Since the late 1980s, a booming video feature film industry evolved in Ghana. While established filmmakers both within and outside the state-owned Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) found it extremely difficult to generate funds for film production, formally untrained people of various backgrounds — from cinema projectionists to car mechanics — took ordinary VHS video cameras, wrote a brief outline, assembled actors (from TV or just “from the street”), and produced full fledged feature films which appeared to be tremendously successful in urban Ghana, and especially in Accra. Established professional filmmakers initially met the initiatives of non-professionals and their use of the medium of video with suspicion. Yet, when they noticed the extraordinary success which these productions had in Ghana and realized that screening these films in local cinemas could generate sufficient funds to sustain a viable video film industry, they also turned to film production in the video format. Moreover, in order to improve the productions made by untrained — and, gradually, self-trained filmmakers, the GFIC offered editing services and other forms of advice to filmmakers in exchange for the right to show the film in its own cinemas in Accra first. Gradually, production networks and systems of distribution evolved and since the beginning of the 1990s, each year saw the release of about fifty video movies made by private and GFIC producers.

Over time, differences pertaining to technical standards of films made by formally trained and self-trained filmmakers gradually faded. And so did differences regarding their social position in the field of film production. This was, above all, a result of the decision of the Ghanaian state to sell seventy percent of the shares of the GFIC to the Malaysian TV production company, Sistem Televisyen Malaysia Berhad of Kuala Lumpur in 1996, as a consequence of which the GFIC transformed into Gama Media System Ltd.^[1] As this foreign company focuses on TV productions and shows little interest in cinema, popular movie production was increasingly left in the hands of independent producers (both self-trained and formally trained^[2]) who were all obliged to make it in Ghana’s newly evolving “showbiz” market. In order to generate funds for the next film and a usually small income, filmmakers solely depend on the taste of the audiences.

One distinctive, recurring feature of Ghanaian movies concerns the emphasis put on the visualization of otherwise invisible occult forces, and the fact that their narrative is usually placed in the framework of the Christian dualism of God and the Devil, who is regarded as leading all “powers of darkness” (see Meyer 1999a). These preferences do not primarily and necessarily reflect the convictions of the filmmakers, but above all the ideas of their audiences. As such, these films resonate well with what occupies people in Accra and other urban areas in south Ghana and hence form exciting sources for anthropologists.

Exactly because of this emphasis on occult forces and their incorporation into the domain of the Christian Devil, popular cinema has been subject to severe criticism on the part of elite film makers and intellectuals.^[3] Movies made by private producers are often ridiculed and denounced as imbued in “superstition” — an assault also levelled against their audiences.^[4] Moreover, occasionally these films are charged with representing Africans in inferior terms, and thereby confirming racist distortions and subverting the development of national pride.^[5] Private video producers are accused of turning a medium meant to serve “development” and “enlightenment” into a vehicle for the expression of ugly matters which should have no place in modern, national Ghanaian culture.

In this essay, I present and discuss two films which are representative of popular cinema in that they foreground how otherwise invisible, occult forces impinge on the visible world. I will show how a quintessentially modern medium-like film, which has been used ever since colonial times to educate and enlighten people through images, has been appropriated in order to express people’s concerns about the hidden presence of the occult in modern urban society. I will argue that the visualization of the dark, secret aspects lurking behind the surface of modern city life concerns an “enlightenment” in another sense than usually intended by modernist protagonists. In so doing, I find it useful to follow a distinction proposed by Michael Taussig during the conference on which this volume is based between revelation and exposure.

While the notion of exposure is part of a hierarchical perspective affirming the superiority of scientific thinking which unmasks magic as false and based on mere superstition, the notion of revelation criticises magic from within, thereby leaving intact the idiom itself. I will show that, contrary to the elites’ expectations of the medium of film to promote superior forms of knowledge and behaviour leading beyond magic, watching popular movies does not make people go beyond magical imagination towards increased levels of rationality, but rather constitutes, or at least confirms, the domain of the occult at the very moment of its revelation. It brings light into the dark and, at the same time, contributes to establish the domain of occult forces as part and parcel of modern city life (cf. Geschiere 1997). I argue that, in so doing, it brings about a break with colonial cinema and realizes the magical potential of movies which is so often ascribed to this art form in the West.

CINEMA IN THE SERVICE OF THE COLONIAL STATE

While the medium of film was introduced to Ghana by private businessmen,^[6] who opened cinemas in urban areas and employed cinema vans to tour the country side (especially the cocoa—growing areas) in the course of the 1920s,^[7] the Information Services Department of the colonial government actively engaged in film only in 1940.^[8] It drove its green-yellow Bedford buses all around the colony and assembled people at spaces in the open air in order “to show documentary films and newsreels to explain the colonial government’s policies to people in towns and villages free of charge” (Sakyi 1996: 9). An important aspect of this information service was propaganda films about the Second World War which were produced by the Colonial Film Unit (CFU) in London (cf. Diawara 1992: 3). After the war, the unit also started to produce educational films and a number of feature films which were screened in Britain’s African colonies. Contrasting the Western and African way of life, these films represented the former as an embodiment of “civilization” and the latter as “backward” and “superstitious” customs to be left behind (cf. Diawara 1992: 3; Ukadike 1994: 44ff.).^[9] Film was thus closely related to governmental and imperial interests and employed to create loyal subjects. Placing film in the service of “civilization”, the CFU avoided screening films that criticized or ridiculed aspects of Western life, thereby denying Africans access to the whole field of Western cinematic representation (cf. Diawara 1992: 1).

