Reel Pleasures. Laura Fair
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of film and to the filmgoing experience in general. A surprising number of Tanzanians went to the movies at least once a week, and many self-described fans went two times a week or more. I also sponsored an essay contest by distributing flyers, in English on one side and Kiswahili on the other, outside schools, businesses, and bus stops. Respondents were able to write on one of eight different prompts. My fantasy was that this exercise would inspire young people to talk to their elders about the past, but in neoliberal Tanzania literate youth scoffed at the paltry prize money I offered. Older people, however, responded enthusiastically, providing detailed descriptions of nights at the drive-in, fashions borrowed from films, and the place of moviegoing in their lives.
Places are containers of memory; as Annette Kuhn has beautifully shown, memories have topography.74 Walking down memory lane might be a cliché, Kuhn argues, but getting people to take such steps is incredibly useful to the oral historian, providing a pathway into the past. In her own study of moviegoing in 1930s Britain, Kuhn found that encouraging respondents in their seventies and eighties to speak of walking to the cinema had the effect of transporting them back to their early years. In the process, films became situated in a larger network of physical, social, and emotional experiences. Setting the scene in this way gave events and facts a context, without which there would have been no purpose for recall. In the United States, nursing homes have recently started making extensive use of music from years gone by to revive the memories of patients plagued with dementia. The sound stirs regions of the brain that trigger physical, mental, and emotional ties to more vibrant times in elders’ lives. My own research revealed that memories of the cinema and moviegoing were surprisingly vivid for many Tanzanians, which I suspect is because such memories activate and draw on so many different parts of the brain. Thinking back to significant films triggered visual, aural, sensual, emotional, and physical recollections for many respondents. Thus, memories of the drive-in made more than one person salivate because the drive-in was intimately connected with a favorite food that was consumed only there. Others began to sing or dance while recalling a particular Egyptian or Indian film. And several cried and many laughed in remembering the antics of a partner, sibling, or age-mate with whom they went to see films. Memories of moviegoing were often powerful because they were not just about a film but also about the emotional relationships that were forged—between families, peers, and lovers—in the process of going to the show. Cinema memories went well beyond celluloid. They were infused with sensuality and affect; they were poignant, sentimental, and nostalgic.
Nostalgia loomed large in these recollections of nights at the show. This nostalgia was informed by specific longings and cultural desires, needs that “the future can no longer supply.”75 Nostalgia for nights at the movies combined deep yearnings for a lost time and a distant place, and in these recollections, the personal and the political were often intertwined. For many of those who were interviewed, childhood, adolescence, or the early years of parenthood corresponded with the hopeful years leading up to or immediately following national independence. These were years of triumph for many, as well as faith that the future’s promise would be fulfilled. Nights at the movies were remembered nostalgically in part because they were associated with the fleeting glories and excitement of youth, a time in both individual and national life cycles that could never be retrieved. Like parents who have grown estranged from their adult children, Tanzanians looked back to the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and longed for the confidence and closeness of those early years. Nostalgia for the golden years of moviegoing was also filled with longing for large public outings. For elders who rarely left the house anymore except to attend funerals, this hunger for public sociability and laughter was particularly strong. Critics might argue that interview data cloud my interpretation precisely because facts and feelings are intertwined. But my interest is not just in what happened in the past; I also want to know what it meant to live that past—how experiences produced feelings that gave meaning and pleasure to life.
Over the course of three summers and one academic year of fieldwork, I conducted over a hundred interviews with exhibitors, distributors, employees, black marketers, and men and women who went to the cinema. Interviews were typically an hour in length, but a few extended over several days. Many enthusiastic, knowledgeable, or accommodating interlocutors were pestered too many times to formally cite. With the help of research assistants, I also made an effort to do somewhat random surveys in Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam, Tanga, Bagamoyo, Moshi, Arusha, Morogoro, and Iringa to get a larger sample of attendance patterns and cinematic tastes, including the views of those who never went to the movies at all. The plan was to conduct surveys in Mwanza, Ujiji, and Lindi as well, but life, and death, intervened. Some three hundred surveys and interviews were conducted in these towns to ascertain how the cinematic habits of local moviegoers compared to those of the larger urban population. Sociologists have every right to laugh at my “random samples”: I made no effort to survey every fifth household, but I did consciously query men and women from a range of ages, religious faiths, races, and neighborhoods. In addition, I hired research assistants to target populations different from those I was interviewing myself. My own random samples involved asking people of relevant ages—in the markets, on the streets, on buses, at restaurants, at soda stands, at football matches, at concerts, or in any public venue where I had the opportunity to engage someone in conversation—about their film and moviegoing experiences. This method gave me a way to start a conversation with a stranger while fixing a shoe or waiting for a bus. If a shop was open but had few customers, I took the opportunity to query employees. Taxi drivers too were frequently canvassed. I also stopped in restaurants, bars, and roadside eateries that catered to people of different classes and offered to buy a drink for anyone willing to chat about his or her experiences. In several cases, employees took it upon themselves to spread the word with members of their cohort, arranging hours of conversations for me over the course of several days. If people were avid cinema fans, we made plans for more lengthy formal interviews. But even with folks who never went to the movies, it was important to understand why. Without these random surveys or the help of research assistants, I would have talked only to fans.
Personal photo collections also provided invaluable insights into how films were mediated and made use of in daily lives. Scholars have studied fan magazines to understand how and why certain stars appealed to audiences, and they have explored the tactile efforts men and women made to replicate the glamour, bravado, and drama of the screen in their own lives.76 Tanzania had no fan publications, but the stories I was told by people as we looked through their photo albums resonated in significant ways with what fans elsewhere articulated in print.
Fans do not merely watch movies; they make tangible links between what they see on screen and their own emotional and material realities. Some fans collect pictures and memorabilia related to idolized stars, and Tanzanian youth were as prone to pasting their bedroom walls with images of their favorite heroes and heroines as kids anywhere. Fans also translate what they see into a cultural activity by sharing their feelings and thoughts with like-minded others. In literate cultures with commercial print media, this is often made evident by subscribing to fan magazines or joining fan clubs. In Tanzania, this type of fan engagement was more likely to take place on the streets, in kitchens, or in classrooms than in published form. People displayed their affinity for various stars by adopting hairstyles, hats, clothing, and modes of comportment modeled on a character in a film. Nearly all the self-identified movie fans who shared their photo albums with me had pictures of themselves in dresses, shirts, shoes, or hairstyles worn by film heroes or heroines and incorporated into their own fashion repertoires. Fan clubs as such did not exist, but this in no way precluded the existence of an expressive fan culture.
Much of the written data used in Reel Pleasures was found outside the official archive. The sources range from the uncollected holdings of departments, ministries, offices, and parastatals to private, personal collections of papers and business records. The potential significance of uncollected state records alone is astounding. For instance, in the national archives in Dar es Salaam the sum total of material related to the Tanzania Film Company—the parastatal that effectively took over the film distribution industry in 1968—was contained in just one file with a few pieces of paper. But in the buildings that formerly housed TFC staff, I found not only files but also films made by TFC that many, including the company’s filmmakers, presumed were forever lost. The private archives of TFC employees, as well as theses written by students at the University of