#685: MAMBÉTY, Djibril Diop: Touki Bouki (1973)

MARTIN SCORSESE'S WORLD CINEMA PROJECT {Spine #684}

MAMBÉTY, Djibril Diop (Senegal)

Touki Bouki [1973]

Spine #685
Blu-ray

With a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Djibril Diop Mambéty paints a vivid, fractured portrait of Senegal in the early 1970s. In this French New Wave-influenced fantasy-drama, two young lovers long to leave Dakar for the glamour and comforts of France, but their escape plan is beset by complications both concrete and mystical. Characterized by dazzling imagery and music, the alternately manic and meditative Touki bouki is widely considered one of the most important African films ever made.

89 minutes
Color

Monaural

in Wolof

1:37:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2013

Director/Writer

Djibril Mambéty was 28 when he wrote and directed Touki Bouki.

The Film

A remarkable film, no doubt about it.

The aural equivalent of the intentionally choppy editing is Josephine Baker’s Paris, Paris, Paris ... Mambéty uses only those three words throughout the film, but the fourth Paris comes in too soon; never on the downbeat; it confounds the ear -- nicely corresponding to the visual cuts.

Also prominent on the soundtrack is the sound of bellowing cows, set to almost anything you might be seeing on the screen -- especially terrified cows ...

Touki Bouki (Journey of the Hyena) stars Magaye Niang as the rebellious Mory and Myriam Niang as his girlfriend, Anta.

Mambéty is fond of filmic rhyming — Mory loses a three-card monte bet of 1,000 francs (which he doesn’t have), but later — after having stolen from Charlie, the rich homosexual (Ousseynou Diop) — he pulls out a wad of stolen 1,000-franc notes and hands one to Anta’s aunt (Aminata Fall).

Film Rating (0-60):

53

The Extras

The Booklet

Sixty-eight page booklet featuring an essay by Richard Porton.

“The film’s playful deployment of kinetic, associative editing, accompanied by a frequently poetic disjunction of sound and image, confirms that Mambéty was as inspired by Sergei Eisenstein and avant-garde traditions as he was by post-New Wave road movies. The eccentric spatial and temporal shifts crystallize unresolvable tensions between rural traditions and urban anomie. Even before the opening credits appear, the transition between a pastoral scene in which a young boy, possibly Mory, herds cows and the bloody floor of an abattoir accelerates the contrasts between a premodern agrarian milieu and bureaucratized, industrialized modernity.”

Commentary

None.

Introduction

To the film by World Cinema Project founder Martin Scorsese.

Interview

With filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako about Touki Bouki.

Extras Rating (0-40):

34

53 + 34 =

87

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