The Cemetery of Cinema
Directed by Thierno Souleymane Diallo
Berlinale Top 3 (1/3)
France/Senegal/Guinea/Saudi Arabia 2023
Going to the cinema never lost its sheen to me, even in the pandemic. After the long dry spell, I was incredibly (almost embarassingly) excited to go back there and was met by Tenet (2020) by Christopher Nolan, a much hyped, but unenjoyable experience. The first visit to the cinema that I can remember was also a profound disappointment – Dreamworks’ Anastasia (1997) directed by Don Bluth. But despite being very young and angry at the entire world for presenting me with this mediocrity (I was a little shit back than), the feeling, the atmosphere of being in a movie theater stuck. The seats, the darkness, the silver screen that demanded your attention regardless of how fidgety you might be otherwise. You can’t stop watching, even if you want to, in a sense. Whatever is happening on-screen becomes your entire world for however long it takes to tell its story (singing bats included).
The communal experience of cinema is profound as well. Everything, from standing in line (listening to workplace gossip is always a personal highlight), to hearing the crispity-crunch of popcorn before the curtain goes up, dials you into the experience that is about to follow. And then the shared emotional experience of watching something with other people, hearing them laugh when you laugh and seeing some of them wipe a tear, just as you’re frantically looking for a hanky in your (kinda filthy) purse after the movie ends, is enough to make you feel a part of something bigger than the sum of its parts.
Does this sound (grossly) melodramatic and (might I say) tropey? Yes, it does. But, what happens if all of that doesn’t exist? No cinemas, no movies, no shared history, nothing.
Thierno Souleymane Diallo is on a quest through Guinea to answer exactly this question. After he graduated from several local universities including the state funded film school Institut Supérieur des Arts Mory Kanté, Diallo was thrust into a defunct movie industry without a chance to make any movies in his home country. In the middle of his journey, which he undertakes barefoot armed with a camera and boom mic, he visits his alma mater, where the students ask him why he’s traveling barefoot. He answers that the state has paid for his education for 5 years, but neglected to mention that, after his studies, there will be no place for him to work: “I live in a country, where there’s no money to make films. How am I supposed to get money to buy shoes?” Despite this unfortunate start, he did make several short films between 2013 and 2018, before securing funding from several countries (see above) to make a full length movie.
His interest is sparked after he hears about a almost mythical movie called Mouramani (dir. Mamadou Touré, 1953), the first Guinean movie ever made, which has been lost to time and is somewhat of a myth among Guinean directors and film enthusiasts alike. Fascinated by the lack of information about the movie and its plot (its supposed to be a movie about the first king of the Baté Empire that is either about a man and his faithful dog or about the Islamization of the Malinka people), he embarks on journey to find the movie As it is unclear, where to even begin the search, we watch Diallo traveling to several abandoned cinemas and archives from Kankan in eastern Guinea, to Diankana and Conakry, to sift through moldy film reels that have been left to rot many years prior.
The first Guinean president Ahmed Sékou Touré, a self-proclaimed socialist, was a big proponent of cinema as a propaganda and educational tool, and soon the state-controlled film studio/distributor Syli-Cinéma-Photo was founded. Although cinema was very tightly ideologically controlled and incarceration of intellectuals was common, this was the only film industry that’s ever existed in Guinea. After the death of Touré, the 1984 coup d’état ousted his party from government, and with it the state-controlled film industry. Syli cinemas and archives were raided and destroyed, film reels burnt or left to rot. Although Syli was replaced by the Centre Culturel Franco-Guinéen, they neither had the experts nor the means to save the remaining film reels, and so mostly burned them themselves. The film industry never recovered, no new cinemas were built.
In this aftermath, The Cemetery of Cinema takes place. On his way, Diallo interviews film enthusiasts, former directors and even a former state censor, always asking the same questions “Did you see Mouramani when it came out? Is it real?” and gets similar answers every time: No, they didn’t see Mouramani. It is definitely real. There is a deep sense of loss pervading the interviews, a longing for cinema and its communal experience, regardless of the control the state seemed to have over the content. As he interviews one of his former teachers, a director, his deep sadness is felt, even as the talks about making movies about a the sewer system in Conacry to inform the public. The former directors long to direct, the aficionados long to take in, there’s definitely a sense of something missing in all of their lives.
Additionally to the loss, there is also a deep frustration at the state and the incompetence or unwillingness in conserving the films that did exist. Almost all of the interviewees express the opinion that Diallo is wasting his time in searching for the movie in Guinea. Instead, they say, he has to go to France – an almost magical place of hope and a working archival system. Before going to Paris, Diallo chats to some bootleggers of Bollywood movies, who sell DVDs translated into the local languages. Bootlegging, as it turns out, is the only functioning distribution system for movies in Guinea, besides SAT TV, with them being unconcerned with national and international copyright laws.
In Paris he dons a swanky blue suit and full-body cardboard “armor” with details about Mouramani (when, where and by whom it was made) to move people to start a search of their own. Still barefoot he wanders through Paris and especially makes note of the cinemas, open, bustling with visitors, alive. Eventually he reaches the Archives françaises du film in Bois D’Arcy, but doesn’t find the movie there either, not on the grounds or in the system of all the national movie archives. Mouramani is truly lost.
So, like the arbiter of new Guinean cinema that he wants to be, Diallo recreates Mouramani in a four-minute short film from the little information he has about it. It’s bright and beautiful and has a dog in it (what’s not to love?). It is of note that the first Guinean film ever made was not about the colonizers or their effects on the country. It was about the inception of Guinea and about its first king (and most probably his dog).
Compared to how many Bible adaptations we’re afforded, Guinea wasn’t even afforded one founding myth. Sitting on the plush seats of a huge Berlin cinema, I found myself mourning the film industry of a country I didn’t know anything about prior to watching this movie, a movie about a country that lost the culture-forming power of cinema as well as its quality to retain the memories of entire generations.