Soleil Ô (Med Hondo, 1970)

Med Hondo, one of the key figures in the history of African cinema, passed away on March 2 at the age of 82. Although his work is not nearly as well known anywhere as it ought to be, it has made more significant inroads in Europe (France in particular) than in the U.S., where he is virtually unknown. I had not heard of him until very recently, and while that in itself proves nothing -- there are lots of people and things I've never heard of -- I had heard of Soleil Ô, probably his best-known work. 

Hondo's film is a strange affair, although it comes to make more conventional "sense" as it goes along. In what could be called an extended prologue, Soleil Ô starts with a collective men's chorus staring directly at the camera from a darkened non-space. In voiceover, we hear a series of claims and condemnations regarding the glorious history of Africa and its abuses at the hands of the West. "We had our own civilizations....Our own religions, our own literature," etc. Eventually, the men pictured above are placed in a kind of abstract conversion camp, where they are made to carry Christian crosses, upend them into swords with which to kill each other, and are made to abandon their native languages and original names. This extended segment has the feel of an Artaudian theatrical production, or something akin to the Living Theater. Verisimilitude is abjured in favor of a trancelike automatism.

Then, in the main body of the film, we meet an unnamed immigrant from Mauritania (Robert Liensol) who is overjoyed to have arrived in France. He expects a warm welcome, but naturally he is disappointed, instead finding overt racism, suspicion, and even sexual fetishism. In an extended conversation with a white businessman, he discusses the importing of African workers who, according to the white man, will become a permanent underclass, performing the jobs the French don't want to. Later, we see the Africans from the chorus learning the word for "broom."

In concept and approach, Soleil Ô is more like a fictional adaptation of Franz Fanon's theories than anything I've ever seen. Like Fanon, Hondo makes it clear that the colonist relies on the colonial subject for his own sense of worth and superiority, and that the colonizing nation demands fealty while providing nothing in return. Black people are reduced to their bodies, their visible "otherness." (Like Fanon, Hondo also focuses almost exclusively on the plight of the African man. The sisters will have to wait, it seems.) In terms of its form, the only analogue I can think of for Soleil Ô is Godard's work, in particular his Groupe Dziga-Vertov period. Hondo's film is rough, abstract, and highly discursive, and clearly intends to change the world. For anyone interested in the political cinema of the 1960s and 70s, it is an absolute must.