Timbuktu

03/04/2025

Miscellaneous    Download PDF  

Speaking of Africa, Abderrahmane Sissako says, “…rather than emphasizing a difference, I think people are the same no matter where they are. And the problem is that they’re not portrayed as being the same.” (Film Comment) If Africa is often viewed as obscure Other, then the title of Timbuktu suggests a further sense of distance. In English, we have the saying, from here to Timbuktu, a phrase proposing that here is central and Timbuktu, peripheral — a place in the middle of nowhere. Sissako reckons it is the middle of somewhere, and should be in our consciousness not only as a trouble-spotwithin a much greater one: the continent of Africa. Though he based the film initially on an incident in 2012 after reading in a newspaper of a couple stoned to death under Sharia law, Sissako’s film is about the intrusion of a radical Islamist group in Mali, rather than its presence. This might seem like a pedantic distinction but it is one central to understanding the sensibility of the film. If the continent is so often in the news only because of a crisis taking place there, then in contrast, Sissako’s film is always on the side of a gentle, relaxed environment that is interrupted by buffoonish, hypocritical and, yes, murderous zealots. However, if one were to change this emphasis, playing up the murderous, we might be in a different type of film (The Last King of Scotland, Blackhawk Down or Blood Diamond). Sissako’s is closer to the deliberate pacing and lingering register of other works from west central Africa, like Ceddo, Yeelen, The Wind, Yaaba, Tilai, and Sissako’s earlier Waiting for Happiness. The film insists there is life constantly unfolding, not only a tragedy imposing itself on the people. 

          In such an approach, we have African films rather than films about Africa, and at the same time a cinema that needn’t be viewed only as one preoccupied with political ideology. An important term during the late sixties and seventies was Third Cinema, initially pertinent to Latin American film but broadened out to incorporate other nations loosely deemed Third World. It was ferociously political with filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino insisting  “the cinema that recognizes [in the anti-imperialist struggle in the Third World and its equivalents within the imperialist countries)…the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestations of our time…in a word, the decolonization of culture.” (The Cinema Book) African cinema would undeniably have been part of this. Roy Armes noted “filmmaking in Africa is fundamentally a postcolonial activity and experience…” (African Filmmaking) Yet, what we notice in many of the West African films quoted above isn’t the force of their claim but the mellowness of their mood. While Sissako might notice the similarity between people of all cultures, he would also well know that there are quite different ways to film them, and this too can be an ideological project. Rather than many cultures falling under the same filmic idiom, better surely that similarities are recognised humanly and yet where the style is singular.  “What I’m doing in the frame is inviting the viewer to enter into it. So I don’t impose the scene on them by saying: “Here, look at this. You’re gonna look at this.” And that’s why there are very few wide shots.”  (Film Comment) 

     What Sissako surely means by the use of wide shots is a beauty that needn’t be insisted upon but a frame that illustrates the landscape as a lived experience over a touristic gaze. While one side of Western cinema emphasises Africa as a place of adrenalised terror (in Blood Diamond, Blackhawk Down etc),  another shows us the continent as a place of exotic splendour: The African Queen, Born Free, Out of Africa and Gorillas in the Mist. While one image proposes it is a place of one’s worst nightmares, the other shows that Africa is a continent of our most desirable fantasies, with the camera attending to the natural environment as unnatural to us. This is the gaze Sissako resists, as though western films set in Africa often want to extract from the continent an image but are less interested in its rhythm. 

           This is why we are proposing Timbuktu and the other films from West Central Africa we have invoked aren’t so interested in the political as the ideological, but that the ideological is much more than the readily political. It is also the temporal. Another well-known phrase comes to mind: time is money, with many films offering this as a narrative dictum. If the film isn’t moving forward in a hurry, it must at least be moving slowly to appreciate a bit of beauty that can earn its keep as an image. But this doesn’t create an alternative rhythm to the experience of the film, just as someone hurtling from one city to the next, who stops every now and again to take a photograph, doesn’t alter the rhythm of their holiday. When Sissako proposes that “Africans are very often portrayed in a way that makes their issues seem mysterious, when in fact they’re really in many ways no different from Europeans” (Film Comment), this needn’t mean they must share a Western rhythm to their lives. When we see two of the film’s characters Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed dit Pono) and Satima (Toulou Kiki) discussing whether they should leave the area now the Islamic group is in town, it isn’t a conflictual scene to generate tension, but a leisurely account of a married couple discussing their options. Nothing in the scene escalates even if they don’t exactly agree.

