:31:02
It may be as difficult to recognize Africa in this leaden fog
:31:07
as it is to recognize struggle in the rather dull activity
of tropical longshoremen.
:31:11
Rumor has it that every third world leader
coined the same phrase the morning after independence:
:31:15
"Now the real problems start."
:31:17
Cabral never got a chance to say it:
he was assassinated first.
:31:21
But the problems started, and went on, and are still going on.
:31:24
Rather unexciting problems for revolutionary romanticism:
:31:27
to work, to produce, to distribute, to overcome postwar exhaustion,
temptations of power and privilege.
:31:34
Ah well... after all, history only tastes bitter
to those who expected it to be sugar coated.
:31:56
My personal problem is more specific:
how to film the ladies of Bissau?
:32:00
Apparently, the magical function of the eye
was working against me there.
:32:05
It was in the marketplaces of Bissau and Cape Verde
that I could stare at them again with equality.
:32:09
And this continuation of figures,
so close to the ritual of the seduction.
:32:12
I see her,
:32:15
she saw me,
:32:17
she knows that I see her,
:32:21
she drops me her glance, but just at an angle where it is still possible to act
as though it was not addressed to me,
:32:28
and at the end the real glance,
:32:29
straightforward,
:32:31
that lasted a twenty-fourth of a second,
the length of a film frame.
:32:41
All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility.
:32:44
And men's task has always been to make them
realize it as late as possible.
:32:48
African men are just as good at this task as others.
:32:52
But after a close look at African women,
I wouldn't necessarily bet on the men.