News

SOLEIL O FINDS THE LIGHT OF DAY

Kirk Michael

3/4/2021 4:21:00 PM

“Soleil Ô,” one of the many lost or nearly lost films that Martin Scorsese has helped pull from obscurity as part of the World Cinema Project, reveals Mauritian writer/director Med Hondo as furiously political but also furiously creative. Originally released in 1967, explanatory text confides that the film was found, “in the audiovisual archives of the Paris chapter of the Communist Party.”

And the story itself is as wild as its rediscovery, with no strict narrative progression but many arresting scenes. Take an early sequence where a group of African migrants are baptized into the Christian faith and piously carry wooden crosses around the churchyard… only to break into military formation, flip the crosses the other way, and use them to practice sword fighting.

It’s hard to know the names of individual characters (no one is properly introduced) but for the most part we tag along with our unnamed African protagonist (Robert Liensol) as he searches for work and lodging in a hostile Paris. Our man is a trained accountant but he never gets the chance to interview for any jobs listed in the newspaper. He recurringly meets a Black street sweeper, whose wry smile shows how far we are from the French promise of liberté, égalité, fraternité. The larger group of fellow migrants serves as a sort of chorus, joining our hero whether he finds himself in a cathedral or cramped apartment for a meeting of communist revolutionaries.

Hondo himself does the voiceover narration and it’s filled with aphorisms like, “I am bleached by your culture but I remain a negro.” He made the film in a period when African immigration to France was ramping up, with some 300,000 migrants entering the country each year. In a series of coy interview-style scenes we see White women muttering, “There are too many already,” before suggesting the government might have to “herd them like American Indians.” They also giggle over base assumptions about the sexual prowess of Black men and Hondo displays his brutal humor when he overlays a meeting of our hero and a White woman with a soundtrack of barnyard noises. Later, a White barfly says, “I love negro spirituals” in the same way that Bradley Whitford’s liberal dad said in “Get Out,” “I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could.”

Hondo’s cinematographic choices also fascinate — even some seemingly simple two-shots of dialogue are complicated by many pans and zooms, with the camera archly landing in uncomfortable closeup as an interlocutor insists only the “most useful” migrants should come to France. Sometimes we get improvised, neorealistic shots of neighborhood life interspersed with a pastiche of ecstatic fantasias, as when a Black man playing a soldier dies only to be resurrected by a single franc note.

While “Soleil Ô” can sometimes bewilder, you’re pulled along by its scruffy charm. After a truly audacious ending, a title card promises “To be continued.” Unfortunately, there’s no sequel available to watch, although the brutal legacy of European colonialism is ongoing.

“Soleil Ô” is streaming on the Criterion Channel. Not rated. Running time 1:48.
Visit www.criterionchannel.com

NOTES ON FILM & RESTORATION

3/3/2021 3:00:00 PM

I note that the Wikipedia entry on Tunes of Glory—a 1960 adaptation of James Kennaway’s novel (Kennaway also wrote the screenplay) directed by Ronald Neame and restored by the Academy Film Archive in collaboration with The Film Foundation, Janus Films, and MoMA with funding from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation—identifies the film as a “dark psychological drama,” a quote from a brief article in TCM’s database. This little turn of phrase, innocuous as it might seem, perfectly embodies what Martin Scorsese calls the “devaluation of cinema.” Such quick, encapsulating descriptions are nothing new of course, but now they’re pervasive, employed as marketing tools and “critical” summations and categories on streaming platforms. Every film now, old or new, is imagined to be reducible to a basic essence, easily describable and thus dismissible. This is the attempted consumerization of the filmgoing experience: every viewing occasion tailored to your tastes and needs.

I use the word “attempted” because, of course, there’s always the simple matter of choice. This is true of so many aspects of the social media/streaming world. I remember a conversation with a younger friend a few years back, who complained about how easy it is to get caught up in Tweet wars. She went on for a bit, and I suggested that she simply drop it—get off of Twitter. For her, it was unthinkable. “You have to participate,” she said. Actually, you don’t.

