Film Review | An Exploration of Culture and Colonialism in ‘Dahomey’

Art museums are strange places. White-walled and hushed, they offer a sort of refuge from the demands of a volatile world, giving their patrons a rare opportunity for sustained aesthetic contemplation. But often, just beneath the placid surface of things, museums find themselves mired in all manner of political disputes, from heated contests over representation and identity to debates over the ethics of accepting gifts from big pharma, fossil fuel giants, arms manufacturers, and other controversial donors.

In recent years, the question of repatriation has surged to the forefront of these debates, with activists, scholars, and national governments alike calling on the world’s leading museums to purge their collections of looted antiquities and return these plundered objects to their native homelands. In her entrancing new documentary, Dahomey, French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop peers in on this struggle, joining contemporaries like the Dutch artist/filmmaker Renzo Martens (see 2020’s White Cube and 2021’s Plantations and Museums) in probing the difficult and often uncertain meanings of repatriation.

Dahomey is Diop’s first foray into non-fiction filmmaking, and only her second feature. She emerged as a major cinematic voice in 2019 with the release of her debut feature, Atlantics, which deservedly won the Grand Prix at Cannes. Heady, stylish, and evasive, Atlantics blends the social issue drama with the genre picture, filtering a pared-back story about the exploitation of Senegalese migrant workers through a feminist revenge plot that incorporates elements of the zombie thriller. With Dahomey, Diop attempts a similarly ambitious synthesis, approaching
the politics of repatriation with a verité posture while still making room for her more metaphysical and speculative impulses.

The film opens in Paris in November, 2021. At the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, final preparations are being made for the repatriation of several statues and artifacts looted from the Kingdom of Dahomey (contemporary Benin) by French colonists in the latter half of the 19th Century. In slow, lingering takes, Diop documents the delicate procedure of lowering the ornate objects into custom-built wooden crates. Among them is an imposing representation of King Béhanzin, who led the Dahomean resistance against French colonial troops during the First
Franco-Dahomean war of 1889-90, and a likeness of King Ghézo, who ended Dahomey’s tributary subordination to the Oyo Empire in the 1820s.

So far, so conventional. But as Ghézo’s shipping crate is sealed shut, a strategically placed cut to black gives the impression that we, too, are being packed up for shipment. Over a darkened screen, we hear the muffled voices of conservators, preparators, and shipping technicians and the blunted squeal of an electric drill as the lid of the crate is screwed down. Soon, a new voice intrudes. Low, rumbling, and heavily distorted, it is the voice of King Ghézo, or, as he is known to those outside the crate, Object #26.

Composed in collaboration with Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel, Ghézo’s ambling monologue is brought to life by a trio of performers—Lucrece Houegbelo, Parfait Viayinon, and Didier Sèdoha Nassègandé — whose voices blend into an otherworldly sonic alloy with an assist from sound designer Nicolas Becker (whose work on the 2019 drama The Sound of Metal earned him an Oscar). Searching and almost incantatory, Ghézo’s speech makes it impossible to regard his likeness as an inert aesthetic object, a mere artifact. Imbued with a vibrant and disarming subjectivity, he is suddenly party to the complex chorus of voices that Diop orchestrates over the course of the film’s brisk, 68-minute running time. But as it turns out, this is a fraught invitation. Even before Ghézo and his traveling companions leave French soil, Diop signals that the coming conversation about this particular gesture of repatriation will be fractious and contentious, its outcomes uncertain.

The Western museum, or at least some of its trappings, appear to have stowed away on the long flight from Paris to Abomey. Without overplaying her hand, Diop nonetheless suggests that the museum may be less a physical building than a mobile complex of practices, expectations, and ideas about how we ought to manage the material world. Flowing back and forth along the tendrils of empire, dusty but tenacious, this complex both enables and ensnares the possibility of repatriation, complicating efforts to treat it as some radical rupture in the colonial ordering of the world.

This uneasy tension simmers quietly in the background through much of the film’s first half. But in later passages, Diop drags it out of the realm of implication and puts it front and center. To do so, she dwells at length on a group of students enrolled at the University of Abomey Calavi, who mark the occasion of repatriation by convening a debate on the subject. Here, any romantic notion of repatriation as decolonizing repair, as the restoration of a culture torn asunder, comes to a crashing halt.

For some of the students, repatriation is a cause for celebration, an incremental but significant attempt at restitution, and an important opportunity to celebrate the ingenuity of their Dahomean forebears. Others, squinting, discern some symbolic value in the act, but find the paltriness of France’s offering — just 26 of some 7,000 looted objects held at the quai du Branly have thus far been repatriated — insulting, and regard it as a bit of slick PR on the part of French president Emmanuel Macron. One mounts a radical critique of the Western museum complex
itself, treating the category ‘art’ both as a colonial imposition and a species of cultural desecration (here, Diop seems in close conversation with Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s 1953 essay film, Les Statues Meurent Aussi, or Statues Also Die).

Taken alone, the mere fact of political disagreement among university students might seem mundane, even predictable. But given the outsized role repatriation has come to play in efforts among Western institutions to face their colonial pasts, it is no small thing to admit, as Diop does, that it may not be the balm we wish it to be, that it may come up short as a decolonizing gesture. Sitting with the students of Abomey Calavi, she helps us to see the possibilities of repatriation even as she alerts us to the ways it may provide an alibi for the persistence of imperial asymmetries of power.

Far from restoring some lost sense of cultural unity, repatriation — framed by Diop’s imaginative direction and filtered through the dazzling, sensual cinematography of Joséphine Drouin-Viallard — occasions a gnarled and fractious conversation about nationhood, justice, identity, and history in empire’s wake. Overflowing the dimensions of any glass display case, whether in Paris or Abomey, this conversation posits the scene of repatriation as an unfolding or an opening, rather than as closure.

In the film’s final moments, Diop turns her camera toward this opening, finding on the other side of history as we know it a vibrant, almost kaleidoscopic scene. As guests of the Palais de la Marina mill about the new exhibition, their own likenesses reflect off of and refract through the glass display cases that house the Dahomean treasures, making it difficult to discern who, exactly, is looking at what. In place of the contemplative, aesthetic gaze privileged by the Western art museum, we find a dense tangle of sightlines and ghostly images, uncertain and unruly but buzzing with possibility. Soon, Ghézo’s voice — which is not one voice, but many — returns, speaking not of entombment or holism, but of infinity.

See trailer here.