The Lives of the Saints

Synopsis

Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.

Green Lanes, north London, the present. Mr Karva runs a local gangland empire. His stepson Othello hangs around with his hairdresser girlfriend Tina (who performs sexual favours for Karva on the side) and his friends Emilio and Roadrunner, the local all-purpose errand boy. One night, Roadrunner finds an abandoned child in a park and smuggles him into Othello's flat. While the others try to decide what to do with him, Roadrunner announces that the child is an angel and that he will no longer work for Karva. Strange events start to occur: Roadrunner is tortured by Karva's henchmen but their blowtorch stops working at a crucial moment; Othello finds that he can no longer lose at gambling (bankrupting Karva's bookies in the process); kebab-shop owner Christella believes that a shambling drunk is the baby son she abandoned; and Tina shows signs of rediscovering her Catholic faith. All this is observed by Father Daniel, the local priest, with bemusement and concern, though he too finds himself succumbing to his innermost desires and performing as a transvestite club singer. Karva asks Emilio to kidnap the child for him. Emilio does so, but finds himself compelled to attack Karva in his Turkish bath and threaten Othello with a gun, demanding that he hand over Tina. In a final confrontation with Othello, Tina and Karva, Emilio shoots the child in the head, and then himself. The others' lives return to normal.

Review

Directorial debuts, at least those showing genuine talent, commonly have two flavours: tightly focused calling-card and over-ambitious sprawl. Current British releases London to Brighton and The Lives of the Saintsrepresent each to perfection. A magical-realist fable set in north London, this first feature by celebrity photographer Rankin and film-making partner Chris Cottam attempts an eccentric (bordering on demented) blend of the sickly-sweet whimsy of Carol Reed's A Kid for Two Farthings(albeit transplanted from the now-defunct East End Jewish community to Haringey's multi-ethnic Green Lanes), graphic torture sequences out of aSaw sequel, and a narrative arc resembling W.W. Jacobs' short story ‘The Monkey's Paw', in which wishes come true with unforeseen and potentially fatal consequences.

If all this weren't heady enough, the film is also liberally laced with more Catholic imagery than anything in British cinema since Ken Russell's heyday, and Lives of the Saints is as wildly self-indulgent, tonally choppy and floridly scripted as anything in his oeuvre. But it's also genuinely heartfelt, with the script by regular Terry Gilliam collaborator Tony Grisoni putting such unfashionable issues as spiritual loneliness centre stage.

The film starts with errand-boy Roadrunner (Daon Broni) doing his rounds, thus introducing both the locale and the principal characters before he makes the discovery that gives the plot its motor: an abandoned child, curly-haired and mute, with caricature cherubic features visible even under a thick layer of grime. The child, a boy who is never even nicknamed, has supernatural powers, and has a life-changing effect on those he encounters. These seemingly miraculous changes are not always welcome, however: for one character, guaranteed success at gambling destroys all the fun; for another, a yearning for a long-lost child turns up a shuffling tramp; and one man's desire to let it all hang out in a gay club leads to a vicious queerbashing. This is one of many scenes sitting uneasily alongside the airy fantasy; another shows Roadrunner threatened with a blowtorch by henchmen sent by his boss, Mr Karva, whose empire encompasses bookies to pool halls to Turkish baths. Played by an unrecognisably shaven-headed James Cosmo with a presence as demonstrative as his voluminous beard, Karva steals every scene he's in, though not necessarily to their advantage. Given his penchant for doing exactly what he wants when he wants, his ultimate desire to become a child again seems somewhat redundant.

His stepson Othello (David Leon) is more intriguing. Like his namesake, he is eaten up with envy, but of others' wealth and success - though when he achieves both himself, he realises he's lost more than he's gained. His voice of reason is girlfriend Tina (Emma Pierson), who is nevertheless pragmatic enough to recognise the strategic value of providing sexual favours for Karva. The odd one out is Emilio (Bronson Webb), Othello's rat-faced sidekick, the paucity of whose ambition is betrayed when he kidnaps the child, only to find his murderous desires no longer restrained by natural hesitancy. The bloody climax is absurdly overwrought, but it logically ties up the film's various themes: Tina, who has rediscovered her faith, is even allowed a brief pietà as she cradles a corpse.

