A Fragmented Epistemology:
The Films of Abderrahmane Sissako

By Michael Sicinski

1. Lost in the Supermarket

Abderrahmane Sissako’s featurette Life on Earth (1998) begins with a tracking shot across a refrigerated shelf in a French grocery store, stocked with an ample inventory of available cheeses. This shot recalls a longer and more dramatically elaborate lateral track through a French supermarket invaded by unruly labor activism in Godard and Gorin’s Tout va bien (1972). While this latter sequence contains a cluster of intratextual echoes (not least the traffic jam in 1968’s Weekend) that may or may not be relevant to Sissako’s shot, the Godard material does clarify a certain cinematic attitude towards consumer culture, a way of using the camera to describe everyday objects and spaces of commerce as alien, menacing. This is the essence of the commodity fetish, which Marx claimed the worker encountered as a familiar object suddenly invested with a dystopian enchantment, a product of one’s own hands which those hands are no longer allowed to touch.

But Sissako, playing a Malian student living in France in Life on Earth, has even less of a tangible relation to these gourmet cheeses than the workers who produced but may not be able to afford them. In this opening shot, the cheese section of the supermarket becomes an objective correlative for France, and a Frenchness, that Sissako observes from an alienated remove. “Is what I am learning so far from home worth what I am losing?” asks Sissako in a letter home to his father in Sokolo. Life on Earth, Sissako’s first fictional feature, is full of such point-blank questions about identity and belonging. Pace Godard, whose cultural estrangement blossomed into an apocalyptic vision of sociopolitical rupture—an endlessly deferred return to zero—Sissako’s outward appearance is that of a filmmaker hoping for renewal and return, for restoration without nostalgia. Although he and his protagonists never seem to settle in one place (and this no doubt pertains to his own experience: born in Mali, raised in neighbouring Mauritania, he then studied in the Soviet Union and launched his directorial career in France), there is always the sense of movement, an investigation of the threshold moment of perplexed, alienated repatriation.
At times, Sissako’s films seem to simply appear, processing the problematics of return without ever establishing a home base they are traveling from. In Sissako’s work the traveller tends to emerge on the scene in media res, and not without a degree of befuddled alienation; in this regard the characters’ experiences mirror the logic of the commodity form. When we encounter Abdallah in Waiting for Happiness (2002), he is already a stranger in his village, having forgotten the local dialect. In Bamako, the tables are turned somewhat, with white Europeans dropped into the Malian capital to play their part defending the World Bank against the Africans’ charges of malice and immiseration. How do the Westerners try to assuage the pangs of homesickness? Why, they go off to the market square, naturally. It’s no Safeway, but the magistrate does get a good deal on some slick new sunglasses.

2. Fantasies of Organic Harmony Break Down

In each of Sissako’s two full-length features, the filmmaker attunes the viewer to a deft, subtle mode of observational cinema, proffered in patient glimpses of everyday activity. Waiting for Happiness has a handful of primary foci (the dislocated Abdullah; the electrician and his apprentice; the musician and her daughter; the telephone operator) whom Sissako gently forges relationships between through his materialist treatment of village space. There’s no crass “intersection” of characters, no plot mechanics pressing Sissako’s lyrical realism into the service of grandiose themes. Instead, the Mauritanian village could be understood as an example of what Gilles Deleuze called “the encompasser,” a cinematic milieu that allows for individual action within the circumscription of a lived, habituated network of options. Despite its constrictive overtones, Deleuze found this system exemplified in the films of John Ford, where the expansiveness of the terrain demanded large, outsized actions, and men adequate to the spaces through which they moved.
           
The village life of Waiting for Happiness, however, is comprised of small gestures that threaten to become ritualized, but whose cyclical determinism is frequently undermined. The death of the old electrician Maata has a foreordained aura about it, particularly after he sagely advises his young charge on the place of death in the natural order of things. But when the boy pays tribute to his master by throwing a light bulb out to sea, it quickly bobs back to shore. Similarly, Abdallah’s attempts to reintegrate into village life by picking up the language only serve to mark his difference all the more dramatically: when chatting up the local girls he blows it by calling his nose his mouth and vice versa. There is an organic unity to village life, but it is both fragile and alienating. In this regard Sissako refuses to either promote some pure, untouched pre-modernity or to mourn for some lost social integration. Sissako’s encompasser always has to make room for those transnational nomads who can’t quite pass muster with traditionalism, and whose presence causes the seemingly organic community to slowly reveal its fissures.
           
