The Forest (literal translation of French title: The Silence of the Forest), directed by Didier Ouenangare and Bassek ba Kobhio, is supposedly the first-ever feature film from the Central African Republic. (Bassek ba Kobhio is Camerounian, and made several films there, including an excellent deconstruction of the myth of Albert Schweitzer, Le grand blanc de Lambarene). It’s a powerful, but strangely divided movie.
The first half of The Forest works as political satire. Gonaba, the protagonist (played by Eric Ebouaney) has idealistically returned to the CAR after getting an excellent French education, because he wants to help improve his country. But what he has found instead is corruption, stagnation, empty concern with pomp and ceremony, and all the other political ailments of so much of contemporary Africa. He’s concerned with injustice — opposing the racist contempt in which the majority of the CAR regard the Biaka people (the so-called “Pigmies”) — but also pompous, condescending, and colonialist-minded (his girlfriend tells him she likes him because he has “the body of a black man and the mind of a white man”).
All this changes in the second half of the film, when Gonaba flees into the jungle and joins a Biaka community. He arrives thinking he will teach them to read and write French, thus raising them up to equality with the rest of the country. But instead of teaching them, he learns from them: he “goes native,” joining their group, being initiated into their ways, and marrying (and having a child with) a Biaka woman. In this portion of the film, the satirical knowingness of the first part totally dissolves. Instead we get a Rousseauian vision of “noble savages.” All the Biaka roles are played by Biaka people who are not professional actors, and much of this section of the film displays, in almost an “ethnographic film” manner, their customs and rituals.
Eventually, Gonaba is forced to leave and return to “civilization”: but we are meant to feel that he learned a more honest and authentic way of life from the Biaka.
The trouble with this is, of course, that the idealized vision of “noble savages” is itself a European racist and colonialist point of view: it’s just the flip side of the dismissal of “savages” as primitive, ignorant, and not-quite-human. The “noble savage” view, just as much as the flat-out racist view, effaces the social and individual reality of the people thus characterized. And usually, as in this film, it uses the vision of “noble primitives” merely as an enabler for the “civilized” person’s self-discovery.
So it’s strange, and more than a little distressing, to see an African film that, after critiquing the Euro-colonialist mindset, ends up adopting that mindset itself. I wish I could convince myself that the filmmakers were self-conscious about this irony; but I can find no evidence that this is the case.
The Forest
The Forest (literal translation of French title: The Silence of the Forest), directed by Didier Ouenangare and Bassek ba Kobhio, is supposedly the first-ever feature film from the Central African Republic. (Bassek ba Kobhio is Camerounian, and made several films there, including an excellent deconstruction of the myth of Albert Schweitzer, Le grand blanc de Lambarene). It’s a powerful, but strangely divided movie.
The first half of The Forest works as political satire. Gonaba, the protagonist (played by Eric Ebouaney) has idealistically returned to the CAR after getting an excellent French education, because he wants to help improve his country. But what he has found instead is corruption, stagnation, empty concern with pomp and ceremony, and all the other political ailments of so much of contemporary Africa. He’s concerned with injustice — opposing the racist contempt in which the majority of the CAR regard the Biaka people (the so-called “Pigmies”) — but also pompous, condescending, and colonialist-minded (his girlfriend tells him she likes him because he has “the body of a black man and the mind of a white man”).
All this changes in the second half of the film, when Gonaba flees into the jungle and joins a Biaka community. He arrives thinking he will teach them to read and write French, thus raising them up to equality with the rest of the country. But instead of teaching them, he learns from them: he “goes native,” joining their group, being initiated into their ways, and marrying (and having a child with) a Biaka woman. In this portion of the film, the satirical knowingness of the first part totally dissolves. Instead we get a Rousseauian vision of “noble savages.” All the Biaka roles are played by Biaka people who are not professional actors, and much of this section of the film displays, in almost an “ethnographic film” manner, their customs and rituals.
Eventually, Gonaba is forced to leave and return to “civilization”: but we are meant to feel that he learned a more honest and authentic way of life from the Biaka.
The trouble with this is, of course, that the idealized vision of “noble savages” is itself a European racist and colonialist point of view: it’s just the flip side of the dismissal of “savages” as primitive, ignorant, and not-quite-human. The “noble savage” view, just as much as the flat-out racist view, effaces the social and individual reality of the people thus characterized. And usually, as in this film, it uses the vision of “noble primitives” merely as an enabler for the “civilized” person’s self-discovery.
So it’s strange, and more than a little distressing, to see an African film that, after critiquing the Euro-colonialist mindset, ends up adopting that mindset itself. I wish I could convince myself that the filmmakers were self-conscious about this irony; but I can find no evidence that this is the case.