56 mins., b&w, sound – French voice-over commentary and field sound recordings of music
Production : Le Haut Commissariat (Cameroun)
Source : CNC at the Bnf
Background – This substantial film follows the various different stages of a complex male initiation rite, known as sso, which is practised by the Eton and Manguisa, two sub-groups of the Beti, one of the principal ethnic groups of West Africa, with a strong presence in Cameroun as well as in parts of Gabon and the Congo-Brazzaville. The rite takes its name from a particular species of small antelope admired for its speed through the forest.
Now no longer practised, the sso ceremony required the initiands to undergo a series of physical ordeals over the course of six months, along with periods of seclusion and hunting in the forest, and interspersed with ritual battles and dancing in the village plaza.
In order to take place, a sso ceremony had to have a ritual sponsor, who would guarantee the considerable quantities of food and drink consumed. The sponsor could thereby expiate some past moral infraction while at the same time gaining great personal prestige.
The film was directed by Maurice Bertaut, a senior colonial officer in the Cameroun, who had previously written a thesis on the customary law of the Boulou, also a Beti subgroup, while the images and the soundtrack of local music were recorded by René Bugniet, a cartographer who had previously made at least a dozen films for the colonial government of Cameroon.
Film Content – The film begins with an interesting ethnofictional sequence in which following the death of his son, a senior man, one Bilima, attributing this loss to a fight that he had had in the past with his brother, undertakes to expiate this infraction by sponsoring a sso ceremony. Thereafter the film follows the unfolding of the ceremony in a largely straightforwardly descriptive manner. This sso turns out to be an impressive affair, involving at one stage perhaps as many as eighty initiands, and featuring many remarkable ordeals and extraordinary dance performances.
Apart from a few occasional lapses, the voice-over scripted and performed by Bertaut, is remarkably free – for the period – of colonialist or racist prejudice.
Meanwhile the shooting and sound-recording by Bugniet is also generally of a high standard, though the film concludes with a particularly voyeuristic final shot, of the the kind that also features in his earlier work, in which he explores the bodies of three young women ‘to dispell any unpleasant memory of the ordeals undergone by the initiands’.
But otherwise, Sso is perhaps the closest pre-war example of the kind of film that would become the standard form of ethnographic film after the Second World War.
Text : Quinn 1980
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