This problematic is pushed even further in Bamako. Into the midst of day-to-day life in the Malian capital, a bizarre anomaly suddenly descends: a trial in the city square, complete with radio coverage, impassioned testimony, demands for economic justice for an entire continent, and even some pasty Europeans thrown into the mix. At one point, a couple of guys sitting outside a building reach up and turn the radio off, as the trial “is getting boring.” This is no doubt Sissako’s droll acknowledgement that a certain segment of his viewership cannot, will not, believe that argumentation about the WTO and debt forgiveness could possibly make for compelling cinema. But part of what is so radical about Bamako, and why it represents a giant leap forward in Sissako’s project, is that the ambient, encompassing world he’s created has a dialectical antithesis in the trial. The testimony by Africans serves to articulate not only the rhythms and attitudes characteristic of life in Bamako but also the invisible forces that impinge on them. Likewise, the observational style Sissako nearly perfected in Waiting for Happiness becomes a form of political argumentation in Bamako, a concrete examination of what is at stake when neoliberal capitalism has its way with the developing world.

3. An Observational Cinema at the Point of Rupture

Sissako’s “organic Africa” is always already breaking up, a loose confederation of ways of being slowly pulling apart under forces both internal and external. Correspondingly, Sissako’s primary skill as an artist is his ability to convey total worlds while maintaining a formal porosity that accommodates the displaced, the traveller, and ultimately the impact of the West. The slow, patient, observational Bazinian realism that has become the virtual house style for films from the developing world (if not of “festival cinema” more generally) is employed by Sissako with the skepticism befitting a filmmaker schooled in the Soviet academy. Bamako pushes this formal tension to the breaking point while making the political nature of that tension absolutely explicit.
            That break is quite literal. In both Waiting and Bamako, there is a point at which something utterly bizarre happens, a momentary breakdown that reflects back upon the stylistics of the rest of the film. The moment in Bamako is unmistakable: the minute we see the title card, Death in Timbuktu, it’s clear we’re in another world. Apart from the shock of seeing Danny Glover, Elia Suleiman, and Zeka Laplaine in a cheap Western, it’s clear that Sissako is making an in-joke about so-called “Third Cinema” and its “aesthetics of poverty.” Death in Timbuktu recalls the Brazilian Westerns of Glauber Rocha, which used the framework of genre as an armature for radical content. Likewise, the fact that various Bamako citizens sit down in front of the television to absorb this “entertainment” implies that not everyone has the luxury, or even the desire, to check politics at the door and veg out.
            Despite the undeniable humour of Bamako’s WTF moment, it also serves a vital formal function, as does its tragic equivalent in Waiting for Happiness. Nana, the flirty young villager who attempts to seduce Abdallah, ends up reaching out to him (and Sissako’s audience) to bear witness to her tale of loss—the death of her infant daughter, her trip to Europe to locate the girl’s white father, and his cruel dismissal of her upon their meeting. During her story, the film breaks completely with the long-take observational style, adopting a purely subjective view. The cinematography becomes grainy and expressionistic, while the striking use of step-printing recalls the Proustian memory plays of Wong Kar-wai. Then, just as suddenly as Sissako plunged us into this evocative cine-reverie, he brings us right back to Mauritania, the deep focus and bright, crisp colours signaling a return to the standard mode. The interludes in Bamako and Waiting for Happiness serve to disrupt Sissako’s observational poetics. By dipping into the repertoires of two other traditions, Sissako not only reaffirms Bazinian realism as a choice rather than some default setting for an ostensibly untainted non-Western milieu, but also, by making these ruptures so excessive, he defuses assumptions of social and/or stylistic organicity elsewhere in his films. “Hybridity” and “otherness” may be postcolonial buzzwords, but Sissako’s cinema dramatizes them as active states of being.

4. Playing at the Limits of Negritude (Sissako and Césaire)

            While Waiting for Happiness finds Sissako posing political questions by absence and inference, Life on Earth and Bamako put political theory on the table front-and-centre. While it would be too pat to claim that Bamako represents a synthesis of Life’s stridency and Waiting’s environmental poetics, the sociological and economic debates surrounding neoliberalism’s impact on Africa and its people—the implication being, of course, that the policies of the World Bank and WTO are neocolonialism by other means—serve to invest Sissako’s directorial approach with a stronger sense of shape. Despite its more easily identifiable “point,” the significance ofBamako’s achievement has to do with the deepening of Sissako’s intellectual foundation, a return to ideas and theories which he now poses within a larger framework.
            Life on Earth’s second sequence finds us in Mali, where a local radio show (identified as “The Voice of the Rice Fields”) is airing a discussion hour on Discourse on Colonialism, the 1950 treatise by Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire. The radio host reads sizable portions of the text aloud, serving as counterpoint to Life’s primary voiceover, the troubled student’s letter home. While Sissako’s student muses on his lost African identity, Césaire’s text articulates the violence and shame that European conquest has brought not only upon the African continent, but also on Europe itself.
Césaire is best known as one of the chief theorists of the negritude movement, an Afrocentric project involved in recovering and celebrating traits deemed intrinsic to the “black personality.” But in the Discourse, Césaire is already far beyond the movement’s more essentialist assumptions. “I search in vain for the place where I could have expressed such views,” he writes, “where I ever underestimated the importance of Europe in the history of human thought; where I ever preached a return of any kind; where I even claimed that there could be a return.” Likewise, “that Europe,” as he refers to it throughout the text, the one that has Sissako’s student so confused and that has rendered Waiting’s Abdallah incapable of speaking with his own people, is not the enemy because of any inherent evil nature of white Europeans. Rather, Césaire contends that African contact with Europe might have gone much differently under different historical circumstances: “that Europe began to ‘propagate’ at a time when it had fallen into the hands of the most unscrupulous financiers and captains of industry; that was our misfortune to encounter that particular Europe on our path; and that Europe is responsible before the human community for the highest heap of corpses in history.”
Life on Earth invokes Césaire as its theoretical touchstone and adopts something of his discursive stridency, while in Waiting for Happiness, the colonial hangover is experienced more as a sense of fragmentation and loss. Yet here Sissako invests Césaire’s damning equation “colonization = thingification” with a more optimistic, almost Heideggerian attitude towards Being. For example, Waiting is replete with close-ups of shoes outside of abodes, and while this points to the Muslim custom of removing one’s shoes before entering another person’s home, it also establishes the shoes themselves as markers of their wearers’ lives, not unlike the insight into Being Heidegger found in Van Gogh’s painting of work boots. The stand-alone quality of the shoes, and the space Sissako affords them in the film, points to the specificity of Malian time.

