The Mad Masters

It's interesting if you actually know about Hauka practice beyond here, but the film itself is pretty much devoid of any contextualization, which is very much to its detriment as it reduces much of the material to just exotic spectacle and shock value.

Apparently one of Herzog's favorite movies, and that's not hard to believe. It's about a West African tribal initiation ceremony that is a bizarre bastardization of the social structure and mannerisms of their European colonial oppressors. It resembles some sort of primal explosion of frustrated satire. The ending of the film suggests that the ritual helps them mentally cope with their daily lives. I was a bit confused during some of it but I was also transfixed. An unusual and provocative work.

A disgusting, disturbing and ultimately depressing documentary about a small group of africans who participate in a cult based around mimicing their English colonial masters. At the beginning and end of the film you see these people in their normal everyday lives, yet in the middle we get a horrifying glimpse into their disturbing rituals.

Really far out shit. Just absolutely wonderful to see this representation of British culture, which, understood as such, is laugh out loud funny. It suffers from an archaic depiction of the Africans, as much as anything from the same period. Not hard to see why Herzog digs it.

Shows the great complexity of any attempt to understand what drives cultural behaviour: what is occurring in this kind of ritual, to what extent it is a kind of symptom of colonialism, what place it has in Gold Coast society as a whole (shortly before the formation of Ghana), and whether it should be understood as a "necessary fiction", are all questions nearly impossible to answer with conviction. Can we really say much more than that it is a group of individuals playing out a scene together?

i was left yearning for more context

This - the ceremony of the Hauka and just as importantly Rouch's film that depicts but also contributes to the creation of a very particular manifestation of these practices - is a highly elaborate and ritualised parody of the way in which Niger's colonial rulers perceive the locals. This is clearly the beginning of Rouch's blending of 'fact' with 'fiction', according to which what is real is less important than what is cinematic. Herzog called it "arguably the best documentary ever made".

i thought this was satire, but it isn't. i get the point, and i'm sure there's an interesting film to be made about these people, but that would require more colonial context and an understanding of how they came into place. as it stands this is mostly "look how crazy those african people are!" shit. it's also boring - probably because of the awful narration - which is quite remarkable given the subject matter.

i really have no idea how to interpret this film and what to take away from it. in ways it was interesting, in ways it was offensive, and all in all it was an odd, somewhat disturbing experience that revealed about our culture as much as the "other". i wish the film had set a better contextual framework for the images it presented, but even still, the psychological and cultural implications of a culture dealing with and coming to terms with colonialism was fascinating.

#834

total madness

Maybe the poor subtitles affected my opinion of this too much, but I found the wikipedia articles on the film and the Hauka way more interesting. The film didn't explain that they weren't trying to just emulate that Europeans, but rather to allegedly steal their life force. All of the exposition on the aping of colonial ceremonies was quite tedious.

777

543

A very interesting subject, though the presentation is far from great.

# 476