Welcome to Applied Fiction

Jean-Pierre Bekolo
Translated from the French by Simon Burt In the beginning there is always a story. When I return to my village, I stop at each house on the single road that crosses the village. The ritual is always the same: I get out of the car. I offer a salutation, which consists first in touching the breastthe breast from which the breath comes, so from which life comes. Then follows a little trial of strength to test the solidity of the bonesthe structure of the other, their armature. Its a question of finding out whether the other is here or there. Then the arms slide along the others arms and stop nervously at various pointsas if measuring the blood pressure, the heartbeat. This means ending up at the hands, which are kept hand in hand, a sign for generosityone gives and takes with the hands. This physical journey around the others body is followed by a story, a timeless story that remains nevertheless an every story. An old woman wastes no time in telling me that the Tsinga, which both she and I are, are an extraordinary people who will always be involved in great undertakings. This was the case with all my ancestors, who she begins to recite for me. One did this, another that, ending up with my father who had not only been an authority in the land, but had also not forgotten his own people. He brought them water, electricity, the road. He was concerned with all his peoples problemsbereavements, marriages, imprisonments. The story goes on, telling me how she had last heard of meon the radio. She doesnt hesitate to tell me of all the fuss and bother she had with this radiothe batteries, the children that leave it running or change the station, making it difficult for her to receive Bebela Ibouk, a local language program she likes very much. Suddenly she gets angry: How is it that the only
Framework 49, No. 2, Fall 2008, pp. 106113. Copyright 2008 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

Applied Fiction time I hear of you these days is on the radio, my son, she says. She stops and lets the tears run down her cheeks. Then she says, Its all right. Go and do great things like your ancestors, bring honor to your people, show the way [tracez la voix], build the path/show the way. Go nowhere without letting everyone know that a Tsinga has been there. But . . . dont forget. Never forget that you come from here. Let no one mislead you. Put no trust in our poverty, the things of the earth belong to the earth. We will all move on, leaving behind all the riches which were never ours in the first place but belong to God who made us. Its years since someone has spoken to me like that. Im bowled over, not so much by the story, but by the way Im included in the epic recital, my current life, along with the cosmos, the dead, the living, science and technology, an Africa I havent known, a millennial voice . . . I am touched. I feel strange. She goes on: We are here, as you see. When I see the day, I thank God. When I have something to eat, I thank God. We dont matter any more. We have done what we had to do. Its your turn now, as I never stop telling your sister who married into the Bamilk. She came back with three children. Apparently there was trouble with her husband, and she was fed up with it all. Has marriage ever been easy? And whats going to be done now with all those children? School, medicine, food, to say nothing of clothes. I am worn out. Where is the strength for it all? Where is the person (of myself)? Its the end. Now I cant hold back the tears. This old woman has just called into question the whole direction of my life. Who am I? What am I doing here? There? On the Earth? I go out to get a little air, and to get a parcel from the car, most often food, and I bring it back to the old woman who is overwhelmed with gratitude. She bursts into a song, interrupted by jokes and laughter. She tries to make me dance with her. At first I feel very stiff, then free enough to take a step or two, which surprises everyone in the room, reminding them that I do belong to them after all. The old woman gives a blessing, and we part. I go on my way to another house, and live through another story. I will spare you all the stories. I hear one in every house in the village. After Ive left the village, these stories stay with me. They haunt me. I turn on the television to clear my head, and I find that television has nothing to say to me anymore. I begin to ask myself if the old woman has taken away my status as an adept in the Occidental world. I get a phone call that reminds me that Im a filmmaker, someone who tells these stories. But this woman has not just told me a story; she has projected me into a whole universe. I fall asleep dreaming that one day I shall be able to bring to life for other people what I have lived through in images and sounds. I find that there is something missing, though. Images and sounds are not enough. I remember an advertisement from Apple, which entices me to buy a Macintosh computer. This is another story that pushes me toward an action. As a filmmaker, I ask myself how best to make a film that has the same effect. I fall asleep without finding

