"Let me tell you, people like the Europeans and the Americans went away from home and began to colonize other people, which they took by force. There was a lot of fighting, and they divided Africa into sections like Sudan, Uganda, Nigeria, and so on. And later, they called them 'free nations.' After that, they went high into space and to the moon! Did you know the moon belongs to the white man?" Thus begins a passionate, perceptive, poetic documentary about an Africa still being snookered by non-Africans. We Come As Friends opens August 28 at the Roxie in San Francisco and the Rialto in Berkeley.
Hubert Sauper is that rare Austrian documentarian who builds his own prop plane around a motorcycle engine and flies it to the Sudan. His technical prowess is matched not only by guts, but by an eye for anachronism and irony, making for some warily poetic voiceover. "This planet Africa is where humans originated. And much later, it was discovered, over and over, and enslaved and dispossessed and colonized. By foreigners who had invented maps and compasses, engines, airplanes. Now [as you land your craft] you might start feeling strange. You recall some sinister memories that you'd prefer to forget."
Sounds like that other Austrian, Sigmund Freud, who used to make people lie down on a divan and talk about their deepest fears. In his director's notes, Sauper calls We Come As Friends "a kind of psychoanalysis of a collective pathology: colonialism, the colonial mindset, domination, and patriarchy. The title reflects an old lie of our civilization. But as sad as this sounds, the movie is a kind of dark comedy." Freud would approve, having demonstrated that comedy is nothing but a wrapper for hard emotional truth. The filmmaker focuses his mind, senses, and camera on the Sudan as wars for resources fragment the country.
The history of European and American prospectors cutting up the continent of Africa is highly charged with emotions like regret, shame, sorrow, and their corollaries denial, disbelief, displacement. After centuries of self-promoting triumphalist tales of empire builders and gilders, brought to a fine and static art from under chubby lesbian-eraser Queen Victoria, the disconnect between what was reported and what actually occurred has steadily grown into a sinkhole down into which the burden of the white man has sunk like a giant sloth in a tar pit. Sauper's clear, fresh, rich, surprising, tantalizing images update us on realities the "news" ignores.
"There was this mighty queen named Victoria," continues soft-spoken Sauper in voiceover as a handheld out a plane window panning a vast savannah picks out a train traveling an impossible straight line. "She had never been to Africa. With her finger she drew a line on a map and in the distance a line of steel would be cut into the sand. And along the track came the soldiers and their rifles and the British flag. But also the queen sent her only god and set him up against someone else's god. And so the war became holy." And so Victoria and her ilk still haunt us today via the consequences of bad, I mean greedy, arrogant, covetous decisions that continue to pervert geopolitics at home and abroad.
We Come As Friends, with its title of heartbreaking irony, is not agit-prop but something much worse: a sensitive, curious, unswerving look at modern Africa from a compassionate, intelligent, informed perspective. The word "documentary" might be unavoidable but should be qualified as "subjective" or "poetic" because Sauper dares to write his own narration with all his sensibilities intact. Too many documentaries lose focus pinning the mike on a series of talking-heads, whose blah-blah might or might not add up to a kaleidoscopic lowest denominator. Rare is the documentarist willing to synthesize his own complex reactions into an evocative grab bag of impressions inviting reflection and further study.
"French and British armies have planted their flags here," says Sauper's voice as we watch elegant tall men in brand-new camouflage uniforms striding past traditional huts. "Two grand imperial dreams collide. The British desire to connect the Nile to the Cape, the North and the South. The French fantasize to possess Africa from the East to the West, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. On such a crossroads, the villagers must learn how to wear uniforms, how to march in step, how to need money and to give up ancestral lands. The masters from London, Paris, and Berlin draw lines in the Savannah. Borders that separate resources from people, that divide cultures and people." We Come As Friends is not a pretty picture, but a beautiful and moving monument to one of Freud's great discoveries: repetition compulsion, the urge to repeat experience, however painful, however pointless.