THE BEST TOOL FOR OUTLAWS IS AND WILL ALWAYS BE CINEMA: THE FILMS OF JEAN-PIERRE BEKOLO
Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s stirring futurist cinema creates paradoxes and brand new philosophical inquiries by subverting expectations of African cinema. Blurring external pre-conceptions and internal understandings of what African cinema is or should be, Bekolo’s aesthetic mode is one that “merrily tosses it all together.” Bekolo’s experiences have led him from a bachelors in physics, to the Cameroonian television industry, through the mentorship of Christian Metz and into the world of academia and auteurism. His vision is two-fold, like the French artists and critics of Cahiers du Cinema with a particular artistic vision rooted in a wealth of filmic knowledge and criticism. Each of his films are interventions in knowledge, complicating a history of Western representations of African people and places and more broadly proving that cinematic representation is itself an illusion with real life implications. His interventions remain freshly relevant to the medium as he continues his work as both a scholar and artist.
The Beacon is honored to be hosting Jean-Pierre Bekolo in person May 7-9 for three Q&A’s!
This series 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.
Films in this Program
Jean-Pierre Bekolo
80 minutes
CAMEROONIAN FILMMAKER JEAN-PIERRE BEKOLO WILL BE IN ATTENDANCE FOR ALL 7:30 SCREENINGS IN THIS RETROSPECTIVE!
Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s first feature length film is a gender farce and coming-of-age tale that extends beyond any of the generic conventions that it dips its toes into. All taking place during a 48-hour period in the working class neighborhood of Mozart and combining urban legend with a sprinkling of witchcraft, QUARTIER MOZART follows a rebellious young girl known to her neighbors as Queen of the Hood. During a late night rant with her neighbor, a friendly middle-aged woman known to be a witch, Queen admits to wishing she could be a boy just to know what it's like. She gets her wish alright – the next thing she knows, Queen has transformed into MyGuy, a total stud whom everyone in town either wants to fight or lay.
As MyGuy pursues the tyrannical police chief’s daughter Saturday, he is pressured into partaking in all of the iconic male experiences: drinking, lying around having sex with girls and getting beat up at soccer practice. Just as he’s getting used to the hectic life of boy-dom he has another run in with the witch who has also transformed herself into a man – a man with the special ability to disappear penises with a single handshake. Layers of mayhem and gender games ensue.
With a cast of characters that each have their special part to play in the shenanigans of Mozart all brought on by this curious young woman and her one wish, QUARTIER MOZART is an absurdist’s exploration of gender roles akin to something like Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Even in his first film, Bekolo is asking questions about representation using his signature style: re-mixing what is wanted from representations of African characters and narratives into constantly shifting dualities that are playfully insightful.
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.
Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s first feature length film is a gender farce and coming-of-age tale that extends beyond any of the generic conventions that it dips its toes into. All taking place during a 48-hour period in the working class neighborhood of Mozart and combining urban legend with a sprinkling of witchcraft, QUARTIER MOZART follows a rebellious young girl known to her neighbors as Queen of the Hood. During a late night rant with her neighbor, a friendly middle-aged woman known to be a witch, Queen admits to wishing she could be a boy just to know what it's like. She gets her wish alright – the next thing she knows, Queen has transformed into MyGuy, a total stud whom everyone in town either wants to fight or lay.
As MyGuy pursues the tyrannical police chief’s daughter Saturday, he is pressured into partaking in all of the iconic male experiences: drinking, lying around having sex with girls and getting beat up at soccer practice. Just as he’s getting used to the hectic life of boy-dom he has another run in with the witch who has also transformed herself into a man – a man with the special ability to disappear penises with a single handshake. Layers of mayhem and gender games ensue.
With a cast of characters that each have their special part to play in the shenanigans of Mozart all brought on by this curious young woman and her one wish, QUARTIER MOZART is an absurdist’s exploration of gender roles akin to something like Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Even in his first film, Bekolo is asking questions about representation using his signature style: re-mixing what is wanted from representations of African characters and narratives into constantly shifting dualities that are playfully insightful.
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.
Jean-Pierre Bekolo
72 minutes
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.
