BY MULUGETA GUDETA
Until the end of the 20th century, the movie scene in Ethiopia was largely dominated by foreign or Western stereotypes. The films were 100 per cent imported from America or India. Unfortunately, there was not a single school of arts until very recently and even now the country does not have a single institute or academy of motion pictures.
Movies are made by amateurs with raw talents and too much passion for success.If we look at filmmaking as a business, investment in this sector is very low and there is no incentive to develop the sector. Government does not spend a penny to sponsor or support filmmaking and yet, no country particularly in Africa, has developed the industry without state support to cinema as part of national culture.
However, the last two decades have proved that success does not come with passion or by imitating foreign models alone. Ethiopian movies therefore need to be based on Ethiopian realities, local themes based on the available cultural and historical materials.
In other words, local movie makers need to change track and adopt local colors even if it is practically impossible to be one hundred per cent Ethiopian in the business due to the above limitations and the negative impacts of foreign or Western stereotypes.
There is too much music, too many pictures, too much sound and too much fury in this world of ours in these troubled times. Local and global television channels are filled with them and there is a kind of artistic convergence at the global level. Music styles and even movies styles are similar despite the diverging cultures. Music genres are imitating one another.
Hip hop, rap and music hall groups proliferate from China to Chad, from Russia to Rumania, from Ethiopia to India. Movies made in Hollywood are stylistically if not thematically repeated by India’s Bollywood and have their counterpart in Nigeria’s Nolywood.
Although here in Ethiopia the movie industry is making baby steps, it has not so far been able to break out of its hard shell of isolation and underdevelopment because of some of the reasons cited above. We have young, ambitious, energetic and hard working filmmakers but we don’t have the other components for the emergence of a vibrant film industry; namely financial support, large investment, training and above of a clear and encouraging national film policy.
Movies are increasingly becoming part of the cultures of people everywhere in the world. Technology is the single most effective magic or most important driver that has led to the current and breathtaking innovations in the arts.
The process is the fastest in human invention, sweeping the slums of Rio with equal fervor or force as it sweeps the shanty towns of Mumbai and the poorest neighborhoods of Addis Ababa.
The same music is daily blaring from the microphones in Durban as it does from those in Kenya’s Kebira, the largest slum area in East Africa. Indian melodramas and Chinese martial arts are watched by hundreds of millions of underprivileged youths in the world’s largest shanties simply because young people who are deprived of livelihoods are forced to spend their times dreaming about the adventures and successes of Indian actors.
Arts are being globalized and artists are emerging in their hundreds if not in their thousands. There is a dynamic interpenetration of cultures, models and styles. Yet most of them tend to maintain their independence when it comes to telling their own stories in their own ways.
Hollywood is still dominating the international movie making business and has always protected its particular philosophy, objective and lasting national interests in the global business. Hollywood is a huge industry and it is also a huge propaganda machine forspreading American ideological, political and military dominance of the word with its soft power.
The Indian film industry known as Bollywood too is making films in the Indian way, with Indian culture as its main foundation and focus and this is also the source of its success and its capacity to compete with Hollywood. In Africa, the Nigerians are making films based on authentically Nigerian themes, cultures and history.
The way they do it is so creative and influential that they have managed to secure a pie of the international movie making business. Nigerian films are enjoyed all over the world not because Nigeria is the richest country in the world but because Nigerian filmmakers have developed their own ways of telling stories that are different from other styles and approaches.
Ethiopia has great landscapes and great historical accounts or facts that could be used as the starting points for the creation of a purely Ethiopian filmmaking culture that is different from the above-indicated giants of the world of cinema.
Instead of searching and finding the Ethiopian way of telling stories in movies, our filmmakers, with the exception of a handful of them, are either imitating foreign and mostly Western models or imitating one another’s defects in their works.
Most of them are guided by audience opinions and this often leads them to raw imitation, repetitions of themes and styles. A film industry has never grown by trying to look like its foreign counterparts but by discovering its own authentic voice and vision.