The film-makers' visual pedigree ensures a distinctive look, achieved through hand-held, multi-speed camerawork, often in the same sequence. Roadrunner's errands are interspersed with sudden explosions of colour, frequently achieved via quick cutaways to close-ups of passing local detail. Exteriors are smothered under a powder-blue duvet of low-lying cloud, with suburban trains running across the bottom of the frame, their sulphurous yellow lights dragging the eye downwards. As with Wong Kar-Wai's impressionistic views of Hong Kong, the effect is both disorienting and intoxicating - or, to invoke Rankin's past as a magazine publisher, dazing and confusing.

Film of the Month: Bamako

Have the monetary policies of the World Bank and the IMF helped or harmed Africa? Bamako puts the west on trial and shows how its greed and neglect have brutalised Malian lives.

Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako examines the ways globalisation has contributed to a process of effectively recolonising Africa through the snares of western financial institutions. A fictional docudrama filmed in a lucid and deceptively simple style, it is one of a number of African films to have made contemporary history their subject matter and the first since Le Franc (Djibril Diop Mambéty's whimsical but acerbic 1994 parable about the French government's devaluation of the West African franc by 50 per cent) to tackle the attitudes of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), G8 and the World Trade Organisation towards the continent.

Bamako literally puts the World Bank and the IMF on trial for instituting ruinous policies driven by Structural Adjustment Programmes (appropriately nicknamed SAPs in Nigeria) that are widely criticised for bringing more pain and harm than help to ailing economies. Africa is rich in natural resources, yet has been exploited, brutalised and impoverished: as Aminata Traoré, the former Malian minister of culture, argues in the film: "I am against the fact that Africa's main characteristic in the eyes of the world is its poverty. Africa is rather the victim of its wealth."

The film opens in a courtyard where an extraordinary legal trial is taking place against a background of children playing and women going about their everyday chores. As witnesses begin to present their cases, we are told of the suffering and hardship western financial institutions inflict on African people. We hear that for over two decades the World Bank and the IMF have forced governments to mortgage their economies to the west through demands for outrageously high interest payments - some countries have to spend up to one third of their GNP to service such loans. In addition, these institutions' insistence on cost-cutting measures such as the removal of government subsidies and the streamlining of the workforce help create intolerable living conditions: 5 million African children will die unnecessarily in the next five years, claims the prosecution. As witnesses continue to testify, it becomes clear that Africans have lost confidence in the west to the point of dismissing the recent promise to eradicate debt by the G8 nations at Gleneagles as "a false cancellation" that is no more than a masquerade of caring acted out to enhance their own reputations.

Sissako's film exemplifies a number of trends in contemporary African cinema. What might be described as the new pan-African aesthetic interweaves melodrama, politics, ideology, satire and comedy - and Sissako draws on all these conventions to produce a film that not only instructs but entertains. His previous features, Life on Earth (1998) andWaiting for Happiness (2002) combined creative modes of address and unconventional structures with the traditions of documentary and fictional cinema to challenge the very nature of representation. And now inBamako he deploys a mix of comedic/satiric elements and political nuance to tell an African story in a recognisably African way as well as to increase his film's incisiveness and marketability.

Throughout the film Sissako eschews the Hollywood norms of narrative progression, instead introducing the stretching of time, the repetition of scenes or voices and nonsensical juxtapositions to draw attention to a distorted reality. An interspersed spoof Western starring Danny Glover and directors Elia Suleiman and Jean-Henri Roger serves as a metaphor for the narrow-mindedness of westerners' views of Africa. As Dziga Vertov said: "The problem is not to make political films but to make films politically."

Unlike in the traditional African chiefs' courthouses where societal feuds are settled or in the post-colonial magistrates' courts, the trial in Bamakoshares its space with the families who live in the courtyard where it is held or who come there to fulfil daily obligations. Indeed, it is through the stories these people provide and the details of their everyday experience - a gun goes missing, a marriage is dissolved, a mother breastfeeds her baby, women dye fabric, a young man lies ill, and so on - that the political point is driven home. These vignettes of life have a documentary immediacy that contrasts with the formality of the trial sequences and offers an insight into Mali's resilient culture and the ways African society has responded to predatory globalisation and the economic adjustments demanded by the IMF.

As the trial goes on, Sissako uses cutaways to give us snapshots of the local inhabitants' lives. Nightclub singer Melé and her unemployed husband Chaka have a sick child. Their marriage is falling apart, but Melé self-centredly ignores her husband's attempts at reconciliation. Their relationship parallels that of the west and Africa: the west has never regarded Africa as a true partner, nor has it wished for Africa what it wishes for itself.

