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Afronautic Tales & Supervison by Maix Mayer

In Afronautic Tales, a cinema narrator performs (Veejaying*) the first GDR SF film "The Silent Star" (1960) in a small video cinema in Dar es Salaam.

* Veejaying is a plurimedial auditory live act (translating, interpreting, commenting, imitating) of appropriating and transforming foreign content for one's own cultural context.

In Supervision, a medicine man makes contact with the African protagonist in the SF film, about whom no biographical information has existed to date.

A short extract of the conversation between Maix Mayer (MM) and Christine Nippe (CN)

Your research for your work Afronautic Tales at the Schwartzsche Villa led you all the way to Tanzania. Can you tell me more about the background behind your trip to Africa?

My first trip to Africa was a few years ago, for an exhibition project of the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei; it led me to Tanzania, a country that received a lot of economic aid while East Germany existed and was considered one of the socialistically oriented countries among the newly created African states.
While occupying myself with this history—my history—I asked myself what media image of Africa I grew up with in East Germany. After further research, I found only two feature films with African actors: the fantasy film Ein Schneeman für Afrika [1977; A Snowman for Africa] and the sci-fi film Der schweigende Stern [1960; uncut English-language release in 2004 as The Silent Star].

So, things began with the idea of reflecting on your own image of Africa, which was formed solely through media, because you could not officially travel to the African countries, after all. How did the link to the current media culture in Tanzania develop then?

My research is always also related to contemporary questions and developments, for example, to a research project of the African Studies department, which has been going on for many years and is examining changes in the East African media landscape. This is the context that led to the idea of having cinema narrators translate (VJ) the two East German films featuring African actors into a contemporary context.

Formally, you present the work of the VJ [video -DJ] through a single static shot in real time: It is a live performance in a kind of experimental arrangement based on a reverse shot from the TV screen. This approach is similar to your work Psycho70, where you use two static shots to observe your mother as she watches the Hitchcock classic Psycho. Is there a connection there?

Psycho70 does, in fact, form the methodological blueprint for this new work, in which the observing of observers, that is, a second- or third-order observation, represents the fundamental configuration. The recording reduces the visual elements of the picture and shifts the cinematic narrative from the screen to the viewer; at the same time, in Psycho70 the original film represents—as a reflection of the television in the glass of the living room cabinet—a visually authentic trace accompanying the sound that fills the room and the observation of my mother. In Afronautic Tales, this confirmation is missing.

In many of your film-based installations, you deal with the relationship between sound and image or, alternatively, language and image. Your latest works, in particular, are centered around offering viewers the possibility of an autonomous perception of their own. They can constantly change their own point of view and, through their wireless headphones, they hear an audio track created using a binaural recording process, which makes it possible to locate a sound in space. You refer to your new works as audiovisual compositions. What distinguishes them from other—that is, earlier—works?

One important characteristic is the new degree of freedom possessed by their audience: They can assimilate the visual information of the image, which cannot be perceived in its entirety at a single glance, in various ways. At the same time, they have complete freedom with respect to their bodies—for example, they can sit, stand, or walk—and the most important thing is that they can decide for themselves how to use their time. Simultaneously, their headphones constantly place them inside the narrative. Because my protagonists don’t speak in my films, the voice-over creates an additional and open imaginary space for their audience, which cannot be associated with anybody. Viewers are forced to repeatedly redefine the relationship between real space, projected space, their own bodies, and the space imagined through the audio track—to live their own subjective experience in time and space.

What characteristic relationship between sound and image is to be found in Afronautic Tales?

For European viewers of the VJ’s work, the plurimedial act of cinema narrating emerges out of the atmospherically hybrid audio track and the reading of the German subtitles as a translation of the speech act. In a kind of doubled absence of the original film image and prior knowledge about the story of the film, viewer-readers are forced to actively imagine this story.

Watching the activity of the VJ known as DJ Mark, the word “cinema narrator” some how seems inadequate to me. What functions do cinema narrators actually serve?

Cinema narrators are a kind of lay translator, and they tell the stories of the films before the backdrop of the world in which they live. In doing so, they transform these foreign global products into a local context. They are simultaneously narrator, commentator, explainer, translator, voice actor, entertainer, and representative of their audience. In a live plurimedial performative act, the cinema narrators mix the original sound track with an additional audio track of their own. They act as a kind of guide through the original film and only permit it to speak when they want.

