Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 607

'The Art of El Anatsui'

Film Review by Elliot Ross*

Making a film about an artist whose work is as beautiful as El Anatsui's must be a daunting thing. But Susan Vogel, in her new documentary, 'Fold, Crumple, Crush: The Art of El Anatsui' (trailer above), has achieved a sensitive and sophisticated portrait that will intrigue Anatsui devotees even as it wins him new admirers.

The film follows Anatsui at work at his studio in Nsukka in Nigeria's Enugu State, and in Venice during the 2007 Biennale at which he exhibited. In keeping with Anatsui's refusal of geographically determined identities, the film has him wandering through the pigeons of St Mark's Square and sweating down a hot Nsukka Road lined with refuse, with little fussing over transitions. The focus is on him and his work, wherever they happen to be.

At the studio, we find him organising his team of all-male assistants in shaping – folding, crumpling, crushing – and weaving together the thousands of bottle-caps that make up his sculptures – "a marriage," he calls it, "between thinking and sculpture." He visits a nearby distillery to harvest great sacks of bottle-caps. "Things that have been used," he murmurs, "things that link people together."

One of 32 children, Anatsui was brought up in Ghana by his uncle, a presbyterian minister. He came to the University of Nigeria at Nsukka in the early 70s, shortly after the end of the Nigerian Civil War, and became involved in the Natural Synthesis movement, which explored a syncretism between local and Western forms.

Anatsui's assistants make sheets in various shapes and colours, and these sheets are then laid out together on the concrete floor of the studio. He tests every individual sheet to make sure they can be folded in all directions. He then arranges and re-arranges the collage, photographs every part of it, and announces, "I think the whole thing's looking too busy." He puts the images onto his computer and searches, with his mouse, for a composition he is happy with. A decent-sized Anatsui takes between two and three months to complete.

In Venice, Vogel skillfully combines footage of giddy gallery-goers and Anatsui, as they encounter each other, and the majestic work that looms above them. People stumble guiltily over the pronunciation of his name, and ask him to explain what they are looking at.

Anatsui tells them it is all bottle tops, mostly from brandy bottles. "A lot of drinking has to go into it. I did some myself."

"I'm a Nigerian," he explains to another gawping visitor.

"Okay," they reply, "and where are you from?"

"I'm from, er, Ghana," he says, and the visitor nods.

Screened at Columbia University last month, the film was followed by a panel that included Vogel herself and the historian Mamadou Diouf, who praised Anatasui's work as an instance of "being African in a way that's outside the anthropological grid."

Vogel said she had wrestled in – and through – the film with the problem of labels of identity as a "vehicle of marginalisation". Particularly as he has attracted the attention of would-be canon-formers, the question of Anatsui's identity tends to be discussed within a binary: either he is to be considered an African artist, or a global artist, or, at best, some mixture of the two.

Mamadou Diouf suggested that Anatsui might instead be usefully thought of as an artist of the Atlantic. As he pointed out, the southern part of Ghana, where Anatsui grew up, has been engaged in one way or another with the Western world since the mid-16th century, and one way of apprehending that violent history is to meditate on the way a commodity such as brandy has been moved around, valued and consumed.

* Elliot Ross, a graduate student at Columbia University, writes occasional posts for AIAC.

New Films

Here's my semi-regular round-up of trailers for new African or African-themed films which I wish to get my hands on. It's a big continent, so I am not surprised at the output. Some of these are sure to make the rounds at film festivals or short runs in art cinemas or pop up on obscure cable channels. (I'm still waiting for that entrepreneur who'll start an African film Netflix. I'll be a customer.) So here they are:

Migration is a big topic in these films.