In the course of the proceedings we notice how everyone is affected or disaffected by the issues under discussion. While the courtyard's inhabitants are either indifferent, discouraged or so engaged with their own lives that they are often unable to follow the debate, several of the witnesses - all of them chosen by Sissako in the weeks before filming and asked to speak in their own words - give passionate testimonies. An elderly man who is not allowed to talk at the start of the session returns towards the end of the film to electrify the audience with a powerful chant in his native dialect that has all the ritualistic resonances of Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen (1987). There are no subtitles, but the pain on his face is eloquent in its own right. In another powerful sequence a schoolteacher testifies without words to show how deeply discouraged he is. These are just two examples of the disturbing images, situations and surprises Sissako's camera captures.

As a political drama, Bamako may appear overtly didactic. Yet the film compels the viewer to reflect on the issues it raises, entertains as it informs, and portrays the complex realities of contemporary Africa. It should not be misinterpreted as a simple diatribe against the west, but should be seen as part of a pan-African cinematic tradition of telling the truth - a truth that in this case replicates the complaints African specialists have been making against the west for some time. Colonialism, neocolonialism and now globalisation have left a gaping hole in the heart of a rich continent. It is to be hoped that in giving Africa a voice, Bamako will not be ignored.

African Cinema: Invisible Classics

African cinema boasts a rich, exhilarating ferment of styles and themes and major directing talents to rival those of any other continent. How is it, then, that its masterworks are so hard to see in the west, wonders Mark Cousins

Donald Rumsfeld was half right. There's what we know we know, and there's what we don't know we don't know. What he didn't say is that, in between, there's what we (in the north) have heard of, what we know we should know, but which remains penumbral. In this mental shadowland lies a world of cinema: film-makers as significant as Martin Scorsese, as discrepant as Orson Welles; imagery as mythic as that of Sergei Paradjanov or Nicolas Roeg; life stories with the amplitude of Francis Ford Coppola's. These are films from a continent three times the size of the US, with more than 50 countries, over 1,000 languages, and nearly 300 film-makers in the Francophone territories alone. Many of us know something about Ousmane Sembène or Djibril Diop Mambéty, but their films don't become obsessions, something we rave about when drunk, or need to own, or show to lovers, or give to friends. Should they? Let's see.

The northern hemisphere invented cinema and set the ball rolling. East Asia ran with it and from the 1930s gave it new pace and direction. Africa, however, didn't get a decent touch until 1935 when the MISR film studio in Cairo became the first of its kind in the African (or Arab) world. Its output was mostly formulaic comedies and musicals, but films like Kamal Selim's The Will (1939) showed more serious potential. The Egyptian Youssef Chahine built on that potential with the seminal Cairo Station (1958) - polygeneric, prefiguring Hitchcock's Psycho, and laying the foundation stone for Arab film-making. Fuelled by Nasserian socialism, Chahine was the first of Africa's directors to see that the continent's cinema would be energised by decolonisation. At the inaugural Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia in 1966 he declared that "freedom of expression is not given, it is taken", later adding: "I'm the first world. I've been here for 7,000 years."

New alliances forged at 1955's Bandung conference of African and Asian states in Indonesia and the wind of self-determination in Africa fanned the flames, and by the mid-1960s the idea of indigenous African cinema had caught fire. Egypt continued to have a functioning film industry and Algeria started making great work like Ahmed Rachedi's Dawn of the Damned (1965), but it was in sub-Saharan Francophone Senegal that the promise burned brightest. There, in 1965, three years before the first major American film directed by a black person, African cinema's second artistic father-figure emerged. Most of those who followed were born into educated middle-class families,but Ousmane Sembène started as a bricklayer, became a Citroën factory worker and eventually a novelist. Like Chahine, he was angry, a Marxist who pointed out in his seminal paper ‘Man Is Culture' that the word ‘art' doesn't exist in any of the languages of West Africa. Such talk makes him sound didactic, but if he's often accused of preaching, that's only because he has taken on most of the big issues of his time. From 1966's La Noire de..., through the hilarious Xala in 1974, Sembène tackled gender. In Camp de Thiaroye (1988) he tracked the tirailleurs senegalais, the black African troops who fought for French colonial armies. Ceddo was ballsy in 1976, but consider its theme now: the arrival of Islam in 19th-century West Africa. Like Euro-Christianity, it brings violence and forces compliance; its advocates are fanatics, blind to cultural freedoms. The film ends with the local Wolof princess shooting an imam.