The Gold Coast Film Unit, which was to produce local films, took up themes particularly relevant to the Gold Coast. These movies, too, were to serve colonial interests and the attention was on “purposes of better health, better crops, better living, better marketing and better human co-operation in the colonies” (Middleton—Mends 1995: 1; cf. also Diawara 1992: 5). As these objectives were thought to be best achieved “on the native soil with native characters” (Middleton-Mends ibid.), from 1948 onwards the unit started training African filmmakers.^[10] Similar film units existed in other parts of British colonial Africa, and their products were mutually exchanged and shown to audiences all over British colonial Africa.

In a very interesting publication, Morton-Williams has presented the results of his research on the reception of so-called fundamental education films by rural Yoruba, Ibo and Hausa audiences in Nigeria, which he conducted for the Colonial Office.^[11] “Fundamental education”, as the author explains, refers to attempts by the British Colonial Administration “to instill motives and the requisite technical skills to improve the material conditions of life, and to make it possible to apprehend, in some degree, the relationship of the rural community to the rest of the territory and to the world” (1953: xii). Next to brief descriptions of the content of thirty-four films (made by the CFU in England, film units in Africa and commercial producers) which address topics from “clean cooking” to “the circulation of blood”, his study provides detailed overviews of audience reactions to these films. Although this study focuses on Nigeria, I see no reason to doubt that these and similar films would have been shown in the Gold Coast as well and that audiences would have reacted in similar ways.

According to Morton-Williams, the bulk of the films falls into the categories health films, farming films, and village development films. The basic message of all these films, of course, is a demonstration of the superiority of Western knowledge and of how sticking to traditions not only implies backwardness, but also leads to ill health and poverty. Indeed, in the light of Michael Taussig’s distinction explained earlier, it may be concluded that the films sought to establish colonial authority on the basis of the exposure of existing magical beliefs as false. Here, magic was represented as modernity’s other.

Intended to serve public goals rather than offering mere private entertainment, these films were to convince audiences about the necessity of changing their behavior. The CFU would send cinema vans to tour the country side from village to village; throughout the day the oncoming film—show would be advertized by loudspeakers, in the evening a big screen would be erected, benches would be put down and a generator put on, and then audiences would be shown a number of educational films (usually explained by local instructors in the local language), with some shorter, more entertaining spots in between. In a context without electricity and far away from the big city, film shows were major events celebrating the superiority of Western technology. Literally bringing light into the dark, colonial film certainly realized MacLuhan’s famous dictum “the medium is the message”. While Morton-Williams observed that rural audiences rapidly accustomed themselves to the medium (thereby defying Western fantasies about primitive people taking film images for reality, cf. Gunning 1989, Moore n.d.: 4), it appeared that in practice many films did not convey their intended message. This was due to the fact that it either failed to come across at all, or, if it did, was unacceptable and had no future impact on actual behavior. For instance, health films relating sicknesses such as smallpox and dysentery to natural causes could not convince audiences of the falsity of their own supernatural explanations. Watching educational movies thus would not lead to a decline of magical beliefs as envisioned by its producers.

As audiences watched films on the basis of existing ideas and experiences, and were not prepared to accept the general superiority of the West, the expectation that the medium of film would set in motion processes of increasing “development” and “civilization” appears to be unwarranted. For that reason, one should be careful not to confound the message of colonial films with their actual impact. What can be assumed, however, is that audiences realizing the efforts made by colonial authorities to show their films even in the remotest village, understood that film was intended to implement colonial development schemes and educate people more than entertain them — an intention which also showed through the fact that educational films were always given priority over the beloved Chaplin.^[12] As such, colonial film appeared as a medium and mediator of colonialism.

Thriving on the opposition between Western knowledge and African superstition, the films represented magic and modernity as mutually exclusive. Here the camera was attributed with the ultimate power of all pervasive vision and, figuring as “the mechanical eye of reason” (McQuire 1998), the capacity to expose false beliefs. Thus, in colonial film the camera was put in the service of a positivist, rational world view and made to assert its power. In this way it became a key symbol of colonial power and of the superiority of science and rational behavior — and ultimately Western “civilization”. While audiences certainly understood these power claims, their unwillingness to let themselves be convinced by colonial films to change their behavior intimates that both the authority of the camera and the message became subject to contest by the colonized.

POPULAR CINEMA BETWEEN THE STATE AND THE MARKET

When the GFIC replaced the Gold Coast Film Unit after independence, state authorities continued to regard film as a powerful medium of “education”, “enlightenment”, as a powerful means to explain institutions and policies to the people. As in colonial times, film was above all to serve public goals, but now these goals were defined in a new way. Above all, film was meant to contribute to the emergence and consolidation of a national culture and identity. In line with anti-colonial critique, foreign films were no longer regarded as effective means to these ends, as they were held to distort and misrepresent African culture by representing it as “exotic” and to mislead Africans to adopt bad Western habits (Ukadike 1994: 111ff.). The task of the GFIC thus was not only to produce information in the service of “education” and “development” and create (and export) counter images to racial distortions, but also to control the potentially bad influence of foreign films through their depiction of violence, sex, and racial prejudice. Due to a chronic lack of funds, in practice it proved to be difficult for the GFIC to live up to these expectations. Having produced a number of films in the immediate postcolonial period, the local cinema industry was virtually defunct in the beginning of the 1980s because of a financial and technological breakdown.

