African Video Movies and Global Desires. Carmela Garritano
spatial arrangement of this format, integrating Adobia’s musical number more smoothly into the space of the film’s narrative. The camera’s movement, furthermore, does not penetrate the closed-off world of the diegesis. Shot/reverse shot editing and eyeline matching focalize the spectator through Kumasenu’s gaze, which remains fixed on Adobia. Only the soundtrack, as I described previously, and, significantly, the display of Adobia as object of desire, “break[s] apart the diegetic universe.” Positioned as spectacle, her image, and the musical performance it is set within, disturb the trajectory of the narrative and invite a different engagement from the spectator. She is a thing to be looked at. Captured in close-up, Adobia’s image functions as a projection of Kumasenu’s desire, and it is this visualization of his desire that documents the presence of an interiority that reveals him as a subject. She is the surface on which his interiority, his subjectivity, and the “active power” of his gaze (Mulvey 1989, 20) are inscribed.
Having disavowed Agboh and Adobia and abandoned superstition and lineage ties, Kumasenu approaches the conclusion of his narrative, and the closing segment of the film returns to a pronouncement about work, emphasizing that work is as crucial to the modern nation as is absorption into the Westernized family. Kumasenu’s labor, to be legitimate, must be modernized, as demonstrated in the final scenes of the film. A shot of Kumasenu, lying on his back after his last tussle with Agboh, dissolves to a panoramic view of the village coast. A slow pan across the beach lands on a long shot of Faiwoo, sitting beneath a tree and mending a fishing-net. The narrator announces that “the story” of Agboh’s fate and his nephew’s role in it had “traveled far up the coast.” Thinking about his nephew’s future as a fisherman on a new boat called the Lydia, the narrator says that Faiwoo, who at that moment casts his glance out toward the sea, “spoke quietly to himself, making of his words a prayer.” The “prayer” is worth quoting in full:
Oh Father of the winds and seas, if it be thy wish that these new things come to pass, then let thy hand fall lightly on [those] on whom the dangerous burden of change must fall. Let them find strong hands among their people to help and guide them. Give them strength and fortitude, for their way into the new world is set about with snares and pitfalls, which can cause great, great suffering if they stray too far from the old ways, if they stray too far, too soon.
Faiwoo’s ventriloquized prayer erases the authoritative and exploitative hand of British colonialism, which is rewritten as change, inevitable and natural. An image of Kumasenu, sitting among a fishing crew on a motorized fishing boat, spools over Faiwoo’s prayer. Smiling broadly, his hand on the engine, Kumasenu waves to Dr. and Mrs. Tamakloe, who watch from the pier. “Thus the past uttered its wisdom and spoke to the future,” concludes the narrator, as on the image track, Kumasenu’s motorboat overtakes a group of traditional fishing boats, powered by groups of rowing men. This image narrates not only the passage of the old into the new, but the assimilation of the old and what is presented as modernized and new. This work as a fisherman, unlike the job he performed miserably in the store, guarantees Kumasenu’s modernity and declares that as a worker and a man, the modern city, a metonym for the liberal nation, has a place for him. The film ends by offering a paternalistic warning to the soon-to-be independent nation of Ghana and its guardians: “Sail boldly into the new, but let the wake of your craft be gentle. Let your past remain upright and proud until we build our ships of the same timber.” The only trace of Kumasenu’s village life allowed entry into the modern city is the work he has been assigned to do.
