The Long and the Short of It
Djibril Diop Mambety's Touki-Bouki and a short film

by Michael Nicolella

Touki-Bouki (The Hyena's Journey)

Written and Directed by Djibril Diop Mambety, 1973
Senegal. 95minutes. With English subtitles
Featuring Aminata Fall, Miriam Niang (Anta), Mgaye Niang (Mory), Mustapha Ture, Ndou Labia, Ousseynou Diop

Characters and imagery shift past one another throughout this tale of two young lovers who steal and scam to leave Dakar for Paris. As opening credits roll and the rhythm of a flute plays, a boy on an ox drives a herd through the grassland. The scene segues to a slaughterhouse where a white ox with great horns is tied and its throat is cut. While panning back to the grassland, an engine rattles into the soundtrack. Mory rides through a shantytown and out of the scene on a motorcycle with a cattle rack on its handlebars, followed by excited children. The camera pans through the neighborhood while an Imam calls, "Allah is great and Mamadou is his prophet…. Who can't wait will die of hunger," before it stops at a vegetable stand in a dusty plaza, where Anta studies and gets into arguments with her mother over traditional values and her brother who studies in France.

Symbol and situation in the film are powerful without overshadowing its characters. One brief scene with an unusual time progression assembles poverty, family, blood, mad laughter, sex, death, and surf washing the crags at the base of a cliff. In the next scene, Mory and Anta lounge nude with each other on a rock by the sea in the late afternoon and plot their way to Paris.

Symbol, situation, and character provide much for the viewer's imagination without making Touki-Bouki ponderous. In Africa, the baobab tree has mythic, medicinal, and practical significance. According to legend, the Devil planted the stunted, twisted tree upside down, or the Creator did so in order to stifle its moans. A common tree in Senegal, its placement in the film is just casual enough to be unobtrusive. When an eccentric young man who's gone native, recognized by passersby as "that white boy who lives in the baobab!" makes his entry from the branches of one near the finale, a sort of joke is sprung. During this later part of the film, Mory and Anta's exodus becomes a wry ensemble play of ambition and desire. The film does not depend on themes so much as on objects and personalities whose relationships are tested and resolved as Mory and Anta's love progresses, by moments, through the film. A mysterious steamer trunk that enters halfway through is one of many foci for viewers.

Miriam Niang and Mgaye Niang in Touki-Bouki.
Image courtesy Film Society at Lincoln Center.

The opening scene with the cattle drive and the slaughterhouse is shot unflinchingly in a documentary fashion. When the scene develops to include Mory riding his motorcycle, the shot appears to be unscripted, except for Niang's stage directions, and the passersby are included actively in the scene. Many parts of Touki-Bouki have as their backdrop the energy and the reactions of local citizens who apparently have been given minimal direction. The storytelling is quick and graceful.

Mambety (1945-1998) said of this, his most famous film, "Touki-Bouki is about Africans sick with the idea of Europe…. I see poetry everywhere, but my films are not poetic cinema. I have a very cruel vision of things - death is everywhere in my films (Variety)." In the showing at Lincoln Center, Touki-Bouki is preceded by la Grammaire de ma Grand'Mere (Grandma's Grammar), a nine-minute short in which Mambety gives his definition of filmmaking and his view of himself as a professional.

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Resources:

To view the schedule for the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Sixth African Film Festival, consult http://www. filmlinc.com/wrt/programs/5-2000/africa/africa.htm The festival continues from 19 May to 1 June.

Some of the films featured in the festival will be released in the United States and worldwide. Check your local listings.