Close-Up Gallery: Teza
Regard Haile Gerima’s earliest cinema, from beginning to end, and watch his tendency to do remarkable things with the mundane. Behold what he often does with closing credits from Child of Resistance (1972) to Teza (2008). The first set of films does not identify him as producer, director and scriptwriter, or editor. The auteur signed Bush Mama (1976), simply, “ ANSWERABLE.” The message was that he strove to be answerable himself; artistically, he was and is answerable to forces that leave auteur individualism in the dust: Ancestors, community, elders, youth, humanity, “All Over the World Afrikans” as one firebrand poet put it ages ago. This was an important point to establish in places and spaces where other filmmakers might not think to make meaning or leave messages at all. The ensuing gallery of words and images illustrates both how poetic his Pan-African cinema is and how answerable it is to poets of the page. Here, it is the call to their response; and they respond quite visually to this series or flow of juxtaposed film stills that reconnects images, geographies, time spaces, and populations too often disconnected, even systematically segregated, by academic criticism and assorted politics of the status quo.