Football without a ball

This is a review from Cambridge African Film Festival of Timbuktu (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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9 November

This is a review of Timbuktu (2014), which screened on 1 November 2014, the Opening Night of the 13th* Cambridge African Film Festival (CAFF / @africacambridge)

At Cambridge African Film Festival, Timbuktu had a hard act to follow in Dankumba (2011), a work that made a feature of the staged nature / staginess / choreography of encounters, as well as of the sheer cinematic joy of a well-composed shot, which says so much just in the way in, and with the care with, which it has been constructed.

Dankumba was being shown in tribute to Bakary Diallo, a Malian director who had died, en route home, at the age of 34, and, although we had kindly been provided with a translation of the dialogue, having one seemed hardly necessary. For the telling was in a sequence such as the presentation of a pair of feet on a colourful mattress, the feet reaching out for the floor, and the body rising erect above them – of course, a twelve-minute film has a different objective and approach, but it still made one hungry for shots assembled how these had been.

A desire that Timbuktu (set in and around that city in Mali**) satisfied to begin with, for example, in some beautiful views of the light on the water (or, as a blindfolded man is being led down into a valley, varying the perspective), but this narrative style, for which Dankumba had made us ready, was not to prove the main one, and did not essentially belong to this setting. Yes, the film utilized the technique of introducing us to elements and challenging us as to whether and, if so, how they would relate to each other, and doing so for as long as some arthouse films might (if not quite as Norte, the End of History always did, though one was in other ways reminded of it).

In some ways, though, Timbuktu (2014) seemed not so much to dissect its subject by doing so, or usefully open it up, but to give the impression of fragmenting one’s involvement with the principal storyline, and, in consequence, of making a disconnection from it. Maybe that was deliberate, but, if so, it was done in a way that hardly suggested artfulness : even when the film returned, at the very end, to the opening motif, of men in a military four-wheel drive, who determine to chase a gazelle-type creature to tire it out, that gesture – of evoking a highly applicable image (that might have encapsulated all that went before) – failed to bring it together.

Four Corners (Die Vier Hoeke) (2014), set in Cape Town and also being shown during CAFF 2014, was reviewed here when it came to Cambridge Film Festival earlier in the year. Unlike this film, where the very simplicity of the core story mirrored that of Norte, the End of History***, the extreme relatedness of everyone to everyone else in a small group meant for a feeling of contrivance.

Here, partly for reasons already given, one feels at a distance to Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed) and his fate (not least as one wonders what, given what happens, it would have been anyway, before the new regime). Unless, of course, the expectation was that one would have read up about the film in advance (an assumption that can make for the incautious construction of documentaries and feature films alike), and it would not need any context beyond that of Abdelkrim’s (Abel Jafri’s) armed men coming into the mosque, at the time of prayer, and being challenged by l’Imam (Adel Mahmoud Cherif).


Not that one did not see, very brutally in at least two cases, lives being disrupted and disjointed by the unflinching imposition of laws and rules in the name of a regime of divine justice and obedience, but they almost seemed not to be part of the same narrative. Beyond establishing quite straightforwardly that the regime actively prohibits – amongst other things – smoking, women with bare hands, adultery, music, football, the film does not integrate the cases of severe punishment into the central story (e.g. that of the beautifully voiced Fatou la chanteuse (Fatmoumata Diawara)) :

It is almost as if the scene of Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) being whipped, in 12 Years A Slave (2013), were introduced not to further Solomon Northup’s story, but just as an unrelated piece of barbarity – in the way that we have the football, studiedly bouncing down the steps in a personified spirit, momentarily reminding us of many a film where an object becomes 'conscious' (e.g. The Yellow Balloon (1953), which Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) references in his A History of Children and Film (2013)).

Not that we do not have a victim, who, when brought before a tribunal, is told that admitting that he knows that football is banned itself justifies a penalty, but there is no consistent message, because the jihad is also shown mocked, by showing a religious enforcer, who is confused by some youths who parade before him a game of football – with everything but a ball****…

A number of films set in the time of unrest or war, ranging from The Book Thief (2013) to René Clément’s La bataille du rail (1946) (or, more controversially perhaps, in Argo (2012)), make use of various features (in common with Timbuktu, and in no particular order) : the perspective of the ultimate victor*****, humour, and representing the enemy / opposing or occupying force as clodhopping clowns.

(Of course, one says ‘in no particular order’, but it is the rational assurance, after the fact, of the first that allows one to do the third.) Here, then, there were other moments (than the game without a ball) of punctured authority, such as when Abdelkrim takes the wheel of a vehicle and succeeds (on this attempt, at least) at doing little more than making it kangaroo or run off course. Or when his secret habit, banned by his own organization, later proves patent to his driving instructor (who says that everyone knows) : in both cases, the driver deflates his pomposity. (No doubt in retaliation, Abdelkrim picks on other things : Your Arabic is so bad.)


Yet some laughter in the screening was a little hard to cope with, as it was not made in response to such a moment of comedy, but felt as though characters were being laughed at, not the situation found amusing in a way that did not target them. At the same time, one element of the film was, clearly, highlighting the buffoonery of the occupying militia, perhaps to heighten the effect of more violent or brutal behaviour – if so, and even if true to when La Police Islamique took control, perhaps ill judged ?

By contrast, at least, with Half of a Yellow Sun (2013), where, in the Q&A with director Biyi Bandele earlier this year, it was clear that the audience had been confused as to whether the characters themselves were meant to be risible.


At root, mentally shorn – as it all too easily was – of its offshoots of incidental action, Timbuktu showed us the typical hypocrisies of a repressive power, whether interpreting party dogma or a religious text to its own end, or when the interview with Abdelkrim (and the amount of 'blood money') seems more important than the trial.

We saw defiance, some of which was struck down in ways that repel us, and some indulged because of a connection with the person who offered it (as in the case of the eccentric Zabou (Kettly Noël)), but little to tell us why the occupation began (or why it could or would end ? - admittedly, perhaps, putting us in the ignorance of the time, as to whether all this would last).

At one level, the film appears to deal in actions that, as one was aware at the time, threatened to overshadow Mali’s rich history and culture, especially its tradition of music, but, on another, it leaves one ignorant as to these actions and where they came from. If it spurred us to find out more, that might be something - rather than our simply consuming the content / story of Timbuktu...


End-notes

* Every festival now has to be the nth ‘edition’, as if no one can be trusted to understand that calling something the nth particular Film or Music Festival means only that, as the nth, there have been n - 1 such events before, not that its ranks nth out of all of them…

** Not that, to be frank, one gets any sense of the real scale or historicity of the city. In addition, where Satima and Kidane live (with their daughter Toya, and her son Issan), the stretch of water where Issan runs into problems with Amadou, and Timbuktu itself are three important exterior locations : one has little notion how they can relate to each other.

*** Or even of Oklahoma, centring on ‘The Farmer and The Cowman should be friends’ ? (Here, there is a cow called GPS – just look at The Jersey Herd Book to see where that fits in the pantheon, with a beast called Salisbury Musical Flashlight…)

**** A motif that, not uniquely, occurs in Sieniawka (2013), as premiered at Cambridge Film Festival 2013 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF)

***** Assuming that there ever is a victor, as such, in an occupation or invasion.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)