On the internet, a friend explained to me many years ago, 300 words is a tome. 300 words is not even close to enough to describe the experience of Tunes of Glory. Dramatically speaking, the film is a war of nerves between an upper crust Colonel, newly arrived to lead a Scottish regiment (Kennaway himself had served with the Gordon Highlanders) and a hard-drinking working class major who has come up in the ranks and led the regiment through most of WWII after the death of their colonel in battle. Discipline and tradition and breeding vs. camaraderie and relaxation of rules and hard knocks. Who will break, the delicately constituted Colonel or the beloved and violently impulsive Major? But that's just the bare bones of the conflict. The movie is something else again, a vivid tapestry of reactions and counter reactions that find physical expression in the cloistered world, visually and psychologically, of Scottish military life, and it reaches an astonishing pitch through the acting of John Mills as the Colonel and Alec Guinness as the Major, who cuts an alarming figure with his ginger brush cut, a swaggering, needling, hard-drinking, unruly braggart, who is finally unleashed and dangerous. (Mills and Guinness were supposedly offered each other’s eventual roles and swapped.) Dark? Hardly—the action plays out in vivid color and is emotionally vibrant and electrifying. Psychological? Sure, but again, that’s just the starting point. I saw Tunes of Glory for the first time myself not too many years ago, and I was overwhelmed. For those who choose to actually watch it rather than consume it, you might have a similar reaction.

That’s 505 words, and it doesn’t even scratch the surface.

- Kent Jones

Follow us on Instagram, and Twitter!

TUNES OF GLORY (1960, d. Ronald Neame)
Restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation in collaboration with Janus Films and The Museum of Modern Art. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

NOTES ON FILM & RESTORATION

2/25/2021 4:00:00 PM

The cinema is widely and commonly recognized as a popular art form, but its presence and the breadth of its history in different areas of the world varies wildly. The art form itself is often identified with this country, because ours has been the most spectacular, the most widely exported, and perhaps the most sheerly dynamic in relation to the development of the century: as André Bazin once observed, American society has told itself its own developing story and mythology through its cinema. But the cinemas of Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, China and Japan have been forceful presences in the history of the art form for just as long, and Indian cinema has been a powerhouse. In other parts of the world, production has been fitful, in Africa most of all. Africa is a big continent and there are obviously exceptions, including Egypt and, to a lesser extent, South Africa. But in general, getting a film made in Africa has long been, and continues to be, difficult. With the exception of the quickly and massively produced titles shot on home video equipment that started coming out of Nigeria in the late 80s, African cinema is basically one film at a time, each one financed and produced under unique circumstances. The preservation of African cinema has been especially problematic for just those reasons.

The African Film Heritage Project was launched in 2017, a closely coordinated effort between The Film Foundation, the Cineteca di Bologna—where the effort is spearheaded by the formidable Cecilia Cenciarelli—UNESCO (whose “General History of Africa” project is now in its 7^th decade and in preparation with its 9^th, 10^th and 11^th volumes) and FEPACI (Pan African Federation of Filmmakers), which launched a crucial survey of all African film archives. The aim of the AFHP is to locate the elements (mainly in European archives) and then restore and preserve African titles selected by a group of African filmmakers and scholars in coordination with FEPACI. Thus far, AFHP has restored Med Hondo’s Soleil O, which was completed not long before the filmmaker’s death; Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s Chronicle of the Years of Fire from Algeria, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1975; Timité Bassori’s 1969 film La Femme au couteau from the Ivory Coast; Jean-Pierre Dikongué Pipa’s Muna Moto from Cameroon; and Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Contras’ City from Senegal. Pre-dating the formation of AFHP, the World Cinema Project arm of The Film Foundation restored Trances and Alyam Alyam by Ahmed Al-Maanouni from Morocco (I focused on Trances a ways back here); Mambéty’s Touki Bouki and Ousmane Sembene’s Borom Sarret and Black Girl, three foundational films from Senegal; and Shadi Abdel-Salam’s Al Momia also known as The Night of Counting the Years, and The Eloquent Peasant, from Egypt. The scope of all these linked initiatives and the dedication behind them is deeply moving, a titanic collective effort to reclaim history on multiple fronts. The majority of these films are revelatory on many levels—for westerners with limited exposure or even knowledge of the fact of Africa’s multiple cinemas, and for African audiences and film students as well. For Aboubakar Sanogo, FEPACI’s North American secretary, this is a crucial element. “The young African filmmakers are at a really important crossroad,” he told Mark Cosgrove. “There has never been more of a passion for making films than now in terms of sheer numbers…What they don’t have access to is the history.” The ultimate goal is that “no African filmmaker can take a camera without seeing a Med Hondo or Sembène or Cissé.” It’s a noble goal for Africa and its cinemas, and a real example to millions living on wealthier continents throughout the world who harbor the sadly mistaken belief that history can be either ignored or discarded or re-molded like a lump of clay. Which always ends in humiliation, disgrace, or tragedy.

- Kent Jones

Follow us on Instagram, and Twitter!

SOLEIL O (1970, d. Med Hondo)
Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in collaboration with Med Hondo. Restoration funded by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation and The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project.