While the French were confined, here is a filmmaker who chose to change the scenery: for once, Robert Guédiguian does not film Marseille and we find him with Twist in Bamako, released in theaters Wednesday January 5.
With this film, we change the scenery, but we remain in the political cinema of a storyteller, that of Robert Guédiguian. We are in Bamako in 1962, just after independence. And when President Modibo Keïta commits his country to the path of pan-African socialism, Samba is one of those enthusiastic young activists who are traveling the country to launch the major reforms which must lead the country towards post-colonialism. He meets Lara, a villager, forcibly married and who flees with him to Bamako. We are no longer in Marseille, but Robert Guédiguian’s recipes work just as well in the tropics.
Twist in Bamako is a romantic and political tale, and this delightful couple have the beauty and strength of their youth when they dance the twist at night. But its fragility comes to light. Samba’s idealism clashes with the apparatchiks of the revolution, and patriarchal traditions do not forgive Lara for having fled her village. This story, rare in cinema, becomes universal and, even if the dialectic is not always cinematographic, we succumb to the charm of this youth who happily undermines to go dancing. Robert Guédiguian puts color on someone who inspired him a lot, the photographs of Malick Sidibé, who, in black and white, chronicled these years of recklessness, this “communist moment”, to use the expression of the filmmaker.
franceinfo: With this film, did you need to get away from it all, to get some fresh air?
Robert Guédiguian: Yes ! Sometimes it’s quite exciting to go and see how it goes elsewhere or how it happened elsewhere. Sometimes, looking back on moments in history can help us see it a little more clearly today. There are roads, a little brushed for sixty years, in L’occurrence, which had been opened and which it is perhaps time to clear up, re-examine, rethink. And assimilate them critically. I believe that the lights of the past can be of use to us.
What place do the bodies and the dance, present in your film, have for you? Twist in Bamako ?
I have always considered that the revolution, the struggles for emancipation, etc., should also be part of the celebration. We must not only emancipate work and the productive forces, change the relations of production, transform the world, but we must also change life. You have to do it collectively, by partying, by dancing, by getting closer to others from all points of view. It must be done in the domain of ideas as well. You have to twist! You have to twist with the body, but also twist with ideas.
Emancipation is undoubtedly the key word of your film. Both from a young woman who wants to escape a forced marriage, but also from a country. Is your film a feminist film?
Resolutely feminist! We often approach revolutionary moments, communist moments, by where they sinned. That is to say by the superstructures: ideas, customs, legal. Because we have often changed, in communist countries, only things which were material: we have changed the relations of production, nationalized industry, collectivized the land. But the daily life of women, heir to traditions and the old way of life, was not affected. However, in the conception of the revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, the first emancipatory thinkers, the idea was to change the world as a whole. It was about changing the whole society. It was not only a question of freeing the forces of labor from exploitation.
Your film is also the story of a communism that does not work, of African Independence, of an appropriation, of injustice. Perhaps because, as one of the characters says, we wanted to adapt a model, that of the French Revolution, which was not adapted to an African country in the 1960s?
There is of course. Césaire spoke about it very well, already, in 1955. [Aimé Césaire, écrivain et député de Martinique, disparu en 2008, est un des fondateurs du mouvement de la négritude. Il publie notamment Discours sur le colonialisme en 1955, aux éditions Présence africaine]. African forms had to be found for this socialist idea, which may not have been found. But I wouldn’t say it doesn’t work because it still works for a while. That’s why I said: a communist moment. We can retain from that moment an illusion to be found, rather than a lost illusion, that is to say, we can keep from that moment the seven, eight years when it worked very well. If you look at what the company was like then, it was preferable in every way to what is happening today, for example.
This results in an absolute impasse for the character of Samba and a dictatorship which is coming, therefore, in small steps …
Yes, because I think it is a tragedy that this moment did not last. So, the film and the characters who embody these ideas had to have a tragic end too … But it ended all the same with a gesture of rebellion.
When you speak of a “communist moment”, is that a way of not being totally depressed?
