The Hollow City

Posted to www.marxmail.org on June 2, 2006

Like the antique gas-guzzlers that ply the streets of Havana, neorealism--a film style that was fashionable around the same time in history--still chugs along in underdeveloped countries. There is a good reason for this. Like post-war Italy, the economies of Latin America, Africa and Asia breed exactly the same sorts of social contradictions.

Now available in video as part of First Run Features superb Global Initiative series (http://www.firstrunfeatures.com/glc1.html), "The Hollow City" tells the story of a homeless boy named N'Dala (João Roldan) who struggles to survive in the streets of Luanda, Angola in 1991. Made in 2004 by Angolan director Maria João Ganga, it is a welcome addition to African cinema and a measurable sign of cultural progress in a country devastated by civil war and imperialist meddling. It incorporates many of the elements of the neorealist genre, from the use of mostly untrained actors to a plot revolving around the everyday struggle of poor people to survive.

Just after the plane carrying N'Dala and other survivors of an UNITA attack sets down in the Luanda, he breaks away from the Catholic nun looking after him and heads for the street. As he strolls along aimlessly, his sole source of amusement is a toy car attached to a string that he has constructed himself out of tin cans and wire that he drags along. He dreams of returning to the Bie province but events conspire against him.

He is fortunate enough to meet Zé early on. Zé is a few years older than him and wise to the vagaries of the Luanda streets. They take part in a series of escapades that might remind you of Pixote, another Lusophone film. One step ahead of the law, they sell cigarettes on the streets and drink beer at local dancehalls when adults are not watching. Even if they were watching, it is doubtful that would make much difference. Zé's "godmother" is a prostitute who expects him to perform housework in exchange for a meager allowance. Her boyfriend Joka is a mechanic by day and a burglar by night.

"The Hollow City" is not really plot-driven. Its main satisfaction is watching its young, untrained actors develop a kind of warm and brotherly relationship when everything around them is cold and exploitative. Although the citizens of Luanda pay lip-service to Angola's revolution (they refer to each other as comrade), this is very much a world in which ideals count for very little.

Marxist scholar Mike Davis has made a breakthrough in trying to understand this new world that he calls "planet of slums":

Likewise Kinshasa, Khartoum, Dar es Salaam, Dhaka and Lima grow prodigiously despite ruined import-substitution industries, shrunken public sectors and downwardly mobile middle classes. The global forces ‘pushing’ people from the countryside—mechanization in Java and India, food imports in Mexico, Haiti and Kenya, civil war and drought throughout Africa, and everywhere the consolidation of small into large holdings and the competition of industrial-scale agribusiness—seem to sustain urbanization even when the ‘pull’ of the city is drastically weakened by debt and depression. At the same time, rapid urban growth in the context of structural adjustment, currency devaluation and state retrenchment has been an inevitable recipe for the mass production of slums. Much of the urban world, as a result, is rushing backwards to the age of Dickens.

Full: http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR26001.shtml

Like men and women who created the neorealist films that inspired "The City of God," director Maria João Ganga seeks to humanize the lives of these slum-dwellers, the wretched of the earth. Despite the grimness of the subject matter, the film is enlivened by African music--including a film score by the great Manu Dibango--and a poet's eye for the streets and beaches of Luanda.

Highly recommended.