I had been looking for this film for a good three years to no avail. It had come highly recommended by one of my more esoteric friends, one of those people whose best lists are topped with films that nobody has ever seen nor heard of, so I figured it was a lost cause. But his manic and passionate description of this so-called documentary intrigued me, and I made a silent note in my head to keep my ears and eyes open. Soon it became my elusive holy film grail: I played detective, draining every possible resource from Kim's Video in New York to eBay...I even had a friend of mine scour the Smithsonian anthropology archives in my quest, but the search was fruitless, my energies depleted, my mind numb and wandering to more easily available filmmakers. Then last night, I watched the news: An rare planetary alignment expected tomorrow, Earth, Mars, Saturn, Venus, Jupiter... This was the same night I saw les Maitres Fous for the first time, in a chance screening at New York's Film Forum, presented by Werner Herzog, along with another great film called 'Sans Soleil' by Chris Marker. Talk about planetary alignment! Herzog presented it by saying this film was shot for virtually no money, on a 16mm Bolex wind-up camera, and the result was in his opinion, one of the greatest films ever made. I sat during this thirty odd minute experience, at first confused, then disturbed, then fascinated, then finally entrained. Whatever it was that I was privy to during this film was magnificently effective and at times profoundly disturbing and apocalyptic.
The film follows a tribe of West Africans in 1955 ruled and oppressed by British colonialists; they work hard labor, for little money, the same story told by generations of Africans when Europe had control over most of the continent. They devised initiation rituals within their tribe in which they work themselves into a kind of therapeutic ecstatic rage, 'possessed' by incarnations of the British elite class: soldiers, generals, governors; rituals that involve thriving, screaming, foaming at the mouth, self mutilation, flagellation, animal sacrifice, all as methods to protect themselves mentally and spiritually from what might be an otherwise rage-inducing role in colonial society. This enables them to resume labor the next day as subservient working class, but regenerated and spiritually cleansed.
In several bizarre sequences, we watch the very primal and brutal dances these young men put themselves through, in order to achieve the desired catharsis, akin to my memories of adolescence where I screamed and punched my walls at the top of my lungs until I was out of energy and breath, a natural reaction to bottled frustration -- a diversionary tactic to potential outward violence by inflicting the pain instead upon myself. They tap into this ingrained potential energy, and intuitive body rhythms, and at times it almost seems like a well choreographed dance, but there is a dark and primal spontaneous sense all though these ritual that while it is very theatrical, the pain and empathy is very real. Herzog afterwords even called it 'a deep glance into the darkest hell and abyss of the human soul'... The rituals are also very creative and surreal, compared to the dull monotony of their everyday jobs, it seems a rather positive, albeit extreme, outlet for these energies and frustrations. In a spectacular series of final shots, we see these same men the next day, in their 'proper' societal roles, as truck drivers, salesmen, hospital attendants, all smiling for the camera, as though the day before had never happened.
It's disturbing that their rituals are what modern day psychology might call 'coping mechanisms'. This kind of collective spiritual purging is virtually unseen or unspoken of in Western society, where I can only imagine it would be considered taboo or blasphemy to act out some of what these men do. The film is endlessly fascinating, and an essential ethnographic document, though how much is 'documentary', I do not know. It is so enormously powerful and surreal it is hard to believe that any of it is 'real'. I suppose the word 'real' is inefficient at describing any film, document or not, but what is fact is that undoubtedly these men and the theater-going audience were profoundly affected. I would say that the larger picture was revealed to me by the end of this film, and it connects all cultures around the world: Society creates the need for such irrational and insane practices, just in order to maintain order and sanity.
The film follows a tribe of West Africans in 1955 ruled and oppressed by British colonialists; they work hard labor, for little money, the same story told by generations of Africans when Europe had control over most of the continent. They devised initiation rituals within their tribe in which they work themselves into a kind of therapeutic ecstatic rage, 'possessed' by incarnations of the British elite class: soldiers, generals, governors; rituals that involve thriving, screaming, foaming at the mouth, self mutilation, flagellation, animal sacrifice, all as methods to protect themselves mentally and spiritually from what might be an otherwise rage-inducing role in colonial society. This enables them to resume labor the next day as subservient working class, but regenerated and spiritually cleansed.
In several bizarre sequences, we watch the very primal and brutal dances these young men put themselves through, in order to achieve the desired catharsis, akin to my memories of adolescence where I screamed and punched my walls at the top of my lungs until I was out of energy and breath, a natural reaction to bottled frustration -- a diversionary tactic to potential outward violence by inflicting the pain instead upon myself. They tap into this ingrained potential energy, and intuitive body rhythms, and at times it almost seems like a well choreographed dance, but there is a dark and primal spontaneous sense all though these ritual that while it is very theatrical, the pain and empathy is very real. Herzog afterwords even called it 'a deep glance into the darkest hell and abyss of the human soul'... The rituals are also very creative and surreal, compared to the dull monotony of their everyday jobs, it seems a rather positive, albeit extreme, outlet for these energies and frustrations. In a spectacular series of final shots, we see these same men the next day, in their 'proper' societal roles, as truck drivers, salesmen, hospital attendants, all smiling for the camera, as though the day before had never happened.
It's disturbing that their rituals are what modern day psychology might call 'coping mechanisms'. This kind of collective spiritual purging is virtually unseen or unspoken of in Western society, where I can only imagine it would be considered taboo or blasphemy to act out some of what these men do. The film is endlessly fascinating, and an essential ethnographic document, though how much is 'documentary', I do not know. It is so enormously powerful and surreal it is hard to believe that any of it is 'real'. I suppose the word 'real' is inefficient at describing any film, document or not, but what is fact is that undoubtedly these men and the theater-going audience were profoundly affected. I would say that the larger picture was revealed to me by the end of this film, and it connects all cultures around the world: Society creates the need for such irrational and insane practices, just in order to maintain order and sanity.