Such range made Sembène not so much a state-of-the-nation film-maker as a state-of-the-continent one, the John Ford of Africa. In his monograph on Sembène, David Murphy quotes Edward Said as saying that in his films we see "the transformation from filiation to affiliation": the change in society from blood relations to civic ones. Sembène's work is all about rethinking and modernisation, and by the mid-1970s his voice had been joined by others. In Mauritania in 1970 Med Hondo had madeSoleil O, the first, greatest, incandescent film about African immigrants. Safi Faye's feature debut, the first film by a black African woman, was the beautiful Letter from My Village (Senegal, 1975). In the same year Algeria won the Palme d'Or at Cannes with Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina'sChronicle of the Years of Embers, shot on 70mm. Still in 1975, Hailé Gerima's Godardian Harvest: 3,000 Years not only put Ethiopia on the film-making map but, with lines like "Is there anywhere in the world where there are no flies or Europeans?", turned African cinema white hot. Sembène had said, "You don't tell a story for revenge but to find your place in the world", and now lots of African film-makers were doing so.

Those of us who were paying attention found the pace of these debuts, the rich ferment of styles and themes, exhilarating. Just as Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg and Bogdanovich were reinventing US film, so Sembène, Hondo, Faye, Gerima and Lakhdar-Hamina were inventing African cinema.

But to say so is to leave out Senegalese man of the theatre-turned-director Djibril Diop Mambéty. Mambéty drank like Sam Peckinpah and was as disinterested in polish and the niceties of synch sound as Orson Welles. At the age of 28 he made a caustic road movie, Touki Bouki(1973), Africa's equivalent of Easy Rider or A bout de souffle. Author ofAfrican Cinema Manthia Diawara wrote that Touki Bouki "tears up the screen with fantasies of African modernity never before seen in film" - and he was right. Mambéty, like his polar-opposite Dakar visionary Sembène, was calling forth a here-and-nowness for Africa, a cubist, layered modernity, a filiation untouched by revenge but bustling with recovery. Touki Bouki means "journey of the hyenas" and Mambéty saw the snarl of these beasts as the greedy face of the World Bank. Scandalously, it would be 20 years before he made his next feature, itself called Hyenas.

Mythic dreamtime

Even those who were following this ferment of film form were unlikely to predict what happened in the 1980s. Many African nations were forced to mortgage their economies to the IMF, and as their currencies dropped in value producers found that on average their budgets bought just one-twentieth of the film stock they had before. And African film dropped its love of the here and now, of the newly self-determined, and started to look backwards. Oral storytellers - griots - became a focus, along with village life, medieval settings, tribal culture and the world before Arab-Islam and Euro-Christianity began to dominate. Senegal was still a centre but Burkina Faso and Mali came to the fore. Their film-makers asked new questions: not ‘What do we do now that the colonisers have gone?' but ‘What were we like before they arrived?' The Maghreb film-makers of the north and the black African masters Sembène, Mambéty and Hondo were joined by three new directors of world class: Burkina Faso's Gaston Kaboré and Idrissa Ouédraogo, and Mali's Souleymane Cissé.

Kaboré's Wend Kuuni (1982), set sometime before 1800, centres on a mute boy found in the bush who is adopted by villagers. Cissé's Yeelen(1987), set around 1500, takes a young man with magical powers on an Oedipal journey into the complex cosmology of his tribe. Ouédraogo'sYaaba (1989) shows how a boy bonds with an old woman whom the locals call a witch. In these encounters with mythic dreamtime, men talk to animals and trees; in Yeelen a dog walks backwards as if he's in Notting Hill at the end of Performance.

I watched my first African film, Yeelen, in 1990 and it changed my taste in cinema. I had read Roy Armes' book Third World Film Making and the West sometime after it came out in paperback in 1987, and so carried in my head the names of African films I wanted to pursue. Armes himself had seen his first African films in Bulgaria in 1978-9. He writes: "I discovered, much to my surprise, that there was indeed an African cinema, made by African film-makers, happily removed from the Tarzan films I devoured as a child." Removed indeed: Yeelen rained on the parade of pleasures I'd experienced watching Tarzan and The African Queen and Pépé le Moko. I turned 20 when Out of Africa was released, and seeing Yeelen made it look like Edenic paternalism.

After Yeelen I sought out Hondo's Sarraounia (1986), then Yaaba (1989), then Mambéty's Touki Bouki. By this stage the escapist, erotic pleasures I'd felt watching western films about Africa had been turned upside down. I was hungry for more films from Dakar - a place, I'd decided, that was as exciting cinematically in the 1970s as LA. Why was Sembène not part of the canon of great directors, like Sergio Leone or Ingmar Bergman? And I hadn't yet heard of Hailé Gerima or Safi Faye.