The Ghana Film Industry Corporation and the Challenges of Film Production in Ghana
At independence in 1957, film production was nationalized in Ghana. As Anne Mette Jørgensen notes, Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, “was highly aware of the potential role of the mass media in Nation building” (2001, 122). Nkrumah upgraded the country’s radio infrastructure, inaugurated, in 1965, the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), a noncommercial, state-controlled television station, and erected new facilities for the national film company. The state, understood as the protector of Ghanaian values and culture, exercised a great deal of control over film production. GFIC owned the filmmaking equipment and controlled the importation of film stock. It trained and employed many of the filmmakers working in the country and played a central role in the inauguration and staffing of the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI), a film and video training institute, founded in 1979. GFIC selected and supported those among its employees who would study at NAFTI or travel to the British Film Institute or the Film and Television Institute of India for training. It also censored all films exhibited in the country, and after purchasing West African Pictures in 1956, had significant control over film exhibition in Ghana.27 GFIC owned and operated six cinemas in Accra: the Rex, Royal, Regal, Roxy, Plaza, and the Film Theatre, located on the grounds of the film company. It also owned the Rex at Asamankese and the Dam at Akosombo.
At its founding, the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) was charged with using film to educate and modernize the masses, to define and celebrate traditional values, to develop a unifying national consciousness, and to counter stereotypical representations of Africa and Africans abroad.28 GFIC was a node on a network of artistic, media, and cultural institutions founded or enhanced by Nkrumah “to meet the demands of the new state of Ghana” (Agovi 1992, 4). Among these were the Institute of African Studies and the School of Music and Drama at the University of Ghana, and the film company worked collaboratively with both academic units in its formative years. It is worth emphasizing, too, that the first generation of Ghanaian filmmakers were, like the first African writers, “products of the institutions that colonialism had introduced and developed” (Gikandi 2004, 379). Among the first filmmakers and managing directors at GFIC were many former students of the Gold Coast Film Unit, including Sam Aryeetey. Others, such as Ernest Abbeyquaye and Bernard Odjidja, received instruction in filmmaking at the British Film Institute. Sean Graham remained at GFIC as managing director until 1965, when the Ghanaian novelist, Kofi Awoonor was appointed to administer the company from 1965 to 1967. No women were included among this group of filmmakers. GFIC’s output, although extremely limited and generally inconsistent, was in every instance informed by the ideologies of anticolonialism and cultural nationalism. As Chris Hesse explained, the company’s aim was to educate and “boost our cultural heritage” (personal communication). Simon Gikandi’s claim about “the key motivations” for the creation of a modern African literature applies with equal validity to the genesis of film production in Ghana. Its driving force was the restoration of “the moral integrity and cultural authority of the African in the age of decolonization” (Gikandi 2004, 381). Likewise, the central paradox confronted by this first generation of African writers, intellectuals, and filmmakers was that in order to oppose colonial domination and assert the rights of Africans they had to “turn to a recently discovered European language of tradition, nation, and race” (382).
Incorporating codes and conventions affiliated with West African oral traditions, the earliest features produced by GFIC represent attempts to Africanize film. The company aspired to the articulation of a distinctly Ghanaian national cinema. To again borrow a particularly apt phrase from Phil Rosen, GFIC mobilized “a culturally rooted stylization” of narrative and address in order to “collectivize” its Ghanaian audience (2001, 297). This objective is perhaps most pronounced in the first production of the newly independent company, No Tears for Ananse (1965). Based on the play Ananse and the Gum Man (1965) by Ghanaian playwright Joe de Graft, who from 1961 to 1969 served as head of the drama division of the School of Music and Drama at the University of Ghana, and written and directed by Sam Aryeetey, the film re-creates the performance of an Anansesem, or a tale of the trickster Ananse. It intends to celebrate the richness of Akan oral tradition and, like the first modern African literary texts, to illustrate in the famous words of Chinua Achebe that “African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans” (Achebe 1975, 8).
As much as Aryeetey’s film taps into a reservoir of cultural knowledge in its incorporation of oral tradition, it also exploits the narrative and theatrical capacities of cinema to produce a sense of national identity based in the articulation of a shared culture and the organization of a national space. Ravi S. Vasudevan (2001) has described the new and emergent forms of subjectivity constituted in Hindi commercial cinema during the first decade after Indian independence, suggesting that the mixed modes of address and systems of narration that structure