Around this time, foreign films entered the country on a massive scale with the advent of video technology. Hundreds of small video theatres and video libraries sprang up in the suburbs of the major cities, thereby turning film into a feature of mass entertainment. But video technology made possible much more than offering access to foreign films. Due to its easy accessibility, video technology was quickly appropriated to local people. Video enterprises were founded which recorded major family occasions, such as funerals and weddings, and eventually, the first video feature filmmakers appeared on the scene and enticed the urban masses with local movies. The stance of the state towards video technology was ambivalent. Regarding foreign films as a serious, yet virtually uncontrollable threat which would mislead Ghanaians to adopt bad Western habits, the Ministry of Information welcomed the revival of Ghanaian cinema brought about by self-trained filmmakers because they devoted so much attention to local affairs and were able to speak to a mass audience. At the same time, the state, which held a monopoly on media as radio and TV far into the 1990s, perceived the new video film industry as a challenge. And rightly so, for due to the relatively low budget and little technological expertise required for the production of video movies, video is a potentially democratic medium able to convey alternative views.

Being convinced of the tremendous power of the moving image to influence the masses, the government — as is the case in any nation state — therefore attempted to keep control of the consumption and production of locally produced video films.^[13] The existing censorship board now has the new task of watching and approving any locally produced film and making sure that it conforms with the guidelines of film censorship, which require that “the moral that crime does not pay” can clearly be drawn from the film. Moreover, the Ministry of Information also met the video boom with a Draft of the National Film and Video Policy for Ghana (1995) which asks filmmakers to make products which would serve the “national interest” and thus increase “public enlightenment”, “national unity”, “national pride”, etc. (cf. Meyer 1999b: 7-8) — a mission which is not easy to match with the (financial) necessity to appeal to popular taste.

Indeed, Ghanaian filmmakers appear to be positioned between expectations of the state bureaucrats who expect media to “enlighten” people, on the one hand, and the need to sell their products in a market dominated by the audiences, on the other. The audiences of Ghanaian movies cannot simply be pinned down to a distinct social category. In fact, we are concerned here with a mass phenomenon which encompasses the urban lower and aspiring middle classes, and — as the main language spoken in the majority of Ghanaian movies is English — cuts across ethnic divisions. A successful movie can easily be watched by more than 30.000 people in Accra’s various cinemas in the center and suburbs, and become the talk of the town. Often its story will be “broadcast” through mobile people such as taxi drivers, street vendors, and traders in Makola market. While the audiences as such are of multiple social and ethnic backgrounds, one recurrent pattern is easily discernible: for reasons to be given below, the instigation to go and watch a certain film or to buy the video tape for home consumption often comes from women, who drag their boyfriend or husband along.

While it may be stated that Ghanaian video movies created new audiences, one could also argue the reverse. In fact, the new Ghanaian film makers completely depend on their audiences’ approval and in order to make a somehow profitable film, they have to ensure to meet spectators’ expectations. Hence filmmakers do their best to visualize the elusive rumors, heartbreaking stories and dramas of everyday life — all of which usually imply occult forces — circulating in town. As they, by and large, share the social background and experiences of their audiences, it is not difficult for them to lend their ear to what keeps people busy and project it back for them to see.

ON MAGIC IN FILM

Most movies, in the same way as their audiences, take occult forces for granted and hardly ever question their reality. Only a few films introduce skeptics (just on the sideline) who are gradually convinced of the existence of magic through incontrovertible facts. In A Mother’s Revenge, for instance, there is a white woman who at first does not believe in the existence of ghosts, yet by the end of the film ascertains that such powers do indeed exist. Turning a white woman into an advocate for a worldview which grants reality to occult forces is, of course, highly symbolic as Western people are usually regarded as representatives of a rational perspective on the world.^[14] Popular film precisely contests this perspective.

In order to examine the appearance of occult forces in films and to understand magic’s relation with the camera, I will focus on two selected films — Ghost Tears and Fatal Decision — in which different invisible forces — ghosts (that is, spirits of the dead) and witchcraft — play a prominent role. During my research, these films were well known among Ghanaian audiences and formed a topic of animated debate. Before discussing and comparing the films’ specific features, I will briefly describe a number of distinctive features with regard to setting, plot and moral geography of popular cinema in general.

Firstly, popular films take, as a point of departure, the distinction between what people call the “physical” and the “spiritual” (cf. Meyer 1999a: *). While only the realm of the “physical” is visible to the naked eye, it is generally assumed that what actually happens in people’s life is, to a large extent, determined by invisible, spiritual forces. The capacity to reveal what is going on in the realm of the spiritual and how it affects a person’s life is a source of power. Presently, in Ghanaian society there is a market for this capacity, and Christian, especially Pentecostal preachers — who are currently extremely popular in Ghana (e.g. Meyer 1995, 1998b, Gifford 1994, 1998) — and native doctors compete with each other. As will soon become clear, the camera, too, takes part in this competition and the visualization of occult forces has to be seen in this context.

Secondly, popular films usually focus on domestic space and all the problems involved, rather than serving public goals as was the case with colonial cinema.^[15] They share a similar setting in that the house of the main protagonists is located in one of the rich residential areas, which keep on expanding all around Accra. Ten thousand of this type of mansion exist, or are in the making.^[16] In contrast to houses in the village or in the popular quarters, the houses in these areas are fenced with massive cement walls, which symbolize and emphasize the privacy of the house as a space confined to the modern nuclear family. The fence actually stands for the separation of the couple and their children from the extended family and their inclusion in a private domain difficult to penetrate. Yet, whereas in real life, what is going on within the confines of the modern house remains invisible and, also in stark contrast to other quarters, virtually inaudible to outside observers, the camera follows the characters mercilessly, thereby enabling audiences to become eye-witnesses to what is going on in this secluded domain. The films show that terrible tensions are going on in the modern family. Located in a space beyond wider familial and social control, it becomes an arena for undetected horror and even crime.