First up there's Swiss director Fernand Melgar's "Special Flight"

Film critic Leo Goldstein writes  about "Special Flight" in Brooklyn Rail:

[Melgar] investigated a detention center for asylum-seekers in Switzerland; his new film concerns a group of foreign nationals at a rather darker place in the process. Many of the film's subjects—a couple of dozen men, mainly originating from Africa and Kosovo—have lived in Switzerland for decades, working, paying taxes, and raising families. Now, at a detention center in Frambois, near Geneva, they sit in clean, gray institutional buildings, waiting to hear about the status of their appeals for citizenship, or else to be forcibly shipped out to their countries of origin, the "special flights" of the film's title … [The] degree of access occasionally gives the film a professional polish that makes it seem almost staged. Stills from the film, which resemble a slightly sunnier Pedro Costa film, made more than one non-Swiss festivalgoer I spoke to think the film was a work of fiction.) Stranger still is the interaction between the detention center's staff and the inmates (whom the former prefer to call "residents"), which is cordial, warm, and often even apologetic. Members of the staff welcome the detainees, express remorse for their situations, and hear out their grievances sympathetically, forming relationships that border on friendship. And when the orders come down for deportation, staff-members carry them out with an odd mix of duty, helplessness, and regret.

There's also Belgian filmmaker Nicolas Provost's "The Invader" which focuses on the travails of an African migrant in Brussels. The film has a brilliant opening scene. See Tom's post later today.

Another feature film with African migrants washing up on the shores of a European island at the heart of it; this time the Canary Islands:

The very talented Akin Omotoso (somebody give him buckets of money to keep making films) directed "Man on Ground," a film about xenophobic violence against African migrants by black South Africans in Johannesburg. Here's an early review and here's an interview with Omotoso. Here's the trailer:

"The Cardboard Village" about an Italian priest and illegal immigrants who take shelter in his church.  Bonus: it stars "Blader Runner" star Rutger Hauer. (I don't know what to expect from that casting choice.) The trailer doesn't make much sense, but here it is anyway:

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And here–in its entirety–is a new short, "Counterfeit," about West African migrants selling counterfeit watches and fake handbags in Chinatown in New York City:

And also a 12 minute short about racism and the border between Dominican Republic and Haiti (no surprises from which side the racism emanates):

"Always Brando" part fake documentary, part drama about a Tunisian filmmaker's obsession with the famed American actor:

Another North African film. This time Moroccan director Faouzi Bensaidi's "Death for Sale" about 3 young petty thieves:

Then there is, "Les Hommes libres," a period piece about an Algerian black marketer in Nazi-occupied France (also by a Moroccan director). The lead is played by Tahar Rahim who played the lead in the prison film, "A Prophete." (I'm assuming this is in the same vein as the excellent "Indigènes," which aimed to set the record straight about the roles of blacks and Arabs' in the liberation of France during World War II):

"The Rhythm of My Life," a documentary film about the Miami rapper Ismael Sankara who travels to Gabon to visit family and sort of figures out his life and career:

A number of German films have recently explored their country's relationship to the African continent. (Remember "Nowhere in Africa," "Sleeping Sickness" and "At Ellen's Age."  Now there's "The River Used To Be A Man" about a German actor finding himself in some open African space.  Here's a clip (what's with  trailers that don't mean or say much?):

The trailer for director Aki Kaurismäki's "Le Havre" (France) about the relationship of an elderly working-class couple in the French port city of the title with a a young, lovable African illegal immigrant they're harboring and the police inspector searching for the stowaway. This film is loved by every mainstream critic who has reviewed it. The trailer suggests it has obvious tropes which appeals to American and European audiences:

Talk about films with cute children. "Lucky" is film about a young South African child and the AIDS epidemic there (remember "Life Above All" directed by Oliver Schmitz and which had a limited release here in New York City in the Spring).  The director of "Lucky" is Avie Luthra, an Indian national. In "Lucky" there is a nice twist though; unlike most AIDS films he is not saved by a saintly white person: the lead character ends up in Durban with unscrupulous relatives, but is helped by a South African woman of Indian origin. As far as I know, apart from Leon Schuster's racist caricatures (Disney just gave him guarantees to make more of that nonsense), "Lucky" might be the first time you have an Indian South African in a major role in a film coming from that country.

Back to documentaries: "Last Call At The Oasis" about the global crisis about water which affects us all:

Films about the unfinished Egyptian Revolution our coming out fast. Take "Tahrir 2011: The Good, The Bad And The Politician." The film is divided into three chapters; the first focuses on activists, the second on the police and the third the dictator Hosni Mubarak:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjA2Xb...

