ABSTRACT
the pre-title sequence of ferid Boughedir’s documentary on twenty years of African cinema, Caméra d’Afrique (France, 1983) serves as the preamble to my analysis of the pre-title sequence of Hugh Hudson’s Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan (USA, 1984). I am interested in this film particularly because it dared to recycle in the 1980s “The Legend of Tarzan,” arguably an irredeemably racist trope from the era of high imperialism derived from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s eugenicist novel Tarzan of the Apes (1912) which had inspired a whole series of egregiously racist films during the 1930s, most famously starring Johny Weissmuller in the 1950s. Not to frame this film by the politics of representation in African cinema would be to compound the way the film Greystoke displaces the overt racism of its heavily colonial reference texts by effecting an almost more disturbing erasure of Africans. What I shall want to suggest is that the film is a critical project insofar as it distances us from the “old order” variously embodied in a number of key male characters. The distancing takes place through separating the Tarzan figure off from the colonial social Darwinist world of its origins, representing him not as its ultimate expression but as a divided and contradicted figure seeking to find his own integrity as a man in the aftermath of its decline. This Tarzan is closer to the topic of other films which took on the theme of children found in the wild, or brought up separated from human society, such as VEnfant Sauvage (Truffaut, France, 1969) and The Enigma of Kasper Hauser (Herzog, Germany, 1974). But the imaginary field of that extremely contemporary struggle for understanding humanity through its origins, heredity and environment is the appropriated spaces of a mythical Africa which is even less inhabited and less historical than that over which Johnny Weissmuller’s inarticulate muscle-bound Tarzan lorded it. The very gesture that updates “Tarzan” as a hero for our times nonetheless exposes a specifically post-colonial racism that can only be truly grasped when confronted with the speaking discourse of Africans on the politics of cinema itself. Contrary to authorial intentions claimed on its behalf, the film Greystoke realizes a specific relation between a representation of a masculine quest and the colonial imaginary which is as structural in the 1980s as in the early 1900s. It is this which qualifies the question of “man’s search for identity” (Hugh Hudson speaking of his film) as a matter of a whiteness that is all the more telling for never imagining that it needed to be addressed.
