Soleil Ô

I am a film historian by training and temperament. I work in (and across) two expansive areas: cinema history in the United States, and cinema history on the African continent (mainly West Africa). Writing a book about Soleil Ô afforded me a unique opportunity to combine, traverse, and possibly even transcend these geographically specific interests. Made by a man who generally rejected (or at least questioned) all nationalisms, the film offers no simple maps, no standard navigational tools, even as it is very clearly rooted in the Paris where it was shot on location. In other words, Soleil Ô shows us where its protagonist is, but not where he has been or where he is going. It doesn’t even tell us his name, for reasons that I try to tease out in the book.

The culturally omnivorous Hondo probably saw at least as many movies (both old and new) as François Truffaut and other cinephiles associated with the French New Wave. He was an autodidact and polymath, and Soleil Ô suggests the sum total of his cinematic education up to that point. In it he parodies the condescending instructional films produced and distributed by colonial authorities, but he also supplements these appropriately derisive sequences with his own, carefully honed approach to documentary pedagogy. The latter consists, in part, of dynamic primers on underdevelopment, resource extraction, asymmetries of power, and much more, lending Soleil Ô the quality of a lesson, but one that is never boring or remotely simplistic.

For Med Hondo, class conflict conceivably transcended racial difference, threatening to breach national borders and inspire a truly global solidarity. The filmmaker’s particular background (Hondo was descended from those who had been enslaved within the Maghreb, where the ethnic group to which he belonged—the Haratin—experienced considerable social isolation and discrimination at the local level) made him distinctly attuned to questions of caste. He was a committed anti-capitalist whose work necessarily intersected with capitalism. Soleil Ô is now widely available thanks in part to a grant from the George Lucas Family Foundation—a revolutionary film restored through the philanthropy of one of the world’s wealthiest men.

Soleil Ô functions as a form of film criticism. Hondo offers, for instance, a biting critique of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s then-recent and utterly misbegotten attempt to read African independence through the prism of ancient Greek democracy in Notes for an African Oresteia (1969), which saw the Italian filmmaker traveling to Tanzania and Uganda with the aim of staging Aeschylus’s trilogy with local performers. “I feel I can see analogies between the Oresteia and Africa today,” Pasolini, appearing in the film, tells a group of skeptical African students during a break in Rome, adding, “It seems to me that African tribal civilization resembles the archaic Greek civilization. And the [ancient] discovery of democracy…is, in a way, the discovery of democracy which Africa has made in recent years.” Soleil Ô shatters such callow Eurocentrism. Africa, it says, has its own histories—political and otherwise—and they need not be legitimated through reference to Northern archetypes. Exposure to the latter came about not through the belated process of aspiration and imitation that Pasolini posits but, as Hondo so vividly demonstrates, much earlier and at the point of a sword.

Ongoing thread. More from Noah Tsika to follow.