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Exile and longing in Abderrahmane Sissako's La Vie sur terre
Abstract
This essay is a study of Abderrahmane Sissako's La Vie sur terre/Life on Earth as conceptual cinema, focusing on the theme of displacement. Part of the series ‘2000 Seen by’, organized with support from
the ‘Mission for the celebration of the year 2000’, La Vie sur terre is Mali's contribution to French commemorations of the new millennium. Ten independent directors were invited to make a film
about the last day of the twentieth century in their countries of origin. Born in Mauritania, trained as filmmaker in the
Soviet Union and residing in France, Sissako responded by creating a film on both the nature of exile and the life cycles
of the inhabitants of his father's village. The challenge was to produce a feature that captures Africa's connection to and
isolation from Europe. To the richly portrayed West African setting, Sissako injects the political and poetic spirit of Martinican
Aimé Césaire and his critique of colonialism. In approaching La Vie sur terre as conceptual cinema in which exile becomes the locus for intense creation, this article strives to articulate how Sissako
mediates the tensions posed by the experience of separation from and entanglement with the native land.
... Sissako borrows structural and stylistic elements from West African oral traditions through his elliptical narratives, a preference for circularity over linearity (Ince 2018), and narration. In African cinema, the voiceover represents the consciousness of the filmmaker, which harks back to one of its founding moments, the voice of the cart driver in Ousmane Sembène's film Borom Sarret (1963) (Balseiro 2007). ...
... Sissako blurs the boundaries between art and lived experience, from which we could draw that no single approach or narrative form is capable of bearing the weight of African social realities (Akudinobi 2000). Because Sissako subverts the boundaries between fiction and documentary (Gabara 2010) and believes in the strength of images (Sissako 2007b;Hamblin 2012;Sissako 2015), he teases meaning from minimalist aesthetics (Balseiro 2007). Sissako has repeatedly invited viewers to create their own stories and interpretations of his films. ...
Another Time, Another Place is a reunion exhibition of artworks by 40 artists who graduated 30 to 36 years ago at the University of Pretoria (South Afica) during a most significant seven-year period between 1986 and 1992. Volume 2 of the exhibition catalogue consists of 20 topical essays written by a spectrum of authors. Some have direct links to the exhibiting group and the institution, while others share personal accounts of experiences of the city of Pretoria. The essays are The essays included in Volume 2 are structured according to five themes: ‘Time and locus’, ‘Contextual responses’, ‘Made for the screen’, ‘Teaching and learning’, and ‘Revisiting history’. It also includes an index of artists, designers and historians who taught at the University of Pretoria Department of Visual Arts between 1986-1992,
... Sissako borrows structural and stylistic elements from West African oral traditions through his elliptical narratives, a preference for circularity over linearity (Ince 2018), and narration. In African cinema, the voiceover represents the consciousness of the filmmaker, which harks back to one of its founding moments, the voice of the cart driver in Ousmane Sembène's film Borom Sarret (1963) (Balseiro 2007). ...
... Sissako blurs the boundaries between art and lived experience, from which we could draw that no single approach or narrative form is capable of bearing the weight of African social realities (Akudinobi 2000). Because Sissako subverts the boundaries between fiction and documentary (Gabara 2010) and believes in the strength of images (Sissako 2007b;Hamblin 2012;Sissako 2015), he teases meaning from minimalist aesthetics (Balseiro 2007). Sissako has repeatedly invited viewers to create their own stories and interpretations of his films. ...
Consumption and production of the arts have been a part of the human experience since the ancient period. This dichotomous process in South Africa is typically characterised by, but not limited to, socioeconomic, sociopolitical, and sociocultural classifications extending the pre-1652 era to the present. The period from 1986 to 1992, which is regarded as a watershed moment in South African art history, is an important part of this. The goal of this essay is to emphasise the significance of the creative output that was explored and experienced by consumers in the Nation's Capital over a sixteen-year period. This one-of-a-kind exhibition, titled "Another Time, Another Place," is a celebration of greatness that honours artists, designers, curators, educators, community role players, consultants, and entrepreneurs who have made significant contributions to their respective fields in the arts. 1986 was a turbulent year in which a state of emergency was declared across the country and talks to release Rolihlahla Mandela were included in the opening address to parliament; this remarkable year was dubbed the "people's power" and ten-year commemoration of the 1976 students' uprising. The United States imposed mandatory sanctions on South Africa that year, marking a significant milestone in the country's political history. The goal of this essay is to emphasise the significance of the creative output that was explored and experienced by consumers in the Nation's Capital over a sixteen-year period. In contrast, the year 1992 was dubbed "the end of apartheid" as a result of a successful "yes vote" in an apartheid referendum.
... Sissako blurs the boundaries between art and lived experience, from which we could draw that no single approach or narrative form is capable of bearing the weight of African social realities (Akudinobi 2000). Because Sissako subverts the boundaries between fiction and documentary (Gabara 2010) and believes in the strength of images (Sissako 2007b;Hamblin 2012;Sissako 2015), he teases meaning from minimalist aesthetics (Balseiro 2007). Sissako has repeatedly invited viewers to create their own stories and interpretations of his films. ...
