by Paul Cronin
What I took from Bruce’s book was the African atmosphere the text is so effective at creating. I travelled through Brazil, Mali, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, before deciding that Colombia and Ghana were the best places to shoot the film. Ghana was one of the first African states to become independent. Culturally speaking, it’s probably the most refined nation on the continent, and the people there possess a great self-confidence. For centuries the English, Portuguese, Dutch and French colonials tried to get rid of the multitude of little kingdoms, but after independence successive governments refused to abolish them. Ghana’s leaders understood the importance and usefulness of the ancient local cultural traditions.
Were you especially interested in the slavery narrative of The Viceroy of Ouidah?
Neither the film nor Bruce’s novel is explicitly about slavery; I don’t consider Cobra Verde to be an historical film, just as I never saw Aguirre and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser as faithful representations of certain events. The story is about the fantasies and follies of the human spirit, not colonialism. I was interested in Francisco Manoel’s relationship with power, though I didn’t particularly want to explain why this enigmatic character becomes a bandit or describe his psychological journey from South America to Africa. He’ll do anything to escape poverty, even if – as he says – it costs him his life. He becomes a slave trader in Africa after overhearing rich landowners in Brazil discussing their plan to send him to his death, because for the last ten years the king of Dahomey has killed every foreigner who has set foot on the soil of his country. It’s pure defiance of what awaits him that pushes Francisco Manoel to confront the situation head on and accept the job without hesitation. He has a grander design than those of his enemies and is prepared to walk directly to his apparent doom. When he reaches west Africa, Francisco Manoel boldly demands that the slave fortress – which has long since been abandoned and looted – is turned over to him and the slave trade resumed.
Although much discussed in the United States and the Caribbean, in many African countries the wounds of slavery are still so deep that people don’t speak about it in public. The subject remains taboo, I suspect, because of the well-established fact that African kingdoms were implicated in the slave trade almost as deeply as white traders. There was also a great deal of trading between the Arab world and black Africa, and even between African nations themselves. Setting the story of Cobra Verde during the last days of slave trafficking means moving it beyond a simple account of an historical phenomenon. As Francisco Manoel says, “Slavery was not a misunderstanding, it was a great crime. Slavery is an element of the human heart.” In other words, no amount of legislation will truly eradicate it.
Africa, not Kinski, is the star.
I was never so successful in filming the landscapes and capturing the spirit of the continent. There are some shots in the film – like the one of the crippled boy who shuffles away from the camera and stops when he reaches the steps, which he is unable to climb – that illustrate the pain slavery has inflicted upon an entire continent. It’s almost as if this boy represents Francisco Manoel’s guilt, and it reminds me of the sequence at the end of Where the Green Ants Dream with the girl sitting in the mining encampment clutching a stone as she listens to a voice on the radio screaming about a goal scored by Argentina during a football match. Both images carry great pathos and sadness, somehow summing up the heart of these films.
The South American sequences of Cobra Verde always felt heavy to me; the African part of the story is much more interesting. What audiences see of the continent are things they aren’t used to, like court rituals and flag signals along the coast, and the wonderfully anarchic and chaotic crowd scenes have real life to them. In most films set in Africa the place is portrayed either as a crumbling, primitive and dangerous place full of savages, or with a kind of Out of Africa nostalgia. Cobra Verde deviates from all that. I set out to show things that had been ignored, like the continent’s sophisticated and complex social structures, its kingdoms, tribes and hierarchies. I even managed to get His Royal Highness Nana Agyefi Kwame II, the real king of Nsein, to play the king of Dahomey. He was a wonderful and dignified man who brought three hundred members of his court with him to the set. I hadn’t originally planned a scene with his entourage, but they looked so magnificent that I put them in the film. Everything and everyone you see around him is authentic; all the jesters, princes, princesses, ministers, dancers and musicians, and the traditional objects they carry. These are the kinds of characters that could never be invented. Kwame II exercised a powerful authority over everyone – even Kinski – and I could never have found anyone more convincing than him to play the king. At one point Kinski attacked a member of the crew and insulted the hundreds of Africans who had come there especially for us. He started to pack his bags, and all the king’s extras were also about to leave. Kwame II explained to Kinski that filming had to continue and that he had to stay, that there were too many important things being said for the first time in the film about slavery, about Africa, about the history of the continent for anyone to allow the production to be halted. Kinski never again raised his voice against the Africans. The king literally saved the film.
I have never seen your short Les Français vus par … Les Gauloises.
It was made as part of a compilation film; the other directors included David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard and Andrzej Wajda. For my contribution I purchased a $1,000 bottle of wine and brought together Claude Josse and Jean Clemente, two of the greatest living French sommeliers, then filmed them opening the wine and gushing poetic descriptions. As a contrast, I wanted to film some real Celtic people; for me they were best represented by members of the Stade Toulousain rugby team, who allowed me into their locker room before a match. I watched them spend a few hours physically menace each other and work themselves up into an absolutely berserk mood as preparation for meeting their opponents out on the field.
Could any of your films be categorised as ethnography or anthropology?
