In one of the early scenes of The Cemetery of Cinema, Guinean director Thierno Souleymane Diallo, who is also the film’s main subject, spells out his goal, as he seeks maternal benediction. He wants to find a film made in 1953, during the French colonisation. The film’s title is Mouramani and its director is Mamadou Touré, about whom not much is known. Scholars of African film history may have heard about these 23 minutes, which has pioneer claims, but as with many pioneer tales, the film comes with several stories of its provenance.
Appropriately, the first speaker Diallo meets on the subject says he doesn’t know the film. That ends quickly and our hero moves on. His quest takes him to Cinema Vox, where we see abandoned film equipment, ostensibly once functional in service of stories no one now knows. This is a quest on which young people can be of hardly any help, and so yet another old man explains what we are looking at.
There was indeed a cinema that had a fair bit of popularity for the populace but it was closed in 1995. Apparently, there was a stampede and a few deaths were recorded. Diallo unspools reels and attempts to guess what they at one point showed. He identifies one as porn and is curious to know if adult material was ever shown at the cinema. His respondents look fairly incredulous but say it was probably at night and for actual adults—not that this information brings him closer to what he seeks.
At some point, he starts to ask if the film is a myth. No one wants to agree. But they are quite forthcoming in talking about the days when cinema was a thing enjoyed by Guineans. As one can expect, an older man expresses his displeasure at what constitutes visual entertainment today.
Along the way, Diallo’s quest begins to make one point clear to viewers: cinema history is really national history. During one interview involving a selection of films that are decades old, he is told that Guinea had a relationship with socialist countries such that some European countries collaborated with the government by sending down films. As some viewers would know, that relationship was hardly a bloodless one, connected as it is to a violent continental history.
Some of these relationship were built during the Cold War, where the U.S. government’s battle against socialist countries extended to African countries, many of which were cultivated to rebuff Soviet advances. Guinea’s neighbour Congo, for example, was caught in the middle of the politics of the time and one of its enduring leaders, Patrice Lumumba, would eventually attempt to navigate those warring passions to tragic effect.
But that is hardly Diallo’s concern. His film is political but not so explicitly. In fact, the one question asked by The Cemetery of Cinema is presumable apolitical: How is it that a country that seemed to have this rich cinematic history has had barely any imprint on cinematic culture, whether in Africa or outside of Africa? The answer comes in an interview in the documentary’s concluding half: a swathe of media professionals ended up jailed. After that, whatever momentum the filmmaking industry had was destroyed. Today, the types of films enjoyed by a large section of the populace are populist entertainment sold in the markets as DVDs and VCDs. Our hero asks a seller for Mouramani. Of course, she is not selling it. Why would anyone looking to make a buck be selling a 23-minute film made in the 1950s?
Diallo finally gets the message, which certainly he must have known even before filming: France is where everything historically important in Francophone Africa gets kept. “You won’t find anything in Guinea,” one man says, almost angrily. “It is impossible…We have no culture of archives.”
And so, our hero heads to Europe, where he was always headed. In fact, you could say that, without the theatrics of seeking and the pressures of making a feature-length project, Diallo’s entire film should take place in Europe. It is where the ancestor he seeks was taught, where the country that ruled over his own country is located, it is the place funding his film, and it is the place where his documentary is getting its first public screening (it is showing in the Panorama section of the 2023 Berlinale).
A lot of what viewers see in his home country — the director’s own barefooted strolls and a passage involving kids carrying toy guns as though in an action film — are just the type of things that get welcomed in Europe. Our hero didn’t make the rules but, on the evidence of The Cemetery of Cinema, he does know how to play the game. But now that his mastery of the game has been rewarded, one hopes that Diallo will make his own rules and his own movie the next time he takes to the field. It would be a shame if his next film goes the way of Mouramani which, as one Frenchman says, left no cultural footprint.
Director: Thierno Souleymane Diallo
Cinematography: Leïla Chaïbi, Thierno Souleymane Diallo
Editing: Aurélie Jourdan, Marianne Haroche
Music: Dom Peter
Sound: Ophélie Boully, Jean-Marie Salque
Producers: Maud Martin, Jean-Pierre Lagrange, Marie-Louise Sarr, Alpha Amadou Diouldé Diallo
Production Companies: L’image d’après (France), JPL Productions (France), Lagune Productions (Senegal)
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Panorama)
In French, Eastern Maninkakan, Pulaar
93 minutes
