Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s fourth feature film, Le President, opens with a sequence in which a row of inserts gradually appears layered across an abstract background. The inserts are small screens, reminiscent of televisions. Across these screens flicker images of streets in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé. The cameras move the viewer in close to the cacophony of moving traffic, pedestrians, and bustling urban life. Another insert then appears atop the row of smaller screens. In this rectangle we see a man wearing sunglasses inside an office in a high-rise overlooking the city. This brief sequence without dialogue introduces the themes of Bekolo’s humorous, yet pointed, political critique: an atrophied political class is out of step with and (literally) detached from a young, dynamic population and with the multifaceted roles of media and mediation in contemporary Cameroon.
Bekolo’s film garnered attention upon its release because it was inevitably censored by Cameroon’s government. The “president” who appears in the insert wearing sunglasses is only nominally fictional; he in fact closely resembles Paul Biya, the octogenarian who has governed the state since 1982. A film made by Richard Djimili about the same subject (139 . . . The Last Predators, 2013) had previously led to the filmmaker’s kidnapping and torture, corroborating in chilling fashion precisely the critiques that Djimili’s and Bekolo’s films make. Yet beyond drawing attention to the lack of freedom of expression under Biya’s authoritarian regime, Le President presents an exciting and sophisticated deployment of the filmic medium to reflect not only the imbrication of the media and the political system that Bekolo critiques, but also media’s potential to construct a polyvocal response to dictatorial ideology.
The plot of Bekolo’s film hinges upon the president’s sudden disappearance: before elections the leader simply disappears after thirty years in power. Cultural pundits, the media, and the general population wonder what has happened to him. A reporter for the fictional television channel “Canal D” (D for democracy?) named Jo Wood’ou goes off to search for him. The ensuing mockumentary forms the bulk of the film. Wood’ou becomes our default narrator, even though his voice is interspersed with the voices of others. As in the opening sequence, Bekolo jumps frequently between disparate contexts, voices, and conversations (between prisoners, with the president’s deceased wife, on television with rappers, with the president’s staff, to name a few), which amalgamate like so many small screens, each reflecting different points of view that conjoin to form a polyvalent filmic body. The quick-paced movement between these perspectives brings up the question of how, in an environment in which the media is so ubiquitous, the president could simply disappear.
Wood’ou exclaims that the president has been present for his entire life: he was “toujours le president” when Wood’ou was born and after he grew up. His image was developed through television; it was thus, in the reporter’s words, “hypnotic.” At the same time, it was unchanging; the president and his policies have not grown with the country, and they are out of step. This issue manifests itself throughout the film in terms of generational conflict. At one point Bekolo stages an interview between the “disappearing” president and a young rapper who suggests that the government should provide youths with financial support after the completion of their studies and promote the burgeoning black market industries which, unlike the static institutional structures, provide opportunities to a frustrated younger generation. His suggestions, however, appear to have little impact upon the intractable president.
The contrast between a political elite that refuses to relinquish its stranglehold on power and a dynamic youthful population manifests itself not only through dialogue but also through Bekolo’s energetic cinematic language. The film ricochets between various perspectives and styles, moving lithely from gritty faux-cinema verité to humorous self-reflexive stagings of the film’s own medial nature. Just as the multiple interviews disavow a singular narrative, so too do the many inserts, split-screens, shots of city life, and rapid cuts provide a means of expression for a pluralistic society. Rather than condemning the pervasive mediatization of culture as a corroborating force in political repression, it asks how cinema can be galvanized to foster dissonant dialogue. The filmmaker embraces the explosion of television and media culture in contemporary Cameroon and mines it to create a cinematic aesthetic that is critical but open ended.
In the film’s narrative, the disappearance of the president engenders the opportunity for a new media language that both addresses and engages the audience and allows it to act as both producer and receiver. In this way Bekolo accomplishes two goals: he reengages with the ideological critiques that undergirded much of early African cinema, and he carries out his own critical project by deploying elements of popular media culture in a manner that does not disavow, but rather engages, commercial media’s style.
