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049 RIDW
245 00 Ainsi Meurent Les Anges (And So Angels Die).
264 1 [San Francisco, California, USA] :|bKanopy Streaming,
|c2015.
300 1 online resource (1 video file, approximately 58 min.) :
|bdigital, .flv file, sound
336 two-dimensional moving image|btdi|2rdacontent
337 computer|bc|2rdamedia
338 online resource|bcr|2rdacarrier
344 digital
347 video file|bMPEG-4|bFlash
500 Title from title frames.
518 Originally produced by California Newsreel in 2001.
520 Moussa Sene Absa's latest work pushes the formal
boundaries of African cinema to explore the complex
interplay of history and psychology in contemporary
Africa. Intensely personal and at the same time deeply
political, Ainsi meurent les anges combines the elegiac
lyricism of his Ça twiste à Poponguine with the acerbic
social critique of Tableau Ferraille. What is perhaps most
surprising is that this creative freedom was won precisely
by working within the constraints of new low-budget video
technology. Appearing the same year as Karmen Geï and Faat
Kine, it attests to the continuing vitality of Senegalese
filmmaking as it propels African cinema in boldly
innovative directions. Ainsi meurent les anges shows how a
"dream deferred" can become a nightmare, how a stolen past
can make the present impossible and render modernity
untenable, how history can become paralyzed. It is a film
about the loss of innocence - by an individual and by an
entire generation. These lost possibilities, these
foregone selves, irrecoverable yet unforgettable, are the
angels of the title. They are not the absolute, unhearing
angels of Rilke's Duino Elegies or even the sympathetic
onlookers of Wim Wender's Wings of Desire; they are
aspects of ourselves, fragile as human hope. This theme of
the penetration of the present by the past, of the
narrative by the subconscious, is given structural
articulation through the dizzying intercutting of color
and black-and-white sequences in the film's bravura
opening. Color footage introduces us to Mory, a troubled
Senegalese poet (played by writer/director Moussa Sene
Absa himself) living outside Paris with his French wife
and their children. We watch his marriage fall apart under
crosscultural pressures, specifically his father's demand
that he take a second wife in Senegal. Homeless in winter,
separated from his children, his poems scattered over a
Paris street, Mory returns to Senegal, penniless and with
uncertain prospects. At the same time, black-and-white
sequences reveal the psychological origins of Mory's
present malaise: his belated discovery that he is the
stepson of his abusive father, his early love for Kumba,
his father's destruction of that love out of caste bigotry
and sexual envy; Kumba's subsequent marriage to a rich man
and death in childbirth, and Mory's disillusioned
departure for France. Interspersed throughout the film,
the director's poetry frames the cinematic present within
a language of memory and loss - Mory's and Africa's. As in
other films in this collection (Faat Kine, Fathers)
patriarchy, here seen in the mythic conflict between son
and father, takes on historical and political resonance,
specifically the theft of Africa's future - first by
slavery and colonialism and now by a corrupt post-colonial
elite. Mory has lost Kumba, the hope for a post-
independence Africa free of traditional authoritarianism,
yet he cannot retreat into an alien European modernity as
the conspicuousness of his African dress in France
symbolizes. In the end, Mory also loses contemporary
Africa when his intended second wife, Yacine, frustrated
by his indecision and poverty, marries a rich German, in a
clear reference to Africa's growing indebtedness to the
West. Director Moussa Sene Absa wants to make further
sociological claims for this father-son metaphor. "This
film presented me with the question of how to approach the
problem of the father in a society where he occupies an
untouchable place. African man has not looked his father
in the eyes. How else can we explain the violent,
fratricidal rage which spreads across this continent? It
is a matter of understanding the Oedipal complex in the
African context through the experience of an intellectual
who has missed his calling." Mory is the familiar figure
of the "lost" African, at home neither in Europe nor in
Africa; he is denied a family and a narrative on both
continents. He is in the end, literally and metaphorically,
a man on the quay, a man in continual transit, an exile
from the present. He may remind us of another Mory in
Senegalese cinema, the dreamer/hero of Djibril Diop
Mambety's seminal Touki Bouki (1973), who was also last
seen alone on a dock, without a clear future, watching a
ship head away toward Europe. "Ainsi Meurent les Anges is
one of the most beautiful and challenging films I've seen
in a long time. It is sincere, simple, life-like and it
moved me to tears." - Euzhan Palcy "A formerly daring film
by a consistently innovative talent which indicates how
video technology is changing African filmmaking. One of
the most psychologically complex portrayals in African
cinema." - Mahen Bonetti, New York Film Festival "Echoes
of Birago Diop and David Diop?s negritude poems speak to a
suffering yet proud Africa . . .The poetic title signals
the poignant and dramatic quality of Mory's experience,
but also Sene Absa?s determination to embrace a ruptured
expression of beauty." - Kenneth W. Harrow, Michigan State
University.
538 Mode of access: World Wide Web.
650 0 Social conditions|xFathers and son relationship|vDrama
|zAfrica|zSenegal.
650 0 Poets|vDrama|zFrance|zParis.
650 0 Abused children|vDrama.
650 0 Interethnic marriage|vDrama.
655 7 Feature films.|2lcgft
700 1 Absa, Moussa Sene |d1958-|efilm director.
710 2 Kanopy (Firm)
856 40 |uhttps://rider.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://
rider.kanopy.com/node/139612|zStreaming video via Kanopy.
Access restricted to current Rider University students,
faculty, and staff.
856 42 |zCover Image|uhttps://www.kanopy.com/node/139612/external
-image
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