Shown in the Panorama Section of the recent Berlin International Film Festival, The Cemetery of Cinema is a mesmerizing way to travel through the country of Guinea and its surroundings. Director Thierno Souleymane Diallo uses his search for the lost 1953 Guinean short film Mouramani (shot in France by Guinean director Mamadou Touré) as a throughline to explore the abandoned cinemas and production houses of his country.
Diallo walks from place to place on bare feet, always armed with his camera. He wears the uniform of a t-shirt, rolled up jeans, headphones, and a boom mic sticking out of his backpack. The boom mic doesn’t leave his back even when he bends over to pick things up or sits front row at an outdoor film screening. The stuff he’s shooting is only seen occassionally in the movie. The camera we see through is mostly trained on him.
The film starts off like it will be overly focused on him. He talks to his mother early on about how people thought he was crazy for going off to film school. This focus falls away quickly though and he becomes more of a welcome friend during the search for a surviving intact copy of Mouramani, or even just a living human who has seen it with their own eyes.
The search takes him to abandoned cinemas. He opens dust covered movie reels left there since the 90s. He unrolls the film and holds it up to the light. He finds movies from old Soviet republics and a porno but no Mouramani. One of the men helping him search tells him the pornos were shown only for adults after 9pm, but kids outside could climb the trees near the theatre to sneak a peek.
He travels to areas where Touré might have visited. A man punctuates every sentence said by other village leaders with a rhythmic singing. Diallo finds a teenager caring for a two month old puppy, an effective way to let us know what Mouramani is about: a man and his dog. The town assembles to watch images Diallo has captured from his visit there. His bare feet leave the ground for him to film a point of view shot from the back of a donkey.
He explains the bare feet as he visits his old film school to give a lecture to current students. He lets them guess why he walks around like that. To reduce noise while filming? No. Because the country doesn’t fund film enough for him to afford shoes. Lack of money or equipment isn’t the hugest obstacle to a beginning filmmaker though. He proves this by giving the students wooden cameras to go and practice their art.
We see how Guinea’s political history has affected the availibility of certain films as well. Diallo visits with a government censor who poetically only seems to have one working eye at this day and time. Even the censor has heard of Mouramani but never seen it. A visit to bootleg dvd sellers finds Bollywood films dubbed into Susu amongst other international blockbusters, but not a copy of the 1953 23 minute long short film Mouramani of course. These DVDs have taken the place of the abandoned cinemas, a communal experience becoming as lost as any lost film.
The search for Mouramani seems futile, but it does carry the documentary along well and maintain interest. It also takes Diallo to the old colonizer France for one last chance to find an existing copy. He puts on a nice blue suit for his travels but still keeps his feet bare on the streets of Paris. He dons a cardboard exoskeleton on which he’s written out what he’s searching for. He has no luck visiting the film preservation societies. We learn that film is alive and degrades. We get to see an example of what a totally unsalvageable reel looks like. It looks like a flat circle of polenta or baklava.
Undefeated, Diallo makes his own version of Mouramani with both a real camera and a cardboard one. Although the short film is most likely lost forever, Guinean film is still alive. This documentary is a very fun and fascinating example of that.
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