Shifting modes from his previous personal investigations, Alex Gibney, perhaps the second-greatest documentary filmmaker working today, is absent from his latest picture Finding Fela. Gibney, whose previous work chronicled contemporary figures and organizations including the Catholic Church, Enron, WikiLeaks, U.S. Foreign Policy, Elliot Spitzer, and Jack Abramoff, here he tells a rather reflexive story chronicling the dramaturgical work of Bill T. Jones’ off Broadway musical Fela!
Mixing talking heads, cinema verite and historical footage of Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, Gibney chronicles the production while crafting an independent biography. The problem native African filmmakers faced in creating their works – notably directors like Senegalese helmer Ousmane Sembene, commonly known as the grandfather of African Cinema — is that African history is primarily written by the colonizers. Fela, who was more aggressive, crafted rump-shaking music that is inherently political, while Bob Marley (mentioned early in the film in the same breath) created chill anthems. (For film lovers, if you want to compare him to a pioneer of African Cinema, I’d say he has the fire of Jean-Marie Teno). A pioneer of the Afrobeat movement, one of the challenges for Jones and his collaborators is finding a structure within his lyrics to build a narrative. The narrative of Fela’s biography is perhaps as complex as Africa’s.
Gibney has crafted an awfully engaging, lively and entertaining look at the life of Fela Kuti, a film that exists on its own rather than as a behind-the-scenes companion to Jones’ musical. Jones and collaborators try to add complexity to a charismatic figure, who was not always likable and they are challenged by the circumstances of Kuti’s death. While they may both succumb to the same fate, his challenge is removing what may be read as his personal politics from the play, but cutting the timeline. Via former lover Sandra Izsadore, a partisan of the Black Panthers, we learn of the tension between the Black liberation movement of the 1960’s and actual political movements within Africa.
Through Africa ’70 and Egypt ’80, Fela grew into an international figure as the son of a prominent and politically active Nigerian family. He harbors what a former NY Times correspondent calls “political ambitions” and “political dilutions,” making his case in aggressive song. Growing out of a nightly shows at Lagos’ Africa House, Fela seemingly would take on a different issue each evening, creating a dialogue designed for change that unfortunately had been drowned out by oil money. While Fela did receive radio play and attention in the United States his music ultimately faced a commercial challenge; record executives wanted to know which four minutes of a 45-minute jam they should play on the radio.
Never silenced, his legacy lives on beyond Bill T. Jones’ Fela! as Gibney has crafted a lively, entertaining and comprehensive biography. By focusing his lens of the musical, Gibney has a leveraged a fascinating device, which deflects what might have been fair criticism: why should an American tell Fela’s story? Luckily, for Fela fans, the project was taken on by a rare American master storyteller.
Finding Fela is now in limited release.