Thirdly, films represent modern life in the city — in a beautiful, well furnished house which is only inhabited by a caring husband, his loving wife and their children, who all lead a Christian life — as ultimately desirable. And yet, this ideal is so difficult to attain because it is threatened from so many angles. Films thrive on a moral geography which opposes the village, which is the realm of the extended family, and the forces of nature, on the one hand, and the secluded house in the city, on the other. This is accentuated in Ghost Tears, where the wife accuses her husband and his girl friend (the house girl Esi) of still being stuck in the inferior village way of life. As in many other video movies, the village is here depicted as caught in a low stage of development from which people are to be uplifted. Very much in line with colonial film and in contrast to “high art” African films shown in the West, the village is also seen as an abode of the powers of darkness, which threaten to mess up life in the city. At the same time, films show how village and city are connected through social networks, with all the spiritual links entailed by them. Insinuating that forces from the village, or from nature, still intrude into people’s life in town, popular films demonstrate that magic and modernity are completely intertwined.

Fourthly, taking the relationship between husband and wife as a point of departure, many films show the destruction of this relationship, which may even lead to the death of at least one of the spouses. Focusing on marital drama, with all the conflicts between the spouses and the extended family included, popular films highlight problems which are easily recognizable to the audiences. By bringing  the nasty aspects involved in familial and marital relations into the picture, the films certainly have much in common with the genre of soap: they, too, reveal people’s “dirty little secrets” and, by enticing audiences to keep on watching and discussing the latest film, generate “the dirty discourse of gossip” (Allen 1995:4).

Significantly, in films, husbands are usually shown to be rather weak characters, who run after sexual pleasure, deceive and even “sack” their wife from the house because of a young mistress, and squander money. This sentiment echoes a woman’s perspective on their current situation and turns the wife into the heroine of each film. She may be mistreated by her husband, but appears as the embodiment of utmost morality (and, often, as close to God as one may possibly get). Popular cinema is a gift and a celebration to their female audiences, not to say sacralization, of their point of view (Meyer 1999b). Indeed, wives and girlfriends are so eager to make their partners watch Ghanaian films because they illustrate dramatically how the failure of the husband to choose for his wife and children inevitably leads into unbearable troubles, and how Christianity, especially its pentecostal-charismatic variant, brings moral superiority and enduring success in modern, urban life.

GHOST TEARS

Kwesi, his very rich wife Dina, their baby Yawa and a girl from the village (Esi, Dina’s cousin’s daughter), who has lived with the couple since childhood, live in a very posh two-storey building which conforms to the highest standards of modernity. Kwesi has a secret affair with Esi who pretends that she is pregnant. The drama starts when Dina finds out about the affair and scolds them, calling them non-grateful “village people”. In the night, Esi drowns her in the bathtub. Kwesi marries Esi, and Yawa grows up without knowing anything about her true mother. Esi, however, is treating the young girl cruelly. Yawa has to work hard until late in the night, and Esi is never satisfied. She is doing virtually nothing, just hanging on the sofa and watching TV.

When Yawa is working, the camera depicts the ghost of the dead mother weeping about her daughter’s fate. About ten years after Dina’s death, Kwesi often thinks about his wife and dreams about happier times, when they visited very expensive places, such as Labadi Beach Hotel (the first hotel in town), gorgeously dressed in the latest African fashion, and listening to piano music whilst sipping from long drinks. Kwesi is seriously concerned about the way Esi treats his daughter, but is not able to change anything.

Yet, one day when Yawa has been sent to the market and has lost her money in a taxi, Dina appears to her. She gives Yawa 10.000 Cedis for the lost 3000 Cedis, and tells her that she is Esi’s auntie. Yawa should greet her and let her know that she would come and visit her some day: blood is blood. Having said this she vanishes miraculously. Upon her return, Yawa tells her father what happened. He is shocked about the story, and immediately expects this woman to be the ghost of his dead wife. But why now, after ten years!? He is scared, and now takes better care of his daughter.

In the night, the ghost of Dina, dressed in the clothes in which she was murdered, enters the house without opening the gate, just passing through, and appears to Kwesi who falls down the stairs in fear. (A powerful scene, for the audience with whom I watched, who screamed, “Jesus, the ghost!”) And this is also what Kwesi shouts before he wakes up and tells himself that this was “just a dream”. Even Esi begins to fear these things. Kwesi stops drinking alcohol and talks to one of his friends in order to find out what he knows about ghosts. Kwesi tells him about his dreams and about the woman who appeared to Yawa at the market. Could this be the ghost of his wife who wants to take revenge? The friend asserts that, since Dina knew that she died by accident — as Kwesi has told him —, she would certainly have no reason to return as a ghost of revenge. This would just be an hallucination. But the friend does not go so far as to assert that ghosts as such do not exist. Kwesi interrupts him, and says firmly what he wants to believe: ghosts don’t exist.

Yet he continues to see Dina in dreams, even during the day when he is stuck in the usual Accra traffic jam. One night, Yawa is called by Dina who discloses her identity to her and tells her about the circumstances of her death. Again, the film leaves it open as to whether the ghost really appears to Yawa or if this happens in a dream. Eventually, we see her weep in her bed. Her father comes and takes her downstairs. Yawa asks about her true mother and, having taken a drink, he tells her the truth. Esi overhears this and runs downstairs to kill him by smashing his head with the bottle she finds on the table. Dina’s ghost is present in the room and looks at the scene, without tears. Then Yawa, who is weeping in despair, gets up and strangulates Esi until she is dead. At that moment we see the ghost leave her daughter’s body who remains behind, all alone and weeping.

