This interview was originally published in the Notebook Cannes Special, a limited-edition print publication distributed at the Cannes Film Festival. Read this week's Rushes to learn more.
Souleymane Cissé. Photograph courtesy of Mahamadou Coulibaly.
The cinematic oeuvre of the monumental Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé, this year’s recipient of the Carrosse d’Or, describes and names itself. The unassuming poetry of the titles of his three most recognized films, Baara (Work, 1980), Finyè (The Wind, 1982), and Yeelen (The Light, 1987), harmonize the artistic and political orientation of a filmmaking trajectory shaped around labor, beauty, and transformation. Cissé was born in Bamako in 1940, encountering cinema as a child and captivated from the first instance, eventually joining the ranks of African filmmakers emerging in concert with the 1960s decolonization and national liberation struggles on the continent.
A drama about a rural and an urban worker which doubles as a searing diagnosis of the labor movement in Mali, Baara is the most evident expression of Cissé’s politicized perspective. Alongside its indictment of workforce exploitation, the film also displayed his sensitivity to the tempos and textures of daily life between city and countryside. Tending to a related field of contested power structures in Mali, the central concern of Finyè is a student revolt against a military regime as a way to address the transformative potential of consciousness raising and collective action. While the cinema of Cissé is in some ways consistent, he is also a shapeshifter, a whirlwind of creative force open to the changes around him. Den Muso (The Young Girl, 1975), his first feature, suggested a naturalistic aesthetic which, even as it carried on to subsequent works such as Baara, was later challenged within the films themselves through unexpected flashes of more disruptive cinematic techniques.
Yeelen cast an incandescent light forward and back, looking to the pre-colonial past of Mali and projecting onto an unbounded future. It exemplifies the Janus-like capacity to hold multiple temporalities that guides Cissé’s most recent films: O Sembene! (2013), a tribute to Ousmane Sembène that offers a historical sense of African cinema; and Oka (Our House, 2015), an intimate study of familial remembrance colliding with contemporary difficulties. Awarded the Jury Prize at Cannes, Yeelen also brought Cissé far greater recognition on the global cinematic stage. As an imaginative and precise study of the Komo secret society told through a clash between a father and son, it is arguably the pinnacle of his demystifying aesthetics. The stunning formal force of this allegorical film is Cissé’s persuasive case for an autonomous African cinematic and visual language, drawing from local cultural practices of oral storytelling and cleansed of the degrading misapprehensions of the colonial gaze.
Ultimately evading categories he never abided by, Cissé’s films synthesize the qualities of social realism with an affinity for experimentation and devotion to symbolism, spirituality, and ambivalence. He carries the inventive temperament of a dreamer armed with a firm political orientation. He has nurtured a historical mission for cinema, grounded in a pedagogical responsibility, the importance of memory, and an unyielding valuation of cultural work. The revelatory contributions he has made continue to illuminate the terrain of African filmmaking: Cissé remains a conjurer.
NOTEBOOK : As you turn your gaze toward the past, what elements contributed to your training as a filmmaker?
SOULEYMANE CISSÉ: There were numerous upheavals after Independence and with the youth movement of the Jeunes Pionniers [Young Pioneers]. In concert with all this activity there were screenings and work in documentaries and public animation. You could say that a political energy was in the air, and everything else folded into it. It was in this context that I used to be a projectionist in the evenings at the Maison des Jeunes de Bamako [House of Youths of Bamako]. One evening, a particular newsreel fell into our laps—we didn’t know what it was before screening it, but it was in fact the report on the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and I was actually the one doing the projection. Afterwards, it felt like such a blow. It was a shock! I do not have adequate words to explain how much I was affected and stunned. This was the moment when I realized that cinema was an extraordinary tool of communication and expression. And just like that, the journey began; I was sent to Moscow to train as a projectionist for six months. Then, when I returned, they sent me back to continue my training—this time in photography—and after that, I received a scholarship to attend VGIK [Russian State University of Cinematography] to gain certification as a cinematographer and director.
NOTEBOOK: Can you speak about the role of ritual and spiritualism in your cinema? Finyè has come to seem almost prophetic and Yeelen, which has a beautiful multitemporal and atemporal quality, has recently been seen as almost futuristic.
CISSÉ: Well, consider that my studies were in a context where certain things were considered mundane, whereas I found them important, and what is most important for me is the image, the discovery of the image, the profound contemplation that the image can invite a person into. What is crucial is the way an image can transform us and change our vision of the world. For me, this is a ritual: a ritual I’m satisfied by. I was never one to consult a marabout [holy man]. I respect the perspective and beliefs of everyone, but in my case, it was the image, which I believe in so deeply, that offered me a transformative perception. Yeelen… there were so many troubles around this film. One day during the production, I woke up and I said, either this film will be finished or it will finish me! Despite the difficulties with everything—from funding to nature itself due to high winds, and the tragic death of the lead actor, all very difficult, very complicated—the film was completed, selected for Cannes, and rewarded with a prize. And there was a reverberation, as it traveled to Europe, Asia, the United States. I could not believe it, but all of it was extraordinary.
NOTEBOOK: You’ve consistently filmed mostly in Bambara, rather than in the colonial language of French, and you founded the Union of Creators and Entrepreneurs of the Cinema and Audiovisual Industries of Western Africa to help create material cinematic infrastructures. Could you talk about the possibility of more autonomous cinematic production and why you consider this important? Your filmmaking certainly manifests the crucial role of community, collective, and even family support.
CISSÉ: It is crucial to understand that we are in dire straits in Mali—there is so little cinematic infrastructure. Cinema is of little interest to our political leaders, not even in its capacity as an industry. This is regrettably the reality we are living and the context in which I have always lived and produced. For the coming generations we must create structures that will permit them to project themselves into filmmaking and be on par with filmmakers from other parts of the world! This will require a change in the dynamic between Africa and the West. It is very important to me that future generations are aware of how we did manage, despite the obstacles, to make films in Mali and to build on this.
NOTEBOOK: Many of your films deal with the friction and negotiations between generations. Could you say more about how you conceive of the generational relay within African filmmaking, between your generation of filmmakers and the ones working now?
CISSÉ: The connection between generations of filmmakers is simply cinema: the young people making beautiful films, which speak to us and help us soar—and there are some in Mali, albeit not many. These younger filmmakers are able to dream by way of cinema, but when they stop dreaming, then comes the monotony, and it is no longer worth it. Even without having adequate resources, it is essential to use the camera to keep imagining. It is difficult to break out, and while some manage, many do not. But I hope this new generation, this potential firestorm of young filmmakers, can circulate around the world with the quality of their images, on our shoulders. Ultimately, tradition is the source of modernity. If you are not grounded in a tradition, in previous generations, then you have no path forward. This reminder is my fight. The future is created from what already exists. For me, cinema is a weapon. An effective weapon. A weapon that can in reality unify, a weapon that can offer a new spirit to people, and that is its strength. Cinema is the thing best positioned to awaken us all into a fuller way of being and living. This is why it’s so important for us.