University of Cape Town – FAM3005F

Lesley Marx

13 May 2016

‘Strangers in Paradise’:

The Notion of Cinematic Purgatory in Djibril Diop Mambety’s Touki-Bouki

““Touki-Bouki was conceived at the time of a very violent crisis in my life,” said Mambety, “I wanted to make a lot of things explode” and that’s just what he did. Touki-Bouki explodes one image at a time.”

– Martin Scorsese in his short Introduction to the film for the Criterion Collection. (Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o555EiqRC10)

“Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?/ Where should we be today?/ Is it right to be watching strangers in a play/ in this strangest of theatres?/ What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life/ in our bodies, we are determined to rush/ to see the sun the other way around? … Oh, must we dream our dreams/ and have them, too?”

– Elizabeth Bishop in her poem ‘Questions of Travel’

“Fifty years after the October Revolution, the American industry rules cinema the world over. There is nothing much to add to this statement of fact. Except that on our own modest level we too should provoke two or three Vietnams in the bosom of the vast Hollywood-Cinecitta-Mosfilm-Pinewood-etc. empire, and, both economically and aesthetically, struggling on two fronts as it were, create cinemas which are national, free, brotherly, comradely and bonded in friendship.”

– Jean-Luc Godard in a 1967 ‘Manifesto’ included in Godard On Godard (1972: 243)

Djibril Diop Mambety’s Touki-Bouki(1973) is an outcast film, and knows so. It belongs nowhere and does not want to be categorized. Emerging just near the end of the greatest era of non-conformity in Film and recorded history, it appears today as a kind of unredeemed promise to the rest of Third Cinema, pledging a homespun audacity beyond anything managed by the auteur systems of Europe or America. After multiple viewings, one might say this is perhaps because Mambety himself does not seem to seek to be reduced to anything less than a solitary avant-gardist. For sure, as a director he is still the sum of his human determinations at the time of the film’s production: 27, male, Senegalese, impetuous etc. But in adapting the time-honoured New Wave Romance of a lovers-on-the-run tale to the specific dreams of post-Independence Dakar, he particularizes his own fantasies beyond the claustrophobic remit of Francophone, African or even World Cinema and raises them to a vertiginous realm of global, iconoclastic cinematic style. In other words, Touki-Bouki is a film created for everyone who loves Cinema as Cinema, which could be anyone from anywhere. The alienation of every other potential audience just seems like the necessary price to pay for the beauty of this potential universality. In this way, Paris and Dakar stand both for themselves – as the twinned opposing poles of Mory and Anta’s ambitions – and for the abstract dialectic of Reality and Utopia as such. All modern characters start from a place they disavow to journey to a place that defies their expectations. Mambety ultimately endorses neither form of disappointment. This essay will attempt to articulate the ways in which this original concept of purgatorial limbo manifests itself throughout Touki-Bouki and seems to represent the confused condition of the African Auteur as such in the person of Mambety himself. With him and Gauguin we must once again ask those grating questions, ‘Where do we come from? What are we? And where [the hell] are we going?’

“One has to choose between engaging in stylistic research or the mere recording of facts.” – Mambety quoted in Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors (2007:99)