This film was screened in the cinemas for weeks. Virtually everybody I spoke to knew this film, or at least its story. The main attraction of the film, as I was told, lies in the fact that it makes visible a revenge ghost (not a technically easy task with video material, because special effects are much more difficult to realize than with celluloid, as I learned from the film editor Marc Coleman), thereby taking up a tremendously popular theme and giving it a visual dimension. Regularly, newspapers publish accounts about ghosts appearing to people who are not aware of their death, or about ghosts living happily with a stranger far away from home until a relative shows up and discloses the ghost’s identity.^[17]

Kwesi desperately wishes that ghosts do not exist, yet in the course of the film he is forced to accept the contrary. By keeping the truth of Dina’s death a secret and, in addition, insulting her by marrying Esi and allowing her to maltreat Yawa, Kwesi calls the ghost’s revenge upon himself. The revenge consists in the exposition of his and Esi’s evil deeds to Yawa, and finally, their death. Ironically, while Kwesi is still contemplating the truth of ghosts, the ghost herself is revealing the truth surrounding her death. In this way, the ghost appears to be the sole entity able to bring about justice and teach Yawa about her roots, whereas her own father lets her grow up in a home which is based on a deception.

Therefore, the central message of the film is not simply that ghosts do indeed exist, but rather that they punish evildoers and reveal truth, whereas people’s lives in the visible realm of the “physical” abound with secrets and lies. The “spiritual”, as it represents itself through dreams, thus becomes a means for the establishment of truth. Here the camera is put in the service of the ghost’s revelatory enterprise (as in the case of Wallace, cf. Pels in this volume). The audiences witness the quarrel that led to the murder of Dina through the eye of the camera, and in the course of watching are made complacent to the ghost’s struggle for justice and truth. By making the ghost visible and occasionally conveying her perspective, the eye of the camera offers audiences the extraordinary experience of penetrating the otherwise invisible.

The emphasis on ghosts, which formed a major theme of popular film in the early 1990s, has evoked protests from different groups in society.^[18] Intellectual elites complained that filmmakers should refrain from supporting the societal obsession with the living dead, which one also found in popular newspapers and tabloids, and rather come up with films which would refrain from visualizing occult forces altogether. Criticisms were also raised from a Christian point of view, which regarded the emphasis of vengeful ghosts as a denial of the absolute power of God. It was asserted that rather than celebrating these embodiments of punishment, films should show that evil deeds would have consequences for the life of the person committing them, and eventually be judged by God. The production of films about the living dead diminished after these criticisms, but popular movies — far from accepting elitist criticisms — kept on picturing other invisible, occult powers, preferably in a Christian framework, or at least by representing occult forces as downright evil.

Taking up more or less explicitly Christian narrative forms, films are now often framed as “confessions”,^[19] and thus as media meant to make visible the hidden machinations of “the powers of darkness”. And although films offer audiences the possibility to take up different subject positions (for instance, that of the bad guy who destroys the moral order which the film seeks to defend), the most superior one among these is the perspective of the all-seeing God (cf. Meyer 1999b). While the characters in the film are still wondering why all sorts of mishaps are troubling them, the audiences already know, assisted by the eye of the camera, who is responsible for all this. They have been enabled to penetrate the secret actions of evil persons, watching them visit shrines in the village or at the margins of the big city, and now wait patiently until these people eventually get the punishment they deserve.

While popular film shifted away from dead people’s ghosts, the role of invisible, occult forces in marriage dramas involving one man and two women certainly remained a hot topic until the present day. This is also the case in Fatal Decision, which can safely be regarded as the paradigm for the production of successful movies.

FATAL DECISION

(1993, H.M. Productions) A well-to-do couple by the name of Mensah is married happily for twenty years, the sole trouble being that they do not have children. Eventually Sarah manages to convince her husband to take a second wife in order to have a baby. He marries Mona, who indeed gives birth to a son. From then on, Mona does her best to chase Sarah out of the house. First she tries to do so through witchcraft, and the camera follows her when she leaves her sleeping body behind in the bed, gets to the beach and transforms herself into a vulture, one of the favorite animal shapes taken by witches. She stands in front of Sarah’s bed, and blows into her face. Sarah, while sleeping, experiences a tormenting dream, with much lightening and thunder. When she wakes up, her first words are: “Thank you, Jesus, for giving me victory over my enemy!”

As this witchcraft attack has failed because of Sarah’s spiritual strength which is due to her Christian faith, Mona now plans a plot which is to show that Sarah is unfaithful to her husband. Unfortunately the latter believes Mona more than his first wife, who is sacked from the house. Miraculously, she has become pregnant after so many years [so the name Sarah certainly was chosen in analogy to the biblical Sarah, who could hardly believe that she could give birth at her age, and then got Isaac], but the husband refuses to accept responsibility for the child. Sarah and her son, whom she calls Obimpe [Akan: “somebody does not want (you)”, i.e. a child without a father] live all alone, under difficult circumstances, but never lose faith in God. Eventually Sarah dies from poverty, and Obimpe, a bright child and devout Christian, has to suffer in the house of a mischievous aunt. Sacked from the house, he is eventually invited to live in the house of the pastor, who appears to belong to the pentecostal brand of Christianity. Performing extraordinarily well in school, he receives a scholarship to study medicine in Europe.

Mona’s son, by contrast, is a good-for-nothing. He and his mother have squandered all riches, and the father is desperate about the whole situation. One day, Mona falls sick and in hospital she meets Obimpe, who has just returned home (significantly by Swiss Air, whereas he left Ghana by the much less prestigious Ghana Airways) as a doctor. Realizing that she is about to die, she confesses that she is a witch and is responsible for the sad fate of his mother. The old father begs his son for forgiveness, and they visit Sarah’s grave and weep.