Would it then be possible to propose the thesis that these cinema narrators are creating a new narrative genre between word and image, in which the visual aspect of the film loses its dominance?

Yes, I support that thesis. One interesting aspect of this observation is that the cinema narrators neutralize the dominance of the globalized images, because the characteristic feature of mass media—disseminating messages in identical form across great distances and around the world—is countered by local realities and processes of appropriation.

That would then be a cultural model of resistance and, in the sense of “learning from Africa,” it would also be very interesting for how we deal with globalized products.

Clearly this method, which is also to be seen within the oral tradition of this cultural sphere, cannot simply be transferred, but it provides some encouragement that the compulsory homogenization inherent to globalization can be productively changed and reinterpreted.

How do cinema narrators earn their money and how do things stand in terms of the licensing and copyright that are considered so important in Europe and America?

As far as I know, they receive small donations from the people who attend the live acts. There is additionally an unlicensed DVD distribution system with their remastered Swahili versions of what were originally Chinese pirated copies—which undermines the globally operating media industry with its copyright system oriented toward profit maximization. On the other hand, a self -concept as authors of creative works certainly exists among cinema narrators. In this context, it almost seems a little ironic when they ask their audiences to buy their DVD version, but to please not copy it.

What are the reasons for cinema narrators’ existence in East Africa and particularly in Tanzania?

In Africa, after the end of the silent film, the cinema narrators have survived all the way down to the present. Particularly the BEKE [Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment] program [1935–39] of the British Colonial Office and the WMC [World Missionary Council], examined how entertaining and educational films could be produced for a Bantu audience as a missionary project for transforming the region into a “modern” colony. These traveling cinemas needed cinema narrators [lay translators], in order to cover the diversity of local languages. With the rise of international film distribution in the form of VHS cassettes, narrators were required because Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nollywood did not see East Africa as a relevant market and, therefore, did not offer versions subtitled or dubbed in Swahili.

How did you make contact with the cinema narrator, and what was the process like behind the event?

This “making of” behind this production would be a project of its own. First, Claudia Böhme from the African Studies department put me in touch with a former cinema narrator who now refers to himself as Bob Rich, bearing his economic success as a surname and acting as an agent for all sorts of services, while owning around twelve different mobile phones for this pur pose. After a reliable driver with a car had been booked, he first organized an English-speaking guide, who had to be picked up and dropped off at his home on the outskirts of the city every day; the constant traffic congestion there meant that this took up half of every day.
After four days, we met with DJ Mark, who lived at the other end of the city and did not have any equipment of his own. He had to borrow a DVD player and mixing table, and we picked up this equipment at different places in the city. Afterwards, we drove to a small video theater in one of the outer districts of the capital city, Dar es Salaam, which is also known as Bongo [the Swahili word for brain], because whoever manages to survive there (in an urban system full of dangers and opportunities) has a lot of “bongo.” In order to reach this little video theater, we had to leave the colonial center of town, which is threatened by demolition, and im merse ourselves in the city’s labyrinthine informal sectors, past lanes and buildings not to be found in any compendium of architectural typologies. These areas are very far from the beaches of the middle class, where beach vendors with postmodernist model homes populate the shore on the weekends. We reached the video theater in the afternoon and hooked up the equipment we’d brought with us: Unfortunately, it did not work at first. After an hour of working with tape and a screwdriver, the film presentation could begin.

Your poster Cine Afrique contains a larger number of little huts that represent video theaters but seem to have little to do with our notion of a movie theater. In your film, the interior of the video theater also seems more like a classroom. How does this differ from our experience in a movie theater?

In the whole of Tanzania, there is not even a handful of movie theaters of the European type, because most of the people there cannot go to and afford these. This is also why there is a large number of informal local video theaters, where films are shown in the absence of typical cinematic codes (darkened room, gong and comfortable seating) and in bright rooms, with people coming and going during the presentation. This is also easy to observe in my film.

I particularly enjoyed the fact that the room is still light at the beginning of the film’s presentation and slowly becomes dark during the screening.