Given the context of its creation, what is so evidently admirable inTouki-Bouki today is Mambety’s defiance of so many default stylistic avenues a debut feature-filmmaker from 1970’s Dakar might have felt tempted to take. The renegade European New Wave filmmakers of the 60’s had only two predominant models of filmmaking to rebel against: the American commercialized genre form and the ‘tradition of quality’, so abhorred by Francois Truffaut, which typified the state-sponsored, stage-bound cinema of the nobler alternative. Mambety instead openly rejects three false options for the Senegalese paradigm: not the timeless heritage of traditional, West-African ‘oral’ storytelling forms, nor the Americanized paint-by-numbers modernity of action-fueled entertainment (Touki-Bouki is not ‘Bonnie and Clyde in Africa’), and not even the acclaimed social(ist) realism of an Ousmane Sembene, which had been seen – and is still viewed in most cinephile quarters – as the one authentically home-grown African film movement. This is not to say that Mambety doesn’t value all three for their own sakes, merely that he subsumes them under a new, entirely personal vision, such that the film includes obvious traces of each without ever sacrificing the sense that Mambety’s sheer artfulness reigns supreme. On a superficial level, the film that resulted from this logic of evasion bears many striking similarities with the work of European New Wave luminaries like Jean-Luc Godard and Wim Wenders, but it cannot be emphasized enough that this is a result of their finding similar solutions to the same generational problems of personal cinematic expression and not a mere importing of European ideas to African shores. [1]In Touki-Bouki we see this particular playfulness in the experimental variety of many schizophrenic sequences.  The famous opening shots set the standard: a herdsboy leads a trundling pack of cattle along a dusty rural path while the credits roll and a light melody plays on a wooden flute. This could be the start of any pastoral fable about a young man’s coming-of-age within the rhythms of agrarian living. But Mambety then cuts to the absolute horror of the same cattle being roped into an abbatoir to be dismembered in the most stomach-churningly painful and bloody ways imaginable.[2] His point seems to be both the obvious one that traditional lifestyles now co-exist with modern soulless industrial production, and the slightly subtler epiphany that meat was still murder even before capitalism arrived on the scene. The similar brutality, twenty minutes later, of a goat’s customary decapitation is even repeated twice, partly it seems just to show how ordinary, how realistic, such images are, which we find so nightmarish, to the shanty-town villagers of Colobane (Mambety’s childhood home). The interval between these two moments of slaughter, on the other hand, appears intentionally dull and uneventful. Besides separately meeting Mory and Anta, we are introduced to little but the ritual views and activities of lower-class Dakar through a number of dragging pans and vérité cutaways. This digressive procedure is repeated throughout the film – a celebratory wrestling match is shown in its entirety, the models at Charlie’s beach house are alternately studied in close-up, a series of white French-speakers spout condescending comments on board the Ancerville – seemingly as a means for Mambety to showcase his facility with stylistic and narrative fragmentation. His cinematic signature is this very variation; Touki-Bouki can be a social realist documentary for ten minutes before switching to being an avant-garde mélange of a sex-scene for five. Orson Welles made Citizen Kane at almost the same age as Mambety made his first feature, and just as with the irascible vigour of youth Welles couldn’t settle on one perspective or judgement for his protagonist, Mambety attempts to provide far more than 13 ways of looking at life in Dakar. However, this formless form, because it never settles and steadily expends its momentary content, is not a sustainable vein of inquiry. Mory’s failure to join Anta on the boat, to ultimately see what their dream of Paris really amounts to[3], can be retrospectively coupled with Mambety’s failure to ride out the madcap creativity of Touki-Bouki into a more productive career. Staying in Dakar is a dead end, for both protagonist and director, not because Dakar itself is a city not worth filming but that in making such a multifarious film, Mambety left behind no replicable creative procedure either for himself or any potential followers. He tries to ride a motorcycle and an ox simultaneously and then can’t get back into the saddle after he crashes.   When he returned to feature-filmmaking 19 years later with Hyenes (1992), his style was still brilliant and recognizable but nowhere near as revolutionary. Touki-Bouki’s mad genius is held together by the promise of a more interesting world where avant-garde artists are more highly valued (Paris) than in this one (Dakar) and when that dream falls apart so does the film itself.

Mambety’s self-evident ‘will-to-individuality’ – his justified sense of the uniqueness of his own vision – echoes a general underlying theme in Touki-Bouki of privatization. This is both the country’s neo-colonial capitalization – so obvious in all the bright billboards and bus adverts making up the background of every scene in the city – and the actual isolation of almost every character in the movie into their own separate reality. Partly this is an effect of overdubbing, as in the scene where Charlie repeatedly implores an oblivious Mory to get into the shower with him, in which the camera stays fixed on the latter as he literally cases the place while the former keeps idly talking as if he doesn’t actually want Mory to respond or interrupt him. But more often this is shown more subtly in details picked up only on a third or fourth viewing: Anta is first seen studying by herself and drinking bottled water while everyone else in the village pumps water from a communal well; the postman who reports a son’s failure to send a letter home from France to his mother in an early scene later walks unthinkingly past Mory just as he’s made the inverse failure of not actually going to France himself; the white French-speakers on the Ancerville declare their racist opinions as if they’re being interviewed instead of actually talking to their partners; and even Mory and Anta never seem to have a scene where they actually talk face to face, we merely hear their conversations in voice-over while they study more diverting sights and possibilities.[4]Their sex scene is particularly confusing in this regard because Anta is shown in canted frames running down the cliff-side to Mory and baring herself to him twice, first with the reverse-shot being the goat’s decapitation and second with images of rushing, lapping waves. Then, in the actual necessarily prudish climax, we only hear her muffled moans mixing with the sounds of the crashing ocean and see her hand clench and slip from the Targui cross on the back of Mory’s bike. And when Mory decides not to get on the boat to France, Anta stares him down but they don’t exchange any words on the matter, leaving each to their separate uncertain futures. All of which appears symptomatic of a grander failure to communicate that typifies the film’s relationship to its audience too. Nothing is entirely clear or conclusive except this avant-garde opacity. Thus, more than any kind of clear-cut anti-capitalism, what Mambety seems to espouse, or at least express, is the need for a more accurate wholesale understanding of the fragmentary nature of reality itself.  We might say that his cinema, pace Sembene’s, concerns itself with epistemology before ideology.[5]As such, Dakar, as we see it in Touki-Bouki through the eyes of Mory and Anta, is held together as a city of cinematic possibility only in as much as it promises a multitude of methods of escape to the imaginary ‘mother-city’ of Paris. The entirety of the plot following the lovers’ post-coital declaration of intent consists of a list of situations in which they might finally “get lucky” – a card game, a wrestling-match robbery, the burglary of Charlie’s cupboards – and then of their attempts to ride the luck they do get all the way out of the country. The ease with which wealth can be appropriated through unethical means in Touki-Bouki’s Dakar[6]is such that it’s no surprise the majority of law-abiding city-dwellers live in relative squalor. Mory and Anta, like so many small-town dreamers before them, disavow this ignominious trap and set out to appropriate the costumes and character of the colonizer’s own sophistication as a means of achieving the highest possible recognition available to them. The very fact though that this dream can be realized ‘in reverse’ – that your social-standing can be merely the result of the clothes you wear instead of vice-versa – implicitly devalues the sincerity of such ambitions in the first place. When the lovers do eventually snatch their fortune, Mory first strips and performs his triumphant monologue to an imaginary passing audience and then two long scenes subsequently show Mory and Anta, fully-clothed in Western dress, waving and smoking cigars, sitting back at a bored, appreciative distance as their praises are sung by ecstatic crowds at a military parade and then by a dancing family in Colobane. It all seems too easy. Just as Josephine Baker’s seductive recording of ‘Paris, Paris, Paris’ gets stuck in the same frustrating fragment on the soundtrack, Mory and Anta’s conceptions of French glamour remain merely false and unrevealing pieces of the bigger picture. If one of the major effects of French colonization was to instill dreams of social mobility into the minds its children, it ironically comes at the price of utterly devaluing the actual achievement of ascendancy. If anyone can get to Paris by selling their souls, what will be left for them to enjoy when they get there?