This film had enormous appeal because of its powerful narrative. Thriving on the contrast between the god—fearing Sarah and the witch Mona,^[20] the film defends monogamous marriage and the Christian nuclear family. Comparing it to Ghost Tears, it becomes clear that this film celebrates Christian values in a straightforward way. This is made explicit in a scene when the pastor comes to announce Sarah’s death to Mr. Mensah and admonishes him that taking a second wife was a “fatal decision” as a result of which his home and business were broken up — a message he does not like to accept, yet all the more endorsed by the audiences, especially women. I learned that women like this film tremendously because of its warning against polygamy and its appeal to wait patiently until God gives a couple the baby they and their parents long for so much.^[21]

The pastor, of course, also plays a crucial role in taking care of Obimpe instead of his stubborn, misguided father who even fails to realize that he is married to a witch, another central theme in many films. Well-behaved, God-fearing, intelligent and modest, Obimpe conforms to the image of the ideal son. The fact that eventually his ultimate dream of becoming a doctor is realized very much appeals to the audiences, who pity him for being forsaken by his father and having to lead a miserable life. Watching this gives both hope and moral satisfaction, another important gift of popular films to their audiences.

For our investigation of the way in which magic figures in popular films, the witchcraft scene is of special importance. The transformation from woman to vulture — made possible through special effects — is certainly as spectacular as the spiritual fight between Mona and Sarah. Blurring the boundary between dream and reality, between the realm of “the spiritual” and that of “the physical”, the camera depicts things which are usually invisible to the naked eye. Completely in line with Christian imagery, and in contrast to Ghost Tears, magic is here the domain of the evildoers, who will perish in the end, while the camera is put in the service of penetrating and revealing the secret domain of people’s engagement with occult forces. In this sense, here the camera is magic’s fiercest enemy: following witches into their secret machinations and making their actions visible on the screen, the camera engages in a modern, mediated form of witchhunt, through which the guilt of the witch is established beyond doubt. In so doing, however, the camera also is very much complicit with occult forces, such as witches, because it confirms, and even proves, their existence. Indeed, the relationship between magic and the camera in popular film is paradoxical in that the latter confirms the existence of occult forces and defeats them at the same time.^[22]

*To return to Taussig’s contribution again, here the camera is engaged in the revelation rather than exposure of magic, it does not question the existence of occult forces as such. In this context it is important to emphasize that “revelation” is a term which is frequently used with regard to what is achieved by popular films. This can ne nicely illustrated through I conversation I had with the filmmaker William A. Akuffo and a script writer (whom I only met once and whose name I do not know). Akuffo told us how incredibly difficult it was for him to produce certain scenes in which the working of occult forces were to be visualized (during filming sessions the light suddenly stopped to work; actors refused to play in scenes in which they were to be prayed upon by a pastor for fear of appearing to be possessed by evil spirits; later there appeared to be nothing recorded on the tape, etc.). The script writer asserted that, as films are “revelations of occult powers”, evil powers would sometimes try to prevent the production of such films. So, in fact, even film production itself is placed in the context of the struggle between occult forces and the camera, which is in the service of divine power.

The obsession with the revelation of “the powers of darkness” is an enduring feature of popular cinema. Successful movies include some more or less explicit references to secret practices such as making juju (sorcery) and the visualization of otherwise invisible occult forces such as witchcraft (see also Meyer 1998, 1999) and put the camera in the service of revelation. Many film makers are merciless with regard to African Culture writ large and show with much vigour how one party — those evil personages who rely on the “powers of darkness” — seeks the downfall of the other — usually devout Christian housewives. Vainly of course, for in the end good always triumphs over evil as much as the union between husband and wife is represented as morally superior to extramarital affairs, and the nuclear family as preferable to the extended family. In so doing, popular movies offer audiences a superior form of vision which is in line with pentecostal—Christian ideas and morals.

At the same time popular film, by democratizing and individualizing vision, goes beyond Christian practices of seeing, where vision is regarded as a special gift by God, which is only granted to the true believer (cf. Meyer 1998). Through the medium of film, the revelation of magic through the eye of the camera becomes a common practice, and this indicates the complete subversion of the role of the camera in colonial film. Here, film technology clearly got turned on its head. Providing an extension of the human eye and showing occult forces at work, the camera claims the ultimate power of revelation. In popular cinema it certainly does not act as the “mechanical eye of reason” engrained in a positivist world view ruling out occult phenomena as “superstitions”, but as a mediator of a form of truth—knowledge which successfully transcends the boundary between the visible and the invisible, “the physical” and “the spiritual”, and enables people to share its perspective.

THE MAGIC OF FILM

Interestingly, both Western and African film critics and cinematographers often refer to the “magic” of film. They do so usually in passing, without deep reflection about the implication of this statement (but see Tylor (1971 [1947]) and Powdermaker (1950), who emphasized the magic of dream creation taking place in Hollywood). This expression seems to suggest, in a somewhat evolutionary way, that in modern, “disenchanted” societies one can still find “survivals” of mythical, magical thought, or, at least, spaces allowing for regression into such thought. The magic of film, of course, consists in the capacity of images that conjure up virtual worlds and make its spectators part of it and “become a dreamer under their spell”, as McLuhan (1995: 285 [1964]) put it.

Right from the beginning of the cinema, films visualized imaginations such as the ones evoked by Gothic novels like Stoker’s Dracula, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and Wallace’s Sanders of the River, in which the occult breaks through and turns civilization into barbarism. Clearly, as the introduction to this volume also argues, the claim that magic has been superceded by modernity, is ideological rather than real. Brantlinger has linked the upsurge of the occult with British imperialism and has shown that many Gothic novels deal with an encounter with another culture — he therefore calls their genre “Imperial Gothic” — and thrives on the anxiety that “Western rationality may be subverted by the very superstition it rejects” (1988: 227). The novels, as well as the films made out of them, are racist (cf. Ukadike 1994: 35ff) and, at the same time seriously question the disenchanted character of modern society.^[23] Here the magic of film thrives on the magic in film: a dream performance in which the fantastic and the real merge in unexpected ways.

