An atonal screech from what is presumably an alto sax or a clarinet fills the soundtrack of Amelia Umuhire’s film Mugabo (2017). Sound, among other less dominant modes of cinematic communication, has a privileged place in the two works being screened at e-flux tonight for the inaugural program of Natacha Nsabimana’s new series, presented under the aegis of the African Film Institute. Innocent (2020), a radio play, denies image completely. Instead, it uses interviews, sound effects, and music to tell the story of the artist’s father. In both works, sounds (some musical, some natural), multiple languages, and fleeting images (exclusively in Mugabo) stand in for the evocative stuff of memory. Umuhire’s conscious ethereality—the artist’s intimacy and attention to the elements of cinema beyond what is seen—invites us to experience remembering in a visceral way.
Umuhire troubles this viscerality however, with a sophisticated approach to the chimeric relationship between memory and our understanding of it. Mugabo, a six-minute video, which mixes collage-like images in both black-and-white and color, elegantly expresses this relationship. The enigmatic work ends with a prolonged sequence that helps retroactively give form to what we’ve seen and heard—providing a sort of thematic rearview. In the scene, two people, including the titular Mugabo (Pacifique Ishimwe), smoke weed and discuss the perspective of a gecko. The gecko, when we observe it, hangs upside down, but to the gecko, this is the world as such. Umuhire, who has returned to Rwanda after emigrating as a child to escape the genocide against the Tutsis, has encountered a perspectival shift (an encounter with the perspectives of others or an encounter with the parallax nature of her own memories). This encounter necessitates a new understanding. The gecko metaphor provides a simple, lighthearted suture for what could be (and perhaps is) a traumatic wound.
Innocent presents listeners with an even more explicit excavation of the past through the present. In Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, Umuhire interviews her mother, her cousin, and others to tell the story of her father. The work plays an intriguing game between denial and generosity—giving us lush sound and a variety of voices and perspectives but denying us the obvious image—and in this way, it only increases its power. The recollections we hear are honored through our listening as we are invited into private remembrances and become, ironically, witnesses to a new human history. Umuhire’s work is not simply about reclaiming a narrative but about redefining the epistemological paradigm through personal, polylinguistic, expressive, and identitarian lenses.
Amelia Umuhire will present two works tonight, January 23, at e-flux Screening Room, followed by a conversation with Natacha Nsabimana, the inaugural presentation in the African Film Institute series.