Then, Italian director Stefano Savona's "Tahrir: Liberation Square":

There's also the music-focused "Microphone" by Egyptian director Ahmed Abdallah:

The trailer for Columbia University art historian Susan Vogel's film, "Food, Crumple Crush," about the famed Ghanaian artist El Anatsui who lives in Nigeria:

There's a few others for which I can't find trailers:

* The film version of Albert Camus' final, unfinished novel based on his childhood in French-occupied Algeria, "The First Man."

* "The Education of Auma Obama" about Barack Obama's sister, Auma, which includes home video of the young Barack Obama on his first ever visit to Kenya in the late 1980s.  (Here's a link to a post-screening Q&A with director Branwen Okpako and Auma Obama at the 2011 Toronto Film Fetsival.)

Then a film, I have at the top of my wish list. "Indochina, tras la pista de una madre" (Indochina, Traces of a Mother) is the story of an Afro-Asian man (the son of a Vietnamese woman an and African soldier) who goes back to Vietnam. His parents met when his father, from Benin, was conscripted by France to go and resist Vietnamese independence:

* A new film about the struggle around AIDS in South Africa (by veteran director Jack Lewis):

This film will definitely not make a commercial cinema screen here. The Senegalese director Mamadou Sellou Diallo films the pregnancy of his wife and the birth of his daughter. It's also a film about womanhood in Senegal:

*  There are also some films about the descendants of Africans in America:

Director Diana Paragas and writer Nelson George's "Brooklyn Boheme," about black life in late 1980s and 1990s Fort Greene, Brooklyn, is finally here. (That's my neighborhood for the last 10 years). Here's the first 5 minutes:

There's a documentary about black punk rockers Fishbone:

A profile of foul-mouthed, ageing rapper Blowfly; in daily life the mainstream musician Clarence Reid:

"White Wash," a documentary about black surfers (which reminds me of the film, "Taking Back the Waves," about Apartheid racism and surfing in South Africa):

"Angel," a documentary film directed by Sebastiano d'Ayala Valva, about a former Ecuadorian boxer, lately a transvestite prostitute in France, traveling back to his homeland:

Helene Lee, who wrote a book–"The First Rasta"– about Leonard Howell, who is considered the founder of Rastafari in Jamaica, has now made a documentary about him:

*  Finally, a couple of short films you can watch in full:

Johannesburg filmmaker Palesa Shongwe–whose work reminds me of fellow South African Steve Mokwena–has a short film (in full below) "Atrophy (and the fear of fading)" about nostalgia and youth:

And, American Allysa Eisenstein's film on homophobia in Uganda based around interviews with gay rights activists and the bigotry and hate they encounter:

Maïmouna and African Urban France

Friday night at Sutra Lounge in New York, Maimouna Coulibaly will be performing alongside myself and DJ King Solo for Africology's Afrique Sessions.

Maïmouna Coulibaly is one of Paris's premier "African Urban Dance" boosters, choreographing some of the biggest artists music videos, teaching dance workshops, releasing DVDs, running her own dance company, and writing, directing, and starring in her own plays about Sub-Urban Paris, and African immigrant youth identity. This is her first and only public performance in New York, so come get a taste of Paris on Friday!

"Grandma's going, so I am going too"

Short video piece on Jelani Gibson, a 16-year-old protester who traveled with his grandmother from Pontiac, Michigan to New York to join the protests Wall Street. He also has a 4.0 GPA.  He had never slept on the street before.  Tell that to US media.

October is Black History Month

What started off in the United States in 1926 as "Negro History Week" to promote awareness of African-American history to the U.S. public in 1976 morphed into "Black History Month" (and some people will still celebrate it there–and in Canada–during the month of February). The UK does so during the month of October. Be that on a slightly smaller budget, these days and courtesy of London's lord mayor Boris Johnson. (I can't remember coming across any similar events on this side of the Channel.) Some criticise it for being turned into a commercial sham (like critics do in the United States) or for being silent on black history's symbiotic relationship to white history), but the group of English hip hop and grime artists in the video above seems determined to wrench it back from the cynics, paying tribute along the way to Maurice Bishop (remember him), Rosa Parks, Patrice Lumumba, Steve Biko, Emmett Till, Shaka Zulu, Malcolm X, Benjamin Banneker, Nat Turner, Mamadou Diallo, Marcus Garvey, Harriet Tubman, Khalid Abdul Muhammad and others. Watch till the end. It may all sound like Afrika Bambataa, early Public Enemy and Native Tongues, but they're keeping it topical: "Our truths they hid it well. If we knew ourselves would so many sit in a cell? When Europe has the influence in African affairs that Africa has in Europe, we can talk about a world that's fair." You may remember rapper Akala, featured here before.

