With the title Elmina, viewers might anticipate a film focusing on this historically significant West African locale, recognized for its linkages within the transatlantic slave trade. While the film addresses transnational exchange and global power relations, it does so unexpectedly by foregrounding the complexities that ensue when individuals concede space to one another. Elmina is a joint project between London-based conceptual artist Doug Fishbone and the Ghanaian Revele Films. As such it maximizes strategies of collaboration and intervention by bringing together the agendas, expertise and investments of the Western art world and the West African popular video/film industry. Collaborative and interventionist strategies are critical not just to this film's intention and subject, but also to its formal composition and outcome as a critical proposition.
Elmina was scripted, filmed and produced in Ghana. Two interwoven storylines structure the narrative: one involves a Chinese oil company angling its way into a Ghanaian village while the other deals with the protagonist's polygamous marriage, and especially the disappearance of his second wife. In addressing issues around economic exploitation, development, land sovereignty and corruption, the film nods to such classics of West African cinema as Ousmane Sembene's Guelwaar (1993). At the same time, the dominant elements of suspense, sorcery, betrayal, sex, greed and murder situate the film within the booming genre of popular West African video/film. Indeed, the production would seem emblematic of Ghallywood/Nollywood were it not for one element – the intervening presence of artist Doug Fishbone, who performs the role of Ato Blankson, the film's protagonist.
As a white American performing the part of a black Ghanaian character in an otherwise all West African cast, Fishbone's initial appearance seems odd, and viewers must wonder about the character's identity as well as the casting. It is only as the plot thickens that viewers come to understand that Blankson is a Ghanaian farmer. Fishbone's intervention operates with efficiency and irony; he takes viewers from moments of moral gravitas to subtly perceptible humour. Given the character's centrality to the narrative, Fishbone's presence reminds us constantly that one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other. In doing so, he challenges conventions of typecasting just as he sparks questions about race, difference and visual representation. Particularly, can race ever really be incidental to visual narratives? The insistence on race as a visual inscription is perhaps Elmina's most compelling dimension, for the film's power hinges on the capacity of the visual to define the difference orienting racial categories.
Even as the storylines unfold and despite Fishbone's deft delivery, the racial incongruity resists fading into the narrative. Rather, the intentional presence of the white actor playing a black character becomes further complicated as Blankson emerges as the film's hero. He is the only community member to take a stand against the town chief's efforts to persuade the community to sell their land to a Chinese oil company. In an impassioned speech, he pronounces, ‘We're being cheated by the white people,’ and ‘Progress is not progress when you give everything away for free.’ The development of Blankson's character as hero both alludes to and interrogates a common trope in Euro-American films about Africa, where a white, usually male hero occupies the centre of stories about the continent's people and histories.
Considering the film as a collaborative endeavour between Fishbone and Revele Films raises a cluster of questions about how individuals concede space to one another in representational projects and how power and authority are ever negotiable. It is from here that the film intersects potently with critical, cross-disciplinary inquiry in African Studies about representation, collaboration and knowledge production. To be sure, all of us who undertake research and produce scholarly narratives both intervene and collaborate. Whether we choose to render transparent our positions, disclose the nuances of our investments, or give play to the differences between our subjects and ourselves, we certainly grapple with many of the same issues. Making these processes explicit is critical to the film's effectiveness.
In relation to Fishbone's previous projects, Elmina continues his approach to satire and inquiries around ‘the relativity of perception’. His engagement with multiple audiences and their apprehension of his proposition from different positions is taken a step further in his strategies for the film's exhibition and distribution. Following its premier at the Tate Britain, the film will be sold as both a collectable, limited edition art work and an affordable DVD/VCD in Europe and Africa. Tapping into diverse economic and cultural networks indicates the fluidity and overlap of circuits typically posited as exclusive from one another (the Western art world and the West African video/film industry). At a time when the global is invoked all too easily, Fishbone's interventionist project engages critically with the possibilities and limits of production across local, continental and global frameworks. Elmina will be valuable to this journal's readers for it extends crucial debates about race, power, collaboration and representation in narrative projects. What's more, Elmina summarizes these issues in a compellingly direct and subtly humorous picture.