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Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 49.2 an answer. And as often happens in cases like this, I dream that Im being chased by a fellow called Aristotle who wants to stab me with a knife called the Internet. If you, who have of course studied Freud, can understand anything about this, please tell me because I dont get it. I wake up with a start, telling myself that Ive got away from Aristotle and his Internet. Not really though, because I tell myself that actually Im going to look into this, and see if there is in fact any connection between them. Two things spring to mind: first, the Internet consists of interactivity. Second, Aristotle wrote a Poetics and a Politics. When Aristotle defines art as an imitation of a graspable reality by seizing its form, he hasnt included the interactivity of the Internet. So I tell myself that the technology that has made cinema possible has also made it possible to give a dream a material shape. The question Im putting is this: How can technology help me as a filmmaker turn the cinema experience into an experience similar to the one I had with the old woman? Im going to call that experience Applied Fiction. What difference is there between Utopia and a dream here? Just one. The old woman in my village is writer, actress, journalist, philosopher, poet, historian, set-designer, mother, and politician all in one. This old woman in my village reminds me of Djibril Diop Mambetys grandmother, who wanted the alphabet that we learned at Film School to be totally transformed. She was a grandmother who wanted grammar to be reinvented each time it was used. She wanted it to be possible, every time a story began Once upon a time, for it to begin A time will come. She was a grandmother who always strove to reinvent her discourse, to prolong the dream. And, speaking of prolonging a dream: What would happen if Aristotle met my old woman? Consider the old womans arm, though. It was fully interactive, because she was in contact with the totality of our psychosomatic being, together, hers and mine. In separating her action from its narrative, Aristotle cuts her into pieces and subtracts from her effectiveness. Which is why my old woman would have no choice but to reduce his two books [The Politics and The Poetics] to one. It would be, of course, an impossible encounter. But there is a single incarnation of Aristotles double: Pushkin. According to Dostoyevski, Pushkins work is a prophecy. It was an oracle, which would show Russia the way to nationhood and the Russian people the way to their birth as a literary people. Why are Pushkin and my old woman at the same time poetic and political? Because in fact, when we talk its always to say something. When we speak with Poetry, we speak to say something in Politics. They are interconnected. Henri Laborit has told us that the fundamental function of the nervous system is to enable us to act. Alongside feelings, then, there are actions. He sums up mans role on this planet as essentially politicalwe must act. Even if there were differences between Pushkin and my old woman, they would have much in common; a little like Djibril and his grandmother. The reproach would be, not that the story was always the same, but that it was

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Applied Fiction always told in the same way . . . out of laziness. Djibrils grandmother allows us not to be faithful to grammar but to transfigure everything we have learned in Film School. She wants us to always reinvent grammar, to beat grammar up, because, as Djibril says, that whole space [the linguistic structure of meaning] belongs to you, my boy. And I imagine the relation to be the samepart hostile, part beautifulbetween my old woman and Pushkin. The old womans relationship with technology is also of interest. When she complains that she has no news of me other than on the radio, what she is in fact complaining of is technologys inability to communicate with her in a way she understands. That is to say, interactively. She deplores the lot of mankind, condemned to fit into the limitations of technology. Her encounter with television is even more interesting: My old woman is going to visit her daughter, married into the Bamilk. First she takes a bush taxi from the village to Yaound, then a second from Yaound to Bafoussam. At Yaound she spends the night with my mother and takes up the journey again on the next day. In the evening she joins the family in front of the television to watch Dynasty, which goes out every evening at seven oclock. She doesnt try too hard to understand. She does notice the characters, though, and she is particularly taken by Blake Carrington. The next day she takes up her journey again and arrives in Bafoussam just in time to see the very same Blake Carrington on her daughters television. Well, he sure gets about quickly, she says. I left him in Yaound yesterday, and here he is today in Bafoussam already, and I took the first bus. What my old woman has also never understood is that someone can be dead in one film and alive again in another. If she were to try to understand these technologies, it would be because they change not only her perception of the world, but her values, her idea of time and space, of life and death. In telling me stories, my old woman is telling me about the cosmos. They are, in her perception, one thing. But in her stories, my old woman is also telling the story of humankind triumphing, through technology, over biology. With technology and its possibilities, a person can enter that same space that my old woman perceivescosmic, unlimited, interconnected. A person now is constantly redefining himself because he is becoming something unprecedented, of which he has no knowledge. His legs, eyes, and brain now can travel quicker, see further, and can memorize enormous quantities of information. When she watches television, listens to the radio, or goes to the cinema, my old woman sees other men die without being able to do anything about it. And these media fill her with anguish because what she is seeing is her own death through the death of others. They hurt her because she is part of the only animal species on earth that knows it is going to die. Doing something and not to be powerless in front of death is her aim in life. The old womans aspirations match our greatest human project, and that is Immortality. By this I mean, continuing the energy of life. Now her stories, and stories in general,