The Ethiopian film audience is a great lover of historical movies. That was why in the past, movies like Cleopatra, Seven against Rome, Spartacus, 2000 years BC.and scores of other historical and war films enjoyed a wide audience here.
The Ethiopian film industry has not so far tried to deal with Ethiopian historical themes of many battles, nation building struggles and popular revolts against tyrannies. Ethiopian filmmakers mostly focus on mundane themes and sensational or superficial stories as mediocre imitations of foreign models.
The nascent Ethiopian film industry could not focus on epic and glorious national themes because of its tunnel vision and the constraints indicated above. Let us take one example. Adwa is a huge Ethiopian and global history of black resistance against white colonialism. It is glorified in books and paintings, in oral and written history. Adwa has become the source and pride of black consciousness globally.
It is inspiring scores of modern black resistance movements from South Africa to the United States’ Black Lives Matter movement of our time. Adwa is simply an epic of black survival and black freedom. Yet, no Ethiopian filmmaker, with the exception of Haile Gerima the true legend of Ethiopian and black cinema, has dared exploit the huge potentials of Adwa as the basis and material for telling or producing not one but dozens of films.
Haile Gerima was long captivated or obsessed with the need to tell Adwa’s story not only to Ethiopian but to the international audiences. That was why he tried to depict it in film stills that, even though fragmented and pictorial or photographic, gave the world a glimpse of what Adwa stood for.
Haile is still obsessed with the same idea of making a big Adwa film with big budgets and big studios participating in the remaking of a glorious epic battle with undisputed international significance. Whether he will succeed or not in realizing this project that is long buried in the depth of his soul depend on the availability of the conditions required for making the ultimate movie of his entire career.
Turning the immortal Adwa epic into an immortal movie production requires not only passion or vision but also money and a lot of money. Technology has facilitated many aspects of making big movies but it has not cut costs down or provided the talented casts and actors required for such a big challenge. The Ethiopian government should also take part in this international project that concerns Ethiopia most of all.
It can for instance cover part of the budget or provide facilities and logistic supports. It can also offer technological and other resources. The Ethiopian government and the ministry of culture in particular can for instance get in touch with foreign or Western film studios and commission a detailed study and cost of turning Adwa into an epic of the silver screen.That would be the greatest contribution to art and culture by the government.
Ethiopian filmmakers both here at home and in the Ethiopia Diaspora should think big and stop making mediocre movies that have no national historical values that cannot mobilize the people for greater achievements in other fields of national endeavors.
Russian filmmaker Sergei Einstein is celebrated for making “Battleship Potemkin” not only for his artistic contributions to the craft of moviemaking but also for stirring Russian national consciousness to live up to many other glorious challenges in its history such as the Second World War and the struggle against Nazi Germany.
Soviet propaganda used the film as a means of mobilizing the Russian workers for great economic achievements. This can be the case also in Ethiopia at present where the entire nation, despite past divisions and conflicts, is united for the great work of the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) that requires greater national unity and collective vision as it was the case during the epic battle of Adwa. A big film about Adwa would help forge a collective national identity and consciousness of invincibility, cohesion and common purpose even for coming generations.
An epic movie about Adwa would also help Ethiopian filmmakers abandon mediocre themes and start exploiting the potentials inherent in their historical and literary accounts. That would free them from their timidity and launch them on the path of mental emancipation as artists. Generations have grown up reading one single Ethiopian literary classic that is fikireskemekaber (Love Unto Death) by the late HaddisAlemayehu but not a single movie maker has ever thought about making a film based on it.
The Ethiopian revolution of February 1974 is a big historical event but we have so far failed to portray it in films so that new generations would have a balanced and historical perspective of its significance, impacts or consequences that free them from the interminable controversies, mutual hostilities that have kept a generation captive for more than forty years now.
Whether we like it or not, we live in a world shaped by past history. And those who ignore their history are said to repeat it. Maybe we are repeating our history in many ways because we ignored or past. A film about Adwa could also serve as a weapon of mental liberation from our meekness, fears and mental ghetto in which we kept ourselves for many decades if not for centuries.
The Ethiopian Herald March 28/2021
