Viva Riva!

2010, Democratic Republic of Congo/France/Belgium, directed by Djo Tunda Wa Munga

As much as I understand the motivations of the generation of African directors who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, who consciously worked against Hollywood cinema in particular, it's hard to avoid the impression that there's something approaching a taboo around the idea of fun in the average film from the continent. That is, in some ways, testament to the continued influence of Ousmane Sembène, who took the view that cinema was an important educational tool, though that's not necessarily an unproblematic idea since most colonial administrations took exactly the same view, even if the intended lessons were somewhat different. While there have been notable earlier exceptions, Ça Twiste à Poponguine or Quartier Mozart to name two, the explosion of Nollywood cinema, often wildly, wilfully entertaining even when engaged in social commentary, often makes the festival-circuit filmmakers seem a little staid.

Viva Riva!, then, is the first film I've seen in quite some time to comprehensively overturn preconceptions about African cinema: as one writer commented, it's as though Tony Scott took his camera to Kinshasa and cooked up one of his over-heated extravaganzas on the banks of the Congo. That's true of both the film's strengths - frenetic pacing, a justifiable cynicism about everyone's motivations, wildly colorful characters - and its weaknesses, most obviously its sexual politics, which are a muddle of progressive attitudes and retrograde images, although the sexual frankness is refreshing for African cinema, sometimes notably coy about matters of the flesh. The opening section is perhaps the strongest of all, a brilliant montage that sets up a background of financial penury and criminal energy with no fuss and no dialogue, while also giving us an unfiltered glimpse of African street life without a hint of ethnography. Even if the rest of the film can't quite rise to that level, it's a wild ride capable of pointed commentary: the ending is a rather bleak commentary on the realities of Kinshasa life.

Pièces d'identités

1998, France/DR Congo/Belgium, directed by Mweze Ngangura


Mweze Ngangura has carved out his own path as an African filmmaker, moving away from the more consciously 'artistic' work of many of other directors and making use instead of a comic tone and sometimes conventional plots to tell stories of contemporary Congo. This 1998 feature is no exception: the plot has more coincidences than a vaudeville play, and implies that Brussels has only a few dozen inhabitants, so frequently do their paths intersect, but underneath the genial tone, there's a forceful commentary on the realities encountered by African immigrants (and visitors) in Europe, and the difficult search for identity when far from home.

Ngangura is a clear-eyed commentator, though; along with the exposure of the lingering colonial mentality in Belgium, he points out that some Africans, too, are stuck in the past, with a re-examination of traditional attitudes - to women, for example - long overdue. He also presents a more nuanced portrait of the coloniser than is sometimes the case, while there's a great deal of poignancy in the relationship between a Belgian cop (and former colonial official) and a Congolese king, who symbolize the missed opportunity for a meaningful encounter between two cultures.

La Vie est belle

1987, Zaïre/France/Belgium, directed by Benoît Lamy and Mweze Ngangura

A major hit in many African countries when it was released - it is one of the few African films to be widely distributed on the continent - La Vie est belle is in many ways an old-fashioned rags-to-riches story with resonances that go far beyond its country and continent of origin, telling the tale of an aspiring musician (Papa Wemba, already a huge music star in Zaïre, and with a growing international reputation) who sets out from his home in the provinces for the bright lights of Kinshasa. The film's main concern isn't with plot (even Shakespeare might have balked at all the coincidences, not to mention the deus ex machina resolution), but rather with creating an authentic impression of Kinshasa life (though circumstances force the filmmakers to be oblique in their criticisms, given that Mobutu's state was among the financial sponsors).

The film's gentle comic style - not to mention the unsurprisingly fine soundtrack - masks what is ultimately a very pointed commentary on the almost complete lack of state assistance, which compels the entire population into an attitude of trying to get by, using and abusing connections in the manner demonstrated by those at the highest levels. In some ways, the force of this commentary is all the greater for its expression in such seemingly benign terms, a force that emerges after the fact, once the glow of the finale has faded.

Lumumba

2000, France/Belgium/Germany/Haiti, directed by Raoul Peck

Although it appears to be a conventional biopic on the surface, Raoul Peck's Lumumba is ultimately no more an objective portrait than his previous documentary on same subject, and functions, like that earlier work, as an examination of Peck's own relationship with his subject. The film opens with a re-creation of the possible circumstances surrounding Lumumba's death (circumstances not too far from the reality, if subsequent admissions from the Belgian government are reliable), and then moves backward, joining Lumumba as he arrives in Congo's capital city, still called, in the pre-independence period, Léopoldville. His political development is over almost in a flash: he goes from selling beer to having a key role in the independence negotiations in a manner that elides almost all of the details of his rise to prominence (which in some ways calls into question the degree to which Lumumba enjoyed popular support).

The film's primary interest is in Lumumba's brief period in power, his few months as prime minister in 1960, during which the idealism of the pre-independence period collides with the (sometimes brutal) realities of governing the vast area of the Congo, riven by regional rivalries as well as by outside influences (the film alludes to the involvement of Belgium, the Soviet Union and the US - while the UN is invoked in terms that portray it as both malign and welcome). There's a great poignancy to Peck's nuanced portrait of Lumumba, as if the director himself is also confronted with the reality that even a hero of the independence period has shades of grey; he doesn't shy away from Lumumba's occasional intransigence, nor from the fact that he, along with other leaders, was ill-prepared for the scale of the task ahead. Peck has no interest in hagiography, and the Lumumba that emerges from his film is a complex man, magnetic but also overburdened, toppled by circumstances in which almost no-one, save for Lumumba himself, remained loyal to the people of Congo.

Lumumba: la mort du prophète

1992, France/Switzerland, directed by Raoul Peck

The title of Raoul Peck's documentary film announces the fact that it does not attempt to provide an objective portrait of its subject (the film is certainly not a reliable primer on the Congo c. 1960-1962 without other complements), but functions rather as a personal memoir on the meaning of Lumumba's brief time in power, and also as a reflection on what it is like to be close to historical events. More controversially, Peck indicts present-day Belgium and Belgians, whose prosperity is, in ways visible and invisible, inextricably linked with the history of its huge African colony.

Peck's filmmaking strategies recall both Jean-Marie Teno and David Achkar, both of whom blend a variety of sources - newsreels, interviews, poetry, home movies - to powerful effect; Peck combines Teno's broader polemical thrust with Achkar's evocation of a very personal series of events (Peck spent much of his childhood in Congo, where his parents worked, though he himself did not arrive from Haiti until after Lumumba's death). The film's main weakness is the paucity of African testimonies to balance the sometimes unreliable - and almost always tendentious - Europeans who are interviewed; while the lack of equilibrium is partly a function of Peck's decision (for reasons of personal safety) not to travel to Kinshasa, little use is made of the overseas Congolese community.