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Niamanto Sanogo, from Mail

NOTE: This is the 200th full-length film review/write-up I have written on tumblr.

Yeelen (1987, Mali)

Also known to English-speaking audiences as its literal translation Brightness, Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen is a fantastical visual splendor based on a mythic legend told by the Bambara, an ethnic subgroup based mostly in Mali, but also having significant presences in Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Senegal. When today’s movie audiences think of fantasy film, images of dragons, hobbits, aspiring wizards with lightning bolt scars, and dueling Greek demigods come to mind. Spare some thought, if you will, for a piece of breathtaking fantasy emanating from a country’s cinema that has been largely ignored. It is not fantasy resembling anything like Western medievalism, Latin American magical realism, or even East and Southeast Asian legend. This is African film untouched from the modernized West and the developing Far East - unimaginable by those who are not film historians or critics (I’m neither, so in the pyramid of those qualified to write about Yeelen, I’m at the second lowest level… just above anyone who has seen a minimum of one movie).

From Mali, Cissé’s Yeelen is the story of Niankoro (Issiaka Kane), a young man born with mystical powers who is being targeted by his father, Soma (Niamanto Sanogo), a wandering sorcerer who has used his destructive magic to feed his insatiable desires for power and fear. It is a game of cat-and-mouse with none of the tension one expects from such pursuing games. Cissé instead is content with imbuing the images he films with a lyricism and poetic nature that is a reflection of the tale’s mysticism and the unexplained magical powers possessed by both son and father. Soma is accompanied by two enslaved, or perhaps bewitched, men carrying the Kolonnkalani, a magical pestle whose powers are never explained. Niankoro, who begins his religious studies of the Komo (the gods of an animistic religion who are channeled when magic is used) with his aging mother (Soumba Traore), is forced to flee to the kingdom of Rouma Boll (Balla Moussa Keita) when his father comes perilously close to seeing his son.

To reiterate, none of the magical powers and their origins and teachings are ever explained. Also left largely unexplained (the Bambara would know more about the religious themes in Yeelen) are the facets of the animism seen throughout and other than an instance where Niankoro receives a fetish while departing his mother, the reasons for conflict are a mystery. Does it matter when the first shot is of a rising sun followed by Soma’s immolation of a live chicken? Yes, it’s a live chicken. If you’re a PETA member, if Mali has a statute of limitations regarding animal cruelty on celluloid, I think that statute has long passed by now. This is a film that revels in the specificities of its small moments and doesn’t seem to care if the broader narrative merges cohesively. Niankoro is allowed much character development as he begins his studies of the Komo and his magics, has his penis betray him as he impregnates Rouma Boll’s supposedly barren third wife Attou (Aoua Sangare), and is forced into a Sergio Leone-style duel of fates with his father at the end. Soma is not allowed as much character-developing agency by Cissé, who also wrote and produced the film. Soma’s villainy is provided no motive and his garrulous, arrogant persona seems to be inalterable. This may have been the explicit intention of Cissé’s, but it was a difficult development for me - a Westerner with minimal knowledge going into my first viewing of Yeelen - to wrap my head around and embrace for all its artistry.

Circular structures and dialogue run abound in Yeelen as the sunrise and a chicken’s immolation in the opening scenes to the sunset and the unveiling of what appears to be two eggs in closing scene (pictured above) appear to complete a full rotation of life and death. The final battle between Niankoro and Soma seems apocalyptic as their fates become sealed. The parallelism and its constant clashes of the old power structures and its challengers and the young and the old rage without too much violence or special effects in this film - an Oedipal myth full of fratricide and not so much the maternal connotation of “Oedipal”. The reliance on the cinematography by Jean-Noel Ferragut and Jean-Michel Humeau instead of special effects - one of the spirits is represented by an actor wearing nothing but a piece covering his midsection and a hyena mask that could be found in a well-stocked Halloween specialty shop - show the film’s priorities. In its elemental beauty, every droplet from a spring’s shower, every breeze passing through brown grasses and tree branches, and even the lapping of miniscule ripples in a bowl of milk are among the dozens upon dozens of extremely small moments this film distinct in its imagery (the sound mixing in many of these scenes is beyond belief). It is at once as grand as the largest Hollywood epic as it is as intimate as any as a sober Asian familial drama.

If you have somehow reached this far in my write-up on Yeelen, one would be correct in assuming that Yeelen is one of the most challenging films out there. Its fragmented, barely linear structure interspersed with scenes of maybe a water buffalo, a panorama of a canyon, or perhaps the unforgiving swathes of the Southern Sahara Desert will not make for easy viewing for anyone who has next to no experience with African cinema drawn from the imaginations and efforts of African filmmakers, not European or American filmmakers trying to frame Africa in their Western light. This is not the fault of any one person as African cinema - perhaps moreso than any other continent’s respective cinema (not Asia, not the Middle East, not Central Asia, not the Middle East, not even Latin America - has been largely ignored by academics, historians, critics, distributors, and executives. This is a problem: film history as it is written is racist by omission and this only serves to lessen the countless viewpoints and outlooks on fantastical and/or real life that film offers - an array of voices second only to literature in the realm of artistic mediums.

In its place in the real world, Yeelen - which is set in the 13th century at the height of the Mali Empire - serves as an allegory of Mali under Moussa Traoré’s militaristic, single-party authoritarianism (1968-1991). Cissé, who knew that it would be dangerous to engage in a direct tirade against the regime, decided to infuse Yeelen with his political criticisms. As Yeelen's setting is anything but 20th century Mali, Cissé’s portrayal of Soma as a consolidationist, entrenched and evil eminence is representative of the Traoré regime while Niankoro embodies Mali’s glorious potential to embrace the very best of its past, contemporary, and future strengths, Sometimes, to allow the wheels progressing towards humanistic and social goods, devastating sacrifices are a necessary toll to pay. Ever since a coup ousted Traoré in 1991, Mali remains a weak Western African state that is struggling to retain a state’s monopoly on violence. Just this past summer, Northern Mali suffered from a military incursion from Islamic extremists and required a considerable French intervention authorized by French president François Hollande to rout the extremists back into neighboring Algeria.

In the scope of Yeelen, these real-life conflicts are dwarfed by Niankoro’s and Soma’s appeals to the animist spirits and the dancing cosmos flitting about above their heads. In that tradition of handing down romantic or tragic tales of adventure and endeavors beyond anyone’s complete understanding, Souleymane Cissé has proven himself as a unique master of such storytelling, even if Yeelen is not the most accessible film to any Westerner. The cyclical nature of the film represents a political and social process decades, if not centuries in the making. In time, it will be interesting if Yeelen will ever be considered the behemoth of fantasy film and - to a more important categorization - African film many have been slow to realize (if they have realized that Yeelen exists, let alone African cinema as a whole, at all). For maybe just this once for any film, I hope sunset is imminent.

My rating: 9/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating.