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The Appeal of Hybrid Documentary Forms in West Africa
The Appeal of Hybrid Documentary Forms in West Africa
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access to French Forum
A la face du soleil et des ai'euls, nous criions alors notre independance, jeunes. in-
soucieux. Nous ignorions le monde qui nous entourait. Nous ignorions les regions
qui limitaient notre petit coin de I' Afrique. Nous ignorions qu'il pourrait exister
d'autres regions 0C1 des petits noirs, de petits jaunes, de petits blancs jouaient, se
ddbattaient dans d'autres fleuves. Et nous, nous avions notre Niger, notre soleil,
notre foret, c'etait le bon temps, le temps du royaume des enfants, des enfants de
toute la terre, il y a de cela, que porte le temps.
for the director to be able to hide behind the mantle of fiction if ques-
tioned by the authorities.
The joyous tone depicting traditional African scenes is no longer
to be seen in the following sequence. A slow pan shot shows Parisian
rooftops against a wintry sky. The slow enunciation of the words does
not mask their subversive content:
En allant d&ouvrir Paris, chercher PAfrique sur Seine, dans l'espoir de se retrou-
ver, l'espoir de se rencontrer, l'espoir de trouver la civilisation, saluons le gtfnie
des hommes de la liberty, de l'egalite. saluons les victoires pacifiques d'hommes
pacifiques. Saluons tous les monuments de Paris, temoins de grandeurs passees et
prdsentes.
the participants. She narrates the film through the use of a voice-over
reading a letter to the villagers. Even though the spectator never sees
Faye's face, he or she knows to whom the narrative voice belongs.
This creates a sense of identification between the spectator and the
narrator by allowing the presence of the filmmaker to pervade the au-
ditory space of the diegesis. Unlike Rouch, who similarly narrates his
films, Safi Faye's commentaries lack a certain rapidity and nervous-
ness in their enunciation. The Senegalese director thereby surprises
the spectator used to the frantic masculine narration of classic ethno-
graphic films, subtly attacking the canonical patriarchy.
Her use of the letter as the structural backbone of the film is note-
worthy. It pushes the plot forward in the fictional sense but also serves
to frame her revealing of the various cultural phenomena of her vil-
lage, hence creating a unique auditory space for the spectator. The
epistolary form in this film is a one-way system in that there is no ex-
change. The spectator only hears Faye's voice speaking to an anony-
mous friend. This anonymity has great powers of suggestion, as we
wonder about the nature of the relationship between Faye and the ad-
dressee. Faye is both director and narrator, with the perversion of the
epistolary relationship from private to public being an effective ploy
in whetting the curiosity of the spectator. We feel privileged to enter
the intimate space between the director and the addressee, even if we
are aware that the letter was "written" solely to narrate the film. In ad-
dition, the enunciation of the written word is different to that used in
other narrative devices such as voice-overs, interviews and dialogues.
Each word seems more reflective, or at least the auditor, who is also
the spectator, thinks so. It is true that every voice-over is in fact read
and written by somebody but perhaps the viewer is more conscious of
this with the epistolary form, as it inscribes itself directly into the nar-
rative construction of the text. In Lettre Paysanne, the letter imbues
the more objective images with a certain sensitivity. The personal tone
allows the film to go beyond the factual tone of the traditional ethno-
graphic film. Gone is the omnipresent voice of God. The imposing
nature of the voice-over is one of the most easily recognizable fea-
tures of documentary cinema but, in Faye's film, it accompanies the
addressee and the spectator, initiating them to the personal world of
the director. This personal tone is to be felt from the first line of the
letter, which states "void mon village." The rhythm of the enunciation
also in her later film Fad'jal (1979) to create her own enunciatory
modality. This is perhaps where the originality and specificity of the
director reside. She does not seek to erase her cinematic signature nor
her directorial flourishes.
Let us now turn our attention to our final case study, which also
acts as a showcase in formal innovation. The film in question is Na-
tionalite: immigre( 1975) by Sidi Sokhona, who continues the militant
tendency of Safi Faye by depicting social marginalisation and the rac-
ism experienced by African immigrants in Paris, and this through the
elaboration of the hybrid form of docu-drama. Nationalite: immigre
represents an audacious aesthetic adventure examining the economic
and political reasons that incite Africans to leave their country to find
themselves subsequently in precarious conditions in France. Similarly
to other political films from that era, the ideological message of this
film prevails over the action. It denounces the injustice of the exploi-
tation of immigrants through several narrative forms: an informative
voice-over, an extradiegetic character who plays the role of narrator
and provides sporadic information, and a fictional plot that mixes fic-
titious characters and the reconstruction of real events. The narrative
thread weaves its way around the fictional world, recounting the ar-
rival of a Mauritanian immigrant in France, played by the director,
and his difficulty in finding accommodation and a job. To what extent
is the real present in this fictional work or should one speak solely
of fictional elements strewn throughout this documentary? This very
question is at the heart of this article as the mixture of constituents of
the real defines the resultant particular form of docu-fiction. Let us be
reminded that docu-drama is comprised of fictional form with docu-
mentary content, mixing realism and (melo)drama in order to deliver a
representation close to the reality of the spectator or a dramatized real
life event but in a more digestible, entertaining form. Let us examine
in greater detail possible explanations for Sidi Sokhona's use of docu-
drama as the narrative backbone of his first film.
A desire to depict an event imbued with a historical and social sig-
nificance could possibly explain the director's mixing of the real and
fiction. He wants to inform and mobilize the spectator and hence has
recourse to fictional narrative forms to facilitate his or her identifi-
cation with the character and his desperate situation. The subjectiv-
ity imposed by the fictional form arouses a feeling of empathy in the
J'ai voulu faire une fiction parce que dans le documentaire, tout repose sur le son. Et
chez les immigres, c'est quelque chose de tres imposant, de tres lourd, surtout quand
il s'agit de la langue frangaise. Dans le Foyer oil je suis, il y a par exemple trois
cents personnes, mais il y en a a peu pres seize qui savent lire et ecrire. (ibid., 33)
Even though Sidi Sokhona describes this film as a fiction with re-
constructed events, he clearly states that all the characters we see on
screen really exist. This mixture of reality and fiction allows us to cat-
egorize it as a docu-drama. Given the narrative complexity of the film
and the confines of this article, I will limit my analysis of formal in-
vention to the multifaceted voice-over. Before doing so however, here
is a summary of the film as articulated by the director:
En 1970, je suis devenu iocataire du Foyer Riquet oil il y eut une grfcve des loyers.
L'idee ctait de faire un film sur cette greve [. . .] Dans le film, je joue mon propre
r61e; j'aurais voulu que quelqu'un d' autre le joue, mais je ne pouvais pas mobiliser
un travailleur comme 5a, sans le payer, (ibid., 26)
Works Cited
Daney, Serge (with Le Peron, Serge and Oudart, Jean-Pierre), "Entretien avec Sidney Sokhona,"
Cahiers du cinema , 265, Paris, 1976, p. 26-33.
Debrix, Jean R., "Le cinema africain," Afrique contemporaine , n° 38-39, Georges Leygnac (ed.),
Paris, La Documentation fran^aise, 1968, p. 7-12.
Gauthier, Guy, Le Documentaire, un autre cinema , Paris, Nathan, 1995.
Leroy, Eric, "Le fonds cin£matographique colonial aux Archives du film et du depot Idgal du
CNC (France)," Journal of Film Preservation , 63, Bruxelles, 2001, p. 55-59.
Moustapha, Mahama Baba, "Lettre paysanne," Cinemarabe , 6, Paris, 1977.
Pfaff, Frangoise, Twenty-five Black African Filmmakers , New York, Greenwood Press, 1988.
Pouillaude, Jean-Luc, "Lettre paysanne," Positif n° 188, 1976, p. 72.
Rhodes, Gary D. and Springer, John Parris (eds.), Docufictions. Essays in the Intersection of
Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking , Jefferson, N.C., McFarland and Company, 2006.
Scheinfeigel, Maxime, Jean Rouch , Paris, CNRS Editions, 2008.
Thompson, Clem W. (ed.), L' Autre et le Sacre: surrealisme, cinema, ethnologie , Paris, L'Har-
mattan, 1995.
Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank, Black African Cinetna, Berkeley, University of California Press,
1993.
Weinberger Eliot, "The Camera People," in Warren, Charles (ed.), Beyond Document. Essays on
Nonfiction Film , Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 1996, p. 137-168.