Now that I was belatedly paying attention, I began to see what a feast African cinema in the 1990s was turning out to be. In the Maghreb, Morocco's Mohamed Abderrahman Tazi made the delightful comedyLooking for My Wife's Husband (1994). Tunisia fired out Férid Boughedir'sHalfaouine (1990), about a 12-year-old boy negotiating the difference between female and male culture as he becomes a man; Moncef Dhouib's bleak semi-response to Boughedir's film, The Sultan of the City(1992); and Moufida Tlatli's The Silences of the Palace (1994). And from Algeria came Merzak Allouache's Bab El-Oued City (1994). These last five all challenge the reactionary elements of Islam.

Black African cinema in the 1990s was equally concerned with tolerance and modernity. In Guelwaar (1992) Sembène was again at his best, tearing into a story about attempts to find and bury a body with comic energy and humanism. In Burkina Faso, Dani Kouyate's Keita! The Voice of the Griot (1995) seemed to suck in a fusion of 1970s and 1980s African movies and breath out a dazzling portrait of a city boy who's been taught Darwinism only to be told by a griot about his mythic ancestors. Guimba the Tyrant (1995), made by Cheick Oumar Sissoko (not to be confused with Sissako), was framed by a griot too; this andGenesis (1999) show the Malian director to be a master. In Lusophone Guinea-Bissau, Flora Gomes' Tree of Blood (1996) was again about the opposed values of rural and modern life, and his follow-up, the musicalNha Fala (2002), was just as good.

Another of these 1990s directors, Mauritania's Abderrahmane Sissako (see page 30), is in the process of being acclaimed in Europe. HisWaiting for Happiness - as good as Antonioni's The Passenger - debuted in Cannes in 2002, by which time he had already made three beautiful films: Sabriya and Rostov-Luanda in 1997 and Life on Earth in 1998. Sissako's Bamako (2006), with its caustic denunciation of African subservience and the World Bank, signals a shift in the direction of Mambéty.

Pasolini meets Mambéty

The attention Sissako has received represents a new chance for African cinema. But then it has had other recent chances too. BBC4 ran a short season of films. In Edinburgh, the Africa in Motion festival showed 15 programmes of classic African cinema, some of it never before screened in the UK. Sembène and Chahine both had films in competition at Cannes in 2004, a concurrence that acted as a reminder of how youngAfrican cinema is - it was like seeing D.W. Griffith on the Croisette. Yet when I tried to raise the funds for a television programme in which these men who have invented the language of African film and excoriated militant Islam and social conservatism would meet and talk, no British company would commission it. Shame on them. Sissako en fete is a chance for African cinema, but perhaps a small one.

A quarter of a million people marched around Edinburgh in July 2005 wearing white T-shirts and wristbands that said ‘Make Poverty History' because they had read in newspapers and watched on television accounts of a continent eviscerated by debt repayments, poverty and illness. Yet how many people in the UK will buy a ticket for Bamako, a great work of art that addresses some of these themes? And how many British film lovers have seen Mambéty's excoriating Hyenas? African cinema, despite its bravura, inventiveness and loveliness, remains on the to-do list.

This has several implications. The first is that the innovations of African film have not had much influence. Surely Werner Herzog, who at the age of 18 ventured across the Sudan, would have collaborated with or have been affected by Sembène if he'd seen his work. Wouldn't Pier Paolo Pasolini, who filmed several times in Africa, have found a kindred spirit in Mambéty or Gerima? And might Sembène's combination of neorealism and poetry, his elevation of the objects and events of everyday life into something resonant, not have influenced the evolution of the great Iranian directors? Daryush Mehrjui started rethinking Iranian cinema in 1970, four years after Sembène's first important work. Arabic and Indian popular cinema have always found enthusiastic audiences in Africa, but the iniquities of film history have deprived us of a possible collaboration between the great African and Persian directors.

It is time to stop having to imagine such encounters, but instead to commission books, films, articles, seasons and documentaries that restore this film culture to its proper place. Then, perhaps, when we talk with our friends about the great films of the 1970s, we'll mention Mambéty in the same breath as Scorsese, Bertolucci or Wenders. ThenCeddo will be as familiar to us as Taxi Driver.

