Lost in Translation – A Confession About the Impossibility of Being Fair

Sambizanga – 1972, Sarah Maldoror

by Allan Fish

At the end of the interminably gestating book I hope to release on Kindle by the end of the year there’s a section I call the Final Apologies. To some, it may seem superfluous to requirements, especially given there are over 2,000 entries in the main text, but there are times when I have come to believe it the most important part of the book. It’s relatively easy to wax lyrical about why you love certain films, why they should be preserved above all others. It’s not as straightforward to say why certain other films shouldn’t.

The Final Apologies is the multi-task section of the book. On one level it’s what it says on the tin, apologies for the films left at reception when the hotel reaches capacity. On another, it’s my Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card, a way of saying that “no, I didn’t forget these, I just didn’t think them up to scratch because…” Yet on another it’s an admission of guilt, an Exhibit A for the prosecution, as it were. The fact remains that no man’s opinion is gospel, there is no arbiter of taste. But it goes beyond that, for to any discerning film buff there are films that are just not for you. It may be a taste thing, a sense of humour or outlook alien to oneself, but it may go deeper, to the point where you know that the deficit is not the film’s, but yours. A recognition that certain films are masterpieces but just not in your eyes; they don’t travel.

So what exactly do I mean? It’s a favourite line of mine, that used by Mark Cousins in The Story of Film, that film history is “racist by omission.” Often, however, it’s been ignorant by choice. Film histories are very happy with their so-called comprehensiveness, thank you very much, and don’t need masterpieces discovering left, right and centre that demand a rewriting of their pages, even whole new chapters. Film History 101 has always been blinkered, blind, focusing us on what it thinks are the accepted essentials, but in doing so people have taken these histories – and the canons they create – as inviolable. They’re not. Canons should only be stepping stones to undertake our own journeys where we go way beyond them.

Yet even with regards to zealots like me who take accepted film history as inadequate, we have to admit our shortcomings. Only recently someone asked me what I felt was my biggest cinematic blind spot, and after careful deliberation I selected African cinema. But acknowledging that is again only the first step of the journey, for one must then ask the obvious question; why?

As it stands, and it’s unlikely to change between here and launch, there are only six African films in my book, two Sembenes from Senegal (Xala and Moolaadé), one Mambéty from the same country (Hyenas), one Cissé from Mali (Yeelen) and Chahine’s Cairo Station and Abouseif’s I Never Sleep from Egypt. And to all intents and purposes, one could reduce that to four, for in reality, Egyptian cinema shouldn’t count as African at all. Yes, geographically it’s in Africa, but its gaze has always led north to the Mediterranean or east beyond the Sinai to the Middle East. This isn’t Black Africa but an Africa familiar to the west, and both films chosen have distinct European leanings.

Of Black African film, few would doubt the inclusion of the four I have selected, or at least few would doubt selections from those three directors, but they may well ask where Sembene’s Black Girl and Camp de Thiaroye, Cissé’s The Wind or Mambéty’s Badou Boy and Touki Bouki are. But I’ll go further to films not available on DVD but all essential to African film’s heritage. So I doff my hat to Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga from Angola, Gadala Gabara’s Tajouj from Sudan, Flora Gomes’ The Blue Eyes of Yonta from Guinea-Bissau, Med Hondo’s O Sun from Mauritania, Mohammad Lakhdar Hamina’s Chronicle of the Years of Embers and Assia Djebbar’s La Nouba from Algeria, Haile Gerima’s Harvest 3,000 Years from Ethiopia, Safi Faye’s Peasant Letter from Senegal, Glauber Rocha’s The Lion Has Seven Heads from Congo, Moustapha Allasane’s Toula, or the Water Spirit from Niger, Ossie Davis’ Kongi’s Harvest from Nigeria, Abdellatif Ben Ammar’s Sejnane from Tunisia, Ahmed el Maanouni’s Trances and Merzak Allouache’s Bab el-Oued City from Morocco…you could go on all night. And there are plenty of others from Egypt I could have taken, not just from Youssef Chahine. There’s a couple in there I haven’t been able to track down, but it gives you an idea of what we’re missing in the West.

So how do we explain it? Or to return to the original query, how do I explain my own inadequacy with regard to them. On reflection to make sense of it one really has to look at the deeper question, beyond mere indoctrination, experience and taste to an answer to all such areas of neglect. The problem with African film is that for those from the west we don’t really have ‘an in’. There’s no core reference we can grasp to allow us to experience the film by anything other than some alien proxy. African culture and history is generally speaking unknown to us. We’re aware of the effect of colonialism but only because we in the west were the colonisers. We’re the Lamberger Gesslers African nationalists were rightly wanting to kick out. It’s perhaps no surprise that the two Sembenes I included, while very much dealing with Senegalese society had ‘an in’ for western audiences. In the case of Xala we may not have experienced colonialism’s boot, but we recognise political satire. In the case of Moolaadé the treatment of women, if not this specific treatment of women, is very much in our eye line. Most aspects of African culture are not, however. This writer just couldn’t quite reach out to the films listed in the previous paragraph because I was not conditioned to do so. More than any culture on Earth, or at least more than any other culture on Earth making movies, African film can, to these eyes, only be truly appreciated if you have some experience of said culture, its rhythms, its smells, its tastes. You need to have walked its red sands, experienced its mixture of poverty, exploitation and simple – by our judgmental standards – pleasures. I haven’t. I’ve never been to Africa, and that’s my fault, not the fault of the films that are created there.