R.I.P. Fred Shuttlesworth and Derrick Bell.

H/T: Mikko Kapanen.

'Revolutions devour their children'

Earlier this week Egypt's military rulers made it clear that they will effectively be in power till "late 2012." The generals, all Mubarak appointees, want to reorganize the political landscape to ensure they can still wield influence. They've also revived old emergency laws favored by Mubarak. And they try civilians in military courts. Revolution indeed.

That reminded me of a recent opinion piece by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley in The New York Review of Books, "The Arab Counterrevolution." There, Agha and Malley argue that "the Arab awakening" is "a tale of three battles rolled into one": people against regimes (basically the tug of war between regimes and spontaneous protesters); people against people ("a focused fight among more organized political groups"); and regimes against other regimes (this "assumes an increasingly prominent role"). They argue that "any number of outcomes could emerge from this complex brew." They claim that "the outcome of the Arab awakening will not be determined by those who launch it."

Revolutions devour their children. The spoils go to the resolute, the patient, who know what they are pursuing and how to achieve it. Revolutions almost invariably are short-lived affairs, bursts of energy that destroy much on their pathway, including the people and ideas that inspired them. So it is with the Arab uprising. It will bring about radical changes. It will empower new forces and marginalize others. But the young activists who first rush onto the streets tend to lose out in the skirmishes that follow. Members of the general public might be grateful for what they have done. They often admire them and hold them in high esteem. But they do not feel they are part of them. The usual condition of a revolutionary is to be tossed aside.

That leaves "two relatively untarnished and powerful forces": the military and "Islamists." The Islamists are more concerned with how they're perceived in the West. As for the military,

[i]n Egypt, although closely identified with the former regime, they dissociated themselves in time, sided with the protesters, and emerged as central power brokers. They are in control, a position at once advantageous and uncomfortable. Their preference is to rule without the appearance of ruling, in order to maintain their privileges while avoiding the limelight and accountability. To that end, they have tried to reach understandings with various political groups. If they do not succeed, a de facto military takeover cannot be ruled out.

Agha and Massey concludes:

The Arab world's immediate future will very likely unfold in a complex tussle between the army, remnants of old regimes, and the Islamists, all of them with roots, resources, as well as the ability and willpower to shape events. Regional parties will have influence and international powers will not refrain from involvement. There are many possible outcomes—from restoration of the old order to military takeover, from unruly fragmentation and civil war to creeping Islamization. But the result that many outsiders had hoped for—a victory by the original protesters—is almost certainly foreclosed.

Source.

Cricket Practice in East London

 American photographer Lori Grinker's new project "Distant Relations" traces the diaspora–in 8 countries–created by the (largely forced) migration of her 19th century ancestors from Lithuania. Grinkers, most who don't know of each other, ended up in places as far afield as the UK, US, Ukraine, Australia, Argentina, Germany, and of course, South Africa. A first cut of the project–from photos taken in Lithuania (2002), South Africa (2005), Ukraine (2008), and the US (2011)–can be seen at a gallery in New York City since early September. Here.   As her cousin Roy Richard Grinke (an anthropologist) writes in an essay accompanying the exhibit,  Lori's aim with the project, he writes, is is to focus,

more on particular environments than people and practices. Paradoxically, however, the photographs, many without people or faces, challenge us to imagine. Who are the people who made these worlds? And how does someone experience a life through them? There is, in these captivating images, what might be called either a present absence or an absent presence. We are compelled to look beyond the shreds and patches that comprise our memories, like letters and photographs, to the unseen. These images, and the people and places they represent, are fragmentary, perhaps like the Jews themselves, but they cohere around their incompleteness and instability, characteristics that are the essence of diaspora.

