Sankofa · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A chapel sits directly on top of the male dungeon at Cape Coast Castle. Worship on one floor. Several hundred chained men on the floor below. The same stone holding both. Haile Gerima shoots it and moves on. He doesn't cut to a hymnal or drop a microphone through the flagstones to catch the singing bleeding down. The building already made the argument. The camera only has to stand where the fact is.

Everything in Sankofa comes out of that arrangement, including its theory of time. The past isn't behind you here. It's underneath you, and it's load-bearing.

Deleuze separates two kinds of film past, and the difference is the whole movie. One is the recollection-image: the dated flashback, cued by a dissolve, framed by someone remembering. It's obedient. It stays in its box, it explains itself, and it hands the present back intact when it's finished. The other he calls sheets of past — not something recalled but layers that never stopped coexisting with now, so a character doesn't remember them, she goes into them. Gerima's threshold is the demonstration. Mona wanders into the dungeon, hands come out of the dark and take her, there's a cut, and she is Shola on a sugar plantation. No ripple. No dissolve. No rules.

The film is shelved under science fiction and contains not one piece of machinery. The mechanism is possession, and Gerima never explains it, never builds a mythology around it, never returns to it as a puzzle to be solved in the last reel. Deleuze has a name for a join like that: the irrational cut, or the interstice. An ordinary cut belongs to the shots on either side and smooths them together. This one belongs to neither. The gap is the point, and leaving it unbridged is what keeps 1993 and the plantation on the same floor of the building rather than stacking one safely behind the other.

Now look at the light. Augustin Cubano shoots present-day Ghana hot and high-key: white stone, white sand, a body arranged on the ramparts for a white photographer's fashion camera. The plantation is desaturated, earthen, close. That contrast isn't decoration, it's the accusation. Tourist light is the light of a place whose history has been made legible and safe. Deleuze thought one of modern cinema's real jobs was making us see a cliché as a cliché, and the drummer at the gate does it out loud, haranguing a model for posing at the site of a catastrophe. Then the film does it with bodies. Mona in gold and beads and sunglasses; Shola stripped, in coarse cloth, branded. Deleuze calls this a gest: a posture held long enough that the social relation organizing it becomes visible without anyone explaining it. The photo shoot and the auction block are staged as one operation with a few centuries between them.

Then ask where the camera is standing. Plantation films run on a particular shot — the long view down the allée, the great house against the sky. That view has an owner. Gerima and Cubano largely refuse it and work in close and medium shot from inside the quarters, so the great house stays at a distance, because that's the distance it has when you're the one cutting cane. Deleuze, borrowing from Pasolini, calls this free indirect discourse: the camera stops observing a character and starts seeing with her, until you can't separate the filmmaker's vision from the community's. It changes what violence is on screen. The whipping is filmed at duration and at proximity, but from among the people made to watch it, which makes it a communal event instead of a display of a ruined back.

That position is the film's deepest Deleuzian move. Deleuze's seer is the figure who replaces the hero: someone who sees something intolerable and has no action available that would resolve it, so the seeing becomes the event. Sankofa shows resistance in several forms and is careful that none of them is a rescue. Gerima had already written the theory from a different direction. His essay in Questions of Third Cinema (1989) argues flatly against Aristotelian construction and the Hollywood catharsis it feeds, for a spectator who participates rather than consumes. His editing keeps the promise: the plantation section accumulates instead of escalating, and refrains — the buzzard, the sea, Nunu's face, the drum — return as punctuation where a conventional film would place plot beats.

Bazin argued that real space and the long take honor the ambiguity of the world, that you shouldn't chop the real into meanings. Gerima pushes to a harder claim: some real spaces are already testimony. He shot inside the actual dungeon of a functioning UNESCO monument rather than building a set, and kept it as dark as it is, which was only practical because early-nineties high-speed tungsten stock let a modest lighting package survive in stone chambers with almost no openings. The dark is data.

Sound carries as much as image. Kofi Ghanaba, the Ghanaian master percussionist who spent the mid-1950s pushing African drumming into conversation with American jazz, plays the divine drummer at the gate, and his drum works as diegetic sound, summons and score at once. Gerima cuts on it as often as on action. The track refuses to translate itself into one language: English shares space with Akan, with Caribbean speech, with chant and untranslated invocation, registering the plain fact that the enslaved did not arrive sharing a tongue. Deleuze would call the drummer's harangue and the voice-over calling on the lingering spirits speech-acts rather than dialogue, declamation that summons instead of converses, and the whole procedure fabulation: story-telling as an act that makes something, people caught mid-legend, inventing themselves aloud.

None of it appeared from nowhere. Harvest: 3,000 Years gave Gerima his durational blocks of labor and the chorus figure who declaims history straight at the camera, the performance register Nunu and the drummer inherit intact. Bush Mama built the handheld proximity, camera against the actor's face with no wide shot to orient you, plus the layered voice track that becomes this film's multilingual soundscape. Ashes and Embers supplied the exact mechanism: an elder interrupts the protagonist's present with unbroken address, and memory arrives as full-scene displacement rather than a marked flashback. From the L.A. Rebellion around Killer of Sheep comes the working method — crew as collective, semi-professional performers, scenes entered mid-action with the establishing shot withheld so you assemble the space yourself. From Sembène's Ceddo comes the griot-and-drum apparatus, percussion as a narrating agent that times and comments rather than scores, and the frontal palaver where conflict is declaimed instead of psychologized. From Med Hondo's Soleil Ô come both the licence to abandon linear causality and the priest as an instrument of capture, colonial Christianity filmed as a machine for manufacturing obedience. Which returns us to the chapel above the dungeon. Hondo filmed that argument. Gerima found the building where it was already built.

Deleuze's last big idea about political cinema is that the people are missing: a filmmaker in this position cannot address a constituted people, because the people has been broken or not yet made, so the film has to help invent one. American distributors told Gerima the film had no market. Same sentence, industry dialect. He four-walled it, renting theaters himself, beginning in Washington where he had taught at Howard since the 1970s, organizing each city in advance through churches, bookstores, sororities, community groups. It ran for months in some markets. Because it bypassed the reporting apparatus nobody can say reliably what it grossed, and the figures in the press should be handled with tongs. What isn't in doubt is that it worked, and became the case people cite for the proposition that the audience the industry declared nonexistent is real. He assembled a public the way he assembles a space: from fragments, no establishing shot. In 2021 the 4K restoration came back through ARRAY, a distribution company founded on that same proposition. What this film seeded isn't a style someone copied. It's an infrastructure.

So: it showed that a historical film can throw out the flashback contract entirely and an audience will follow, which means the past on film doesn't have to be quoted, it can be entered. It deleted the proprietor's establishing shot from the plantation picture and made the enslaved community the place where the camera lives. And it treated its viewers as a constituency rather than a demographic.

The title is the Akan proverb, the bird looking backward while walking forward. It is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot. Notice the bird is still moving. The film leaves the harder half of that open and won't answer it for you: what is the fetching for? Watch it again and track one thing — where the camera is standing, shot by shot, and whose eyes that position belongs to. Once you can see that, you'll notice it missing from almost every other film about slavery you've ever watched.