 At the same time, Mambety feels too playfully intelligent a filmmaker to settle on such a moralistic message. He is, instead, a great modern poet of isolation and Touki-Bouki is, more than anything, an attestation of loneliness, a message in a bottle to any audience that might understand his particular existential dilemma. This is what gives the film its meditative heft: Mambety implicitly feels just as trapped in Dakar as his characters do but, unlike them, he understands for the most part that all fantasies of escape are more chimerical than accurate. Nonetheless, the fact of his having become an artist in a place (1970’s Dakar) which felt – and perhaps still feels – marginal even to itself, ironically imbues him with a unique sense of the very condition of marginality he so brilliantly explores in most of his films. Because a person cannot choose the world they’re born into, only abandon it given the right opportunity, there is a certain ignominy to being from anywhere in particular at all, which Mambety seems to embody in Touki-Bouki. The depth and duration of his digressive observations of the city bespeaks a kind of self-enforced distance from its details. He knows the place too well to provide many conventional establishing shots or expositional tracts; instead, the lived-in, ultra-subjective experience of acknowledging the ordinary sights of Colobane seems to breed the dream-like sequences of acclaim and escape Mory and Anta later undergo. As such, Mambety films the world he knows so as to make it strange. He draws out the inherent surreality of his home as a means of making the utopian concept of ‘Paris (!)’ seem simultaneously even more preferable and even less realizable. Mory articulates his vision of the city (“the Big One!”) as a place where things are no longer merely “black or white”, where he can “hit on all the mulatto girls” with impunity because integration and heterogeneity are supposedly trumpeted as virtues over and above the condescension and stratification so associated with Dakar. In reality, since the dawn of Imperialism Paris has certainly been an eventful haven for adventurous characters of all stripes, but one need only watch Godard’s Breathlessand Pierrot Le Fou to see that the civilized liberal values which allowed the existence of a specifically French bohemian mentality also bred the city’s own criminal underclass and inspired converse dreams of escape back to nature.[7]If Mory and Anta did make it to Paris together, we can be close to certain they would not find the place particularly hospitable.  However, for Mambety, this realization (explicitly shown in Mory’s inability to board the Ancerville) does not simply consign the lovers’ story to being a warning against not settling for the home one knows. For one thing, Anta stays on the boat and her future is utterly open for debate. For another, it’s clear that Mory’s decision to stay in Dakar is a tragic one. Besides the probability that he will soon be arrested on Charlie’s orders, his desperate run back into the city lets him arrive only just in time to find his “handsome beast” of a bike overturned and leaking oil like an ox leaking blood. Its totemic skull-and-horns has been cracked into two pieces and, over moody psychedelic rock, we leave Mory cradling the broken halves of his already split identity. The final image of the herdsboy once again leading his cattle-pack seems to hammer home the message that Mory’s ended up back where he started, only now with an even less coherent self and more alone than ever before.  However the penultimate image, also a repeated one, showing Mory and Anta lying together again on the cliff-side post-coitally contemplating the sea, is perhaps more telling. The final result of their romance is that they are both now roped to nothing[8], not even each other, but neither are they completely free. For Mambety and his characters, escape to Paris has been emblematic of escape from every other unasked-for obligation in their lives, whether it be the law, poverty, their families, their nations, stylistic categorization or just inertia itself. Even if their adventure ends in failure, it leaves behind the romance of its own memory, the residual image of a liminal space between the sea and the land where Mory and Anta actually do have their whole lives ahead of them, where anything they’d choose to do would be truly radical for being their own conscious decision. This limbo of freedom seems to be what Mambety advocates. If nothing else, it produces a beautiful film, and worthwhile communication is always better than silence.

In the final instance, Mambety can be said to have made Touki-Bouki just to show that he could. A film needs no justification for existing, but Touki-Bouki is Mambety’s testament to his own freedom as an auteur. He wanted to show that an African director could make as unexpected and personal a film as any European New Wave radical, and for the same reasons that the European New Wave radicals made their own: to show that cinema doesn’t have to be an assembly-line process and that good films address all image-lovers regardless of their private origins. The very existence of this essay is evidence of his success. However, whether any future African filmmakers can find a way out of Mambety’s expression of purgatory is anyone’s guess. As we have seen, this infernal gap is not just the space between the false choices of colonizer and colonized, happiness and poverty, Paris and Dakar, but the inherently cinematic division between artistry and anonymity, communication and solipsism. Films, of course, do not exist without an audience but an audience can be waiting for a film no-one’s had the temerity to make yet and a film can be made without knowing if an audience awaits it. The leap of faith a film like Touki-Bouki makes is perhaps the bravest and most admirable feat in cinema. Because Mambety made his debut feature for no-one in particular, expressing his particular loneliness in a not instantly likable style, he gambles on the hospitality of humanity in general and simultaneously wins and loses. The film’s existence and the reputation he gained for making it were reward enough but its inimitable brilliance leaves it a dead-end for the moment.  Let’s hope that moment will pass eventually and that Paris and Dakar will one day become known for what they really are.   

