Father Geek here with the new Africa-AICN column from Dr. SOTHA, Rigobert Song and their respective staffs. Check it all out... Mr. Song sings a wonderful review of DIVINE CARCASSE this time out, he's really back in form this week. Annnnnd our good doctor seems to be successfully battling his bout of "Eternal Euphoria" by working Head Nurse Hollis overtime. Careful, Hollis, least you cum down with the dreaded affliction yourself...

Now here's SOTHA and his report...

You'll remember that in my last column I lost a good friend/lover (Ghi Ghi) to an infectious disease called 'eternal euphoria' in a Nice prison cell. I've conducted a number of tests on her organs and have concluded that this aberration rears its ugly head during sexual intercourse. That's right, DR.SOTHA knows for a fact that prolonged sex can lead to 'eternal euphoria'. A full report will be issued to the media in the next couple of days for all those skeptics out there.

Oh and one more thing, the only cure for this murderous outbreak, is celibacy for the time being. More unorthodox methods to deal with 'eternal euphoria' will be forthcoming. Send any related info you may know of to My Capetown Psycho Ward and I'll see to it that someone gets ahold of you about it.

Say no to sex, the only cure to 'eternal euphoria'

(p.s. Head Nurse Hollis here just to say that I do not endorse DR.SOTHA's ludicrous findings)

SOUTH AFRICA

* Ken Kaplan's feature film Pure Blood (produced by Bioskope Pictures, Videovision Entertainment and Revolution Pictures) had its world premier in Italy last week at the Roma Fantafestival, Europe's most established Genre film festival. Pure Blood, described as a "political horror film", won the coveted Luciano Fulci Award for Best First Film. Pure Blood is the first South African feature film to come out of the Government's Department of Arts, Culture, Science & Technology and the National Film & Video Foundation (NFVF).

* IndieWIRE.com reports that 13 animated films by William Kentridge are currently being featured at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in Lower Manhattan. This forms part of a retrospective of the South African artist entitled "In a Kaleidescope of Remembering and Forgetting".

* Controversial South African born film maker Ian Kerkhof is the special guest at this year's Standard Bank National Arts Festival film programme. Progressive cineastes can talk to him and view 22 of his short films which challenge every norm and set the pace for digital experimentation. Rap culture, the rave underground, fetishism, noise art, serial killing, rape and self-destruction all come up for examination through his relentless lens. Back on the safer ground of commercial cinema, festinos can look forward to three exciting premières. Nu Metro presents Three Thousand Miles to Graceland (a heist at the Las Vegas Elvis-look-alike convention) and The Heartbreakers (a sexy mother and daughter con team who know the quickest way to a man's wallet). (Can you believe it a premiere that was only seen in North America 3 months ago - DR.SOTHA) Ster Kinekor presents 'The King is Alive' a Danish work about a group of travellers stranded in Namibia starring Jennifer Jason Leigh. Innovation is balanced by nine European classics, including La Dolce Vita, The Blue Angel, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Gospel According to St Matthew. Fill the gaps in your experience of cultural history at Filmfest 2001! Back to the present, more than a dozen recent releases include Helena Noguiera's monumental Ingrid Jonker: her lives and time - the director's cut and several other fine specimens of South African cinema. Two programmes of short contemporary films offer a vivid insight into the minds of our local filmmakers. One features three works by Dumisani Phakhati: watch this man, he's going places. Sonic explorers will diarize the series of Frank Scheffer music films which are presented in collaboration with the New Music Indaba. Recent documentaries on the work of dramatist Brett Bailey and poet/painter Breyten Breytenbach share another programme slot. And, as an adrenaline closer, two masterpieces of action cinema from Hong Kong's martial arts studios will be screened on the last two days of Festival 2001. The Standard Bank National Arts Festival takes place between 28 June and 7 July. A comprehensive free Booking Kit giving everything you need to know about the shows and accommodation is available from select branches of the Standard Bank. Book through Computicket, Teletix or the internet (http://www.sbfest.co.za)

* The dude mentioned our country, and he may be the next Bond.and that's why it appears here: Another Scotsman To Play Bond? Scottish actor Gerard Butler has confirmed that he has had talks with James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli about taking over the 007 role if Pierce Brosnan decides to relinquish it. (Bond was originally played by a Scotsman, Sean Connery.) Appearing on the U.K.'s commercial breakfast television company GMTV, Butler said, "It's very flattering and I can't say much more then that. I was getting phone calls from L.A. saying that it was on CNN that I had been named as the new Bond. Since then I've been getting calls from everywhere from Israel to South Africa." Some writers speculated that Butler may have been joking, since no record could be found of such a CNN report.

