Two pre‐millennial films, released just one year apart, set the scene for this chapter on narrative and economic understandings of post‐millennial contemporaneity in Francophone Africa. I focus in this chapter on recent cinematic work by Abderrahmane Sissako (Mauritania) and Mahamat‐Saleh Haroun (Chad), but two of their films from before the turn of the century signal the set of anxieties and narrative problems I want to examine here. The first of these films is Sissako’s La vie sur terre (Life on Earth, 1998): This is a fictionalized documentary dealing with the return of a middle‐aged man (played by Sissako himself) from France to his father’s village in rural Mali. The man, Dramane, arrives in the run‐up to the new millennium, and as he cycles through the dusty streets we see the village’s residents going about their everyday lives while news bulletins from Radio France Internationale (RFI) relay the excitement of new year’s celebrations taking place in other parts of the world. The lack of obvious mise‐en‐scène in Sissako’s shots communicates to viewers a sense of documentary immediacy, drawing us into the everyday as a cinematic narrative category. At the same time, ambiguous voice‐over quotations from Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) about colonial marginalization suggest a transitional cultural‐political context that is no longer “postcolonial” in the conventional sense, but that is not yet fully millennial, either.
La vie sur terre communicates Mali’s uneven integration into the global cultural and economic landscape by playing with the uncertainty of its ill‐defined historical moment; the film’s sense of immediacy nonetheless gives us to understand that we are on the cusp of a new understanding of the present that has yet to take shape. Mahamat‐Saleh Haroun’s Bye Bye Africa (1999), my second filmic example, offers a similar narrative of homecoming: Haroun plays himself as a fictional character who returns after a long absence to his native Chad following the death of his mother. Bye Bye Africa, like La vie sur terre, weaves fiction into a documentary aesthetic, and we watch Haroun’s character film street scenes, record interviews with producers and aspiring actors, and gather footage for a new film that, as it turns out, may or may not be the one we are actually watching. Bye Bye Africa evokes a sense of anxiety akin to the one we witness in Sissako’s film: Haroun’s return to Chad also signals a transitional moment, one whose attendant uncertainty causes the director to inquire ceaselessly about the economic future of big‐screen African cinema, its viability in Chad’s fragile post‐conflict society, and its desirability when faced with competition from low‐rent video clubs.1 Bye Bye Africa asks, how can cinema mark this transition and communicate its urgency as well as its most pressing filmic stakes? Like La vie sur terre, this film links African cultural production with cinematic attempts to define and characterize the immediacy of a cultural moment that overlaps with the turn of the new millennium.
These films situate global economics and the future of film in Africa within localized and intensely felt experiences of the now; they bespeak a desire to record, imagine, and narrativize the actuality of millennial transitions. At the same time, they indicate a desire to periodize and to outline changing experiences of historical time in the face of the “promise” offered by the new century, as Alain Badiou has put it (2007, p. 17). Building on the themes explored and questions raised by these early‐millennial films, in this chapter I turn to Haroun’s and Sissako’s post‐millennial cinematic archive in order to investigate the development of their cinematic approaches to an aesthetic economy of immediacy. How do their post‐millennial films – specifically those about economics and war – communicate “now‐ness” to spectators? In what ways do Haroun and Sissako endow everyday life with a current of urgency? How do they visualize and narrativize the everyday as a cinematic category that has an aesthetics as well as a political economy? Relatedly, but more generally, how do filmic narratives designate historical periods and cultural moments, and how does film attribute narrative value to contemporaneity as a post‐millennial aesthetic category? These are the interrelated questions I take up in this chapter, and the responses Haroun and Sissako propose to them comprise what I call cinematic economies of the hypercontemporary. This formulation references how a thematics of urgent contemporaneity intersects with visualizations of warscapes, post‐millennial capitalism, and with new narrative strategies designed to express in film emerging relations to immediacy. The economic here refers to the ways in which cinematic narratives thematize and visualize political economy; more metaphorically, it also refers to modes of attributing value to key elements of filmic narrative.
The hypercontemporary refers not just to narrative experiences of “now‐ness,” but more importantly, as the prefix “hyper‐” suggests, to the fact that these experiences can possess a surfeit of intensity that speaks to a broader historical moment. As Paul Rabinow (2008) reminds us in his work on “the anthropology of the contemporary,” the now is not necessarily synonymous or coterminous with “the new,” and for him the contemporary is the shifting terrain upon which “older and newer elements” interact and are negotiated (2008, pp. 2–3). My reading of the hypercontemporary here focuses on forms of cinematic periodization, but Rabinow’s reminder helpfully points toward the co‐presence of contrasting experiences of temporality within an emerging historical moment. This co‐presence helps explain why the now appears in multiple forms in the films I study here. On the one hand, cinema expresses the now thematically: For example, in this chapter’s first section I examine how economic urgency is woven into filmic narratives of everyday life, and Sissako’s La vie sur terre takes as its central theme the very moments marking the changeover from one millennium to the next. On the other hand, the idea of the now goes beyond the realm of the thematic and also enters into questions of cinematic form. Thus, certain films slow time down or even seem to pause it completely (as in Sissako’s 2014 film, Timbuktu), drawing out the now into an expanded temporal moment, whereas others condense the now into an increasingly saturated immediacy, heightening the tension and intensity of “real time.” What these disparate renderings of the now have in common is that each one also articulates and accounts for a new historical moment; these related but distinct expressions of temporal intensity and periodization are what make up the hypercontemporary.
We can consider several brief examples from Haroun and Sissako that illustrate more concretely what the hypercontemporary looks like in the context of cinematic narratives of everyday life. In La vie sur terre, for instance, Sissako’s camera lingers in six different shots on a group of men lounging in chairs and listening to the radio (presumably RFI) in the little shade offered by a building. These shots punctuate his hour‐long film, and the men do little more than inch their chairs closer to the building as their strip of shade grows smaller. They communicate intense feelings of boredom that contrast sharply with the foreign news bulletins excitedly describing how the world plans to celebrate the arrival of the year 2000. This set of shots pulls viewers at once into the excruciating actuality of the men’s boredom and into a globalized millennial moment that seems to have left this rural Malian village behind. Filming boredom, that most unproductive of conditions, is actually a productive mode of communicating now‐ness since the viewer comes to feel the weight of useless instants all the more acutely as they connect to the broader articulation of a new post‐millennial historical period. Numerous shots of everyday labor in Sissako’s Bamako (2006) have a similar function: As African civil society faces off against global financial institutions in a mock trial, daily life proceeds unimpeded in the neighborhood where the film is set and shots of a local open‐air dyeworks bring the trial’s political‐economic rhetoric into highly localized focus. Labor both compresses and stretches transitional time in Haroun’s Daratt (2006): The young Atim begins a baker’s apprenticeship with Nassara, the man who killed his father during Chad’s civil war. Sequences of the two preparing bread, sweating from their painstaking efforts, extend wordlessly as the political time of post‐conflict reconciliation seeps into the elongated moments of Haroun’s shots. These examples convey to viewers intense cinematic experiences of the now while, at the same time, pointing to and defining much broader cultural moments that coalesce into a post‐millennial period whose contemporaneity, as I show in what follows, becomes an especially pressing problem for cinematic narrative.
Manthia Diawar...