        This refusal to use escalation for dramatic tension is often evident in the film, even in scenes where potentially extreme conflict might take place. We see it for example, when the new rules insist the women wear gloves and one who is selling fish says it is impossible to do the work wearing them. She is more irate than the men carrying guns who seem almost apologetic in the request. We see it too when gunmen go into the mosque and they’re told by a religious leader they cannot enter the house of God wearing shoes and carrying weapons. We see it again when Satima says to one of the radical Islamists, after he tells her to cover her head, that if he doesn’t like to see her hair he should look the other way.  Rather than forcing the victims into brutal submission, the radicals appear confused as the potential tension dissipates into doubt. It might be the radicals who are trying to force extreme Islam on the locals, but it seems the locals have a greater grounding in their faith than those trying to impose harsher laws upon them. The religious leader insists, after one of the radicals says, “you want to convince me to renounce Jihad,” that the radical is not in a position to speak of someone else’s jihad as he says it is a personal relationship with Allah rather than an imposition on others. Jihad has become known as meaning a holy war in a geo-political discussion between Islam and Christianity. However, as the religious leader makes clear, Jihad is working upon oneself and “may help us reject vanity and pride.”  

        There may be violence in the film, including those stoned and others shot, as well as a cow that is murdered — a death that propels a plot that is hardly in a hurry. Yet the tone is never on the side of the violent as the often mournful music offers a melancholic mood within a generally tranquil environment. While the film and television images of Africa show a continent war-torn, hungry and poor, with occasional forays into the tourist-exotic, Timbuktu accepts that violence intrudes upon the region but refuses to make it the dramatic force of the material. When we watch scenes from The Last King of Scotland, Blood Diamond and Black Hawk Down (none of them terrible films), we nevertheless aren’t just watching movies playing up a Hollywood template; we are also working with a tempo that emphasises action over stillness, conflict over contemplation. The films may be set respectively in Uganda, Sierra Leone and Somalia, but theseare works that take from the continent what they need for their dramatic ends and have little interest in African life beyond the crisis addressed. Template obliterates tempo.

         But as the great Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene says of his own work, “it was necessary to have a slowness that was, however, not too slow…I also worked a great deal on the decor. Each shot includes something which lets them see for themselves that their country is very beautiful…that our trees are just as pretty as others.” (Cineaste) Part of this slowness in the particular film Sembene is talking about (Emitai) rests on language and the same is so with Timbuktu, as those pushing the new laws on to the locals don’t speak the language and are in constant need of translation. Such a respect for the languages spoken is thus part of the tempo in Emitai and Timbuktu, as if everyone must have the patience to hear another language that takes time to translate. For a director interested in conflict, the misunderstanding isn’t there to slow the film down but to crank up the tension, as we find in The Last King of Scotland when the central kills a cow with Idi Amin’s gun.  His colleague is trying to explain to the locals they have to put the cow out of its misery and the confusion comes close to leading to catastrophic consequences. The doctor becomes so frustrated trying to attend to Amin’s broken wrist and the cow’s cries of pain, that he takes the dictator’s gun from a car roof and kills the cow himself. It looks like he might end up the way of the cow as Amin’s troops train their guns upon him. The problem of translationspeeds the film up; it doesn’t slow it down. 

