(World Mirror Cinema, Moolaadé)
After the witnessing the fragility of celluloid in Decasia, watching Gustav Deutsch's World Mirror Cinema actively manipulate silent-era footage to breathe new meaning into it was a sublimely melancholic experience. In three episodes, Deutsch takes documentary footage of crowds of people outside a cinema, randomly (or not) zooms in on a face and creates a story, or rather a fleeting moment, behind the face using other documentary footage from the same era.

The slow-mo images of constant movement accompanied by the electronic soundtrack makes for an experience that is almost as hypnotic as Decasia, but Deutsch's experiment is more immediately nostalgic, and takes a certain self-possessed pleasure in losing and finding itself in a community of people, as the oh-so-slowly thawing silent-era images gently come together to form a kind of ritualistic dance of their own.

And speaking of female genital mutilation, Ousmane Sembene's Moolaadé is a strange, frustrating beast. Unfolding slowly and for most of the time, naturalistically, it incorporates deeply Senegalese customs within the already overbearing aura of the village (credited to the near-Fordian establishment of community), but Sembene has never been a subtle filmmaker (the spitting orgy that concludes Xala, anyone?), and he infuses Moolaadé with numerous symbols, extreme bursts of emotion, and explicit didacticism. Besides, the fact that Sembene is forever ready to divide the clouded 'right' from the demystified 'wrong' with his camera may stifle and intimidate some, while others may yet be reassured that passion and morality is still alive in this world, etc.

Personally, I found much to admire in the film's pseudo-formalism, its leisurely movement towards its maker's timely final statement (which confronts the misconception of a violent act as being Islamic), its tagged dichotomies worn unabashedly on its sleeve (internal: African superstition vs. religion, man vs. woman; external: tradition vs. modernity, etc), and most importantly, I was thankful that we're spared any bleeding vaginal imagery. Which always translates as a recommendation.—MA