This film was shared with Future PCVs in Benin. It is called Divine Carcasse (1998).
Click here to view the film on Youtube.
The film, as a whole, is framed by two scenes of vessels. These scenes are not simply motion of ships, but a bearing of a sacred cargo. With the knowledge of the objects upon these ships, these ships are transformed into arks. Though, the divinities that these arks carry are of a different kind.
The first in its opening shot, is of an ominous freighter approaching the camera. To an eye unfamiliar with this technology, it does not even appear to move, but simply lurk upon the horizon with dreadful authority . We come to see in the following scene that this ship bears precious cargo, a 1950's Peugeot.
The second scene, a quiet, crawling ride down a river, reveals a punt bearing the same Peugeot. But the Peugeot, over the course of the film, has undergone a metamorphosis. After passing through many hands, the Peugeot has been left as junk. A metal-worker has been called to construct a fetish of the spirit Agbo. The punt has become a vessel of divinity.
The film allows the viewer to compare two kinds of mythology. The mythology of the France, held by the expatriate philosophy teacher, in which the Peugeot lives as a symbol of nostalgia and youth. This is an disenchanted nostalgia though, because the Peugeot survives simply as a commodity. Compare this with the mythology of the Benin, in which the Peugeot is quite literally, re-enchanted with the spirit of Agbo.
This comparison is made most evident in a scene at 17.25:
Joseph: Do you know what they call a car like this in France?
Joseph: An ancestor.
Villager: An ancestor?
Villager: Can you call a car an ancestor?
Joseph: That's what the French call it.
Villager: We can't call it that. Here we have our own ancestors, who protect and guide us. It can't be our protection god. It's nothing but an old car.
Joseph: Yes. Still, it's in good shape. See how it bore me from afar.
Villager: You can't call a living object an ancestor.
Villager: Still, it is nice.
In an disenchanted France, the Peugeot is given a ironic pejorative with the phrase ancestor. The objects of antiquity to the western world are junk. The village's rejection of the name "ancestor" is two-fold: an "ancestor" is far more powerful than a mere machine, and an ancestor, by necessity, must not be alive. The village attributes the Peugeot spirit, but denies it the status of ancestor. (I am unfamiliar with what language is being used in this scene, but the corresponding words appears to be "tabo" or "tapo". I will do some investigating later to find out what that word means.)
These are simply cursory sketches of the relations of mythological modes of the west and Benin. This film serves as equal parts documentary-ethnography and a fictionalized metamorphosis myth. I see an fascinating intersection of Western Capitalism, Beninese Vodun, language, and man's relationship with objects in this film. I look forward to exploring more of this in my service in Benin.
I can not help but be reminded of Baudelaire's own divine carcass in "Une Charogne", another divine metamorphosis, or re-enchantment. Read it here: http://fleursdumal.org/poem/126
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