Scorsese/Cissé recap

From left: Manchia Diawara, Souleymane Cisse, Martin Scorsese, myself. Photo by Getty Images.

The April 29 Tribeca Talks: Directors’ Series event with Malian dir­ect­or Souleymane Cissé and Martin Scorsese was a really ter­rif­ic and enlight­en­ing and, for myself, kind of nerve-wracking event. I was the mod­er­at­or and I got things off to a really dumb start by intro­du­cing Cissé’s trans­lat­or, NYU Cinema Studies pro­fess­or and Mali nat­ive Manchia Diawara as Mathieu Roy. I have an explan­a­tion for this, and a les­son for the Future Moderators of Young America, that is, “Just ask.” I had been intro­duced to Cissé and Diawara in the green room, only heard a por­tion of Diawara’s name, and settled in for the exchan­ging of pleas­ant­ries while wait­ing for Scorsese and the start of the event. I wanted to intro­duce Diawara on stage, of course, but did­n’t wanna look like a dum­bass by ask­ing for the cor­rect spelling and pro­noun­ci­ation of his name, so I thought I’d be clev­er and copy the name off of an e‑mail doc­u­ment he had been look­ing at dur­ing or con­ver­sa­tion. An e‑mail not to him but to Mathieu Roy, whose name I would have recog­nized, had my brain been work­ing prop­erly, as that of the one-time Scorsese crew mem­ber and doc­u­ment­ari­an. So. Anyway, I bounced back from that error okay, I guess, and then we talked about Cissé’s film­mak­ing begin­nings. It was inter­est­ing to learn that he was raised as a fairly strict Muslim and that he was so know­ledge­able about reli­gion grow­ing up that his boy­hood nick­name was “Imam.” I poin­ted out that it was inter­est­ing that anoth­er would-be man of God had been lost to cinema; Scorsese, of course, con­sidered becom­ing a priest in his own youth, and his some­time col­lab­or­at­or Paul Schrader had such a strict reli­gious upbring­ing that he did­n’t see a movie for the first time until he was sev­en­teen. Cissé was some­what more pre­co­cious; he saw his first films when he was five, and vividly remem­bers the battles between cow­boys and Indians if not the stars or dir­ect­ors of the films. The mak­ing of his first fea­ture res­ul­ted in a lot of hassles from Mali’s offi­cials, includ­ing some time in jail; he recalls emer­ging from a cell determ­ined to get star­ted on his next pic­ture, and then know­ing that he was a filmmaker.

I tried to make a point that in a sense a film­maker­’s out­put is very much determ­ined by the con­di­tions of the place in which he or she makes them, and that goes for a lot more than the state of that place’s ostens­ible film industry. We west­ern­ers like to bemoan the paucity of Tarkovsky and Paradjanov’s cine­mat­ic out­put, and the oppres­sion those two film­makers exper­i­enced, and those things are worth bemoan­ing. But on the oth­er hand, just as a thought exper­i­ment, let’s try to ima­gine the kinds of careers that Tarkovsky and Paradjanov might have had in Hollywood. Scorsese accep­ted the premise, and allowed that he had been “lucky” to begin as a film­maker dur­ing a time when advances in equip­ment had made it pos­sible for someone to just pick up a cam­era and shoot on the streets. 

Beyond that, we spent a good deal of time explor­ing Cisse’s film world, and a won­der­ful world it is. One of the most appeal­ing things about the rel­at­ively small body of work he’s pro­duced since the ’70s is its dir­ect­ness, the decept­ive sim­pli­city of the approach that puts the view­er right there in the char­ac­ters’ lives wheth­er he’s deal­ing with the con­tem­por­ary world, as in the stag­ger­ing 1978 Baara (Work), about, among oth­er things, a fact­ory own­er­’s melt­down, or the ancient world of Bambaran lore and myth in Yeelen (Bright­ness), the 1987 film that’s his best-known work in the West. As I said in my intro­duct­ory remarks, it’s a simple approach that can only be achieved via the deep­est artistry. There’s also the way the films blend that qual­ity referred to by the lib­er­al shib­boleth “uni­ver­sal­ity” with a very exact­ing spe­cificity. It’s bra­cing, for instance, to see in his 1995 film Waati (Time), Boer oppress­ors as they are seen through the eyes of black Africans, both the film­maker him­self and the oppressed African characters…as opposed to through the eyes of, say, white sym­path­izers with the oppressed char­ac­ters, as is usu­ally the case in Western films. We did­n’t get into this a whole lot on stage, but before the offi­cial dis­cus­sion, when I brought this up with Cissé, he laughed—he’s a ter­rific­ally enga­ging and warm per­son, by the way—and said that when he first went to South Africa and met some such indi­vidu­als, he thought, these folks are a breed of their own; you can­’t even call them “white people.”

We man­aged to tie in Cisse’s film world with the work of Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, an off­shoot of his Film Foundation, and the organ­iz­a­tion that’s mak­ing sure, among oth­er things, that you too will be able to exper­i­ence Cissé’s film world in a mean­ing­ful way. (It was through the sug­ges­tion of my friend Kent Jones, the WCF’s Special Advisor, that I took the mod­er­at­or’s spot, and many thanks to him.) I hope every­one in attend­ance, and every­one read­ing this, is inspired to check out and get involved in the Foundation’s work. I know that cer­tain unre­pro­du­cible cine­mat­ic exper­i­ences of my life—to name just three, Limite, Touki Bouki, and Mest—would not likely have been pos­sible without the Foundation’s work. So it was very grat­i­fy­ing to be able, with the help of two truly great film­makers, to help put the word out there. And if you see YouTube videos in which it appears that I’m look­ing at my Blackberry, well, it’s a fair cop—but I was­n’t check­ing e‑mail or tweet­ing or any­thing but keep­ing track of time, which as you can ima­gine both the ven­ue and cer­tain of the par­ti­cipants were very much pressed for. I’ll close with a pic­ture of me say­ing some­thing that makes Scorsese laugh, which should not be taken as an indic­a­tion of a cap­tion con­test or any such thing.