Dahomey

 Dahomey is an interesting documentary directed by Mati Diop and premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2024.  The film concerns the repatriation of 27 royal artifacts looted by the French from the African kingdom of Benin around 1894.  Until 2022, the objects were displayed at the Musee du Quai Branq (Jacques Chirac) in Paris.  At that time, the stolen art objects were transported to modern Benin and, then, put on display at a museum in the ancient royal city of Abomey.  Diop, an important African director, composes her documentary, really more in the nature of a film essay in six parts, the total picture about 70 minutes long:  we see the artifacts being carefully boxed and shipped from Paris, their arrival in Benin amidst a great patriotic celebration, an animated debate among university students about the significance of the repatriation, and images of people admiring the objects in the Abomey Museum.  A sixth part of the film represents the perspective of one of the objects, a life-size statue of King Gezo (ruler until 1858) portraying the chieftain as an attribute of the Voudon god of metal, Gu -- the figure is studded with iron blades signifying war, an attribute of Gu in the Voudon pantheon.  A Haitian poet gives voice to the deified king's thoughts and narrates the story of the statue's return from its point-of-view.  This fantasy perspective is questionable -- first the deified King doesn't have much of any interest to say (he seems a bit dim-witted) and speaks in a highly abstract and poetic way about darkness and the landscapes of Benin (he describes the shore of the Atlantic as the "wounds of the Atlantic").  The statue's voice is a basso profundo, heavily distorted with a garnish of hiss -- it's about what you'd expect an African royal statue to sound like and, inadvertently, suggests that it would be better if the wood and metal fetish didn't try to talk:  he has nothing useful or intelligent to say.  The film ends with a fantasy of the idol wandering around the modern streets of Benin, inspecting his kingdom -- the city alternately vibrant with cafes and very poor with homeless people sleeping on the streets and distant prospects along urban streets that seem blurring into tiny villages in the African countryside.  Diop's imagery of foliage (lush with nightblooming flowers against the velvet darkness), patrolling soldiers, and huge jets of water shot onto palace lawns is very beautiful in a gloomy and sinister way.  

The film provides little in the way of information.  Negotiations leading up to the repatriation of the stolen artifacts are not discussed.  The political situation in Benin is not explained.  There are some hints that not everyone is happy with the repatriation:  some students during the debate scene complain that the leader of Benin, Patrice Talon, capitulated to the French by requiring return of only 27 objects of the 7000 taken from Benin in 1894 as war booty.  The film is lyric and not polemical -- it is suggestive as opposed to being explanatory.  There are a couple very short art-historical sequences explaining the significance of the repatriated objects but this is cursory.  The debate among the students has to do with claims that the patrimony of Benin was stolen and that the people must cast off the colonialist legacy.  People complain about their Eurocentric education (in fluent, eloquent French).  One of the students says that she is afraid of the artifacts, presumably because of their entanglement with Vodoun; someone else says that after attending Christian religious services, 95% of the people then make sacrifices to the Vodoun gods.  There are other speeches but they are inconsequential.  How any of  this applies to anything more than repatriation isn't really specified and the students don't have anything very interesting to say -- they are like the deity (he calls himself 27):  he's mildly talkative but doesn't have much to say.  The meaning of the film is carried by the images -- the antiseptic corridors in the basement of the French museum, the way in which the deified kings (one represents a lion and another is shaped like a "shark-man") are shackled and swaddled before plunged into the darkness of their shipping crates, the sound of drills sealing the boxes.  The festivities on the Benin streets where huge crowds greet the return of the objects are colorful and moving.  In the middle of the film, there's a night sequence in which King Gezo meditates on the gardens around the sea-side museum, the Palais de Marina, big fountains of water from lawn sprinklers jetting up into the air where solitary guards are pacing the perimeter of the property.  A procession of very elderly tribal dignitaries appears, old people who have to be half-carried to the halls where the artifacts are displayed in brand-new cases.  We don't know who these people are or why they carry their various scepters and canes or the significance of their elaborate raiment. There are some questions raised about one of the king's posthumous brass and bronze monument, a so-called Asen (or funerary offering) -- how did the king manage to complete this thing before he was dead?  In one shot, we are given a tour of a throne and learn that the economy of the kingdom was based on the slave trade -- on a higher level the king is carved under a parasol amidst him harem, but the seraglio is supported by enslaved prisoners.  (This was a brutish imperialist and expansionist regime itself we are told.) The imagery, consisting largely of vacant spaces, crowds of people peering into glass cases, and technicians with clipboards taking stock of the condition of the artifacts is elusive in meaning and dreamlike.  The film has a brilliant symphonic score that adds to the picture's poetic resonance.  There's an inevitable sadness in the picture -- now that these objects have come home, then what?  Of course, most of Benin is indifferent to the spectacle at the Marina Palace -- in the film's last couple minutes we catch a glimpse of the lives of people who aren't paying much attention (if any) to the festivities that are the subject of the film.  The movie is modest, unassuming, and very thought-provoking, but the thoughts are invested in things -- flowers, tile floors, gesturing wood and metal idols, the wild sea breaking against the shore beside the museum, the beggars sprawled across the sidewalks, the choruses of dancing girls performing for the gods that have returned from Paris.  

The questions posed by repatriation of looted objects are interesting and, now, au courant in the world of museums and the curatorial profession.  When I was in Hamburg, I saw intricate bronzes of jaw-dropping splendor also from Benin, although I think from the late medieval kingdom.  The Germans knew that these were ill-gotten artifacts, advertising the fact with apologetic labels in the dark display spaces where the bronzes were on show.  Other labels apologized for presenting the bronzes as staged theatrically in darkness with piercing beams of light cutting through the gloom -- the curators said that this was intended to "other" the exhibits and make them appear uncanny or spooky.  The apologies were ludicrous -- these bronzes are intrinsically uncanny and spooky, utterly alien, and strangely beautiful according to canons that have nothing to do with Greek antiquity or Roman esthetics..  The things were like the enormous Olmec head shown in a early moment in the film, a monumental spherical sculpture behind glass in the elegant facade of the Paris museum, remote and unsettling. I wonder when the descendants of the Olmecs will come for their head. There is a vigorous dispute in Hamburg about repatriating the Benin bronzes.  Mati Diop's dream-like film is not a proposition and doesn't take an explicit side -- poetry is indifferent and not on anyone's side.

Dahomey is the name of the Kingdom of Benin in the 19th century.