The Cemetery of Cinema focuses on a young Guinean filmmaker’s search for the first film made in Guinea, and one of the first films in French-speaking Africa, Mouramani. This journey takes him on a road trip through the country, examining the reasons why film and film heritage has been allowed to be lost, despite the importance of film to people and communities.
This is one of those films that brings home to me just how much I do not know. A good documentary will do that.
For context, France was the colonial power in Guinea and had banned Africans in its colonies from making their own films. But as the movement for Independence gained momentum, African filmmakers were bravely creating films in defiance. Mouramani was one of these, created in 1953 by Mamadou Toure. It’s 23 minutes long and tells the tale of a legendary leader from Guinea’s pre-colonial history.
Trying to track the survival of copies of this film is like tracking the survival of the Guinean people, culture and imagination through successive waves of violence. This fragile suspension of human creativity in celluloid is sent out into a storm.
When Guinea gained Independence in 1958, the French went full scorched earth, destroying any infrastructure, equipment or property they considered theirs. They took everything with them they could, down to the least lightbulb. The Guineans would inherit their country but would have to start everything from scratch over again.
Nonetheless, in the optimism of a post-Independence Guinea, there were cinemas everywhere, showing films by Africans themselves. Beautiful big cinemas, small community ones, a mobile cinema, a film school with film labs as good as anywhere in the world, a raft of new filmmakers learning their trade, and a film library, beginning to collect and archive the film of the region.
But almost immediately, the new government began sliding into dictatorship. In this Cold War, era censorship was rife, all films must support the party line. The filmmaker talks to an old film censor from those times who tells him almost nothing was not cut or altered in some way. And when there was an unsuccessful attempt by a foreign power to overthrow the government, it provided the excuse for a crackdown and further power grab. Intellectuals, including filmmakers and film lecturers, were rounded up and imprisoned, or forced to flee from the country. Cinemas were smashed up, the film library looted, and film reels thrown in pits to be buried or burned.
The filmmaker looks back at this inheritance. The losses are so great that it is an accomplishment to even have an accurate list of what was lost, never mind attempt to recover it. The film Mouramani is listed by some as being about a pre-colonial leader, English listings say it is about a man and his dog, some say it is about the bringing of Islam, some that it is about a king.
The filmmaker asks members of the older generation, “Is it a myth?” Only some people know of its existence and no one has seen it. “Of course not!” they tell him, it existed, it was made and shown in their lifetime. But that’s how quickly something becomes a myth in a place where the impact and legacy of colonialism is continually erasing African history. A film can be made 70 years ago, within a human lifespan, and drift into legend. Who’s to say if the evidence is gone?
But this film is not just about the loss of cinematic heritage, it is about the continuation of it. The cinemas might be closed, but they are not abandoned. Many people still try to preserve and protect what’s inside. There are reels stored in canisters, testaments to the wide variety of films that used to be shown, from Ukraine to India to America, from cartoons to Westerns to porn. The filmmaker visits rural villages where people still remember fondly watching as a community movies on the big screen. He shows folks his camera, helps them make their own film, and screens it for the whole village. He meets young film students and encourages them to think about what films they want to make, what stories they want to tell. Everywhere he meets people with a love of film, of the collective cinema experience.
The legacy of colonialism, the cultural erasure, the pillage of wealth, the destabilisation of society, and the lasting power imbalance, all of it serves to darken the world, to rob peoples of their heritage, but all it takes is one person to carry the torch to keep the light burning.