Only in so far as my goal is to use cinema to explore and chronicle the human condition and our states of mind. I don’t make films using only images of clouds and trees; I work with human beings because the way they function within different cultural groups interests me. If that makes me an anthropologist, so be it. But I never think in terms of strict ethnography, going out to some distant island with the explicit purpose of studying the natives and their communities.
I understand what you’re getting at with a question like that, but a film like Wodaabe, Herdsmen of the Sun can’t be seriously considered ethnographic because it’s stylised to such an extent that the audience is taken into the realm of the ecstatic. I don’t deny you can learn a certain number of facts about the Wodaabe from the film, but that was never my primary intention. There is no voiceover, and even the short text at the start tells you only the barest facts about these people, that they have been around since the Stone Age and are a ragged tribe despised by neighbouring peoples. I purposefully pull away from anything that could be considered anthropological. In the opening scene of the bizarre male beauty contest, the tribesmen are rolling their eyeballs, extolling the whiteness of their teeth and making ecstatic faces. The fact that they were being filmed made no difference; they were completely immersed in the spectacle. These young men are so wildly stylised, why shouldn’t I be too? On the soundtrack we hear a 1901 recording of Gounod’s Ave Maria from an Edison cylinder, sung by the last castrato of the Vatican, which creates a strange, almost ecstatic feeling, and establishes a powerful counterpoint between music and images. A traditional ethnographic filmmaker would never dare do anything like that. Using this specific recording helps carry us out of the realm of what I call the accountant’s truth; anything else wouldn’t touch us so deeply. It means the film isn’t a documentary about a specific African tribe, rather a story about beauty and desire. It’s the same idea as when I used drumming music from Burundi in Fitzcarraldo, which has nothing per se to do with the Amazon jungl
e, and is why, at the end of Little Dieter Needs to Fly, you hear a piece of music sung in Malagasy that was recorded in 1931 in Madagascar. I can’t tell you how many people asked me why I didn’t use Laotian or Vietnamese music.
What drew you to the nomadic Wodaabe of the southern Sahara?
They are scornfully referred to by neighbouring peoples as “Bororo,” a term of abuse roughly meaning “ragged shepherds.” Wodaabe, the name they call themselves, means “those under the taboo of purity.” They number no more than about two hundred thousand, and travel through the Sahel zone of the desert from Senegal on the Atlantic almost across to the Nile, particularly Mali and Niger. We know Wodaabe have been in the Sahara since time immemorial because the brand marks on their cattle are the same as those found on six-thousand-year-old rock engravings in the Aïr mountains. They have no concept of modern-day borders and are in strong danger of disappearing because their living space has shrunk as a result of the dramatic southwards spread of the desert. The Wodaabe don’t know where they come from; their myths make vague mention of crossing a great stretch of water in the east. Since their language is unrelated to that of any other African peoples and they have light skin and sharp-featured, narrow faces, some people believe they must have come from Mesopotamia, crossing the Red Sea in prehistoric times.
The Wodaabe consider themselves to be the most beautiful people on earth. The men compete against each other in contests, while the young women assign one of themselves to select the most handsome man. She picks one out and disappears with him into the bush for a few nights. Most of the women are already married, which is why they return their booty to the bosom of his family once they are finished with him. Occasionally they keep the man for themselves, resuming their nomadic journey with him. During the preparations for their beauty contests groups of young men in the encampments joke and laugh, making themselves as beautiful as possible; they dress up and put on make-up made from natural dyes that have been pounded into powder. Some take a whole day to prepare for the festival, which starts at dawn and lasts five days. It’s thought to be particularly beautiful to show as much of one’s teeth and the white of the eyeball as possible, and some of the men roll their eyes upwards as if in ecstasy. A succession of complex dances and rituals are performed, with the men in straight lines, striding forward, grimacing ecstatically, then retreating until the moment of decision, when the winner is chosen. One of the women I filmed joked that none of the men were anything special – actually on the ugly side – and that the one she had spent the previous night with was a wimp of a lover. She was determined to find a better one.
Jean-Bédel Bokassa is the subject of Echoes from a Sombre Empire.
It was during the making of Fata Morgana that I first went to the Central African Republic, after having been released from prison in Cameroon. Let me say this about my time there: if you were driving a Land Rover and suddenly the vehicle was surrounded by a crowd of screaming people, the only sane thing to do was put your foot down and get the hell out of there. Bokassa had assumed power after a coup d’état in 1966, and in 1977 proclaimed himself emperor. He was truly bizarre; the evil sparkling of this incredible character was fascinating to me. Bokassa was completely unlike Léopold Sédar Senghor, who, before he became the first president of Senegal, had studied Western thought and philosophy. Bokassa was, alongside Idi Amin, the most African of African leaders. Film allows us to reveal the least understood truths of man. It delves into our fantasies and dreams, in this case our nightmares. Bokassa represented the kind of human darkness you find in Nero or Caligula, and Echoes from a Sombre Empire was an attempt to explore the dark abysses that lie at the heart of man. Some reviews inevitably said the film should have focused more on French foreign policy and history, but it isn’t for me to discuss such things. I leave that to the journalists.
