Film: The Cameroonian Connection

Iremember this Andy Warhol movie of someone sleeping for 8 hours," recalls filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo, a Duke filmmaker-in-residence from Cameroon. "I think it was a brilliant thing! Because we don't even know who we are sometimes; we don't have time."

Two weeks ago, a screening of Bekolo's 1995 film Aristotle's Plot was featured in a discussion series jointly sponsored by the International House, the Franklin Center and the Mary Lou Williams Center. The series, entitled "Can We Preserve our Culture? Our Identity?" was intended to explore film, poetry and music as artistic media that preserve individual identity, while transcending international boundaries.

Bekolo's work is uniquely suited to the task. In 1995, Bekolo was chosen by the British Film Institute to create a representative African film in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of cinema. The result. Aristotle's Plot, was an attempt to reconcile the honor of recognition with Bekolo's struggle to find a uniquely African form of cinema--something that's neither Hollywood nor National Geographic but individual, complex and authentic.

"I was commissioned to make this film for the anniversary of cinema," explains Bekolo, "but at the same time, I decided to use this as a tool for self-expression. Also a discourse about all the aspects of being asked to make a film in itself, and my criticism of what film's all about."

Bekolo teaches a course on filmmaking, titled "Invisible Cinema." Filmmaking can be about storytelling but more importantly, it's about what you don't see: emotion, form and the subtle, skillful mastery of communication. "Mastery of the tools, mastery of the language, and to really be free with it," he explains, is what filmmakers should aspire to.

Bekolo describes communication techniques as having been "frozen" in the early days of cinema. What we see onscreen today is stale and imitative; yet language needs to be constantly reinvented to retain meaning. He continues: "The idea is to go back to the smallest unit, the word. Go back to the smallest unit, and assemble them in a way that makes sense to you."

The world of cinema is a reflection of our own world, and ourselves--both viewed from a critical distance, necessary for an objective appraisal. "It's a world we can project ourselves into," he concludes. "Humans can project themselves into the kind of future world they want to live in, instead of just reaffirming the one that they're living in."

This Monday, Nov. 17, Screen/Society will screen another of Bekolo's films, Quartier Mozart, in Griffith at 8 pm. Bekolo will provide an introduction, and remain for a question and answer session.