* The comedy break with the South African Box Office: The Mummy Returns (Brendan Fraser / Arnold Vosloo) has hit the South African box office with a vengeance, knocking Pearl Harbor from its number one spot. "Mummy" made R3 644 438 (about the price of a pretzel in North America - DR.SOTHA) in its first week. The other three films in the top five are The Mexican, Sweet November and Exit Wounds.

NORTH AFRICA

* Pay-TV broadcaster M-Net has partnered with the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) in a mutually beneficial sustainable approach to spearheading development and production activity in the East African film and television industry. Carl Fischer, CEO of M-Net's commissioning arm MagicWorks says: "M-Net is keen to invest in and support pan-African industry initiatives. Through partnering with ZIFF, we are able to create impactful synergies for skills development and the exhibition and promotion of African films." M-Net will host the master New Directions Africa II (NDA II) scriptwriting workshop at ZIFF. MagicWorks will present the internal commissioning procedure as a case study paper at the ZIFF Industry Forum. M-Net will also bring journalists from West and East Africa to observe the festival. Three New Directions Africa short films produced last year - Surrender (Tanzania), The Father (Ethiopia) and A Barber's Wisdom (Nigeria) will officially open the festival.

* Here's Rogobert at his most detailed:

Glad to hear the good Doctor is back to pilot this column once again. Remember to e-mail me at My Spacious Office if you want to talk African Film. This week's review is in depth, so beware.

"Divine Carcasse" Produced and Directed by Dominque Loreau - Belgium/Benin - 59 minutes - In French, Fon and Yoruba with English subtitles

Divine Carcasse is an unusual hybrid, a half fictional, half ethnographic film. It is a study in cultural contrast, between a desacralized, materialistic European view of reality and an animist, pre-industrial African one. Belgian director Dominique Loreau has described her film as "an encounter with another culture, another way of relating to the world, objects and death - one that challenges our own relationships to the world."

In a sense, Divine Carcasse could be seen as just an extended play on a double entendre - that "ancestor" in French slang can mean an old car but to Africans refers to the omnipresent forces that shape their world. This film shows the literal metamorphosis of one of the most prosaic artifacts of Western culture, into a revered fetish of the coastal people of Benin. In so doing, it provides a concise lesson about the uneasy encounter between European technology and African tradition offering insight into some of our most deep-seated ideas about economics, art, anthropology and religion. In the opening shot, a mysterious cargo ship approaches the Benin coast much, one imagines, as did the brigantines of the first European explorers. In its hold, however, is a 1955 Peugeot imported to Cotonou by Simon, an expatriate European philosophy teacher. His friends deride the car as an unreliable means of transport but relish its nostalgia value but their view of the past extends no further than their own youth in the 50's. Of course, a car can be a fetish object in European culture; a friend suggests Simon can use it to pick up women. But it remains primarily a disposable commodity to these complacent members of the consumer society who drive along singing, "My life is on credit and in stereo."

The philosophical ambitions of this deceptively straightforward film are suggested by Simon who is preparing a lesson on Plato's "Myth of the Cave." In a remarkable prefiguring of cinema, Plato described ordinary perception as confusing the shadows on the walls of a cave with the object passing by outside which produce them, the " things in themselves." This locus classicus of the fundamental distinction between a higher noumenal reality and the everyday world of phenomena or appearances has haunted Western philosophy from Plato to Kant's epistemological skepticism to the radical relativism of today's discourse theory. A small fetish object above Simon's desk reminds us, however, of an alternative African metaphysics which sees the natural world as suffused with immanent noumenosity revealing itself through objects, people and gods.

The film's focus rapidly shifts from the European expatriate community to urban, modernizing Africa, a transitional space between these two worldviews. Simon in frustration gives the decrepit car to Joseph, his cook, who hopes to ride it to financial success and independence. When he shows it off in his natal village, the crowd is shocked that the French call such cars "ancestors" since they look at their own ancestors as "guides and protectors." Joseph's wife, fearing the villagers' envy, asks for the ancestors' intervention on the grounds that the car will lift the fortunes of the entire family line. But Joseph's taxi business is a failure and during a "ghost dance" or egungun ritual the ancestors tell him that his recently deceased maternal uncle has cursed him and must be placated. The ancestors still don't seem much help; Joseph is forced to sell the car to a garage which discards it as scrap.

At this point the film's fictional narrative disappears entirely to be replaced by a nearly documentary study of an actual Beninois metalworker making a fetish commissioned by the village of Ouassou. We watch as he uses pre-industrial techniques to turn the car door into long strips of metal, presumably in imitation of the straw garments worn by the other fetishes. This fetish, the ram god, Agbo, master of the night, symbolized by the horns of the crescent moon, is brought back by four village elders by boat - the same way the car arrived at the film's beginning. The film ends when the statue is accepted or recognized by the joyful villagers and joins the other fetishes in the zangbeto society supposedly a kind of night watch for the village. Dark falls but the fetish's eyes blaze - perhaps amazed at its metamorphosis from a car into a god who sees in the dark.

