On demand: "Yeelen"

Had the film industry originated in Africa - rather than mainland Europe or the west coast of America - it would obviously speak a different language, but would also have had a new set of myths to draw from and images with which to work. This probably explains why Souleymane Cissé's great 1987 film Yeelen remains as jolting as it does: for a little over an hour and a half, it offers nothing less than a portal into an alternative reality. Narratively, what we're watching could reasonably be described as a chase movie, and a power struggle between a crazed warlock and his estranged son, who's inherited some of dad's spellcasting but resolved to use it only for good. (Several introductory title cards recall the long scroll at the start of the first Star Wars, so we're not in a galaxy so very far, far away.) Yet the events that play out within this framework have been thought through and shot with an entirely fresh imagination. There are many more chickens being set on fire, for starters, but also: a whole new landscape to consider, from the caves the characters call home to the twisted, sawn-off trees marking the horizon and the parched flats underfoot; a midfilm pause for several rounds of millet beer (or Millet Lite, for those driving); a man in a hyena mask who may represent a trickster of some kind (i.e. just a man wearing a mask) or a fantastical creature (i.e. an actual talking hyena), and whose presence is all the more magical for going unexplained by a paragraph of exposition; and some sort of ritualised fight that involves the unarmed combatants pressing their foreheads together, like stags without antlers. Here is a film that, at every turn, illustrates how little the movies have thought to show us - and how much more of this world there is to explore and document.

In any English dictionary, mere inches separate mythic from mystification, and there are, granted, stretches here where the relative lack of contextualising information - Cissé's decision to toss the viewer headfirst into another culture - leaves us to puzzle out developments for ourselves. Most, however, lead to moments of brilliant clarity, as if a match had suddenly been struck before our very eyes. An example: the sequence where the son is pressganged into helping repel warriors from the village at which he's just arrived. It's something of a headscratcher that this process should involve a horse's shinbone, to be sundered, filled with sticks, bound with twine and then hammered into the ground - but, however we get there, either the hammering or the proximity of a foreign object looses a swarm of angry bees to be set on the invaders. Yeelen moves in comparably mysterious ways towards a final showdown between a man clutching a big log and a boy clutching a paddle with what now looks like an Infinity Stone at the end of it, and the payoff seems to connect back to the previous year's nuclear-themed The Sacrifice as much as The Empire Strikes Back. In an Afrocentric cinema, the conflicts and setpieces would be vastly more original, the reference points more diverse. For all that Yeelen belongs to a particular storytelling tradition, for all that it feels like a yarn passed down through a hundred generations or more, its words finally weigh less than Cissé's superlative images, which are burnished and handsome with regard to the people and the places they pass through, and richly unfamiliar with regard to what these people are doing there. Yes, many of these images require greater interpretation than those we've seen elsewhere, but the question to ask is not why the dog is walking backwards, but why can't the dog walk backwards? Why shouldn't the dog walk backwards? Why should our movies be bound by the same tired logic and rationale they've been bound by for well over a century now? Why can't the cinema, from time to time, go in a completely different direction?

Yeelen is now streaming via Rarefilmm.com.