As well ! There are only “moments”, perhaps. But moments, plus moments, plus moments, I’m not going to repeat the proverb of small streams, but here it is … I believe that to be a communist today, you have to create communism permanently: through a cooperative, an area to defend, a village where such or such action in a low-cost housing estate, a ZAD … Sometimes at the cinema! A film can be a communist moment: there is little money, everyone makes the film together, we share the proceeds, etc. I think that being a communist today has become more of an ethic, a way of being. There is a categorical imperative here. I try whatever I do, to create something in common around me. Making a film is an ideal situation to try to create something in common …
You have just published with Les Liens qui liber editions Will the Lendemains sing again?, a dialogue with Christophe Kantcheff, journalist at Politis. Looking at the political landscape and the divided left, what is your state of mind today? ?
I am a little desperate … All historians say it: there has never been a victory on the left without a union of the left. But by letting ourselves be dominated, since we have just spent ten years where people on the left said that they were no longer on the left, that we should no longer speak of the left, that the left was no longer left. ‘did not exist, nor the left-right divide. But I think that the right-left divide still exists, me. Moreover, when we talk about increasing the minimum wage or not, it is very simple, the right-left divide! We have to replay it, we have to reaffirm that we are on the left or on the right, we have to reaffirm the principles of the union of the left. We have to re-establish an alliance between reformists and revolutionaries, the workers’ movement has been separated since 1920. The USSR no longer exists and there is no question of joining the Third International, all of this is a thing of the past. But if Jaurès had lived, he would still speak of radical reformism today. One “revolutionary reformism”, he said. It’s an oxymoron, but I think it’s workable.
Could such a union bring together just about everyone who is on the starting line?
I believe. Anne Hidalgo cannot reject a proposal, for example, for tax reform, like the one Jean-Luc Mélenchon is proposing. It is the voice of reason. But that there may be compromises and that there may be, faced with all these fractions of peoples, different sensibilities expressed in different parties, in different associations, but that they unite on the essential, the question equality, maybe they will win! All the examples since the Cartel of the left in 1923, it is the union of the left. A disunited left, a single left has never won. Neither the Communist Party nor the Insoumis won a presidential election. We really have to find a way out of this absolute trap.
The question of identity is at the heart of the presidential election campaign. You quote a sentence by Aimé Césaire in your book: There is “two ways to get lost” : “by segregation walled in the particular and by dilution in the universal”.
Aimé Césaire was master of Marxism and therefore of dialectics. I believe that the particular exists only in the universal and the universal in the particular. We have to invent this dialectic.
It is therefore wrong to make this separation between universalists and communitarians ?
Absolutely wrong. The particularity is the form that the universal takes, which is the ground. The universal is the universal of the human condition which, in fact, is embodied in various forms and in various colors, in various religions. But the lives of men all over the world are exactly the same everywhere! This is the universal, it is not the universal of Catholicism, of Islam, of the universal, of capitalism, of socialism. The universal is the human condition.
And that how we arrive today, when the thought is regularly locked in something binary to create debate in the complexity. Where and how do we do it?
It is true that it is hard. There is less opinion press, independent press, free press. The press is also less followed. We listen to a lot more people on social networks who have equal say. Which is not a good thing, since a professor from the Collège de France has the same voice as a bistro. I have nothing against bistros and I like bistros. But for some questions, I prefer to speak to someone authorized at the university. It is difficult, but we must continue. By all means.
What do you think of Emmanuel Macron’s words, who hears “piss off the French” who are not vaccinated?
It’s terrifying. Terrifying skill. Obviously, he knows very well what he is saying. He said a bad word. Why ? So that we can talk about it. And we are talking about it. And as long as we are talking about it, we are not talking about the increase in the minimum wage that has not taken place, for example. The debate remains focused on things of this type instead of finally starting on economic and social questions.
In your book, you talk about “bastards” about bosses. You justify the use of insult, sometimes. It can intervene in the speech as something shocking that strikes the reader. Possibly the person. Is this a clever use of insult?
When I say “bastard”, yes! But the difference between him and me is that he speaks with quality. He is the President of the Republic. And I am only a modest filmmaker. So I can use the insult in a more targeted, more detailed way … And I have more the right to do it, I believe.