African Video Movies and Global Desires. Carmela Garritano

World War I exposed the extent to which imperial Britain was vulnerable to a changing global economy and polity, World War II revealed the moral anachronism of the British Empire. With the visible cruelties of German and Italian Fascism and the invisible exploitation of American finance capitalism, Britain’s brand of colonialism looked awkwardly similar to the former and just plain awkward compared to the latter. Symptomatic of Britain’s changing imperial status in this new century, the British State became invested in earning the approbation of an emerging international community of nations by demonstrating its moral responsibility toward its colonies. (11)

      Colonial officials described the formal inauguration of film units in the colonies as one of its moral responsibilities, and this is clearly demonstrated in remarks made by Jones in his opening address at the 1948 conference “Film in Colonial Development”:

      I think we visualize today our colonial responsibility in a manner constructive and positive, in effect the creation of nationhood, the establishment of free political institutions, the creation of colonial democracies, democracies possessed with that sense of values which we prize in Western Europe and democracies supported by our social services and good economic conditions. (4)

      He continued to explain that training African filmmakers was imperative because “we are recognizing today that Empire (if we continue to use that particular word) is not an opportunity of exploitation to our material advantage, but the occasion of service” (Jones 1948, 4). At the same conference, the filmmaker John Grierson, who was at the time Films Controller at the Films Division of the Central Office of Information, emphasized that “international criticism is growing on how we use and develop our work in the colonies” (Grierson 1948, 12). He affirmed the new objective of the CFU: “It is no longer a question of people dropping into Africa to make a picture, to ‘do something’ for the natives as, only a generation ago, the Squire and his lady ‘did something’ for us. . . . It is a question of working with Africans and of creating a genuine African Unit that can work with native units in the other Colonies” (13). CFU’s motives, certainly, were not entirely in the interest of “serving” Africans. Film was believed to be an essential tool in educating Africans for citizenship, in the development of a national outlook, and in creating a Commonwealth sensibility among the soon-to-be former colonies of Britain (Smyth 1992; Jaikumar 2006).

      Film production began in West Africa in 1946 when a four-person production team came to the Gold Coast. Its inaugural film was Fight TB at Home (1946), followed by Weaving in Togoland (1948). In 1949, the CFU set up a film training school in Accra for West African students. Its aim “was to train students to a standard which would enable them to film local events in newsreel fashion and also to produce simple instructional films of more lasting importance” (Smyth 1992, 168). Among the first class were several Nigerians and Ghanaians, including Sam Aryeetey, who later became director of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation, R. O. Fenuku, and Bob Okanta. That same year, the Gold Coast Film Unit was organized, largely as a result of the success of the film training program. In 1949 the Unit was reorganized under the guidance of Sean Graham, and within seven years it had become one of the best-equipped film units in Africa capable of shooting films and completing postproduction editing and sound recording in its Accra facilities. The GCFU shot on 35mm film, and Africans were trained in all aspects of filmmaking. It was Graham, however, who directed most productions; even African students trained under him were rarely given the chance to create and direct their own films. This system, Manthia Diawara (1992) argues, impaired the Ghanaian national film company, leaving it at independence with an inexperienced production team and, because the unit used 35mm instead of 16mm film, reliant on the Overseas Film and Television Unit in London for film processing. Before independence, the unit’s staff consisted of three Europeans and twenty Africans. All were men. A few of the African filmmakers were sent to London for advanced training (Advance 1956, 9), and between 1949 and 1956, the unit made forty-four films. The majority of these films were educational documentaries, although a few feature films were also produced. Titles included Amenu’s Child (1950), The Boy Kumasenu (1952), Theresa, the Story of a Nurse in Training (1955), and Mr. Mensah Builds a House (1955).20 Many of the unit’s films were released commercially in Ghana while they were exported for nontheatrical release in Britain and other Commonwealth countries.21

      African film units operating under the jurisdiction of the Colonial Film Unit (CFU) were guided by the filmmaking theories of George Pearson and William Sellers, leading figures at the CFU. Pearson and Sellers believed that films made for African audiences would be most effective if they employed a primitive film style: “a simple doctrine for gaining by cinema, and holding by cinema, the attention of an illiterate audience, while imparting knowledge that is appreciated and later applied” (Pearson 1948, 24). Informed by colonial and racist notions about the “native” African, the primitive style purged from its productions “all the conventional methods for short-circuiting time and place” (25), such as mixes, montage, and wipes. Camera movements such as panning and dollying were prohibited because “trees seemingly running along the far horizon, buildings apparently rising or sinking, static objects seeming to move of their own volition, only divert [the native’s] attention from the scene message to the mystery of seeming magic” (25). Films were required to maintain “visual continuity from scene to scene” and, because “the native mind needs longer time to absorb the picture content,” to adopt a slow pace. Manthia Diawara (1992) aptly points out that the CFU

      wanted to turn back film history and develop a different type of cinema for Africans because they considered the African mind too primitive to follow the sophisticated narrative techniques of mainstream cinema. Thus they thought it necessary to return to the beginning of film history—to use uncut scenes, slow down the story’s pace, and make the narrative simpler by using fewer actors and adhering to just one dominant theme. (4)

      Most significant to the analysis of The Boy Kumasenu is Pearson’s effort to distinguish the primitive style from “our British Documentary” (Pearson 1948, 25), a reference to the work of Grierson and the filmmakers who worked with him in developing the British Documentary Movement of the 1930s and ’40s. While acknowledging the British documentary’s “power, under wise control, to do magnificent work towards colonial development,” Pearson insists that its comprehension lies beyond “the illiterate field” that is Africa (25). He writes: “In that field of work Documentary technique, excellent as it is for its cinema-minded audiences, is useless for ours. It uses a pictorial idiom beyond the comprehension of the illiterate” (26).

      In Close-Up: The Boy Kumasenu

      Although firmly rooted in colonial discourses of modernity and in imperialist ideology, many of the films made in the Gold Coast are noteworthy in their deviations from the primitive aesthetics developed for colonial educational and propaganda films. Smyth notes that the Gold Coast Film Unit distinguished itself by “attempting to break new ground in the format to get around the problem of patronizing commentaries and simplistic plots of many of the CFU films” (1992, 169). Jean Rouch, too, has remarked on the “high quality, both technically and dramatically” of the unit’s films (2003, 66). Rouch credits the unit’s achievements to the decision, made by Graham, to “split off fairly early from the Colonial Film Unit, in favor of association with groups of independent English producers” (2003, 66). Graham recruited filmmakers such as Basil Wright, Terry Bishop, and George Noble to participate in various capacities in GCFU productions. Additionally, according to Sam Aryeetey, Graham worked collaboratively with the young African trainees involved in his productions (personal communication). He drew on their creativity and solicited from them information about local audiences.

      Larkin (2008) describes two types of cinema distribution in colonial Nigeria: commercial cinema theaters, which exhibited feature films from the US and UK; and the mobile cinema vans, which screened colonial content exclusively. In The Boy Kumasenu Graham merges commercial and colonial forms in an entertaining and educational colonial feature film that audiences both in the colonies and in England would pay to see. The Boy Kumasenu incorporates the conventions of the British documentary and Hollywood narrative cinema to create a sympathetic African subject, Kumasenu, from whose point of view most of the film is focalized. In this and other ways, it also challenges the pervasive, racist representations of Africa in British and American commercial films. It featured only black African actors, recasting