Synopsis
In a South African city, a group of thugs has taken over a cinema, screening only American films. A filmmaker, dedicated to promoting African cinema, decides to reclaim the theater in order to program films aligned with his vision. However, his efforts are met with hostility from the group. This story serves as a meta-discourse on cinema and the dominance of non-African works on African screens.
A word from Tënk
Aristotle’s Plot is a hybrid form satire film from Jean-Pierre Bekolo. The hybridity of the film itself is seen in multiple forms – there are fictional and non-fictional forms present throughout the film, realism and formalism in the style of the film as well as externality and internality in the narrative. As is widely known, Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s cinema is not just experimental or narrative, it is a kind of cinema that is in constant search of its own identity and form, eventually satisfied with leaving this as a question for the audience to answer.
Released in 1996, very few films on African realities had been able to capture the nuance of satire using a truly hybrid film form, the kind employed by Jean-Pierre Bekolo in this film. The filmmaker is able to address a variety of African socio-political realities that he would have been unable to accomplish in a standard documentary format. For a non-fiction film audience, the mise en abyme of the film further accentuates the hybridity, recognizing the non-fiction form of the outer narrative which is then complimented by the fiction form of the inner narrative. The external narrative where the filmmaker sets about making a film to commemorate 100 years of cinema as instructed to do so by the British is largely the story of the film itself, Bekolo’s role as the filmmaker and why it was produced. Pure satire is used here in place of fiction for the external narrative. Bekolo then uses this opportunity to make a politically charged internal narrative where he is able to comment on colonial cinema history on the African continent, the influence of western cinema in Africa, which includes the previous ban on Africans to make African films, and the colonial film legacy of the British on the continent. The present is very much included, including the perception of African filmmakers in global cinema as always "young, upcoming and full of potential" until they get too old and become "ancestors." However, it is important to note that not only does the film’s inner narrative point the finger at the colonialists, but it also does at Africans themselves who are not able to recognize this influence on their own cinematic tastes.
Badewa Ajibade
Guest curator