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Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 49.2 can be made proactive, if not real, with an interactivity available to us through new technology. As for the Internet, she heard of it for the first time in the local language broadcast Bebela Ibouk. She heard about a man who had left his wife and children to go off with a woman he had met on the Internet. Not knowing what the Internet was, she identified it with a wicked woman who steals other peoples husbands. He has run off with that woman Internet. Even if this misunderstanding raises a smile, it doesnt alter the fact that these things existtechnology becomes real to us only when it relates to our personal problems. She doesnt separate the container and the contained. The Medium is the Message. And in that way life on earth and life on the Internet are, for our old woman, a novel written by the behavior of people in a world of things. Her story is a critique of the media, just as technology itself is a commentary on Functionalism in all its aspects: anthropological, scientific, political and aesthetic. It bewails the lot of the biological, psychosomatic entity that is man made up of holes in relation to himself, to others and to the world around him. Man is an animal which can no longer have the same connections as before, because he is now equipped with a new anatomy. His legs are wheels (engines indeed), and his eyes are cameras. In this way a simple private argument, solvable in former times with a few punches, can now become the occasion for global conflict. The old womans greeting styletouching me, holding mewas a way to find out if we still belonged to the same species because everything else around us is changing. Her journey around my body only verifies this new and shifting anatomy. She is trying to read the semantic system of the world, imposed by God on the surface of an earth that has been changed by technology. Man is no longer something she recognizes, any more than the earth is. Little by little, bits have been added to it until it has become something quite other. She is looking, therefore, in her reading, for the sense of life, that is, its meaning and direction. She would have met God, my old woman, in the way that Foucault did. She would have met a God who, in order to give us matter to exercise our wisdom upon, had sewn the world of nature with images and signs to decipher. What is the difference between these visible marks left by God and the old womans achievement? None. My old woman is merely imitating nature itself. Doesnt Aristotle say that a work of art is that which imitates a graspable reality by seizing its form? It is not surprising that after leaving my village, I find watching television impossible to endure. I feel the lived experience well in advance of the cinematic experience. The old woman has sent me on a journey into a universe where I am an important agent in relation to the people of the past. It is in this way that my old woman, an artist in life, has called upon the Internet to be a place for a new art form: the art of living. Vilm Flusser is afraid that one day our lives will be programmed by machines. The old woman also believes this, in her nave way. She might agree with the idea that people should make machines do all the difficult

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Applied Fiction work. Then there will be free time to have fun, to play. But for the old woman to play is to arrange the world in the way she wants. She arranges the world in a way that satisfies her. For her the contrary of play is not seriousness, it is reality. In doing so, the old woman is inviting all of us to play like children, to play with symbols, to play with the Internet. She asks us to reinvent the universe by reinventing the meaning of each thing according to our own need and understanding, so that our thoughts, feelings and desire remain grounded in what is human. She is asking us to translate the semantic of the world created by God so that we will redefine what living means, so that living is not just about servicing machines as we do now (we oil them, gas them, etc.). We have to reverse that and make sure the machine services us. This is our opportunity to redefine life. As Laborit says, life is the totality of functions that resist death. We need to erect immortality, or a merging of energies, as lifes objective. Where she would be completely lost is when Hugo de Garis talks of creating machines more intelligent than man, that is, artilects or artificial intellects. Human intelligence is first a question of subtlety and not of memoryit is an art. When de Garis thinks that one day these machines will decide that the human race is harmful, and it will become necessary to destroy it, it is clear that the plan to build such machines is in opposition to any plan for immortality. My old woman would not need a qualification from MIT to understand the troubling dynamic inside these questions about the destiny of humanity and the universe. Hence the necessity for people to have a plan for machines before machines have a plan for them. My old woman doesnt know Kasparov. If you talk to her about chess, she will equate it with Songo, a Cameroonian chess in which the one who wins is the one who gives away the most, a philosophy very different from that adopted by Kasparov and Deep Blue in 1997. Kasparov, in an article in Liberation, declaredThey cheated by letting me believe it was just me versus the computer, while in fact it is obvious that there was human intervention, especially in the judgments of position. They cheated in allowing it to be thought that Deep Blue was intelligent enough to keep up pressure on my positions. Kasparov may well have played [Jouer] Deep Blue. He did not outplay [Djouer] it. No one thinks that freedom is being able to play with [Jouer] a machine in order to [Djouer] thwart it, but the question here is, how much freedom is left when man confronts machine? My old woman would have had two trumps to play on Deep Blue. First, she has never played chess. She plays Songo, and there is a radical difference of understanding between the two games. And second, she would have played not just against one person or a computer; she would have played with the whole universe. Beyond their functions, all the machines that surround us will become computers connected to the Internet. Michael Dertouzos of MIT thought that soon there will be no such thing as cyberspace. The first industrial revolution brought us cars and electricity. We no longer speak of motorspace

