In selecting what to highlight and what to neglect, documentary filmmaking carries a peculiar moral burden of history—probably unmatched by other channels of knowledge production and dissemination. I have always respected thoughtful filmmakers, but after producing the first episode of The Fuji Documentary, my respect for them went over the moon
I LOVE my job for several reasons, including seeing students engage with my work and posing thought-provoking questions. On February 28, during my interaction with students of the University of Wisconsin-Madison who watched “Mr. Fuji: Barry Wonder,” Episode I of The Fuji Documentary, I received several thoughtful questions. Two of them stand out clearly.
I was expecting these questions while working on the documentary, but I wasn’t expecting them to come from 18-year-olds, taking a lower-division course on Africa for the first time. These questions are the typical ones you get from senior academics at a doctoral thesis defense. Or at specialized academic workshops and conferences where people speak vague grammar, drop irrelevant names, and mobilize unnecessary theories—just to sound aimlessly sophisticated, and confuse everyone, including themselves!
The first question was: What did you leave out of this film and why? In clear terms, this question is at the center of how knowledge is produced. The considerations that shape how we select materials to create knowledge. This question brought me back to the realization that what I included in the film would be treated as what “actually happened,” and what I didn’t include either didn’t happen or wasn’t important.
In selecting what to highlight and what to neglect, documentary filmmaking carries a peculiar moral burden of history—probably unmatched by other channels of knowledge production and dissemination. I have always respected thoughtful filmmakers, but after producing the first episode of The Fuji Documentary, my respect for them went over the moon.
The second question was about translation. One of the students noticed that I didn’t translate some of the spoken words and wondered why, and more importantly “what is lost” when a material is translated from one language to another. This is another very sophisticated question that belongs to the highest arena of leading language experts in the world. Or at prestigious international documentary film festivals like the iRepresent, happening in Lagos in two weeks.
Translation is a domain of cultural tension. In making the documentary accessible to a wider audience, I needed to creatively condense several spoken and unspoken Yoruba words into English—without crowding the screen with texts and messing with the aesthetics of the pictures. Brevity and precision are key to achieving this.
In the process, several nuisances are lost because the expressions/stories/texts have their context and history, which translation would never be able to effectively capture. Which statements or words to translate or ignore is a difficult decision that has several linguistic, epistemic, and artistic implications. Again, it’s another moral question of what is important or not.
Yet, translation is not always about what is lost, but also what is gained. Several words assumed new poetic beauty and meaning when translated into English!
In all, the film screening achieved several missions, including introducing the students to Fuji and another great African giant who has not received deserving attention in global African popular culture, music, and history. They now know Fuji. They now know Barry Wonder!
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