              Speaking of his earlier Waiting for Happiness, Sissako said, “I think that happiness is an anticipation. In the conduct of a day. In the little everyday details. And that’s why there is this atmosphere of serenity in the film.” (Dokumen.Pub) He retains this serenity in Timbuktu no matter the terrors introduced and the tragedies that occur, as though what matters far more than the temporary drama is the ongoing existence and the values that contain them. When under the new Sharia law, Kidane looks like he is facing death because the family of the farmer he has accidentally killed might insist upon it, he says, “I’m at peace with death.” Later, after the decision is made that he will die, Kidane says “I’ll miss only one thing. A face. My daughter’s face. My wife’s. I’ll ask God if you have children — that he help you understand my pain. I don’t fear the death you’re giving me. It is part of me already…I’m ready.” The film, in the courtroom, cuts to the farmer’s family looking on, with no sense of triumph on their faces, and then to first the daughter and then the mother, drawing patterns in the sand back at home, aware that Kidane’s death would seem inevitable. Even though Samita will try and intervene, there is no narrative development to this decision, only a rushed action that quickly leads to both Kidane and Satima’s demise.

           When critics spoke of Third Cinema, they saw the first as Hollywood and the second as the Soviet Union and communist countries. There was no specific place for films that would loosely fall under the heading of art films, yet this might be the category that Timbuktu most resembles if we think of the importance in Godard’s Contempt, for example, of slowing down a story through translation, with characters constantly speaking in a language that someone else has to interpret, or Antonioni’s Blow-Up, when it comes to imagination over actualisation. There is a scene in Timbuktu when the locals play a match without a football after the radicals insist games are banned, just as in Blow-Up, the students play tennis without a ball. However, in Godard and Antonioni films the choices seem provocations, brilliant instances of asking the viewer to think about the director’s aesthetic freedoms. Here, they become realistic examples of oppression when people ignorantly arrive in Timbuktu without a cultural or linguistic grasp of the environment, and where the locals insist they will play a game anyway even if they don’t have a ball to play it with. Sissako shows that African works needn’t fall into Third Cinema expectations but can draw on art film’s innovations to generate a pace that resembles the high modernism of European film. However, it is one very much for its own tranquil ends, no matter the brutality it also happens to invoke and that can turn art house moments into pragmatic survival.  

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Timbuktu

Speaking of Africa, Abderrahmane Sissako says, “…rather than emphasizing a difference, I think people are the same no matter where they are. And the problem is that they’re not portrayed as being the same.” (Film Comment) If Africa is often viewed as obscure Other, then the title of Timbuktu suggests a further sense of distance. In English, we have the saying, from here to Timbuktu, a phrase proposing that here is central and Timbuktu, peripheral — a place in the middle of nowhere. Sissako reckons it is the middle of somewhere, and should be in our consciousness not only as a trouble-spotwithin a much greater one: the continent of Africa. Though he based the film initially on an incident in 2012 after reading in a newspaper of a couple stoned to death under Sharia law, Sissako’s film is about the intrusion of a radical Islamist group in Mali, rather than its presence. This might seem like a pedantic distinction but it is one central to understanding the sensibility of the film. If the continent is so often in the news only because of a crisis taking place there, then in contrast, Sissako’s film is always on the side of a gentle, relaxed environment that is interrupted by buffoonish, hypocritical and, yes, murderous zealots. However, if one were to change this emphasis, playing up the murderous, we might be in a different type of film (The Last King of Scotland, Blackhawk Down or Blood Diamond). Sissako’s is closer to the deliberate pacing and lingering register of other works from west central Africa, like Ceddo, Yeelen, The Wind, Yaaba, Tilai, and Sissako’s earlier Waiting for Happiness. The film insists there is life constantly unfolding, not only a tragedy imposing itself on the people. 

