Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Hyenas
1992 · Djibril Diop Mambéty · Hyenas on Sightlines
First the sandals. Yellow plastic, brand new, and all at once they are on everybody's feet in Colobane. Nobody in this town has money. Nobody has been paid anything. But the sandals arrive, and then a fan, then a refrigerator, and by the time you have counted them you realize the town has already decided. The talking comes after. The killing comes after. The sandals are the verdict.
Djibril Diop Mambéty made two features in a lifetime, nineteen years apart, and died in 1998 with the third panel of his money-and-power trilogy unshot. For the second he took a Swiss play, Dürrenmatt's The Visit, about an old millionairess who comes home and offers a town a fortune in exchange for one man's death, and carried it to the dust of the place he was born. The woman is now "richer than the World Bank." The man she wants killed is the shopkeeper who abandoned her decades ago and left her with his child. The debt is real. So is the price.
What Mambéty found inside that machine is something no stage version could give it: a way of filming appetite.
Deleuze has a name for this, and it isn't one of his famous ones. Between the close-up, where a feeling is held in a face and not yet spent, and the action-image, where a person sizes up a situation and acts on it, he found a third and stranger thing: the impulse-image. Here nobody acts on a situation. A drive gets hold of them. The world thins out into part-objects that a drive can seize — food, a body, a shoe — and those objects take on a charge out of all proportion to what they are. Deleuze called that charge fetish. Hyenas is full of it. The fans and the refrigerators and the cheap sandals are not props, and they are not quite symbols either. They are what the appetite has instead of hands.
The impulse-image needs two worlds running at once, and this is the part worth slowing down for. There is the derived milieu: a specific, dated, socially exact place. Colobane, poor, Senegalese, early nineties, with its shops and its debts. And showing through it like bone through skin is what Deleuze called the originary world, a savage place of pure appetite with no history in it at all, no politics, only hunger and what hunger does. Naturalism, in his sense, is the art of filming the second through the first.
Which is why the animals are not decoration. Elephants get cut into the drama. Vultures too. In another film these would be atmosphere, or a heavy metaphor, and you would be right to flinch. Here they are the originary world becoming visible for a second. Mambéty cuts them the way his own Touki Bouki cut livestock and ocean and machinery into a love story: not to explain anything, but to set one image beside another and let the third meaning form in you. That debt is exact. The jump cuts, the dislocated sound bridges that carry you across a gap into an unrelated image, the rhythmic commentary track built out of things that don't belong together — all of it is his 1973 grammar, brought back and pointed at a crime. The hyena of the title is never announced. It is the shape the crowd takes.
And the crowd is the film's real character. Deleuze borrowed a word for a mass filmed as one feeling rather than as many people: the dividual. Colobane's townspeople are one of those. They gather, they argue themselves along, they move through the streets in something close to carnival, and the comedy Mambéty gets out of this stays genuinely funny for a long time before it turns your stomach. Fellini's provincial parades are in its blood. Greed is staged here as public pageant, action turned into spectacle rather than performed, which is roughly what Deleuze meant by the attraction-image.
Nothing in Hyenas rises. Everything settles. The impulse-image runs down what Deleuze called a line of slope, an irreversible descent toward exhaustion, and the wicked joke of this film is that the descent is furnished. Each new appliance is a step further down that feels like a step up. Sembène had already found this in Xala, where the neocolonial bourgeoisie is punished through its imported luxuries and the commodity is the visible symptom of the rot. Mambéty takes it and inflates it to the scale of a whole town. Buñuel is in the room too, Deleuze's own great naturalist: the beggars' banquet of Viridiana, the poor gorging at a table that isn't theirs while a moral debt is quietly written off, is the exact tableau Hyenas moves outdoors and hands a desert.
Here is what the lens actually buys you, and why it is more than vocabulary. Read Hyenas as a morality play and it becomes a story about bad people choosing wrong, which lets you leave feeling superior to them. Read it as an impulse-image and there is no choosing anywhere in it. The town never decides to kill a man. The town is bought, object by object, until killing him is simply the next thing. That is a far harder film, and it is the one Mambéty shot.
Deleuze said modern political cinema begins from an admission: the people are missing. A filmmaker can no longer speak on behalf of a constituted people, only try to conjure one that doesn't yet exist. Hyenas is the black-comic proof. Colobane has every outward form of a people — assembly, deliberation, consent, procession — and what it produces is a pack. Deleuze's hope was fabulation, a community caught in the act of legending itself into being. Mambéty films the same faculty running in reverse: a town telling itself a story in which it is just and the man has it coming. Same machine. Murder at the end of it.
What did this do to film? It found a way to make neocolonialism visible without one speech about it. Black Girl had distilled the whole subject into a single allegorical figure and a parable told plain; Mambéty inherited that clarity and blew it up to carnival size, so that debt and structural adjustment arrive as farce and you can watch a population get priced in appliances. What he handed forward is a method rather than a look. Let the goods do the arguing. Cut an animal in when the human frame gets too polite. Trust the audience to assemble the accusation itself.
Watch the feet. The film tells you everything in shoes, long before anybody says yes.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — The townspeople never deliberate their way to a decision; consumer goods arrive "like a slow-motion bribe" and the town talks itself into murder — appetite seizes them rather than a situation calling forth an act.
- fetish — Fans, refrigerators and yellow plastic sandals carry a compulsive charge out of all proportion to what they are; they are the part-objects the drive takes hold of.
- derived-milieu — Colobane, the dusty, impoverished, historically specific Senegalese town of Mambéty's birth, with its shopkeeper and its debts.
- originary-world — Elephants and vultures cut into the drama, and the townsfolk massing like the hyenas of the title — the desert showing through the town as a world of pure appetite.
- entropy / degradation — The film's only trajectory is downward: each new appliance delivered to Colobane is another step toward the killing, a descent that arrives furnished.
- dividual — The townsfolk massing as a single body — an escalating chorus of collective complicity rather than a set of individual choices.
- attraction-image — The carnivalesque staging inherited from Amarcord: processions and public spectacle that render greed as communal pageant, figuring the act rather than performing it.
- montage-dialectical-soviet — Elephants and vultures cut against the human drama so that the third term — the pack, the hyena — forms in the viewer rather than being stated.
- interstice / the "AND" — The Touki Bouki grammar carried over: jump cuts and dislocated sound bridges yoking unrelated images (livestock, ocean, machinery) into a rhythmic commentary track that joins across a gap instead of by continuity.
- people-are-missing — Colobane has every form of a collective — assembly, deliberation, consent, procession — and what it constitutes is a murderous pack; the neocolonial comedy is that no people is available to be addressed.
- story-telling / legending — The town talks itself into murder, composing a version of itself in which the killing is justice — legending run in reverse.