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Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 49.2 because motors have been assimilated into our lives. We have built fridges from them, cars and toys. Motors are everywhere and nowhere, in every object of our daily life. The same thing will happen with computers: in twenty years they will be everywhere and nowhere, omnipresent and invisible. It will only be old village women who are astonished to see money coming out of the wall, on seeing an ATM for the first time. This means that each of the objects that surround us are potentially medias, capable of going beyond the tasks they were designed for, and serving as a vehicle for information in the form of images, texts, or sounds. Add interactivity and memory to that and what does your microwave become? With all our appliances connected to the Internet, they become medias. Now it remains to be seen what stories they can tell us, insofar as they can tell us stories at all. This confusion is the reason why our myths (i.e., energy and immortality at work) will have to be rewritten. Right now, our myths, as the media tells them, have allowed the virtual to invade the real and, as such, today we meet problems against which our myths should have forearmed us. My old woman knows very well what happens when our dominant social stories dont engage our humanity but drains us of it. Flussers fear of the loss of human liberty in the face of the machine could only be well founded if man did not exploit the possibilities opened by this Internetization of all appliances in order to rewrite history. This would be a good story, but not one that inspires pity and terror as, according to Aristotle, all stories should. Conversely, a good story will be true because it exists continually in a state to be invented. Will the Internet be the place where aesthetics and ethics meet? If we recognize that stories have a social function, what part will truth and beauty play in the stories that well be eating, hearing, living, becoming? In a world where stories are increasingly bought and sold, will the question of building a free society still be asked? Then it becomes a question of making a cinema in reality, of creating a new form. This will mean lifting the barrier between the real and the imaginary and redefining the rules of a new space where media and reality meld, a space where we can live our brave, new invented story. This will be done by practicing the new art of daily life. The art practiced by my old woman: The art of living. And like all great art, it will also insist that we change our life. What would this art consist of in a society that has solved its problem of survival? Henri Laborit would hope that industrialized peoples, freed from work and thus from hunger and poverty, will rediscover their existential being through new self-reflection. The art of life could therefore find itself without an end, Immortal, unless, as B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore foretell, the world becomes one great theme park. Having evolved from an agrarian to an industrial economy then to a service economy, humanity is entering into an economy built on realizing saleable experience, like a Disney park. This economy has evolved first by offering commodities for sale, then goods, and then services.

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Applied Fiction But all those aspects were outside the purchaser. Real experience takes place when a service is used as a scene, when goods are used as accessories in such a way as to create a memorable event. These experiences are personal, existing only in the mind of an individual wooed on an emotional, physical, intellectual, and even spiritual level. With political and social fabrications invading public and private life, reality television performing reality on television, it is time for a new field of study. I advocate Applied Fiction, my grandmothers method. Applied Fiction will be about creating a new generation of rea-ctual (or real-virtual, pronounced as ritual) auteursfrom the Greek root auteure that means to add to the world or to increase the world beneficially. It is Applied Fiction that will free us from an audiovisual symbolic language that imposes its own kind of reality upon us. This reduces us to consumers without an opinion other than the one supplied by the omnipresent medias. This keeps us believing that both story and actuality are separate while they are now only one thing. When my old woman tells me her stories she does so to draw me into the universe; when the media, at its most corrupt, tells me stories, it is done to push me away from the universe. To sum up: Our role on the planet is entirely political. Our role, with or without technology, is to make social structures, relationships between people, and between groups. This will enable us to survive as a species on our cosmic vessel. Immortality. We shouldnt just be making movies we should be changing reality. Jean-Pierre Bekolo is the director of Quartier Mozart (CM/FR, 1992), Aristotles Plot (FR/UK/ZE, 1996), which was part of the BFI Centennial film series, and Les Saignantes (FR/CM, 2006). He has taught filmmaking at Duke University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Virginia Tech. His work was included in the Muse du Quai Branly 2007 exhibition in Paris on the African Diaspora, Une Africaine dans lEspace.

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