These images come from the past, my past. They were taken forty years ago, with an eight-millimeter camera, and are the first film I ever shot. It was the summer of 1968, in Tanzania, and I was volunteering on a hospital construction site. When the driver of the truck transporting bricks to the site fell ill, I was promoted from laborer to driver. That's how I ended up at the brickyard and looking out over this infernal circle: running in the African heat, with more than ten kilos of mud on my arms, running between brick walls drying in the sun, running to produce enough piecework to get through a meager day, running while singing hymns to the Lord, running through the mud, running through the dust, running through the smoke, running, and more running. I had a movie camera, and instead of using it to film the animals of the savannah, I decided to use all the few reels of film I had to tell the story of these runs. I then used the film to perform in some theatre shows and to pass some exams at the Faculty of Architecture.
The story narrated by the voiceover is a true story in every detail, and it's easily recognizable even though the film doesn't explicitly state the location, time, or character. The setting is China, the time is the 3rd century BC, and the character is Ying Zheng, lord of Qin. After subduing all the neighboring kingdoms, he orders that from then on he be called Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, the first emperor of China. He begins the Great Wall, orders the burning of all books and the burial of 46 scholars, and builds the Terracotta Army, which, exhumed, is now being toured around museums around the world.
Yet the memory (dating back only to the end of the last century) of armies burning books and building walls is still vivid in us. And today we see our people building walls in the sea and staining them with blood. The truth of this story, therefore, is tied to neither a time, nor a place, nor a person.
Jorge Luis Borges, in the first chapter of Other Inquisitions, considers the character Qin Shi Huang and the relationship between two key, seemingly contradictory events in his life: the construction of the wall, to defend territory and culture, and the burning of books, to erase the past and culture (B. was still unaware of the existence of the Terracotta Army). From this writing I drew the thought that Borges imagines may have passed through the emperor's mind before his death: "Men love the past, and against this love I can do nothing, and my executioners can do nothing, but one day a man will come who will feel the same way as me, and he will destroy my wall, as I destroyed the books, he will erase my memory and will be my shadow and my mirror, and he will not know it."
I recorded the background drums in 1973 in a village in northern Zaire, on the banks of the Ubanghi River. The Lokele people, who inhabit this region, are famous for their drums. Through them, they are able to speak and communicate over distance, overcoming the visual barrier of the forest. What's used isn't a code, like our Morse code, but a true tonal reproduction of the word. Here, too, words and barriers. Although here the words aren't burned, but relaunched, and the barriers are penetrated. The general theme of this film seems to be pursuing itself, unintentionally, in strange ways. The background track I used (the original 8mm is silent), however, doesn't reproduce a conversation made with the drums, nor even an intense moment of music, but that moment when everyone begins to gather, people chat, the drums warm up, and the party is about to begin.
A bit like how I'd like this film of ours to be.