This change from fiction to documentary is not arbitrary; it illustrates the difference between the Europeanized sector where people like Joseph see themselves as individual subjects and agents of their own fates and rural areas where they are immersed in a complex matrix of collective values, mores and activities. Their world is part of an on-going shared narrative where the past in the form of the ancestors is always connected to the present and future. It could be said no one ever fully dies in Benin. Divine Carcasse may even ask if a culture which overtly sees itself as dominated by supernatural forces is any less free than the illusory individualism of our own capitalist culture locked in the equally tight grip of Adam Smith's "invisible hand," not to say, the very visible one of Madison Avenue.

The distinction can, however, be most clearly seen in the different attitude to the fetish itself. In the West, it would be seen as a self-contained, finished creation by an individual artist to be consumed simply for its aesthetic value. In Benin it is a functional object constructed by an anonymous craftsman which only fully assumes its meaning when it is used as a vessel on which a god alights. Surprisingly, it is Jean Genet who makes this point in the film's epigraph: "A work of art is not for the generation of children, it is offered to the countless generations of the past, who approve or reject it." It may seem to Africans, perhaps, too obvious a point to make.

Divine Carcasse can also be seen as an allegory of Europe's encounter with Africa. Colonialism brought to Africa a version of their own technological civilization, albeit a run-down, and second hand one, which post-independent African states have attempted to make work only to have it fall apart entirely. In the end Africa must rely on its own resources and traditions so that as the film moves forward it also moves backward into a pre-colonial past culture. Perhaps such a simple "return to the ancestors" is impractical in a relentlessly modernizing, globally inter-connected world. But Africa like much of the world is struggling to develop its own version of modernism in which objects can be produced not for profit or for supernatural beings but simply for human use.

Divine Carcasse, in its wry awareness of the ambiguous relationship between fiction and documentary, builds on the work of pioneering ethnographer Jean Rouch (see Rouch in Reverse). It deliberately does not ask us to choose between African and Western perspectives but to recognize both as equally valid and equally fictional. The film is just one reading of Beninois reality just as these few paragraphs have been just one reading of the film. Dominique Loreau points to her film as illustrative of this polysemous vision of the world: "My film is itself a fiction by its very nature; an object passes from hand to hand changing its meaning according to how we use it. It is a fiction and realty at the same time. Like a fetish, it is a fiction which creates a reality."

AFRICAN AMERICAN

* Bernie Mac ("The Original Kings of Comedy") is finalizing a deal to star in New Regency's action-comedy feature "The Last Ride," for which he will be paid $1 million, sources said. The project reunites Mac with the Fox-based production company whose television division, Regency TV, is co-producing his half-hour Fox network fall sitcom "The Bernie Mac Show" with 20th Century Fox Television. Written by Mike Mahern, "Ride" is described as a hip-hop road race in the spirit of "The Cannonball Run." Aaron Mendelsohn and Paul Tamasy rewrote the script.

* Fox 2000 is finalizing a deal to pick up the project "Truck 44" from Universal Pictures with filmmaker Peter Berg on board to direct from his own script. Fox 2000 hopes to have "Truck" in production later this year, sources said. The dramatic project will be overseen by Fox 2000 executive vp Carla Hacken, a former agent at ICM, where she repped Berg. Berg is now with Endeavor. "Truck" centers on a group of New York firefighters who attempt to rob a building but end up setting it on fire. The project was originally set up at Interscope, where Berg had directed "Very Bad Things" from his own script. At that time, USA Films was on board to distribute "Truck" but put it into turnaround. When Interscope dissolved, the project was absorbed by Interscope founder Ted Fields' new company Radar Pictures, which is producing the project. After Universal picked up the project, Samuel L. Jackson was negotiating to star

* And now for one of those stories we all like to read: Sexy movie star Halle Berry is ready to do more nude scenes. When she broke into the movies she was initially reluctant to show her body, fearing that it would typecast her. "Ten years ago I was a former model and beauty queen and I believed that if I showed my body I would be seen as one- dimensional. Now that I'm a more established actress I feel more comfortable to explore it." How different to when she started off, as she admits: "It's true that I wouldn't even read scripts that had nudity in them before but now that I've done it I realise that it's actually very easy." Berry's breasts can be seen in the new movie Swordfish.

* From Berry's breasts we move to: Oprah Winfrey's popular resident human behaviour guru, Dr. Phil McGraw, is getting his own show - funded by Oprah herself. Oprah's production company, Harpo Studios, says it will produce a daily talk show featuring McGraw for autumn 2002. Texas-based McGraw appears on Oprah's talk show each Tuesday, where he often deals with couples' conflicts. He is also a best-selling author.

DR.SOTHA REVO & OUT