Guns and Roses

From gangsters to grindhouse, movies seem addicted to the idea of revenge. So why has African cinema rejected retaliation in favour of telling dazzling stories? By Mark Cousins

WHERE would movies be without the fire and phlegm of revenge? It’s the driving force in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill and Death Proof. Reprisal is a dish served cold in Korean director Park Chan-wook’s trilogy Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Gladiator kicked off the new millennium with Old Testament revenge. And it was the same further back. A 60s western like Once Upon a Time in the West is a retaliation opera. The Godfather trilogy is a Rembrandtesque study in vengeance. The films of Don Siegel, Jean Pierre Melville and Robert Siodmak are cratered with revenge. The first commandment of genres like martial arts, horror, grindhouse, gangster, and rape revenge is an eye for an eye. Grindhouse and horror seem high on it. Retaliation, in these genres, is narcotic.

It’s in pop songs and novels, theatre and opera too. And it’s surely no surprise. The desire to hurt someone who’s hurt you is a primitive impulse; its moderation or otherwise is the stuff of the great religions.

But in cinema revenge is particularly prevalent, because it has a movie shape. A cruel act – a false imprisonment, say, or the murder of a relative – sparks a quest for retribution that is suspenseful because its conclusion will be violent. Revenge isn’t multiple, like novels are multiple, but singular, like classic movies.

So how do we explain the fact that the continent of Africa, which has rather more reason to be vengeful than the Anglophone world because of the iniquities of colonialism, has hardly produced any films about getting its own back? Lots of wonderful movies have been made in Africa since the 1960s yet, unlike Tarantino or Sergio Leone or Park Chan-wook, its great movie makers don’t seem excited by the idea of filming people hunting down and hurting those who have hurt them. You’d expect centuries of oppression, humiliation and exploitation to have a caused a continent-wide psychological need for catharsis and, indeed, African life has been tragically bloody for decades now. But its movies don’t really reflect this.

Take Daratt, for example, the last African film released in the UK, made in Chad by Mahamat–Saleh Haroun. In it, a 16-year-old youth sets off to find and murder the man who killed his father. He takes a job in a bakery owned by the murderer, watching him every day, choosing his moment. Surely this is a classic revenge situation? Yes, the film broods with andante suspense, but in the end the son only pretends to kill the assassin, so Daratt is about the dissolution of the impulse to avenge. It looks at retaliation through a fresher lens than bravura western directors like Tarantino.

But what, then, about Bamako, the previous African film shown in the UK, in which a trial is held in a courtyard in Mali’s capital city? In it, African society is the plaintiff and the legacy of colonialism and the world financial institutions are in the dock. Again the stage is set for a revenge story – the film stares the evils of colonialism squarely in the eye – but what unfolds is witness bearing, not vengeance.

And, further back in the history of African film, when the wounds of colonialism were still raw and so cinematic retaliation might be both more expected and excusable, it seldom appears either. Even those classic African films that seem to be about vengeance, or look as if they will depict it, aren’t quite and don’t. Med Hondo’s Sarraounia, for example, made in Burkina Faso and Mauritania in 1986, is one of the continent’s angriest movies. It is set in 1899 in the Sudan, amidst French atrocities committed against locals. But it shows resistance to, rather than vengeance for, those crimes. It lacks a time lag and, therefore, doesn’t deal with the psychology of delayed anger. The plot of the late Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène’s masterpiece Ceddo (1977) similarly sounds like a springboard for retribution: In an unspecified past, the Ceddo tribe are threatened by the spiritual colonisation of Arab-Islam and Euro-Christianity, and physical slavery. They must choose between insurrection or integration. Sembène is too busy charting the implications of this choice to look at belated bloodletting.

Egyptian director Youssef Chahine’s state of the nation film The Sparrow (1972), which I’ve mentioned before, climaxes with Nasser’s shock announcement of the loss of the Sinai during the Six Day War. His characters are stunned. The matriarch of the film, Bahiyya, runs into the streets, overwhelmed and yelling, “We won’t accept defeat!” Chahine’s tracking shots of her are amongst the greatest moments in world cinema – passionately melodramatic and moving – yet his film stops short of vengeance.

I could go on, but the point is surely clear. Neither new African cinema nor the great films by founding fathers Sembène and Chahine nor mid-period master directors like Hondo are much about retaliation. Why not?  As many of the great African films – and there are loads of them – are co-funded by the French government, it’s tempting to think that the former oppressors have baulked at financing films in which wrongdoing is avenged. This may be so – only an analysis of African film projects rejected for French funding would show whether it is – but even if it were, it would only be a partial explanation.

More relevant, I think, is the fact that, with the exception of Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa, the continent’s movies have been closer to what we in Europe think of as art cinema, and so have not been an expression of populist rage and resentment.

This is not to say that there’s no fury in African movies, just that they aren’t, on the whole, populist. It’s certainly there – few filmmakers in the world were more militant than Sembène and his brilliant compatriot Djibril Diop Mambéty. But instead of that fury being embodied by lone avengers like Clint Eastwood or Jimmy Cagney, their angry people are likely to be women, in the case of Sembène, or the tone of their movies is likely to be wildly satirical, like Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973) or Hyenas (1992) or Sembène’s Xala (1975). Hyenas seems to be about rage – a jilted former lover, who has since become “richer than the world bank”, returns to her home village to punish the man she loved by promising the villagers that, if they kill him, she will give them all the consumer goods they want. But it is the locals’ greed that vexes director Mambéty, not the woman’s ire. And the story itself is European, adapted from a play by Friedrich Durrenmatt. After an hour or more of crisp gender satire in Sembène’s Xala, a troupe of disabled people do circle in on the movie’s greedy and self–important central character. They enact a revenge of sorts by spitting on him, the shock of the act coming from the very fact that it is so rare in African movies. Both films are about women, in many ways, and women are just as capable of wanting revenge as men, of course, but the target of their ire in African cinema is as likely to be obdurate black men as domineering white states, so their narratives do not usually have nice clean vengeance contours. And the influence of griots – storytellers – on African film stops them being clean-cut eye-for-an-eye movies too. From the mid-70s onwards, such griots have woven their way through African cinema, turning fact into fable, and interpreting events. This takes some of the raw anger out of the plots, rendering them mythic.

All of the above are relevant but the real answer to why African films are less vengeful than ours comes from Sembène again. In his great book on the director, David Murphy quotes him as saying “you don’t tell a story for revenge but rather to understand your place in the world”. Surely that’s it. African cinema is angry, yes, and driven, but not by the need to retaliate. Daratt and Bamako, Touki Bouki, Hyenas and Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen, Ceddo and The Sparrow are too busy working out how Africans should live with other Africans – what Edward Said called the move from filiation to affiliation – to deal with the almost decadent matter of revenge. Vengeance is for people with time on their hands. Eastwood and Cagney, Oh Dae-su in Oldboy and Charles Bronson’s Harmonica man in Once Upon a Time in the West had bags of time. African movies in the 70s looked around at the rubble left by colonialism and said, Ok, now that we’ve shook them off, where do we go from here? In the 80s they turned the clock backwards and told stories of pre-colonial times, to ask Where were we before they came? And can we pick up a thread from those times? These were such brilliant and relevant questions that, in comparison, vengeance stories were for wusses.

Back in the Anglophone West, we have begun a cycle of Iraq movies – The Kingdom, Brian De Palma’s Redacted, etc – that have the feel of apology and atonement about them. It’s right to say sorry, of course, but maybe our filmmakers could take a leaf out of Africa’s book by not only saying gotcha or sorry, but by making dazzling films about finding a place in the world.