Space and Time in African Cinema and Cine-scapes

Kenneth W. Harrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032265704
• eBook ISBN: 9781000598551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Media Studies

This book is the first of its kind to bring basic notions of contemporary physics to bear on African cine-scapes.

In this book, renowned African cinema scholar Kenneth W. Harrow presents unique new ways to think about space and time in film, with a specific focus on African and African diasporic cinema. Through a series of case studies, he explores how cinema creates and represents time and space and, more specifically, how a cinema centered in African landscapes and figures accomplishes this. He reflects on the issues and problems posed by scientists when faced with the basic questions of what space and time are and their solutions or conclusions, giving both film studies and African studies scholars access to new ways to formulate their thinking about African cine-scapes. Working beyond the limits of a framework based in a postcolonial and cultural understanding of time and space, Harrow demonstrates how a scientific understanding of time and space can open up new approaches to African cinema and cinema in general.

A unique, interdisciplinary book that encourages brand new ways to approach cinematic texts and, specifically, African cine-scapes.

Part One Space and Relationality

1 “Borom Sarret” and Framing the Questions of Science

DOI: 10.4324/9781003288893-3

Barad puts it beautifully here: “We are part of that nature that we seek to understand” (Barad 67). This key concept will be elaborated more fully in the course of this chapter where Barad develops the notion of “intra-acts.”

1.

What is at play when our borom sarret (or cartman: in Wolof borom means homme, man; sarret means charette, cart) enters onto the Plateau, in Dakar? The key quote about Anthropic ideas might be this one from Karen Barad: “We are part of that nature that we seek to understand” (67). The idea is articulated clearly in Hawking’s Brief History of Time (1990) in which he states that the reason humans seemed to have adapted well enough to think about and explain the workings of nature is that we were formed by the same evolutionary forces that formed the natural world as well. We can perceive, function in and think within the frame of a world that was shaped by the same evolutionary principles that account for our existence. Once we see humans as no different from any other part of nature that came about since the Big Bang, and as having been constituted by evolutionary forces so as to perceive the world as an evolutionary development, we can understand the key point that we are integrated into what we are observing. It seems obvious how the anthropic defines us as part of nature. We might as simply say the world developed beings like us because it, like us, is made up of particles that emit forces and are subject to forces that interact in such a way as to permit the better adaptive configurations to have survived.¹

We don’t think normally of the confluence of adaptive practices and evolving beings when seeking to give a reading of a simple film like “Borom Sarret” because we have bracketed off the larger universe when analyzing the actions in the film. But the minute we imagine the actions in the film as framed within a universe larger than that defined by colonial spaces, colonial discourses or nascent postcolonial environments, we become open to new ways of seeing the spaces and interactions recorded in the film. I do not mean to say we can see them through the eyes of the physicist, but as film scholars newly informed with different spectatorial issues, different takes on the real.

Of course, the film’s images and scenes are not “recorded” but created. But the creation sits comfortably within a set of conventional frames, frames often reduced to binaries like le quartier and le plateau, the cart-driver (le borom sarret) and his wife, cart and automobile, rich and poor, or European and African, etc. There is almost no end to the multiplication of opposites or of binary coordinates we might wish to deploy, depending on the ideological framing of the moment. As times change, we could return to the film from the vantage of 2018² and look at it as a relic of 1963, creating another division of perspectives between now and then. As film specialists we would consider looking at this as a 16-mm black and white film using voice-over versus color films with recorded dialogue, or look at the pedagogical approach of Sembène from the outset of his career versus the trends in the current African video film industry with its digital platforms and high entertainment values. We might consider embodiment, or posthumanist approaches, but at every point where the previous generation’s ideological truisms reach their point of exhaustion, we persist in search of new explanatory approaches that stop short of a framing that encompasses the very desire to establish frames.

Returning to Hawking feels liberating, not because we would want to stop taking hermeneutic approaches, but because the undertaking can be driven by a return to basics that are not initially beholden to grand or petty narratives. The simple questions are clear, if taken as starting points. They come from the issues that arose at the turn of the 20th century when Einstein asked what it would look like if the time measured on a moving train were to be compared with that of someone standing on the stationary train platform, or what the station platform and its observer would look like to someone sitting in a car of the train. Or, to elaborate a bit on Einstein, what it would look like to observers in both locations who were looking at the other and measuring time in their own frames.

