University of Cape Town – FAM3003S

Jacques De Villiers

7 September 2016

‘I’m Looking Through You’:

The Aesthetics and Politics of Ruination in Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire De…(1966) and Atom Egoyan’s Calendar (1993)

“The others were there, and I sat down on the curb, as I did every day, to wait for destiny.”

– Diouana’s voice-over in the former.

“All that is meant to protect us is bound to fall apart. Bound to become contrived, useless and absurd. All that’s meant to protect is bound to isolate. And all that’s meant to isolate is bound to hurt.”

– Photographer’s voice-over in the latter.

The historical transition we are most concerned with in Deleuze’s personal Histoire de Cinema – that between the Movement-Image and the Time-Image – can perhaps also be cast as a profound change of perspective for the cinematic gaze – from Capital to Labour, or just from Power to the Powerless. This can maybe be said to begin in post-war Italian Neo-realism, as Deleuze himself claims, but it should be emphasized that as a process of acknowledging the subjectivity of the other, it has repeated itself on multiple occasions since, and we witness two undeniably brilliant examples of it in Sembene’s La Noire de…(1966) and Egoyan’s Calendar (1993). 

 Of course, it’s more obvious in the former: the first African feature film as such, the tale of a housemaid instead of her bourgeois masters, many protracted shots of her doing her job and ‘living her life’ a la the second chapter of Godard’s Vivre sa Vie (1962). Diouana is a ‘Black Girl from …’, the ellipsis indicating lack and rootlessness. Like Ozu’s title ‘I Was Born, But…’, no-one in the film will think to finish the phrase because no-one besides the protagonist thinks of it as a phrase that needs finishing. She comes from Dakar to the Cote d’Azur, feeling at home in neither, asked to cook French meals when her masters are in Africa and Senegalese rice when they’re living in France. Her mistress announces her laziness while reading a magazine with her husband and Diouana cleans up around them. “Independence has made them less natural”, says a dinner guest at one point. And this makes a modicum of sense, but only if you think of the ‘natural’ as an unchanging order or a species of domination. Certainly Diouana is seemingly not at home in the world as such. Unlike Sembene, she can’t even join the proletariat because she’s confined to her living quarters for the most part. Thus the little freedom she has comes in her voice-over (directed at no-one in particular, maybe just to herself), her flashbacks to her drifting days in Dakar, and ultimately her suicide, as if she’d internalized Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus from experience alone. The time-image here is that of the decolonized subject awaiting a better revolution, or at least one that makes her wage-labour feel less like old-fashioned slavery. In the absence of that, Diouana takes matters into her own hands and removes herself from the picture, leaving behind her masters, a newspaper clipping and an empty mask that cannot be returned to Africa without recrimination. The future is thus utterly in question.

In Calendar, however, the past and the future seem to happen simultaneously. Choosing between them for the sake of holding to a set present feels fiendishly difficult. Yet both are as systematic as Max Weber’s Iron Cage of bureaucratic efficiency. We see how a calendar of desolate Armenian churches is produced and then we switch to see how it is used and expended, and back again. And each and every time, like an exercise or a gimmick, we see the same repeated forms displayed with the casual banality of décor, as the months and the seasons themselves pass much as they do in life, without us really noticing their significance. But the intriguing transition process here is experimental in the extreme:  Egoyan himself plays  ‘Photographer’ and his stills camera doubles as the site of all twelve static shots that contribute to the final product of the movie too. We don’t see him in these scenes, just as we never see the actual director of a film in the film itself (cameos are still diegetic characters), but his subjects – the translator, the guide, the churches themselves – seem to accuse him of a lack of vision, of not knowing why the calendar and the film should exist in the first place (Is it enough that the images just look beautiful all in one place?). And just as his two companions fall in love and elope in front of his eyes and camera, all the swapped scenes, of the dates he goes on throughout the next year (the calendar now used as a marker of time instead of being time itself), always follow the same ostensible script with few variations – awkward conversation, the pouring of wine, an extended phone-call by the water-cooler, a letter or a rumination composed in the date’s absence. You would’ve thought Photographer would’ve grown suspicious of all this consistency by now… But the Deleuzean shift here is about his, and Egoyan’s, underlying lack of control. He may be calling the shots, literally, but by focusing on one supposedly beautiful thing – a herd of sheep that passes by forever per se – he runs the risk of missing the real story going on just behind him, just out of frame. And this uncertainty principle of cinema, a failure to communicate comparable to the experiences of a first date and simultaneous translation, is its own version of the any-space-whatever. We see an image in a calendar and it tells us that a certain view could be seen for a certain moment in the universe, but this convinces us that we have the full picture, regardless of the people standing just out of frame, the history that made the shot possible and the photographer himself who has to be included in its consideration. Every picture, person and place is a ruin of itself waiting to happen, and Egoyan accepts that. Whether we can do so too is the more pertinent question.