Over and again the magic in American and European films — and, for that matter, in other genres (cf. the introduction to this volume) — has been the magic of a non-civilized Other, modelled after the “backward primitive” or the “mysterious oriental” encountered at the periphery of the colonial Empire, who threatens to subvert the rationality of the Westerner. Against this background it is understandable that Ghanaian film critics and professional film makers are highly critical of films in which Africans are still associated with magic and prefer to show how, on the contrary, European attitudes subvert African dignity and warn about the devastating influence foreign films have on African audiences.

Yet, in attempting to decolonize cinema, ironically, they tend to reproduce rather paternalistic attitudes towards film as a means of education in pursuit of public goals, which also motivated colonial cinema. Diawara has stated that colonial cinema denied Africans the full cinematic heritage of the West, because of the fear that “backward people” would not be able to distinguish between truth and falsehood of filmic representation (1992: 1), between reality and fantasy.^[24] Hence colonial authorities did not like to screen films which challenged Western superiority, and even let people sit through a number of educational films before showing them Chaplin.^[25] As stated earlier, films were to serve colonial interests and entice people to learn and progress, to move towards increasing levels of rationality and self control, leaving behind the stage of “superstition”. As, according to the British colonial authorities, these goals could not be achieved by merely screening Western films, they found it necessary to limit access to Western cinematographic repertoires and make specific films for solely African audiences.

Against this background, critics’ stancea towards video movies, who still regard people’s struggle against occult forces as a “superstition” which forms a stumbling block for development as an attitude which should not exist, let alone be visualized in film, appears to be quite problematic. For, in this way, these critics deny film a central and perhaps defining feature, namely the performance of magic as a way to cast doubt on modernity’s dominant claim of disenchantment and to point towards the actual entanglement of magic and modernity.

To me, it looks as if private video producers in their urge to make products which appeal to popular taste, finally — and probably without consciously striving to do so — have moved beyond paternalizing cinema, a convention that has been dominant in Africa ever since this medium was introduced. Whatever one thinks about magic in film, its presence certainly contributes to the emergence of the magic of film which transposes audiences into the “interspace” of the realms of the “physical” and the “spiritual”, where much more may be revealed — and learned — about everyday life in an African city than through any “realistic”, educative representation stuck in the opposition of magic versus modernity.

^[1]In November 1996 the treaty was signed between the governments of Ghana and Malaysia. In Ghana, the company has two divisions: a television section (TV 3), and a section for the production of feature films in the Betacam format, primarily in order to be shown on TV.

^[2]In fact, a number of former GFIC-filmmakers left the new Malaysian—dominated company disillusioned and started trying their luck in the market.

^[3] Interestingly, films made by the GFIC hardly, if ever, dealt with magic, or as it is popularly called juju, and other occult phenomena. Rather, these films tried to describe problems arising in the city as social (and this means: prosaic) problems, make a plea for development of the countryside, or try to contribute to the valorization of the “Ghanaian cultural heritage”. Likewise, films produced by Gama Media Systems focus on family dramas and tend to pay no attention to occult forces.

^[4] Kofi Middleton-Mends, who teaches at the National Film And Television Institute (NAFTI) and who also acts in a number of films, told me in an interview on 16 October 1996 that students are discouraged of making films about juju. Although this is what many of them want (as they know that this type of film easily sells), for their final exam they should make films which meet NAFTI’s artistic and intellectual standards. Students of NAFTI told me that their teachers urged them to depict Ghanaian culture in a positive way, as a heritage to be cherished, rather than as something dangerous to be gotten rid of (as is propagated by Ghanaian pentecostalists [Meyer 1998], who have a tremendous influence on popular culture, see below).

^[5] For instance, the Ghanaian film critic Audrey Gadzekpo wrote, “And when other nations do get to view us through the lens of our present crop of budding filmmakers, I am afraid they may be tempted to conclude that Ghana must be a nation of superstitious, contentious people whose men have libidos that are way out of control” (quoted in Middleton-Mends 1995: 6).

^[6] The history of cinema in Ghana has hardly been a topic of research. Next to Ukadike’s (1994) and Diawara’s (1992) invaluable overviews on Africa cinema, in which they also deal with the Ghanaian situation, there are only two unpublished theses about the GFIC (founded in 1957) and its predecessor, the Gold Coast Film Unit (established in 1945) (Mensah 1989; Sakyi 1996).

^[7] According to Mensah, the first feature film was shown to a paying — and, of course, well-to-do and educated — audience at the Palladium Cinema in Accra in 1922 (Mensah 1989: 8). The owner of this cinema opened more theatres in other parts of the country. The films shown in this period were silent movies from India; since they were shown in “chapters” it took a number of nights to complete the whole epos. At the beginning of 1930, a number of mobile cinema exploiters started to show films in cocoa growing areas, where people, at least after harvest time, had sufficient funds to pay for this new form of entertainment (ibid.). In the 1940s, a number of Lebanese businessmen also ventured into film and opened a number of theatres, above all in Accra, Kumasi and some important towns in the cocoa growing areas.

^[8] Unfortunately, I have no information as to when mission societies started to show films in Ghana. There is no doubt that they employed the Magic Lantern already in the nineteenth century and showed films like The Pilgrim’s Progress in the twentieth-century. On mission’s use of the Magic Lantern, see Landau 1994.

^[9] Diawara has qualified the Colonial Film Unit as “paternalistic and racist”. Wishing “to turn back film history and develop a different type of cinema for Africans because they considered the African mind too primitive to follow the sophisticated narrative techniques of mainstream cinema’, their films turned out to be “boring and clumsy” (1992: 4). The African audiences clearly preferred Charlie Chaplin and Indian movies.