The answer to Einstein came when he postulated that the observer in the train could not continue to increase his speed indefinitely as it moved away from the station since the speed of all objects had a limit.³ What led his thinking in that direction was learning that light particles, photons, could not move at a speed greater than the speed of light. And in fact, even when it was discovered that photons were also waves, the waves too could not be made to travel faster than 186,000 miles per second, the speed of light. A number of amazing discoveries rapidly followed after 1905: namely, as particles with mass increase their speed, they contract in length, that is, become denser, and the contraction also has a limit in proportion to the limit on speed. Time on the moving train is dilated: it takes longer for time to pass on a moving train than on an inert platform when measured by clocks on both locations. It was discovered by Lorentz that the location and speed of the object on the train bear a direct relation to the object stationed inertly on the train station so that the distance between them followed a standard equation, regardless of their frame. It was discovered that space, like light, was subject to limitations, and did not extend out indefinitely. Infinity would seem to have an existence in conceptual thinking, as in the conception of differentially smaller and smaller slices in approaching the limits of measurement of the area under a curve, but whose total remains finite as they approach an asymptote. Here I am thinking of integration and differentiation in calculus which involve infinite divisions of space or additions of infinitely thin slices of space in the calculation of area under a curve. The traveler on the train can’t go faster than light’s speed and can’t become infinitely dense. Even the curvature of spacetime implies a limit to space, not an infinite extension.⁴

How might that traveler on the train relate to the person standing on the station: how might their relative speeds or masses, be measured, and where would the one doing the measuring stand so as to make that relative comparison? If the two beings were particles that were entangled in their formation, and thus were spinning in opposite directions, a measurement might be made that would reveal that an action that bore on the one would have a consequence observed in the other so that changing the spin on the one would result in a changed spin in the other. Entanglement, discovered some 30 years after special relativity, imposes equally on us the obligation to ask how relations of frames, of beings or particles, can be seen relative to each other, relative within the strictures of the frames in which they are being observed. We would not automatically turn to that notion in film studies using approaches that are developed outside a perspective created for scientific questions. An immense gulf has opened in “our” thinking that needs to be bridged.

Now we understand that when entanglement or measurement questions arise, an observer cannot stand outside that operation: the act of measuring the one entangled particle would not only affect the other, but the act of measurement would also affect the results of the observation so that the particle being observed, the apparatus used to observe it and the results would seem all to be in sync. The logic used to determine if light is a particle or a wave, and the machinery used to test that theory, would almost seem to be alive and working in tandem with the apparatus so that asking the question, testing the particle and reading the results cannot be viewed as acts that are separated from each other—the results are affected by the act of measurement. That is, the “measurement problem” central to the work of Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen school⁵—and to Karen Barad’s work.

If these simple quantum and special relativity notions are not to remain separate from “Borom Sarret,” we have to find a way to ask questions of the film that take into cognizance what was learned about light and particles by Einstein, Bohr and Lorentz, and their generation going back a hundred or so years ago, as well as Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Oppenheimer and the quantum scientists of the mid-20th century. Once we imagine that there might be such questions, we can let ourselves bracket off the logics of postcolonialism, not to mention race, feminism or questions of subjectivities; or neoliberalism, with material approaches seeking to find answers framed by coordinates of class, species, historical materialism, economism, etc. The brackets are not intended to exclude those answers, but to keep them from occluding our goal of posing simpler questions about fundamental scientific axes of inquiry. With Barad, there is intersectionality, especially around feminism and gender; with us the colonial and what it entrained can never be quite excluded. But still, what can the sciences bring that is new?

For instance, what relationship might exist between the person on the train and on the station? How are their relative positionings to be understood? We might begin with relative speed, motion and the time occupied by each during the scene. Or we might begin by asking how our own relationship as viewer to the scene in the film is to be understood in terms of time and speed.