5. What You Don’t Know Can Help You

With Bamako, Sissako brings Césaire’s Marxist political insights to bear on the present situation in Africa. Now more than ever, the continent is in hock to the West, and the trial serves to make manifest those ideas that the observational aspects of Bamakoconvey in a poetic, humanist register. But what Sissako shows so dramatically in Bamako is that the very structure of the trial, and of Western jurisprudence more generally, means that certain knowledges and experiences have no voice. Not unlike a military tribunal or a tax court, wherein power only has to justify itself before itself, the WTO/World Bank trial demands that its plaintiffs marshal evidence in the form of facts, statistics, and contestatory history.
While the trial thus rehearses some of the most familiar arguments regarding African debt forgiveness and Western hegemony—which, like Bono and Brad Pitt’s “One” Campaign, problematically boils down the whole complex issue to “Africa” versus “the West,” eliding the subtle geopolitics the discussion really demands—Sissako’s “witnesses” deliver their testimony with such passion that it is as though we are hearing these arguments (and those who make them) for the first time. But the most powerful moments in Bamako occur when Sissako demonstrates the limits of juridical discourse. One key witness, a teacher, walks up to the microphone, pauses, hangs his head and walks away in silence. Is he merely shy? Or, more likely, is his silence meant to dramatize the ridiculousness of the demand made of him, that he give voice to a massive structure of injustice, within a forum governed by the same Euro-humanist ideals that Césaire and Sissako rightly consider suspect?
Nevertheless, Bamako does not simply reject Western values of justice, or advocate a “return” to pre-contact, pre-modern negritude. The French prosecutor, whose summation suggests, among other things, throwing Paul Wolfowitz to the caimans (who would likely reject him as tainted meat), certainly shows that Mali needs Western allies, those who will listen to Africans and work with them in coalition against entrenched power. But perhaps more importantly, Sissako, true to form, uses the trial and its surroundings to display two ways of life at loggerheads, even as they are inextricably linked. When, near the end of the trial, an elderly Malian man delivers his testimony as a mournful folk song, Sissako doesn’t bother with subtitles, since the timbre and delivery seemingly tell us everything we need to know.
While this sequence is, without a doubt, the emotional pinnacle of Bamako, Sissako’s decision to withhold translation is a formal and political gamble; it risks positioning the singer-witness as a fetishized “authentic native,” someone who stands in for the limits of the Western audience’s capacity to understand. However, this confrontation with the outsider’s state of not knowing is perhaps calculated to put Western viewers in a more emotionally receptive state of mind. Not only does it force us to listen to aspects of communication that ordinary speech tends to occlude, it also facilitates an unexpected moment of identification with the “Other,” pushing past negritude and other essentialist discourses into a space that retains typicality (in the Brechtian sense) but also asserts radical particularity. It places us outside of knowledge, drops us into the poetic or aesthetic realms where our nostalgic need for “authenticity” can instead be replaced by a deeply felt political need.
While the majority of the trial manifests the desire to arrive at solutions via rational discourse, the folk song stops juridical time, thwarting Western desire for knowledge and substituting a lacuna. The political history of Africa, the colonial legacy, and the systematic impoverishment of a continent that, as one witness notes, “is a victim of its wealth” —all of this fails to satisfactorily articulate the lived experience of Africans burdened by neoliberal capitalism and crippling debt. Throughout Bamako, Sissako employs the poetic skills of his earlier work in order to give his leftist arguments greater social force. With the secret song of its star witness, Sissako is demanding a kind of spectatorial humility. The hope is that by listening and failing to understand—by taking that profound ignorance on as our own wound—Western ears might at last take in something radically new.

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