Postcolonial African Cinema. From Political Engagement to Postmodernism

At a time when world cinema still struggles to establish itself within the Western cinema circuit, it is a welcome development to see the publication, almost simultaneously, of two books that deal with African cinema. After a highly promising early phase, initiated in the West on the basis of Ousmane Sembene's films, African cinema has not quite managed, as the 20th Century went on, to attract a critical status equal to, say, Iranian or Korean cinerna. It certainly does not have recourse to the kind of financial backing that has made Bollywood a global success story (owed to a large degree to its predictable commercialism).

Despite this rather troubling outlook for African film, some recent developments in African cinema are more promising: It is not only the worldwide attention given to Gavin Hood's Tsotsi, the South African award-winning movie about a thug discovering the importance and beauty of familial love, that might very well spark renewed interest in the cinematic output of a continent historically ignored by Western critics beyond its abuse as a provider of "primitive" art. Two new books aim to bolster the still-exclusive discipline of African film studies and to provide a much-needed first orientation for a budding field. They also show that to write about African film does not prevent critics from proving their aptness at using highly complex theoretical cinema studies approaches.

Both books carry the title Postcolonial African Cinema and thereby express the importance of the colonial past for the work of African filmmakers; the choice of title also hints at the books' tendency to privilege cultural studies approaches over cinematic analysis. The subtitles make clear that the authors of the two books have quite different aims: Kenneth Harrow, in Postcolonial African Cinema. From Political Engagement to Postmodernism, situates African cinema in the larger global discussion about the relationship of art and theory in a post-modern age; David Murphy and Patrick Williams, in Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors, aim to introduce a wide range of African filmmakers systematically. Needless to say, the two books complement each other more than they overlap.

Harrow prefaces his densely packed book with an epigraph taken from Roland Barthes's essay "The Death of the Author," already setting the poststructuralist tone for the argument to follow. By applying the approaches of a range of theorists to African films, Harrow aims to take African cinema studies in a new direction. By focusing on "African postmodernism [...] as a function of African cultural responses to globalization" (xv), Harrow's book includes detailed analyses of individual films, placing them in the larger political and aesthetical environment of postcolonial Africa.

Harrow justifies his interest in critical theory by the fact that "as Sembene has become canonized, as decolonized African culture has moved from under the heavy weight of an anti-colonial or anti-neocolonial exigency to one now defined as postcolonial, the controlling frames of historicism and class-based analysis have been increasingly discarded" (20). Rather than seeing African cinema as necessarily dealing with issues such as national identities, Harrow clearly states that his "interest lies in those films that are amenable to the kinds of analysis that are concerned with the ways in which desire and fantasy play decisive roles in the ideological construction of subjectivity and agency" (20).

Accordingly, the first chapter faults early African film criticism (and filmmakers) for focusing on the deep structures of social realist films. In contrast to this approach, Harrow's film analyses are inspired more by the aesthetics of individual films. Applying the work of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Slavoj Zizek, amongst others, Harrow productively (and creatively) deconstructs a wide selection of African films, supporting his arguments with references to a wide range of critical sources, but also to African and Western literature and to World Cinema (not even shying away from Renaissance paintings, as in the chapter on Djibril Diop Mambety's Hyenas).

Harrow consistently shows how African cinema draws both from indigenous traditions of story telling and from Western models of film making, creating in effect a very African but nevertheless highly post-modern pastiche. His close readings of individual scenes of famous and lesser known African films, often illustrated by stills, show Harrow's great familiarity with African cinema of the past 50 years as well as with critical theory. In fact, at times one may wonder whether the concepts by fashionable critics that Harrow employs are included to explain the films, or whether the films serve to corroborate ideas by Lacan and others.

While Harrow's book discusses a wide selection of films, certain scenes resurface in different chapters, leading to moments of deja vu on the side of the reader (creating a feeling that some would call unheimlich). Zizek's use of l'objet a and of Hitchcook's McGuffin shapes a number of chapters, not always contributing in a new way to the understanding of the film scene under discussion. In fact, Harrow's Postcolonial African Cinema is at its best, as in Chapter 7 on Souleyman Cisse's Finye, when the author applies his impressive analytical skills directly to film analysis.

At other times in the book, Harrow offers detailed plot summaries, as for Dominique Loreau's Divine Carcasse (107-11): by thus alternating between more abstract and very concrete approaches to film, Harrow's book never allows its readers to foresee where the argument will go next. By performing post-modernism's belief in the necessarily palimpsestic nature of writing, Harrow implicitly argues for the need to read African film as an expression of the continent's own post-modernity.

