Although Ousmane Sembène had already earned international recognition with La Noire de… (1966), it was the satirical comedy Xala (1975) that led to the Senegalese director’s major breakthrough. Often called “the father of African film,” Sembène’s cinema provides a commentary on the tensions that shape Senegal’s post-colonial reality. In Xala, which is based on Sembène’s eponymous novel, he mocks the “new African bourgeoisie”, criticizing their hypocritical and corrupt behaviour.
Besides being Věra Chytilová’s first feature film, Something Different is also the film that ushered in the Czechoslovak New Wave. Through a double-narrative structure, it intercuts two storylines about a housewife and a gymnast. Although their lives never merge, parallels are drawn in how the female protagonists navigate a male-dominated society. While the conventional narrative structure and the cinéma-vérité approach are less radical than the surrealist experiments Chytilová would later develop in Daisies (1966), Something Different (1963) already shows signs of a nascent modernist desire to break with classical cinema. As the Czech filmmakers puts it: “If there’s something you don’t like, don’t keep to the rules – break them.”
As an ode to German filmmaker Wolfgang Kolb, who passed away last year, CINEMATEK shows two of his dance films. In Muurwerk (1987), Kolb engages with a choreography by Roxane Huilman. Rather than simply documenting or archiving it, he filmically translates the dancer’s movements to the screen, including the claustrophobic spatial awareness they convey. In Hoppla! (1989) Kolb adopts a similar approach, using the camera as a tool to interpret rather than record the work of Anne-Teresa de Keersmaeker, almost becoming part of the choreography himself.
A corrupt politician is cursed with impotence on the night of his third wedding after embezzling 100 tons of rice.
EN
“The film language of Xala can be constructed on the model of an African poetic form called ‘semenna-worq’ which literally means “wax and gold”. The term refers to the ‘lost wax’ process in which a goldsmith creates a wax form, casts a clay mold around it, then drains out the wax and pours in pure molten gold to form the valued object. Applied to poetics, the concept acknowledges two levels of interpretation, distinct in theory and representation. Such poetic form aims to attain maximum ideas with minimum words. ‘Wax’ refers to the most obvious and superficial meaning, whereas the ‘gold’ embedded in the art work offers the ‘true’ meaning, which may be inaccessible unless one understands the nuances of folk culture.”
1Teshome H. Gabriel, “Xala: Cinema of Wax and Gold,” in Jump Cut Hollywood, Politics and Counter Cinema, ed. Peter Steven. (Toronto: Between the lines, 1985).
Věra, a bored housewife with a defiant son and an unappreciative husband, seeks an escape from her frustrations in an extramarital affair. Meanwhile, the headstrong gymnast Eva Bosáková trains for the 1962 World Championship in Prague. Her lack of motivation prompts her coach to put pressure on her.
EN
“The anxiety present in [Something Different] results from a heightened knowledge that both women “compete” in their distant worlds, but with similar questions. Still, Eva’s solution is more positive: ‘Domestic’ Věra, after her useless escape from her tedious marriage into a romantic affair, tries to patch up her broken family ties without any clearer hope for betterment. ‘Public’ Eva’s life also does not improve appreciably, but she at least tries to pass on to her successors what [her trainer] has taught her: an art or a set of skills. Certainly, Eva has not left her space; she does not have any other. But is it not great that she passes on to others part of her talent? Is not the chance to hand something on the centre of her efforts?”