Jean-Pierre Bekolo
97 minutes
CAMEROONIAN FILMMAKER JEAN-PIERRE BEKOLO WILL BE IN ATTENDANCE FOR ALL 7:30 SCREENINGS IN THIS RETROSPECTIVE!
A science-fiction film and erotic thriller, LES SAIGNANTES follows two sex workers as they attempt to dispose of the corpse of one of their clients, a political leader. As usual, Jean-Pierre Bekolo mixes genres in this hybrid film, which is part female revenge film, part antisexist denunciation and part open criticism of the systemic corruption of Cameroonian politics. The director also looks to the future, placing Africa and women at the heart of a narrative in which they are usually absent, and drawing inspiration from the precolonial cultures of Cameroon's powerful Beti women's secret society to imagine Black heroines capable of fighting and healing the postcolonial state.
Journalist and critic Olivier Barlet (Africultures) describes the film as "astonishing, provocative, insolent, fun and perfectly paranoid.” With LES SAIGNANTES, Jean-Pierre Bekolo offers a future tale of a dystopian Cameroon, with burlesque outbursts and lurid lighting, mixing sex and death, as if to underline an impossibility: indeed, "How can you make a film of anticipation in a country that has no future? How can you make a detective film in a country where you can't investigate?" asks Bekolo. (Harvard Film Archive)
“Bekolo’s dismantling of rigid dichotomies and monolithic narratives of African tradition centers on contingency. His aim is not to offer viewers a ‘new’ mode of thought to substitute for the ‘old.’ Instead, he calls for us to be open to narrative and philosophical uncertainty—to a politics and thought ‘without guarantees.’ If we rely too much on fixed meanings and notions of authenticity and cultural determinism, then our thought becomes confined to what we have always known. Disrupting singular meanings turns a single code of thought into a polyvalent web of intellectual, and therefore social, potentiality. Emblematic of this polyvalent intellectual web is LES SAIGNANTES' narrative of two transgressive cyborgs who redefine notions of body and machine in their effort to subvert masculinist state power… Through their mechanized cyborg bodies, Majolie and Chouchou symbolically refuse the physical, spatial, and intellectual dominance that the masculinist state has imposed.” - Matthew Omelsky
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.
A science-fiction film and erotic thriller, LES SAIGNANTES follows two sex workers as they attempt to dispose of the corpse of one of their clients, a political leader. As usual, Jean-Pierre Bekolo mixes genres in this hybrid film, which is part female revenge film, part antisexist denunciation and part open criticism of the systemic corruption of Cameroonian politics. The director also looks to the future, placing Africa and women at the heart of a narrative in which they are usually absent, and drawing inspiration from the precolonial cultures of Cameroon's powerful Beti women's secret society to imagine Black heroines capable of fighting and healing the postcolonial state.
Journalist and critic Olivier Barlet (Africultures) describes the film as "astonishing, provocative, insolent, fun and perfectly paranoid.” With LES SAIGNANTES, Jean-Pierre Bekolo offers a future tale of a dystopian Cameroon, with burlesque outbursts and lurid lighting, mixing sex and death, as if to underline an impossibility: indeed, "How can you make a film of anticipation in a country that has no future? How can you make a detective film in a country where you can't investigate?" asks Bekolo. (Harvard Film Archive)
“Bekolo’s dismantling of rigid dichotomies and monolithic narratives of African tradition centers on contingency. His aim is not to offer viewers a ‘new’ mode of thought to substitute for the ‘old.’ Instead, he calls for us to be open to narrative and philosophical uncertainty—to a politics and thought ‘without guarantees.’ If we rely too much on fixed meanings and notions of authenticity and cultural determinism, then our thought becomes confined to what we have always known. Disrupting singular meanings turns a single code of thought into a polyvalent web of intellectual, and therefore social, potentiality. Emblematic of this polyvalent intellectual web is LES SAIGNANTES' narrative of two transgressive cyborgs who redefine notions of body and machine in their effort to subvert masculinist state power… Through their mechanized cyborg bodies, Majolie and Chouchou symbolically refuse the physical, spatial, and intellectual dominance that the masculinist state has imposed.” - Matthew Omelsky
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.
