Africa is a Country

The Cannes Film Festival is now over. I had earlier noted that no African film had made the cut for the official (or main) program, but were relegated to a series of “special sections.”

That’s like humanitarianism for film.

A friend of mine who knows a thing about African film exhibition and distribution in the United States is less diplomatic: “Cannes is like a nightclub singer whose time has expired.”

It turns out that technically I wasn’t entirely correct since at least two films with African topics did make the “official” selection. The first was Madonna’s self-indulgent documentary about her attempt to adopt a baby in Malawi disguised as a film about AIDS orphaps, “I Am Because We Are.” Although not officially part of the festival’s program, the film took on an undeserved importance. The film was panned in French media, with one critic making fun of the images of “… tearful, emaciated children” accompanied by “overwrought music, pointless slow motion sequences, and simplistic commentary on the order of ‘everybody needs love’ ”

The other film with an African-theme that made the program is “Johnny Mad Dog,” directed by French filmmaker, Jean-Stephane Sauvaire, as part of the “Un Certain Regarde” section of the festival. Here‘s Manohla Dargis, one of the more perceptive film reviewers at The New York Times (and The International Herald Tribune) on “Johnny Mad Dog”:

“… One of a gang of lost children who call themselves ‘the death dealers,’ Mad Dog roams the wastelands of his country, spreading machine-gun terror and death — to men, women and other children — in the name of the revolution. Whose revolution? The movie doesn’t say. Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president who drove the country into civil war, is never mentioned, as far as I could tell. Instead, there are skillfully shot, rapidly edited scenes of dead-eyed children walking, running, dancing, shooting, screaming and killing, killing, killing. Without context, information or explanation, the movie plunges you into horror — yet, to what end? There’s no pleasure here, certainly, just effort and craft and a lot of black bodies, children and adolescents mostly, though also some adults, in a surrealistic and violent pantomime. In one late scene, Mr. Sauvaire shows the frenzied child soldiers dancing around a bonfire, their dark skin glistening in the ruddy light and the whites of their eyes shining brightly. Although I’m certain Mr. Sauvaire means well — he talks a good line about wanting to get close to the truth, though doesn’t explain what truth he means — it’s impossible not to question what he wants his audience to take away from this spectacle. Terror? Pity? I felt both, but was also repulsed by Mr. Sauvaire’s high-minded exploitation and provocative flourishes, like the image of the children walking through a graveyard as a radio broadcast of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech fills the air. (Liberia was founded by former American slaves in the mid-19th century.) During the end credits, as Nina Simone sings the old Billie Holiday standard “Strange Fruit,” we see a series of real images of the war taken by the French photographer Patrick Robert. One picture shows a man clutching what looks like a human femur and another shows two small, presumably dead children in a puddle of blood. In another, a severed human head rests in the middle of a road, neck down. During the prescreening pleasantries when some of the movie’s creators were introduced, one of the group assured the predominately white audience that Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, and all the people of the republic stand behind “Johnny Mad Dog.” Afterward, still reeling from what I’d just seen, I wondered, Who am I to argue?”