships, to become a salesgirl for the pro-government paper Le Soleil.
Mambéty's last film LA PETITE VENDEUSE DE SOLEIL is the second part of an uncompleted trilogy on the “history of the little people” (histoire des petites gens). LA PETITE VENDEUSE DE SOLEIL was finished after Mambéty's death in 1998 under the direction of the Swiss producer Silvia Voser. The film is joyful and poignant, full of eccentric characters, and provides a vision of great happiness in the midst of complete desperation. LA PETITE VENDEUSE DE SOLEIL is permeated with music – which is the story, narrative, and elixir of life and is the focus of an analytical kind of filmmaking that works with ambiguity at all levels and cultivates small intersections of various narrative strands. But LA PETITE VENDEUSE DE SOLEIL is also a film about the future, that of the little salesgirl, and also that of the other children, of the stunted and shriveled; a future in which wisdom and madness lay side by side, and in which it takes a lot of wit and bravery to live with any respect.

Event date: February 17, 2015