          In such an approach, we have African films rather than films about Africa, and at the same time a cinema that needn’t be viewed only as one preoccupied with political ideology. An important term during the late sixties and seventies was Third Cinema, initially pertinent to Latin American film but broadened out to incorporate other nations loosely deemed Third World. It was ferociously political with filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino insisting  “the cinema that recognizes [in the anti-imperialist struggle in the Third World and its equivalents within the imperialist countries)…the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestations of our time…in a word, the decolonization of culture.” (The Cinema Book) African cinema would undeniably have been part of this. Roy Armes noted “filmmaking in Africa is fundamentally a postcolonial activity and experience…” (African Filmmaking) Yet, what we notice in many of the West African films quoted above isn’t the force of their claim but the mellowness of their mood. While Sissako might notice the similarity between people of all cultures, he would also well know that there are quite different ways to film them, and this too can be an ideological project. Rather than many cultures falling under the same filmic idiom, better surely that similarities are recognised humanly and yet where the style is singular.  “What I’m doing in the frame is inviting the viewer to enter into it. So I don’t impose the scene on them by saying: “Here, look at this. You’re gonna look at this.” And that’s why there are very few wide shots.”  (Film Comment) 

     What Sissako surely means by the use of wide shots is a beauty that needn’t be insisted upon but a frame that illustrates the landscape as a lived experience over a touristic gaze. While one side of Western cinema emphasises Africa as a place of adrenalised terror (in Blood Diamond, Blackhawk Down etc),  another shows us the continent as a place of exotic splendour: The African Queen, Born Free, Out of Africa and Gorillas in the Mist. While one image proposes it is a place of one’s worst nightmares, the other shows that Africa is a continent of our most desirable fantasies, with the camera attending to the natural environment as unnatural to us. This is the gaze Sissako resists, as though western films set in Africa often want to extract from the continent an image but are less interested in its rhythm. 

           This is why we are proposing Timbuktu and the other films from West Central Africa we have invoked aren’t so interested in the political as the ideological, but that the ideological is much more than the readily political. It is also the temporal. Another well-known phrase comes to mind: time is money, with many films offering this as a narrative dictum. If the film isn’t moving forward in a hurry, it must at least be moving slowly to appreciate a bit of beauty that can earn its keep as an image. But this doesn’t create an alternative rhythm to the experience of the film, just as someone hurtling from one city to the next, who stops every now and again to take a photograph, doesn’t alter the rhythm of their holiday. When Sissako proposes that “Africans are very often portrayed in a way that makes their issues seem mysterious, when in fact they’re really in many ways no different from Europeans” (Film Comment), this needn’t mean they must share a Western rhythm to their lives. When we see two of the film’s characters Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed dit Pono) and Satima (Toulou Kiki) discussing whether they should leave the area now the Islamic group is in town, it isn’t a conflictual scene to generate tension, but a leisurely account of a married couple discussing their options. Nothing in the scene escalates even if they don’t exactly agree.

        This refusal to use escalation for dramatic tension is often evident in the film, even in scenes where potentially extreme conflict might take place. We see it for example, when the new rules insist the women wear gloves and one who is selling fish says it is impossible to do the work wearing them. She is more irate than the men carrying guns who seem almost apologetic in the request. We see it too when gunmen go into the mosque and they’re told by a religious leader they cannot enter the house of God wearing shoes and carrying weapons. We see it again when Satima says to one of the radical Islamists, after he tells her to cover her head, that if he doesn’t like to see her hair he should look the other way.  Rather than forcing the victims into brutal submission, the radicals appear confused as the potential tension dissipates into doubt. It might be the radicals who are trying to force extreme Islam on the locals, but it seems the locals have a greater grounding in their faith than those trying to impose harsher laws upon them. The religious leader insists, after one of the radicals says, “you want to convince me to renounce Jihad,” that the radical is not in a position to speak of someone else’s jihad as he says it is a personal relationship with Allah rather than an imposition on others. Jihad has become known as meaning a holy war in a geo-political discussion between Islam and Christianity. However, as the religious leader makes clear, Jihad is working upon oneself and “may help us reject vanity and pride.”  

