Coming Soon
ARISTOTLE’S PLOT
1996
Director
Jean-Pierre Bekolo
Starring
Albee Lesotho
Seputla Sebogodi
Anthony Levendale
Ken Gampu
Runtime
72 minutes
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CAMEROONIAN FILMMAKER JEAN-PIERRE BEKOLO WILL BE IN ATTENDANCE FOR ALL 7:30 SCREENINGS IN THIS RETROSPECTIVE!
The best tool for outlaws is and always will be cinema.
The ultimate contemplation on the relationship between African filmmakers and African audiences is Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s ARISTOTLE’S PLOT. Commissioned by the British Film Institute, Bekolo went out and made an ambitiously complex essayist narrative film that became the first African film to get into Sundance.
Cineaste Essomba Tourneur (aka E.T.) has just returned home from his travels to an Africa that is no longer familiar to him – the citizens have become influenced by an onslaught of imported Hollywood action films at the local cinema and have begun, acting like characters from corny action flicks, or, as the narrator suggests, “imitating imitations of life.” The band of angsty cinephiles, with names like Cinema, Cobra and Bruce Lee, have no respect for African film and kick E.T. out. As an African filmmaker himself, E.T. rightfully takes issue with Cinema and his gang’s Western ideals and begins to plot their downfall, turning into a TERMINATOR-esque character himself.
In a lineage of films that wrestle with the issues of representation, spectatorship and narrative (Kiarostami’s CLOSE-UP, Godard’s LES CARIBINIERS) what is at stake in ARISTOTLE’S PLOT is reality versus fiction threatening the very fabric of society. As E.T. and Cinema and his gang of film bros amp up their attacks on each other, the film transforms into the very form it criticizes, but as a distinctly African film at the same time– critiquing both sides of the argument and landing on neither side. Bekolo’s carefully constructed cinematic style weaves in and out of a Brechtian political criticism and pure Hollywood-esque entertainment with a lyrical essayist sensibility that blends either party together at the filmic level.
This screening is promoted in partnership with Black Cinema Collective, a group of multicultural artists and scholars who examine and celebrate works of African and Afro-diasporic filmmakers.
The best tool for outlaws is and always will be cinema.
The ultimate contemplation on the relationship between African filmmakers and African audiences is Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s ARISTOTLE’S PLOT. Commissioned by the British Film Institute, Bekolo went out and made an ambitiously complex essayist narrative film that became the first African film to get into Sundance.
Cineaste Essomba Tourneur (aka E.T.) has just returned home from his travels to an Africa that is no longer familiar to him – the citizens have become influenced by an onslaught of imported Hollywood action films at the local cinema and have begun, acting like characters from corny action flicks, or, as the narrator suggests, “imitating imitations of life.” The band of angsty cinephiles, with names like Cinema, Cobra and Bruce Lee, have no respect for African film and kick E.T. out. As an African filmmaker himself, E.T. rightfully takes issue with Cinema and his gang’s Western ideals and begins to plot their downfall, turning into a TERMINATOR-esque character himself.
In a lineage of films that wrestle with the issues of representation, spectatorship and narrative (Kiarostami’s CLOSE-UP, Godard’s LES CARIBINIERS) what is at stake in ARISTOTLE’S PLOT is reality versus fiction threatening the very fabric of society. As E.T. and Cinema and his gang of film bros amp up their attacks on each other, the film transforms into the very form it criticizes, but as a distinctly African film at the same time– critiquing both sides of the argument and landing on neither side. Bekolo’s carefully constructed cinematic style weaves in and out of a Brechtian political criticism and pure Hollywood-esque entertainment with a lyrical essayist sensibility that blends either party together at the filmic level.
This screening is promoted in partnership with Black Cinema Collective, a group of multicultural artists and scholars who examine and celebrate works of African and Afro-diasporic filmmakers.