It’s an admission that works everywhere you go. Take the general western reaction of cringing at the slapstick comedy asides in Hong Kong kung-fu and wuxia films, of the o.t.t. stylistic anti-realism of many Japanese yakuza flicks, of the habit of Bollywood melodramas of bursting into song at inopportune moments, or the styles of the Soviet musicals and comedies with their forever smiling protagonists seemingly telling us “aren’t we happy little Communists?” that were so influential in Bollywood. Even closer to home there are things that turn one off; I have problems with some of the more broad Italian comedies, with their Mediterranean hot-blooded and tempered caricatures. Or then there’s those dramas and comedies out of the old Yugoslavia and Romania dealing with the Romany gypsy culture, from Aleksandr Petrovic to Lucian Pintilie to Emir Kusturica, which seem to belong to a different world. They rub me up the wrong way because the culture is alien to me.

Petrovic’s Happy Gypsies, 1967 – alien culture?

Take Indian cinema in general, seen as the arthouse films of Satyajit Ray from Calcutta’s East Coast on one extreme and the melodramas of Bollywood (Bombay/Mumbai) on the other. It’s not too far wrong, but with India we in the west, and especially in Britain, have ‘an in’. So much of Indian culture has permeated our own, we once ruled the place, for God’s sake, and ghostly remnants of the Raj can be seen everywhere right down the use of English itself, where whole words and sentences creep into everyday language on both east and west coasts and where in some quarters the mother tongue is more accessible than either Bengali or Hindi, depending on what part of the country you are in. As such, while few would argue with the selection of seven or eight Satyajit Ray films, I also have twice as many other Indian films selected as from the whole of Africa. That ‘in’ is essential, it’s undeniable.

There are other default settings, too. There are a lot of British entries in the book, not least from TV where there are seven or eight times as many as from American TV, even accounting for the rise in American TV in the 21^st century since being released from the mediocrity shackles of the networks. But that’s again because British cinema has suffered from neglect. For too long we believed the French belief that cinema and British don’t belong in the same sentence. They weren’t being nationalistic, or at least only in part, they were dumping on British film by default. They believed auteur theory was everything, while British film disproved the theory and was always about collaboration towards a common goal. To prove their theory they had to dismiss an entire national cinema, unless it was Hitchcock, who quickly got out and left for Hollywood. Yet even now American views of British film are blinkered. In the States British film is seen as Hitchcock, Korda, Olivier’s Shakespeare films, Lean, Reed, Powell and Pressburger, Ealing comedies, the new wave and kitchen sink realists, American in London Joseph Losey, Leigh, Frears and Loach. All worthy, but what of Anthony Asquith, Walter Forde, Will Hay comedies, Jessie Matthews musicals, Launder and Gilliat, the Boulting Brothers (and not the Peter Sellers comedies but the far superior forties work), the documentary school led by Humphrey Jennings, Peter Watkins, Ken Russell’s BBC pieces, Alan Clarke, Bill Douglas, Terence Davies, the great TV plays and serials of the seventies, eighties and nineties, to name but a few. A few are finally coming to attention Stateside, but it’s all so pitifully slow. America doesn’t want the real Britain, it wants Downton bleeding Abbey, interminably sanitised costume drama adaptations and quaint British detective dramas, all enough to make me want to puke.

All of which returns us to those goddamn canons. For too long Polish film has been seen as Polanski, Wajda and Kieslowski. Czech film as Menzel, Forman, Chytilova’s Daisies, Kadar’s The Shop on Main Street, and more recently Jires’ Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and Vlacil’s Marketa Lazarova. Hungarian film is just Jancsó, Szábo and Tarr. Romanian film is treated as if it didn’t exist prior to the 21^st century. Bulgarian film as if it never existed at all. Greece is just Angelopoulos and the classical tragedies of Cacoyannis. Turkey is just Serif Gören, if it’s anything at all prior to Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Dutch cinema is just Verhoeven. Spain is just Buñuel, Saura and Almodóvar. Scandinavia is just the silent masters climaxed by Dreyer, then Bergman and Von Trier. And then there’s the old Soviet Union, where if it isn’t Vertov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin or Dovzhenko, or later on the prestige films of Bondarchuk, Kozintsev and Tarkovsky, we don’t want to know.

And it goes beyond Europe. How many have seen Argentinian, Mexican or Brazilian masterpieces older than 1970 (aside from those made by Buñuel)? How many have asked the obvious question, that if there was a Chinese Fifth Generation led by Yimou, Zhuangzhuang and Kaige, doesn’t that tell you there were four others beforehand. Or who has seen Hong Kong masterpieces from before Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan?

We’re still living with the consequences of the self-denial. We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented. One must always look to go beyond the pale. We must realise that a film can be a masterpiece without an endorsement from the Criterion Collection, for they’re out to make money and maintain the status quo, not to educate you. But even when you do seek beyond the accepted, accept your own shortcomings and make people look beyond even your own horizons. That’s the purpose of the Final Apologies. It’s not just a covering of my tracks.