Throughout the world forces of social criticism and resistance are shifting. Exiled from the settled and domesticated dynamics of culture they find their new incarnation in the migrant. The artist is today the consciousness of such resistance, as much as the intellectual or political figure in exile. Such artists find their existence between forms, between homes and between languages. Their existence is dictated by the predicaments that disfigure the present age: mass deportation, imprisonment, population transfer, collective dispossession and forced emigration.
Hussein Sharif, a Sudanese painter and film maker, has been living away from Sudan for a decade. He was forced to flee his homeland, along with many other Sudanese intellectuals, in the wake of the 1989 coup d'état and the increasingly ham-fisted restrictions on freedom of expression that resulted from the head-on clash between the regime and its opposition. He is part of a tragic exodus of intellectuals -- a diaspora of unprecedented proportions in Sudan's history. Those who remained at home are marginalised, virtual exiles in their own country. And according to a recent study, 116 artists who stayed have died in suspicious circumstances in the past decades.
Sudanese poets such as Mohamed Elmaki Ibrahim, Mahjoub Sharif and Jaili Abdel-Rahman give voice and deeper spiritual meaning to this culture of resistance, much as Pablo Neruda, Aimé Césaire and Mahmoud Darwish have done elsewhere. It is a culture that encompasses a wide spectrum of artists and intellectuals, linked only by shared commitment to the ideals of multi-ethnic, multicultural democracy.
Sharif studied fine art in London during the 1950s, but in the late 1960s developed a growing interest in cinema. "Primarily," he says, "I was seeking to widen my repertoire of communication by experimenting with another medium. The visual image can always be understood to some degree. Even when it is not completely comprehended or understood intellectually, it is absorbed somehow." And after ten years of concentrated painting, Sharif is once more turning his attention to cinema, working on Letters from Abroad. It will be his third film, following The Dislocation of Amber and Tigers are Better Looking.
Letters from Abroad is an attempt to create a cinematic equivalence of a group of carefully selected contemporary Sudanese poems which, though different in texture, tone and modality of expression, nonetheless represent a word continuum, a charting and projection of inner space with a shared ancestry, each unique yet umbilically joined. The poetry resonates with imaginary and visual evocations, readily lending itself to cinematic interpretation. Accompanied by music, the individual poems are narrated, chanted, and/or rendered dramatically, according to the dictates of structure.
"The formation of private spheres out of public chaos": a reasonable enough conception of poetry, and one that might serve as a useful starting point to approach Sharif's basic premise. For Letters from Abroad attempts a cinematic encapsulation of a "public chaos" that is largely hidden from the gaze of the world.
The film dramatises the version a manner that creates its own, hitherto unexpected, genre. It may be documentary in focus, but seeks to synthesise image, music and words.
Sharif is firm in his contention that an artist cannot work under laws which seem to restrict freedom of speech or of expression. "What do you do? You either keep quiet or emigrate. In diaspora, though, many people find themselves occupied with irrelevancies, leaving no time for creation. The creative impulse is then in danger of disintegrating. There are many examples of exodus in recent history and the case of Sudan, so far, is no exception. There is a universal culture of exile that is still emerging. Eventually it will be evaluated."
The poetry used in the film reflects the realities of a country in which social conditions have considerably worsened since the fundamentalist military coup of 1989 brought to power the self-styled "government of national salvation." Behind the rhetoric millions of Sudanese live a life of squalor. It is this dislocation that informs the poetry that Sharif has chosen.
The poems themselves, though often harking back to a once glorious past, do so only in as much as it is necessary to provide a counterpoint to the deeply troubled present. Some constitute routes which connect the homeland with the place of exile, "where caravans have inscribed the history of longing on the winds and the sands." They include the passionate articulation of the Afro-Arab dichotomy, a world of irrevocably mixed identity with a bewilderment of mirrors to reflect opposites. A common thread that weaves through this poetry of dislocation, though, is its relentless optimism -- the vision of a Phoenix rising from the ashes of a fractured social structure that characterises present day Sudan.
The visual structures of the film are intended to be interpretive, combining with the music and the words to create a complex metaphor. Impossible to film in Sudan, Sharif took care to select landscapes within Egypt that echo the countryside of its southern neighbour.
"When I begin painting," Sharif says, "I never have a preconceived idea. I don't know, but suddenly something happens. This accident is useful and it happens through this sensory, cerebral emotional sort of thing, coming from the depth of you and you capture it and then the picture emerges. There is a definite analogy between my work as a painter and my work as film-maker, which I think is inevitable. My framing of the film is painterly. When it is in black and white the form of the frame becomes even more important. My attitude to colour on film is also painterly... This is the way I do things. I use colour to compose the visual element of the film. With film there must be a preconceived idea but within that there must be space where things can happen even during the shoot... suddenly an idea emerges. This happened while shooting Letters from Abroad. We were shooting, on schedule, the script was written etc. but when I saw the location certain ideas emerged and certain shots which were not planned suddenly had to be there because... the place... I don't know, it is like a sudden vision or inspiration. In this sense I do not consider it a deviation from the text, but rather a development. It is just like magic. We should allow a certain limit of flexibility and space for things to happen and when they happen we should accept them."
(عدل بواسطة farda on 01-31-2005, 10:57 AM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 01-31-2005, 11:11 AM)
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