Reel Resistance: the Cinema of Jean-Marie Teno, co-authored with Melissa Thackway, is a unique, complex and timely work highlighting the biography, filmic poetics and anticolonial politics of filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno.
Melissa Thackway is a British independent scholar and translator, residing in Paris where she teaches African Cinema at Sciences-Po Paris and at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (International institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations - INALCO). Thackway has published widely on film and representation in Africa and the diaspora. Her 2003 book, Africa Shoots Back underlines her post-colonial and later decolonial approach to the analysis of film and contemporary cultural processes.
Jean-Marie Teno is a Cameroonian filmmaker living in France. His work bears testimony to: creative freedom, disregard for the so-called universal canon, narrative interest in real life/ real people and attention to the impact of history and politics on the shaping of dominated biographies and nations. These characteristics have influenced Teno's outstanding international reputation, earning him deserved academic attention and film awards, as well and financial and other professional hardships.
Reel Resistance… is the forthright fruit of collaboration and dialogue between Thackway and Teno whose teamwork appropriately identifies the contribution of each author.
The title of the work is eloquent. Its dual political and historic focus concerns cinema in general and African cinema in particular, since the 1960s and 70s. Using a metaphor harking back to the days before the digital, when films (and the news) were made on "reel" and when, in cinemas, the screening of the feature film followed newsreels enunciating colonial and post-colonial master narratives, which Africans and other subalternised peoples worldwide did not create, but which, in fundamental ways, created them and their unacceptable dominated mindscapes and cartographies.
In a such a context, African filmmaking became, for many creators, a mode of deconstructing "20th and 21st century colonial representations of Africa". It projected cinematic art forms paying attention to the real, rife with the refusal and resistance of silence, palimpsest and cliché. For African filmmakers of that independence era, the camera was both a weapon and a pen. As a pen, this cinema, which has remained that of Jean-Marie Teno, narrated human stories, imbibed in the present, drawing in a new way on ancestral aesthetics of narrating and questioning experience.
The stated and implied purposes of Reel Resistance are to: elucidate, through dialogue and academic analysis, the battles fought by the filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno in order to accomplish and gain recognition for an anticolonial oeuvre that films against the grain, imbricating history and story, fiction and biography, through the glance of a collectively-involved "I". These ingredients are moulded into a cinematic whole whose main thrust is documentary redefined, in/and through the processes of a personal and artistic quest for historically conscious, politically and aesthetically committed (engagé) expressions of the real.
The epigraph of Reel Resistance sets the tone by citing an inspirational filmmaker, the late Agnès Varda. Varda's words serve to pay homage, in the first book-length work, to the ongoing oeuvre of Jean-Marie Teno, and, moreover, to those like him: "All the inventive and courageous filmmakers, those who create an original cinema, fiction or documentary, who do not enjoy the limelight, but who continue [nevertheless]".
Jean-Marie Teno's preface to this major co-authored volume, places his own work within the global fortunes of the documentary genre. He underlines the hurdles and challenges involved in documentary filmmaking, especially for a minority, African/Cameroonian filmmaker residing in France. Whilst the documentary film forms are finally emerging in this country, acceptance still comes at a price, which, for Teno, is exorbitant and inacceptable, forcing the resisting filmmaker to strenuously (and impecuniously) create alone in an art requiring both teamwork and funding. But acquiring funds often involves submission to the diktats of sanitized documentary poetics and politics. Funding and box-office success depend, Teno believes, in a willingness to toe the line, to utter politically and culturally correct indignation; in short, not challenging the status quo in return for consecration as ‘an acceptable and accepted Other'. Here and throughout the volume, in the spaces dedicated specifically to his voice, Teno questions whether aspects of his aesthetics of "formal resistance" might account for the side-lining of his work by the contemporary African intelligentsia. Is his take on story too simple, he wonders? Is it too different, too far from expectations?
Melissa Thackway's presentation of Reel Resistance emphasizes the post-colonial need for a focus on the real, as an antidote to a somber history of colonial lies and betrayal. The book expresses Thackway's self-confessed subjective glance, born of durable intimate dialogue and later collaboration with Jean-Marie Teno as his assistant on his last two films, Une Feuille dans le vent and Chosen. The British film scholar has long been fascinated by the "force and originality" of the work of Teno, whom she describes as an "unorthodox", bold black, male African/ Cameroonian filmmaker. For Thackway, Teno's films, such as Afrique, je te plumerai / Africa, I Will Fleece You (1992), Clando, (1996) Une Feuille dans le vent / Leaf in the Wind (2013), and Chosen / Le Futur dans le rétro (2018), "push back boundaries", procure "cinematic pleasure" and provoke material for worthwhile academic analysis. This is due, she states, to their engagement with "challenging social, political, intellectual and artistic debate". Thackway considers Teno's cinema starting thirty-five years after his first steps and works backwards to the present.
But personal admiration and aesthetic pleasure are not the main justifications Thackway gives for her significant collaboration in Reel Resistance; she underlines the importance of this work for "Film Studies, African Studies" as a "monograph of this prolific Cameroonian director's oeuvre" whose value also resides, Thackway says, in the "critical dialogue between a filmmaker and a scholar".
This dialogue, Thackway declares, consciously assumes the difference and asymmetry of the authors' respective "personalities "and positionalities" in a work that brings together a "White British female scholar from the Global North" and a "Black Cameroonian male artist from the global South". I couldn't agree less with this forced ‘decolonial' dichotomy: for Teno is a cosmopolitan, widely travelled artist, who has spent the better part of his life residing in the North, outside his native Cameroon, whilst the longstanding influence of the French language/culture on Thackway is clear for any bilingual (French/English) reader with a keen ear.
Moreover, although the decolonial/postcolonial concepts to which Thackway has recourse are generally on point, I cannot help taking issue with the comfortable use she makes of the term ‘subaltern', assuring the reader that not only can the ‘subaltern' speak (Spivak), but he can also do so "refractorily"; he can speak back and shoot back. The use of the concept, unless employed with irony, has a tendency, unintended as this may be, of ‘naturalising', of normalising the constructed status of dominated subjects and nations. This said, Thackway's methodology, based on decolonial/postcolonial theories is rigorous, savvy and balanced.
2019.05.30 Africa, I Will Fleece You from UnionDocs on Vimeo.
Antoinette TIDJANI ALOUtidjanialoua@yahoo.frUniversité Abdou MoumouniNiamey, Niger.