Much of the criticism levelled against Abderrahmane Sissako is but veiled critique of his Africanness. He is a man of many places and cultures—Mali, Mauritania, Russia, France—who dislikes reduction to an identity from a geographically defined culture. Sissako's films are famously elliptical: he refuses to attribute specific meaning to any of his films and would rather spectators do so their selves. Perhaps it is exactly his awareness of his expatriate position that enables him to present transnational visions of Africa on screen. Karin Barber (1985) remarked that modern popular arts can transcend geographical, ethnic and national boundaries. Her observations ring particularly true for Sissako. Against this background this article explores how popular West African cultural practices manifest in Abderrahmane Sissako’s films.
A crise migratória, explorada a exaustão em imagens de TV e fotografias de jornais, tornou-se o maior dilema moral contemporâneo e desafia rotineiramente nosso entendimento dos padrões culturais e dos direitos estabelecidos – ao mesmo tempo que denuncia um controle crescente dos corpos e do espaço. Se tais imagens refletem a nossa sociedade, também servem elas simultaneamente como um elemento que a constitui. Sendo assim, este livro propõe compreender de que forma o “fenômeno migratório”, como “deslocamento no espaço” – seja ele físico ou imaginário – foi reapropriado e problematizado por cineastas africanos contemporâneos (eles próprios sujeitos migrantes e diaspóricos), a partir da análise de filmes produzidos nos últimos anos. Como filmes que assumem uma postura histórica engajada, busca-se aqui compreender as diferentes estratégias estéticas subjacentes à “encenação fílmica”, no que se refere à trajetória de seus personagens dentro do espaço social e simbólico do mundo recriado em cada obra. Logo, o livro busca lançar luz e pensar, a partir de bases sociológicas, de que maneira, no cinema, “articulam-se” estrategicamente novas subjetividades estéticas e políticas, reconfigurando a tensão entre o “global” e o “local”, o “aqui” e o “acolá”, ao apresentar outras formas possíveis de “comunidade”, “espacialidade”, “territorialidade”, “memória” e “pertencimento”, além das fronteiras tradicionalmente delimitadas.
Nos últimos anos, a história africana tem sido objeto de celebração e discussão, mas também disputas, em diferentes âmbitos – acadêmico, político, cultural. Particularmente, por meio do resgate e valorização do passado africano, tem-se buscado entender criticamente as contradições de seu presente e, a partir disso, formar alicerces que ajudem na edificação de um novo futuro para o continente. Um dos pilares desse processo de re-visão tem sido, reconhecidamente, as suas produções artísticas, e, em especial, a sua produção cinematográfica – considerada ao mesmo tempo como produto e produtora de Histórias. Dito isto, o artigo busca lançar luz sobre as continuidades e descontinuidades da produção audiovisual africana nas últimas décadas, a fim de entender como o continente africano e sua população têm sido imaginados e re-imaginados em diferentes momentos da história recente.
This essay takes Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako's statements about the impression Spaghetti Westerns made on him as a teen as an entry point to consider new insights into Sissako's films that emerge when they are viewed comparatively through the genre convention of the western. Rather than arguing that Sissako seeks to fulfill or depart from such conventions, the essay shows that Sissako's experience of the genre is in fact common to a number of West African artists and that his approach to landscape, quest narratives, and seriality resonate with the Spaghetti Western genre. Yet the influence of key francophone thinkers like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon is equally strong in Sissako's work. The political engagement that motivated many Italian directors is transmuted in Sissako's work to address the slow violence of globalization, using familiar generic tropes to anchor viewers confronted with cross-genre, self-reflexive, and open-ended films.
This essay attempts a preliminary conceptualization of the cinema of Abderrahmane Sissako through his formal treatment of
expatriation, intellectualism and genre. The essay recognizes that Bamako, Abderrahmane Sissako's recent film about the impact of the economic programs of the World Bank on poor countries, may have
encouraged a perception of the filmmaker as a new thorn in the side of corporate capital. However, the sociopolitical as well
as aesthetic questions which have become definitive of the filmmaker's work, were extensively laid out in two films from the
late 1990s -Rostov-Luanda (1997) and Life on Earth (1999). By discussing the two films at length, the essay argues that the categories of expatriation, intellectualism and
genre and their intricate relationship to institutional and social issues are constitutive of form in the cinema of Sissako.
It argues further that although Sissako's status as an expatriate artist affords him the privilege that comes with commissions,
the same position rhetorically draws him to places or subjects which simultaneously compel and confound artistic representation.
The result is an aesthetic process in which the making of a work of art is transformed into an implicitly conceptual undertaking.
The essay concludes by highlighting the impact of production context on this process as a highly fraught one, allowing for
such political engagement as is evident Sissako's work but producing an intellectual category unthinkable outside of institutions.
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