Griots modernos: por uma compreensão do uso de alegorias como recurso retórico em filmes africanos

Abstract

Among images, stories and memories, there are many ways to narrate African cinemas and “narrate” their narratives. Taking as a starting point the complex and multiple scenario of films made by African filmmakers, our thesis looks at the way like these films build their narratives and, especially, how the presence of allegories can be configured simultaneously as a legacy of oral narratives and a rhetorical strategy in African film production. Going beyond the concept of allegory as a figure of speech, our proposal is to understand how its presence in the narrative provides new arrangements of meaning to the chain of events presented and functions as a rhetorical resource, by promoting the articulation between different temporalities and historicities (BENJAMIN, 1984). A way of demonstrating the influence of allegory on the film narrative, we have analyzed three films made by African filmmakers, from different countries and generations, that converge by the usage of allegorical constructions in the narrative for two aspects: the immersion of the director in a scenario crisis and the intermingling of personal and collective memories in the narrative composition. By associating such aspects, the selected films are: Soleil Ô (Med Hondo, Mauritania, 1967), Aristotle’s plot (Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Cameroon, 1996) and República di mininus (Flora Gomes, Guinea-Bissau, 2012). Based on this corpus, our objective is to observe the extent to which the presence of allegories in films made by African filmmakers can be considered as an update of oral traditions in cinema. An update that does not necessarily occur in terms of adapting African tales, but through a kind of mimicry of “narrative gestures” used by the griot, the great storyteller and memoir keeper in the African context. Gestures, marked by the use of certain strategies (presentification, repetition, digression and inversion) that also contribute to the composition of the allegory in the film narrative. Thus, while recognizing allegory as a possible legacy of oral traditions in African cinema, we also admit that its occurrence is not a property intrinsic to the film object, but emerges from a relationship between it and the viewer. Therefore, based on the semio pragmatic model of film analysis (ODIN, 2000), we start from the hypothesis that the presence of allegories also results by a specific reading mode activated by spectators in relation with films (allegorizing reading), embodying allegories not as mere figure of language but a agent of modification in narrative (narrative allegory). Such process while it evidences the opacity of cinematographic discourse (XAVIER, 2005), also provide the possibility to viewers go beyond film’s narrative and have a relationship with different levels of temporality and historicity (GAGNEBIN, 1999) through stories that are performed. Finally, we conclude that the narratives of the analyzed films, although inspired by events related to the trajectory of their directors, find in the allegory a way to update the narrative legacy of oral traditions and embody a specific narrative way in African cinemas which different historical dimensions can be articulated through filmic narrative.