Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Who Killed Captain Alex?
2010 · Nabwana IGG · Who Killed Captain Alex? on Sightlines
A man stands in a dirt yard in Wakaliga holding a machine gun his neighbor milled out of scrap. He fires. Across from him another neighbor takes the hit and a condom of stage blood bursts against his shirt. Off-screen a voice is yelling at you, delighted: "Expect the unexpectable!" None of it is hidden. You can see the paint on the gun.
That visibility isn't the film's failure. It's its contract. Take the contract seriously and Who Killed Captain Alex? stops being a joke you're in on and becomes what it actually is, which is the founding of a cinema.
Nabwana IGG made it for roughly two hundred dollars in a Kampala slum. He taught himself to cut from scavenged manuals and built the computers he cut on out of salvaged parts. The cast was the neighborhood. The story is a war between police commandos and the Tiger Mafia after a raid in which a police captain is killed: a question for a title, an aftermath for a plot. Before this, Uganda had no action movie. That isn't trivia. It's the situation, and it's why Gilles Deleuze turns out to be the right companion for a film he never lived to see.
Two things from him. The smaller one first, because the film delivers it with a completely straight face.
Deleuze's name for the engine of ordinary movies is the action-image. A character perceives a situation, acts on it, and the situation changes; the cutting exists to serve that chain. See the threat, throw the punch, the balance shifts. It sounds like nothing. It is brutally hard. By 2010 a lot of expensive action cinema had stopped really attempting it, blurring fights into handheld smear and two-frame cuts so you felt impact without ever knowing where anybody was standing. Nabwana's fights know where everybody is standing. He inherits that legibility straight from Enter the Dragon (1973), which codified escalating one-against-many combat: clear lines of attack, one beat per blow. And from Police Story (1985) he takes the other half, the principle that whatever is lying around on set becomes the weapon, and that undercranking the camera sharpens the hit. His Waka Starz drill those beats by hand. What arrives, from the direction nobody was watching, is a real action director's rhythm.
Deleuze would call the shape of the conflict a binomial: force set squarely against force, commandos against Tiger Mafia, with the Kampala street working as what he calls the encompasser, the milieu that presses on people until they act. Here the encompasser is doubled in a way no studio can buy. The slum surrounding the fiction is the slum that produced it. The wall the actor gets thrown against is his wall.
Now the larger thing, which is where the film becomes important rather than charming.
In his second cinema book Deleuze writes about filmmakers working where no film industry exists, and argues their political task cannot be representing a people, because, in his phrase, the people are missing. No established audience, no national image-bank, no industry to be the voice of. What's left is fabulation: legending. You catch people in the act of inventing themselves, and the invention is the politics. That is exactly what Wakaliwood does. "Da best of da best" is not a boast about a finished thing, it's a summons. Neighbors step in front of the camera as commandos and the camera speaks for them while they perform a genre Uganda had never shot — Deleuze's free indirect discourse, where the filmmaker's vision and the characters' fuse into a single voice belonging to neither. Nabwana isn't documenting Wakaliga and he isn't escaping it. He's conscripting it into an action movie, and the action movie into Wakaliga.
Which brings us to VJ Emmie, the most radical element in the film and the one most often mistaken for a gimmick. Emmie is a video joker, working inside a Ugandan exhibition tradition of live narration over the running image. He isn't a character and he isn't dubbing dialogue. Deleuze has a category for precisely this kind of voice: the speech act, the legending or testifying voice that stands apart from the visible bodies instead of issuing from them. And because Emmie's performance is live, sound and image here are two self-standing wholes that touch only across a gap. Deleuze calls that heautonomy. Most movies weld voice to body so tightly you forget there's a seam. Captain Alex pries them apart and installs the audience's own reaction, its laughter and hype and running commentary, inside the work as a second author.
There's a temptation to reach here for Deleuze's powers of the false, the Wellesian art of forgery where true and false become undecidable. It doesn't fit, and the misfit teaches something. Nothing in this film is undecidable. The blood is visibly a condom, the gun is visibly scrap, nobody is fooled for a second. What Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) bequeathed isn't deception but its opposite: sincerity that plows straight through its own visible seams and earns something a seamless film can't. You aren't asked to believe. You're asked to watch people make it.
Even the film's existence is provisional. Nabwana routinely deleted finished work to free hard-drive space, and the original Captain Alex footage is gone. What you can watch is a re-edit, a film whose surviving body was rebuilt in the cut, which is fitting for a director whose one formally trained craft is editing. Sit with what that does to the idea of a movie. No original. A narration performed live in the room. A version instead of a text. That's closer to how stories behave when they're spoken aloud than to how they behave in a can.
The craft debts run past Hong Kong. El Mariachi (1992) proved a one-man crew and in-camera economy could carry an entire genre picture for pocket change; Nabwana scales that model down to a slum budget and up into a studio. Bad Taste (1987) is the practical-effects ancestor — weekend shoots, friends as cast, homemade gore standing in for the whole production design. The distribution spine comes from Living in Bondage (1992), which launched Nollywood's straight-to-video engine: shoot fast in a local language, sell the discs off market stalls. Ramon Film Productions inherited that engine and jumped it onto the internet, where a trailer went viral and turned a Kampala compound into a destination, collaborators and pilgrims arriving to work there.
It didn't seed one successor film. It seeded a proof and a place. The floor of this art is now measurably at two hundred dollars, and what Nabwana invented is a method: the constraint list becomes the choreography. What the neighborhood physically contains, who's free on Sunday, how much drive space is left.
So watch it again with the laugh still available, but watch the geometry too. Count the beats in a fight. Notice where he chooses to cut. Hear Emmie as an author rather than a joke track. Then stay with the good question the film leaves open: who made the thing you just watched — the man who shot it, the man shouting over it, the street that acted in it, or the version that happened to survive?
Concepts in play
- Action-image — The commando-vs-Tiger Mafia set-pieces run the sensory-motor circuit at full power, built on Enter the Dragon's escalating one-against-many grammar (clear lines of attack, a beat per blow) and Police Story's use of whatever is on set as a weapon plus undercranking to sharpen impact — 'real choreography, real editing rhythm, a real action director.'
- Binomial (force against force) — The film's structure is police commandos set squarely against the Tiger Mafia, following the raid in which Captain Alex is killed.
- The encompasser (synsign) — The Wakaliga slum in Kampala is both the fiction's pressing milieu and the actual production site — the neighbors are the cast and their own street is the action space.
- The people are missing — Uganda had no action cinema and no audience for one; Nabwana makes 'Uganda's first action movie' in a slum with neighbors as cast, inventing the audience and the national genre at the same time as the film.
- Fabulation (legending) — The 'da best of da best' bravado and VJ Emmie's 'Expect the unexpectable!' catch Wakaliwood in the act of legending itself into existence — a compound that became a global phenomenon after its trailer circulated.
- Free indirect discourse (political) — Nabwana's neighbors appear as police commandos and Tiger Mafia; the camera speaks for Wakaliga while Wakaliga performs a genre Uganda had never shot, the director's vision and the performers' fused.
- Speech act (acte de parole) — VJ Emmie's live 'video joker' narration, in the Ugandan tradition of exhibition commentary, is a legending/testifying voice over the image rather than dialogue issuing from a visible body — and it is inseparable from the film.
- Heautonomy — Because Emmie's commentary is performed live over the running film, the sound track and the image track are each self-standing wholes that meet only across the gap between them.
- Montage (the cut as unit) — The original footage was deleted to free hard-drive space, so the surviving film exists only as a re-edit — the work was rebuilt in the cut by a director whose one self-taught formal craft, learned from scavenged manuals, is editing.