Yes. When you walk from outside to the inside of most rural African houses, you come from a very bright sunlight to a very dark space where, for a moment, you are totally blind. It takes some time to get adjusted to the darkness inside. This experience is one of the conceptual bases of
. To move inside oneself, one has to be willing to go intermittently blind. Similarly, to move toward other people, one has to take the jump and move ahead blindly at certain moments of inquiry. If one is not even momentarily blind, if one remains as one is from the outside or from the inside, then it is unlikely that one can break through that moment where suddenly everything stops, one's luggage is emptied out, and one moves in a state of nonknowingness, where destabilizing encounters with the 'unfamiliar' or 'unknown' are multiplied and experienced anew.
Since as a technology, film captures light, the traditional
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From
(1985).
assumption has been that anything that's dark is not worth looking at. At most, darkness is a context for romance and for danger. Even in a documentary, we'd either never see the types of dimly lit spaces you reveal, or they'd be lit artificially, which would allow the technology to record them, but in a way that would distort the real experience of such spaces. The technology determines what one can see about other cultures. You depart from this not only by recording indoor spaces in their own natural low-light conditions, but by revealing the beauty of these spaces.
You can imagine these houses being shot with a light inside. The quality of solid darkness and the shafts of light that penetrate the inside spaces would totally be damaged.
Instead of intimateif that's the right wordthe spaces would become bare, empty.
Yes, yes. The question of cinema and light is pivotal in
. Dwelling is both material and immaterial; it invites volume and shape, and it reflects a cosmology and a way of living creatively. In other words, to deal with architecture is to deal with the notion of light in space. To deal with the notion of light in space is to deal with color, and to deal with color is to deal with music, because the question of light in film is also a question of timing and rhythm. Such mutual accord of elements of daily existence is particularly striking in the built environments filmed and the way these materialize the multiple oneness of life.
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There are a number of direct statements on color and color timing in the text of
[''Color is life /
'; '
']. The look of a film and how people are represented depends so vitally on color timing. For me, it has always been crucial to work closely with the color timer, especially in
. Very often, when films shot in Africa reach the lab, they are treated the same way as films shot in Western cultures; that is, they are timed more on the blue side of the color chart for people with fair skin. Hence, the African people often come out with a skin color that is dull charcoal black. This is not the vibrant skin color that I saw and remembered, so I devoted much of my energy at the lab learning from and cooperating with the timer on 'color correcting,' insisting whenever appropriate, on the orange and warmer colors to obtain the usually missing vibrant quality of African skin tones.
The relationship I worked on between color and light was also the link I drew between architecture, music, and film. The connections that determine the structure of the film are those that I have experienced in the living spaces of the different peoples involved. The roundness of life is not only literally manifested in the round shape of many of the houses. It is also recognizable in all spheres of sociocultural activity, such as the various dances shown or even the way women work together. 'The house opens onto the sky in a perfect circle.' a voice states in
and the subtitle of the film is 'Living Is Round.'
You were talking about music and architecture. Certainly one of the things that's unusual about both African films is the sound tracks: the movement back and forth between music, other everyday sounds, the various narrators, and silence. I assume this interweaving of different strands of sound and silence derives from your interest in music.
I guess now I can come back to your earlier question about the film background I don't really have, by relating the way I work with film to my musical background. I fare with ease in the world of experimental music, perhaps because of the cultural hybridity of both its instrumentation and its deterritorialized spacethe way it questions the boundaries of what is music and what is not. I really admired, for example, John Cage, whose Zen- inspired compositions and readings have effected radical change in all fields of the arts. I was very attracted to his work because it touched on something I was similarly groping for but had not articulated. The fact that Cage brought silence and the sounds of life into the consecrated realm of concert halls and out into the domain of public debate, was very liberating. 'Experimental music' in this context is a constant exploration of sound as sound, rather than as a substitute