^[10] Yet, due to a serious lack of funds, in more than thirty-five years, only thirteen celluloid feature films were made by the Film Unit and, later, the GFIC, in some cases, in collaboration with European producers (Sakyi 1996: 96).

^[11] These films differ in length (between ten and 45 minutes), and many of them convey their message through a story. Usually a number of films were shown, with fragments from, for instance, Chaplin films, in between. I assume that with regard to message and storyline, these films are quite similar to feature films.

^[12] Chaplin, of course, countered the self-image of the West created by colonial film. As Morton-Williams indicates, audiences were wild about his films and “the responses to the old Chaplin films in particular being no less hilarious than that of the audience they were made for” (1953:37).

^[13] In this context it is worth recalling that the state only sold the majority of the GFIC-shares in 1996. Before that time, TV (the only station being the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation [GBC]) was fully state-controlled. State-control over radio only loosened in the course of 1994, when independent, initially illegal, private radio stations emerged and a new media law was passed which allowed for private media. For a state exercising full control over TV and radio, the presence of “small media” (Sreberny-Mohammadi & Mohammadi 1994) such as video and audio—tapes, of course, entails a tremendous threat.

^[14] This is reminiscent of Juju in My Life by James H. Neal (1966), who first came to the Gold Coast as a British colonial officer and after Independence became the chief investigations officer for the government of Ghana. His book is an account of how, gradually, he gave up his skepticism with regard to juju and became convinced of its existence and efficiency.

^[15] I am not sure why domestic space is so privileged in popular cinema. On the one hand, audiences, especially women, are certainly concerned with matters of the house. On the other hand, the recent fascination with Nigerian video movies, which also address issues such as corruption and crime on the part of those in power, shows that Ghanaian audiences are eager to watch this type of film. A number of Ghanaian filmmakers told me that they were reluctant to take up political issues or events of immediate public relevance, because they feared problems with either the censorship board or the people involved in these issues and events.

^[16] In Ghana it is considered of utmost value for a man to construct a house. This is the symbol of a successful life (cf. Van der Geest 1997). While until the 1960s and 1970s a successful man was expected to, and actually would, build a house in his home town or village where he would eventually retire, nowadays there is still a trend of building houses in Accra.

^[17] Stories concerning ghosts who seek revenge for evil done to them during their lifetime build on existing cultural concepts. In Akan, Ga and Ewe culture, power is attributed to the victims of bad, violent deaths, and rituals have been developed to keep control over these forces by relegating them once and for all to the realm of death or, if they keep on appearing in the living world, they establish a shrine for them. Yet, in the context of the city, where the circumstances leading to a person‘s death are not transparent, these forces remain untamed, thereby threatening to blur the boundary between life and death. There is an ongoing debate about the truth of ghosts and the nature of dreams which is taken up by many movies.

^[18] Many filmmakers told me that, after the hausse of ghost films, such as Ghost Tears, A Mother’s Revenge, Step-Dad, and Suzzy in various journals, one could find letters to the editor which complaint as to why filmmakers were focusing only on ghosts. Didn’t they have better stories to tell? These criticisms led filmmakers to look for new stories.

^[19] “Confession” holds a central place in the pentecostal churches. In contrast to catholicism, where confession takes place at a secluded space between the priest and an individual sinner (cf. Pels 1999: 107-109), pentecostal churches celebrate public confession, where Born Again Christians tell spectacular stories about their experiences in the realm of “the powers of darkness”. In many respects this form of confession resembles Akan, Ga and Ewe practices of confession, like in the case of witchcraft, which also took place in practice. At the same time, pentecostal confession certainly forms part of a corpus of modern technologies of self (cf. Pels ibid.), in the sense that pentecostalists are encouraged to continuously investigate themselves about their involvement with occult forces relegated to the past and the domain of evil, and eventually come up with a story (Meyer 1998). This public form of confession is carried a step further by popular cinema, where unbounded, anonymous audiences can now shiver about the evil committed by certain people before they turned on the right path.

^[20] For the Ghanaian public, well grounded in the Bible as it is, is immediately clear  that the film takes up the biblical story on Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, Abraham’s second wife and mother of his first son.

^[21] In fact, plenty of film are devoted to the theme of the young couple who remains childless, the husband’s liaisons (often instigated by his mother) with other girls, the poor wife’s prayers and, finally, her well-deserved reward.

^[22] This resonates with nineteenth-century Pietist missionary and current pentecostal attitudes toward “the powers of darkness”, who are represented as existing agents of the Christian Devil who are to be defeated by any good Christian (cf. Meyer 1999a).

^[23] This is reminiscent of the fierce debates about Jean Rouch’s documentary on the Hauka-possession cult in Ghana, Les maîtres fous, which depicts Africans portraying their white overlords in barbaric ways. Whilst some spectators regarded the film as racist, others noticed that this cult implied a deep anti-colonial critique because it questioned the very order which lay at the base of the civilizing mission (cf. Kramer 1987: 137; Ukadike 1994: 50ff).

^[24] In the West, one finds similar paternalistic doubts as to the ability of the so-called masses not to let themselves be lured into the magic of film and become unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality (cf. Starker 1989; Verrips in press).

^[25] I have not yet been able to find out, whether and to what extent films as King Solomon’s Mines have been shown to an African public during colonial times. I would not be surprised if watching these films would have been restricted, both because of the racism and the doubts about Western rationality. In any case it is clear that not many Africans had access to films anyway. Ukadike mentions in passing that African men had the opportunity to watch this type of films when they take part in the First World War in France.

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