There was a cornucopia of stories surrounding Bokassa and his regime, most of which are well documented today. He had a number of children killed because they weren’t wearing school uniforms, and spent a third of the country’s national budget to pay for his coronation. He personally presided over the judicial system, had people indiscriminately thrown to the crocodiles, and apparently fathered fifty-four children. The cult of personality surrounding him was astonishing. He awarded himself a huge number of medals, all of which he would wear at public events, claimed he was bulletproof and could read people’s minds, issued orders to have the ears of thieves cut off and personally beat inmates to death with his ivory-topped cane. The deeper I dug, the more I discovered tragedies worthy of Shakespeare. There is the tale of the two Martines, a film in itself. When Bokassa was a soldier in Indochina he had a child called Martine with a local woman. Once in power he decided to find his daughter and bring her to Africa, but the girl who was found and brought over turned out not to be the real Martine. When he eventually did find the genuine Martine he allowed the other one to stay, and the two women were married on the same day in a huge celebration, though soon afterwards both husbands were executed. Apparently one of them was involved in the murder of the other’s newborn child. Bokassa decided to send the “fake” Martine back to Vietnam. She was put on an aeroplane that returned only half an hour later; it was obvious she had been pushed out over the jungle. Bokassa’s crumbling palace represented the melancholy of his story. A building like that quickly decays in such a climate. Compare it to the seventeenth-century castles in Scotland, overgrown with ivy and moss, which have aged beautifully.
After he was deposed, Bokassa fled to France and was condemned to death in absentia. A few years later, however, he decided he couldn’t stand the French winters, so, cold and homesick, he boarded a commercial airliner, believing he would be received like Napoleon returning from exile, his nation on its knees before him. He was immediately arrested, put on trial and condemned to death again, though his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, then twelve years, then house arrest. Permission came down from President Kolingba to film with Bokassa, and he wanted to meet us, but at the last minute we were expelled from the country by the minister of the interior. He was apparently implicated in several crimes from the Bokassa era, so didn’t appreciate us being so nosy.
Did the man really eat human flesh?
The German ambassador to the Central African Republic told me that after an execution in front of the press and diplomatic corps, the execution squad rushed forward, ripped the liver from the body and ate it. After speaking to so many people who had stories about Bokassa, I quickly realised that when there is so much hearsay about a single man or event – when you hear the same stories from so many different people – speculation condenses into something factual. We have to believe it. The deeper truth of the situation is outside our reach, but not the facts. Bokassa was a cannibal. During his trial – which was videotaped in its entirety – there were precise witness accounts, including one from Bokassa’s cook. When the French paratroopers who assisted in deposing Bokassa opened up the huge refrigerators in his palace, they found half of one of the emperor’s ministers frozen solid. The other half had been eaten during a banquet.
Cannibalism is a documented phenomenon of many human societies, but when we made the film even those officials who had been in opposition to the Bokassa regime flatly denied he ever ate anyone. Such behaviour clearly breaks so many taboos, and admitting it somehow casts the whole continent of Africa in a bad light. You see the same kind of thing in Mexico, where some people still maintain the Aztecs never sacrificed human beings or practised cannibalism because they consider it so shameful. They make wild suggestions that such claims are a fabrication of the Spanish to denigrate the Aztec way of life.
Michael Goldsmith guides us through the story of Bokassa’s regime.
I encountered Michael – who at the time was the head of the African branch of the Associated Press – after having read some of his published dispatches. I don’t recall exactly where I first met him, but like those who have crossed the Sahara, people who have bee
n in the Central African Republic during Bokassa’s reign or the chaos of the Congo somehow find each other. I can’t explain how such people connect; we just recognise one another. Michael Goldsmith was different from most journalists I had met in Africa. Many were young social climbers or ageing, cynical alcoholics, but Michael expressed a certain philosophical attitude. He had reported from around the world for decades, and I appreciated his outlook on life. From the moment I encountered him I knew he was the key to telling Bokassa’s story, which is why I always saw Echoes from a Sombre Empire more as a journey into a personal nightmare than a documentary. In the seventies he had been accused by Bokassa of being a spy and was sentenced to death. He almost died after being beaten with the imperial sceptre by the emperor himself, then manacled to the wall of a rat-infested cell, and was saved only after his wife intervened. Years later, once Bokassa had been deposed, Michael was anxious to return to the Central African Republic.
Although he looked like a kindly librarian, Michael was a courageous man who was used to being in dangerous situations and had real insight into Africa. Soon after we finished the film he went to Liberia and was taken prisoner by a faction of insurgent rebels, most of them child soldiers. Eight-year-old children wearing rags and brandishing Kalashnikovs and M16s were shooting at everything that moved. Michael told me they were usually drunk or stoned, and one time raided a bridal store so they could dress up as bride and groom. The “bride” was an eight-year-old boy wearing a veil and a gown with high heels that were much too big for him who fired his rifle wildly, and the “groom” was naked except for a tailcoat that dragged after him. Very strange images. Michael was held captive in a building from where they had shot a passer-by; day after day he watched the body decompose. By the end dogs were carrying away the last pieces and only a dark spot remained. He managed to get home and saw Echoes from a Sombre Empire at the Venice Film Festival. Three weeks later he died.