In the last chapter of his book, on work by Fanta Nacro and Djibril Diop Mambety, he concludes that "the west does not own post-modernism any more than it owns cinema" (199). Taking issue with Fredric Jameson's notion of the post-modern, Harrow shows that African film often counters the Eurocentric view of post-modernism and that it actively subverts cinematic traditions (similar to the ideas of "counter-cinema," one could add). In particular, Harrow notes the role of capitalism and its related use of commodity objects Harrow as deeply Western concepts that should not be applied directly to a discussion of African post-modernism. Instead, he suggests that readers look for moments when the suppressed Lacanian real surfaces through uniquely African symbols and images.

Murphy and Williams place their Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors in a somewhat similar context. They, too, take an interdisciplinary approach that relies on a range of theoretical models. However, their book, as the subtitle indicates, moves along a more auteur-oriented trajectory, analysing the work of individual directors in separate chapters.

After introducing individual directors and their cultural backgrounds, the chapters aim "to situate African cinema in relation to important critical and theoretical debates" (l). In their introduction, Murphy and Williams succinctly address the major critical debates relating to African cinema, including questions about its relationship to post-colonial studies, nationalism, the "African-ness" of African film and its criticism, as well as the status of African film as a popular art form. The authors also express their conviction that an appropriate response to African cinema has to include stylistic and aesthetic considerations (19). The individual chapters on the ten directors cover African cinema from the 1950s into the 21st Century. In terms of geography, the authors do not limit themselves to discussing filmmakers from Anglophone and Francophone countries; instead, their selection of directors represents pretty much all of Africa.

Each chapter begins with a biographical section that focuses on the growth of the artist. After outlining the historical, social, and cultural context of the filmmaker, the authors go on to discuss individual films, placing the greatest emphasis on plot and theme while leaving cinematic technique somewhat to the background, thereby potentially disappointing some of their readers. By discussing, in each chapter, the major themes that shape the work of the director under discussion, the authors complement the more encyclopedic introductory sections.

In the final part of each chapter, Murphy and Williams discuss the films in the context of various postcolonial studies questions: Fredric Jameson's notion of the national allegory (with respect to films by Youssef Chahine), Third Cinema and Marxism (Ousmane Sembene), Frantz Fanon's psychological criticism (Med Hondo), the debate between the (post)modern and post-colonial (Djibril Diop Mambety), the post-colonial exotic (Souleymane Cisse), Amilcar Cabral's thinking on tradition (Flora Gomes), the role of popular culture for African Cinema (Idrissa Ouedraogo), corporeality (Moufida Tlatli), the borders of African cinema (Jean-Pierre Bekolo), and the force of liberalism (Darrell James Roodt).

The strength of Ten Directors clearly lies with its wide coverage of filmmakers and with its very systematic approach. The chapters are highly usable for classroom situations, offering students a wonderful first orientation to a specific filmmaker within the historical and cultural context of the films, along with well-chosen theoretical concepts for further discussion. These last two parts of each chapter should prove to be particularly valuable due to their skilled introduction of controversial ideas. The supposed separation into film discussion and thematic analysis shows the authors" expertise both in the fields of film studies and critical theory: it also shows their ability to combine film criticism with cultural theories.

In fact, their chapters provide just the kind of insightful use of theory that applies ideas productively while at the same time challenging readers to start their own thought processes. Because the book introduces theoretical terms and concepts very carefully, it should be particularly useful as a set text in courses on postcolonial studies that also include a significant proportion of film analysis.

Apart from the radically different approach that the authors take to the field of African cinema (and even to film studies per se), the list of canonical African filmmakers these two books consider seems to be a matter for debate. So while Ousmane Sembene, Djibril Diop Membety, and Jean-Pierre Bekolo feature strongly in both books, other important filmmakers, like Jean-Marie Teno and Youssef Chahine, only appear in one study, respectively; yet others, like Kwaw Painstil Ansah, are noticeably absent from both publications. That the vast subject of African film can only be treated selectively in a single-volume study goes without saying, and no doubt future books on the topic will fill gaps in the treatment of these two pioneering works. In fact, the complementary nature of the two books implicitly emphasizes the need for further research in African film. Read side by side they offer a wonderful starting point for future research into African cinema.

Totally Tati - The French Film Festival

The French Film Festival screens across the UK from 8 November to 20 December. David Bellos author of a new biography of Jaques Tati writes about the French director's comedic genius whose films are celebrated during the festival.