This real-time link between brightness and cinematic time was by chance, because the presentations normally end while it is still light, so that the people can get home safely, because there are no street lights.

I was struck by the fact that you had already dealt on film with the theme of science fiction in several earlier film works, such as screening the alien and subfiction 1+2. Where does your personal interest in sci-fi come from?

When I was young, there were lots of magazines and books with fantastic illustrations representing a near future that was supposed to be so completely different from the present. But it was not just space design or architecture that offered a promise for the future: Different model worlds and prototypes for another social community were also proclaimed. In this sense, I always experienced science fiction primarily as social fiction.
A good example of this is provided by the media work subfiction 2, which is based on the first East German sci-fi film The Silent Star, from 1960, where a group of astronauts (one each from Russia, America, Germany, Poland, India, Africa, Japan, and China) are supposed to represent the population of the earth and fly to Venus to save the earth.

I see several parallels to Afronautic Tales in subfiction 2, and these are related not just to the theme of translation but also to the conceptual incorporation of other media, such as painting, and their specific local characteristics. The original point of departure was actually research into the relationship of film and architecture, wasn’t it?

Yes, I spent an extended period of time examining the relationships between city and cinema or, alternatively, between film, film architecture, and architecture. In the course of this, I conducted an interview with the film architect of The Silent Star, during which she told me that the Chinese man and the African (who, ironically, played a television technician) couldn’t speak any German and had been cast directly from the streets of East Berlin. With this background knowledge, I made subfiction 2 in Hong Kong, exploring the question of what the Chinese man might have said on the film set, because, of course, he had to speak in order to be dubbed, even if no one understood him. I took the passages where the Chinese man speaks and showed them to a deaf-mute lip reader in Hong Kong: He carried out the initial translation into a special sign-language, which led to further translations with sign-language specialists, etc., and we ended up with something like a game of telephone. One peculiarity of the conditions surrounding these translations was that no one was informed about the original context of the work that was to be translated, so that the subjective experiences of the translators had to make a larger contribution. Parallel to the documentation of the translation process on film, a large hand-painted film poster was commissioned, and it was carried out by the studio of former Hong Kong poster painters. A film still of the Chinese man floating in the dome of the space ship provided the source material.
The five storyboards painted on canvas in Afronautic Tales were commissioned from Tanzanian street painters. In order to generate a hybrid Afrofuturist narrative of my own, the source material I gave them consisted of film stills from The Silent Star as well as photos of the plantations of the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, which were created during the German colonial period in East Africa [when it was still an active spinning mill].

The term Afrofuturism has been floating around our cultural landscape somewhat nebulously for two decades. What does it mean to you, and how is it represented in your work Afronautic Tales?

In German, the term—which was introduced by the American cultural critic Mark Dery in the early nineties—suggests a combination of “afro” for African and the early twentieth-century Italian artistic avant-garde movement of “Futurism,” but this is not what it refers to. I associate Afrofuturism, above all, with the musical work of the jazz musician and poet Sun Ra and his Arkestra as well as George Clinton’s band Parliament and the cultural attempt to break up the dominant strains of white European and particularly American cultural history, in order to renegotiate issues of identity in the Black Diaspora in literature, art, and music. The time travel in science fiction calls the linear chronology of past-present-future into question, and this enables a diverse new construction of identities, questions, and apparent certainties. Against this backdrop, the question of the possible identity of the African actor in the East German sci-fi film The Silent Star is raised in a new way, because no biographical data of any kind exists about him. I printed out two film stills in A4 format and went to a shaman in Zanzibar. He was known for enabling the Maasai, who worked on the island and lived there separated from their families for eleven months, to contact their ancestors. After talking with him about his abilities, I showed him the two photos depicting the film’s African protagonist and asked if he could tell me something about this person. He asked me to leave the images with him for two days and two nights so that he could attempt to establish contact and we could then continue our conversation afterward, which we did. This story is documented in the short film that accompanies the work.

I’d like to ask you for a concluding sentence and would like to cite the African-American writer Greg Tate: “… being black in America is a science fiction experience.”

I’d like to respond to you with the media theorist Marshall McLuhan: “Our technology forces us to live mythically.”