        There may be violence in the film, including those stoned and others shot, as well as a cow that is murdered — a death that propels a plot that is hardly in a hurry. Yet the tone is never on the side of the violent as the often mournful music offers a melancholic mood within a generally tranquil environment. While the film and television images of Africa show a continent war-torn, hungry and poor, with occasional forays into the tourist-exotic, Timbuktu accepts that violence intrudes upon the region but refuses to make it the dramatic force of the material. When we watch scenes from The Last King of Scotland, Blood Diamond and Black Hawk Down (none of them terrible films), we nevertheless aren’t just watching movies playing up a Hollywood template; we are also working with a tempo that emphasises action over stillness, conflict over contemplation. The films may be set respectively in Uganda, Sierra Leone and Somalia, but theseare works that take from the continent what they need for their dramatic ends and have little interest in African life beyond the crisis addressed. Template obliterates tempo.

         But as the great Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene says of his own work, “it was necessary to have a slowness that was, however, not too slow…I also worked a great deal on the decor. Each shot includes something which lets them see for themselves that their country is very beautiful…that our trees are just as pretty as others.” (Cineaste) Part of this slowness in the particular film Sembene is talking about (Emitai) rests on language and the same is so with Timbuktu, as those pushing the new laws on to the locals don’t speak the language and are in constant need of translation. Such a respect for the languages spoken is thus part of the tempo in Emitai and Timbuktu, as if everyone must have the patience to hear another language that takes time to translate. For a director interested in conflict, the misunderstanding isn’t there to slow the film down but to crank up the tension, as we find in The Last King of Scotland when the central kills a cow with Idi Amin’s gun.  His colleague is trying to explain to the locals they have to put the cow out of its misery and the confusion comes close to leading to catastrophic consequences. The doctor becomes so frustrated trying to attend to Amin’s broken wrist and the cow’s cries of pain, that he takes the dictator’s gun from a car roof and kills the cow himself. It looks like he might end up the way of the cow as Amin’s troops train their guns upon him. The problem of translationspeeds the film up; it doesn’t slow it down. 

              Speaking of his earlier Waiting for Happiness, Sissako said, “I think that happiness is an anticipation. In the conduct of a day. In the little everyday details. And that’s why there is this atmosphere of serenity in the film.” (Dokumen.Pub) He retains this serenity in Timbuktu no matter the terrors introduced and the tragedies that occur, as though what matters far more than the temporary drama is the ongoing existence and the values that contain them. When under the new Sharia law, Kidane looks like he is facing death because the family of the farmer he has accidentally killed might insist upon it, he says, “I’m at peace with death.” Later, after the decision is made that he will die, Kidane says “I’ll miss only one thing. A face. My daughter’s face. My wife’s. I’ll ask God if you have children — that he help you understand my pain. I don’t fear the death you’re giving me. It is part of me already…I’m ready.” The film, in the courtroom, cuts to the farmer’s family looking on, with no sense of triumph on their faces, and then to first the daughter and then the mother, drawing patterns in the sand back at home, aware that Kidane’s death would seem inevitable. Even though Samita will try and intervene, there is no narrative development to this decision, only a rushed action that quickly leads to both Kidane and Satima’s demise.

           When critics spoke of Third Cinema, they saw the first as Hollywood and the second as the Soviet Union and communist countries. There was no specific place for films that would loosely fall under the heading of art films, yet this might be the category that Timbuktu most resembles if we think of the importance in Godard’s Contempt, for example, of slowing down a story through translation, with characters constantly speaking in a language that someone else has to interpret, or Antonioni’s Blow-Up, when it comes to imagination over actualisation. There is a scene in Timbuktu when the locals play a match without a football after the radicals insist games are banned, just as in Blow-Up, the students play tennis without a ball. However, in Godard and Antonioni films the choices seem provocations, brilliant instances of asking the viewer to think about the director’s aesthetic freedoms. Here, they become realistic examples of oppression when people ignorantly arrive in Timbuktu without a cultural or linguistic grasp of the environment, and where the locals insist they will play a game anyway even if they don’t have a ball to play it with. Sissako shows that African works needn’t fall into Third Cinema expectations but can draw on art film’s innovations to generate a pace that resembles the high modernism of European film. However, it is one very much for its own tranquil ends, no matter the brutality it also happens to invoke and that can turn art house moments into pragmatic survival.  


© Tony McKibbin