Word Count: 3156

Reference List:

Godard, Jean-Luc. 1972. ‘Manifesto’ in Godard on Godard. Translated and Edited by Tom Milne. New York & London: Da Capo Press.

Murphy, D. 2007. Djibril Diop Mambety. In D. Murphy and P. Williams.Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 91-109.

Scorsese, Martin. 2014. ‘Martin Scorsese on “Touki-Bouki”’. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o555EiqRC10[May 13, 2016]

Wynchank, A. 1998. Touki-Bouki: The New Wave on the cinematic shores of Africa. South African Theatre Journal, 12 (1 & 2), 53-72.

[1]“The impulse for what I do came at that moment of liberation back in the 60’s and is inspired more by my understanding of the limits of possibility than by any developments or trends in European film at the time.” – Mambety quoted from a 1996 Interview with Sight & Sound Magazine in (Wynchank, 1998: 58)

[2]Needless to say, some animals were harmed during the making of Touki-Boukiand Mambety would probably make no apologies for shocking his audience with images of production processes that take place millions of times a day in every society on the planet.

[3]The best comparison I can think of to illuminate, if not explain, Mory’s indecision at the climax is with Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which multiple scenes are similarly strangely repeated and a group of bourgeois characters discover they simply cannot leave the room they’ve just had dinner in. The outside world may as well not exist, or at least no matter how much the characters want to leave they can’t because they don’t seem to believe that anything outside their little lives can be real. For Mory, the concept of Paris is so perfect its actual existence would be a tragic disappointment.

[4]The parade sequence is a perfect example of how Mambety uses economic necessity to express this aesthetic point: the crowd shots and the images of the presidential palace were filmed at a rally for Senegalese independence while Mory and Anta’s regal reactions were filmed months afterwards and intercut with them to show the subjective distance inherent to their fantasies of wealth, power and acclaim. Because we never see them and the crowd in the same shot, a real separation is apparent between the thrill of their dreams and what they’re actually experiencing.

[5]Mambety even dramatizes this shift in emphasis early on in the film when a truck full of student revolutionaries alternately berate Anta for no longer coming to their meetings and then kidnap Mory for being her prime distraction. Questions of Romance and personal fantasy thus seem incommensurate with the more selfless concerns of political solidarity and didacticism.

[6]Policemen and card-hucksters extort citizens on a daily basis, the already loaded Charlie has an ‘Officer Mambety’ on nepotistic speed-dial, a whole trunk of money is collected for the sake of a monument to the arch-colonial patriarch General De Gaulle of all people etc.

[7]The bird-whispering white hobo living in a baobab tree who steals Mory’s bike after Anta crashes it and then crashes it himself in the film’s climax is perhaps Mambety’s nod to this particular colonizer-colonized paradox: a bourgeois Frenchman thinks Senegal a natural paradise and a poor Senegalese man thinks France a utopia, and they’re both wrong. 

[8]A whole paragraph of this essay could have been written on the consistent playfulness of Mambety’s use of animal and containment metaphors, but hopefully a few examples have already shown up in the preceding text.  For the moment suffice it to point out that the title Touki-Bouki refers to the wandering path of hyenas, those homeless, ridiculous, opportunistic scavengers of the Savannah; that Mory’s indecision on the gangplank is intercut with images of a cow pulling at a rope leading it to slaughter; and that Mory is lassoed and trussed up by the truck-full of revolutionaries like a prize kill. All of which are literal and figurative expressions of the fact that humans (and Mambety’s protagonists in particular) are ultimately animals acting on their instinctual preference for freedom and that ideology, in whatever form it takes, is just a rope-leash of its own.