We do not need to devise experiments, but simply ask what we have learned about relations since that advent of special relativity and quantum that might return us to examine our own approach, and to ask if there are not more basic coordinates that might be posited. For Barad, the question becomes even more fundamental: how can we imagine a series of interactions that take into account the full apparatus, the practices engaged in measurements? Instead of considering this set-up as constituted by an observer and an object observed, or as a involving equipment or tools that enable one to make an observation, with each being constituted as separate elements, she uses the term apparatus to designate all these elements as formulating an entire entity (closer to the sense in which the term apparatus has been conceived in film theory as constituted by a multitude of conditions and tools that enable a film’s ideology to be formulated). The decision to determine where the line falls between the object being observed and the agencies of observation instantiates a “cut,” just as we instantiate divisions between the instrument doing the measurement and the measurement itself. The apparatus functions as practices so as to produce phenomena; and the term apparatus is much more all-encompassing than any notion of it as a simple set of instruments: it is what operates all together in effecting any measurement, in producing any encounter of elements of the universe and in producing our understanding of the elements as seen in relation to each other:

[A]pparatuses are specific material configurations, or rather, dynamic (re) configurations of the world through which bodies are intra-actively materialized. That is, apparatuses are the practices of mattering through which intelligibility and materiality are constituted (along with the excluded realm of what doesn’t matter).

[A]pparatuses are material-discursive practices—causal intra-actions through which matter is iteratively and differentially articulated, reconfiguring the material-discursive field of possibilities and impossibilities in the ongoing dynamics of intra-activity that is agency. Apparatuses are not bounded objects or structures; they are open-ended practices.

Barad (170, my stress)⁶

The cut needed to separate the object being observed from the agencies of observation determines the way we view both the object and the mark it makes in a measurement; when placed differently, we might hold that the subject and object come to be viewed differently, separated in different ways. No independent object or subject can be identified as such in this framing of measurements, in this framing of how things are placed into interactions/intra-actions. Barad uses the term “intra-action” to emphasize the conjunction, the entangled way things or objects come to be understood as delineated; as arising from the mechanisms of observation placed into relation with objects being observed so that we perceive them to function together, within nature, within the forces of nature. “The apparatus enacts a cut delineating the object from the agencies of observation” (114). Following Bohr, Barad reasons: “as a matter of principle, there is no unambiguous way to differentiate between the ‘object’ and the ‘agencies of observation.’ No inherent/Cartesian subject-object distinction exists” (115). Barad continues:

What constitutes the object of observation and what constitutes the agencies of observation [i.e., “object” that causes the mark; the ‘agencies of observation,” including the “effect” or that which receives the mark] are determinable only on the condition that the measurement apparatus is specified. The apparatus enacts a cut delineating the object from the agencies of observation … observations do not refer to properties of observation—independent objects (since they don’t preexist as such).

(115)

Barad asks: “If the distinction between object and agencies of observation is not inherent, what sense, if any, should we attribute to the notion of observation?” (115).

Along those lines: our situation of viewing a film is not objective as it would be if what we were watching could be constituted separately from our act of watching.⁷ We are changed as we watch; we change what we watch by making it “watchable,” “visible,” comprehensible within the frame we utilize to effect comprehension. If we are the agency of observation, we are not just an object to ourselves, or to anyone else—if agency is “intra-actional,” we act as subjects in relation to others, to the world around us, whose forces are at work through us as through the rest of the matter of the universe. We exist only in relation. That is true of the apparatus of cinema as well. We are materially embodied by the encounter with the film, and respond with affect to our perceptions of it. We can say the same about our engagement with a film as of a scientist engaged in measurements. We enact cuts so as to produce the objects of our study.

It is difficult not to think of this problem in analogical ways. For instance, one might construe the cut that produces differential objects, like colonizer and colonized, and the measurement of the space between them—be it psychological, physical, historical or geographical—as a function of an arbitrary decision subject to revision, just as the cut made in measuring particles in the double-slit experiment changes as the apparatus is altered when looking for particles or waves. But Barad wisely refuses to take the objects of study in question as existing in a space that enables us to separate off the observer or the apparatus for observation. She places objects in relation to each other: the observer and object being observed cannot be defined as separate beings located in separate spaces without taking into account the tools used by the one to observe the other. To take this analogically, we could say that the man on the train looking back at the station with binoculars changes what he is looking at by virtue of using the binoculars. That might seem crazy, but without the binoculars he couldn’t see his friend on the platform, and with them the only thing he can see is a binoc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One Space and Relationality
• Part Two Time
• Conclusion
• Filmography
• Works Cited
• Index