The 'Totally Tati' tribute offers a rare opportunity to see the almost complete works of France's unique master of comedy film, from his early shorts to his masterpiece, Playtime, Jaques Tati was a loner and didn't belong to any school except his own. He kept his distance from other directors and from ideas like the cinéma d'auteur. Yet his four main features, made with meticulous care between 1947 and 1968, were created almost entirely by him, as writer, director, and star.

What's special about Tati's vision is that the camera never tells you to look at the main action. Often, there is no main action! But something is going on in every part of the screen. Using mostly long shots, Tati invites you to see not the comedian, but comedy itself. That's why he's given us the adjective "tatiesque" to describe the delicious absurdity of people behaving... well, as they do!

Who was Jacques Tati? Born in 1907 and brought up in a well-to-do home in the west of Paris, he was not a bright boy. In fact, he was so hesitant with words that even when he was a famous film director many people thought him a bit dim. The village-idiot postman act that he performs in his first slapstick feature, Jour de fête, is also stylised self-mockery. Tati left school at 16 and went to work as a trainee pictureframer.

Some of Tati's concern with the composition of his frames on screen can be traced back to what he found a miserably tedious occupation. He also played rugby, and because he was tall and fast on his legs, he turned out to be good at it. But when he started to mime the exploits of his team-mates, he found his first great gift. He left home and job around the age of 25 to seek his fortune as a mime on the music-hall stage. Fame came in 1935 when Colette wrote a rave review of his performance as a horse and rider -- Tati using his great long legs to mimic the horse, and his trunk and arms to mimic the rider.

Mime is integral to Tati's idea of what film comedy should be. Using only amateur actors in all his movies, he directed them to imitate him as he mimed their own movements and postures. The ballet-like movements of the characters in his masterpieces of the 1950s -- Les vacances de M Hulot andMon Oncle -- are the direct result of long-drawn-out mime lessons given on set every day of the shoot. Out of those exaggerated postures and outsize legs came the Ministry of Silly Walks and Mr Bean.

Tati's clumsiness with speech is also faithfully represented in all his films. His characters do speak, but what they say is fragmentary and inconsequential, more like vocal gestures than proper speech. The nonsense-announcement on the station PA at the start of Les vacances sums up Tati's attitude to words: incoherent noises making people run here and there, usually in the wrong direction. Monty Python never did it better!

Tati's sound-tracks are nonetheless extraordinarily subtle compositions, made of music, ambience and a wide range of effects, each one of which was recorded separately and dubbed in. The farm noises of Jours de fête, the sound of a swing door in Les vacances, the bouncing plastic bowl in the kitchen of Mon Oncle, and the clack of Giffard's heels in Playtime (which are actually the sounds of human actors, a cello string, a sink plunger and ping-pong balls, respectively) are high points in the art of hand-made, synthetic sound. Playtime will be seen in its original and sumptuous format on 70mm panoramic film, for only the second time ever in the UK in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Cambridge only.

All Tati's films celebrate leisure, as his titles announce: Jour de fête, Les vacances, Playtime.... The world of work is only represented in Mon Oncle, where it serves mainly to show M Hulot's incapacity to settle in without turning everything upside down. (Watch the street-sweeper in the old town sequences of Mon Oncle to see Tati's revolutionary perspective on the nobility of labour!) Tati's films also seem to celebrate the old and the quaint, and to berate the modern. But it would be a complete mistake to see Tati as a reactionary anti-modernist. True, he is nostalgic for the pleasures of childhood — seaside holidays, jam-filled pancakes, and playground roundabouts, magically recreated in the coda to Playtime — but he is also unambiguously admiring of modern architecture, evenwhen stylised to the point of absurdity.

Tati took infinite pains with all aspects of his work, driving many of his staff wild with frustration at the delays. But he knew what he was doing. "Why do you look like a sad dog?" he was once asked in a TV interview. He looked straight at the lens and replied slowly, in his own kind of English: "I am difficult to make me laugh." That is why he laboured so hard to ensure that now, and always, his films would make us laugh too.

he French Film Festival is screened in cities across the UK and delivers some of the best contemporary cinéma français from established auteurs to new talents. The 2009 and seventeenth French Film Festival UK runs from 8 November to 20 December and will feature special tributes to two diverse but legendary figures: Jacques Tati and Jean Eustache. Visit the website for more information.

Screenings happening at: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee, Inverness, Stirling, St Andrews, Dumfries, Coventry, Cambridge, London, Manchester, Durham.