As for her South African relatives, she tells The New York Times' Lens Blog:

In South Africa, she met Anthony Grinker, who had been a politician. He was married to Hilda Grinker, a black woman whose family had been politically active in the anti-Apartheid movement. Mr. Grinker, who contracted H.I.V. as a single man, was the first person in South Africa's parliament to go public about having H.I.V. The couple had been trying to have a baby when he died tragically in a car crash.

There's an image of Anthony Grinker and his wife in a slideshow on the Lens Blog page. (He was an IFP MP in Cape Town and later a provincial MP before he briefly joined an IFP splinter group before his death.) I have vague memories of meeting through my old job. Friendly, descent man.

There's also some video evidence of the South African Grinkers in this short video (the 5 minute mark). Here are some more images of the life worlds of the South African Grinkers (a rugby field, the coast, a synagogue).

A niche on morality

If you haven't seen the video of Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize Recipient 1984, patriot) going after South Africa's ruling party/government, do so. (The context was the government forcing the Dalai Lama to cancel his visit to South Africa next month; the rationale is supposed pressure from China). Tutu is clearly die moer in. * The full 9 minutes is worth watching. Here's the takeaway:

Our government is worse than the apartheid government because at least you would expect it with the apartheid government … Our government we expect to be sensitive to the sentiments of our constitution …

Let the ANC know they have a large majority. Well, Mubarak had a large majority, Gaddafi had a large majority. I am warning you: watch out. Watch out.

Our government – representing me! – says it will not support Tibetans being viciously oppressed by China. You, president Zuma and your government, do not represent me. I am warning you, as I warned the [apartheid] nationalists, one day we will pray for the defeat of the ANC government.

But there is more to this. What all this reflects argues journalist Eve Fairbanks in Foreign Policy  (she just returned to the US after 2 years in South Africa) is that the event "reflects South Africa's desire to grope its way toward a new style of foreign policy." Here's an extract:

Post-apartheid South Africa is still a teenager, young on the world stage. Its reluctance to stand firm on moral issues stems not only from a desire to curry favor with wealthy pariahs, but from a deeper sense of tension over what kind of country it wants to be, both inside (should every household have a television set?) and as an external actor. Some in South Africa's civil society still exhort the government to embrace a destiny as the world's conscience: The popular news website Daily Maverick invoked the example of Mandela in pleading for the government to extend "a hand of friendship" to all oppressed peoples and welcome the Dalai Lama. But the new generation of South African leaders is not content to occupy a niche on morality like Bhutan's niche on happiness, in which South Africa's primary export remains a kind of Gross National Blamelessness. This core of leaders yearns for the space to act as unabashedly "pragmatically as the Chinese," explains Habib, the political scientist, so South Africa can grow into the regional-big-macher role suggested by the country's new status as Africa's China or its Brazil.

Caught between these poles, South Africa has taken to blaming the confusion on bureaucratic foul-ups and misinformation. After an outcry from human rights activists about the Dalai Lama, the government suggested, incredibly, that the monk himself had screwed up on his visa application. Similarly, after backtracking on its support of the no-fly zone over Libya, South Africa claimed its diplomats hadn't entirely understood what the U.N. resolution's language meant.

Such excuses are increasingly embarrassing — and unsustainable. South Africa may be a vacillating teenager now, but sooner or later it will have to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. As several commentators have pointed out, this won't be the last time someone invites the Dalai Lama to South Africa.

The rest of Fairbanks' article is here.

* No prizes for getting what this means.

Music Break / Jean Grae

We're still waiting for that album to drop. Jean Grae is indeed South African jazz couple Abdullah Ibrahim and Sathima Bea Benjamin's daughter. Sara Benincasa, by the way, feels about Jean Grae the way the Tea Party feels about Mexicans.

Predicting 'The Moment of Revolution'

A video about the motivations and some of the demands of the people questioning Wall Street's control of American politics, wanting to make "a Middle Eastern style revolution" happen here and giving both the right, mainstream and American left headaches. Also, I think I heard someone blowing a vuvuzela the right way–around the 4 minute mark.