Malawi Man of Steel: How Movies Mutate As They Travel
In Malawi, different cinematic influences from around the world are remixed locally — creating something entirely new.
The cardboard display outside the informal cinema or ’video hall’ acts as a frontline view into the complex flows of media in a globalised world.
The films on offer span continents: Nollywood, Bollywood, Korean Hallyuwood, 90s and modern day Hollywood. Action movies are a clear favourite — with a wide collection from Bangkok to Hong Kong, from Maharashtrian martial arts to the Muscles from Brussels himself, Jean Claude Van Damme.
When we speak of globalisation and the increased flow of media around the world, it is often a story about less developed countries adapting to ‘global’ trends and tastes. By ‘global’ we often mean ‘Western’. In TV and film, we mostly mean American.
We make exceptions for the likes of Nollywood — clearly a global player and exporter of cinema and influence. However, what little is written about somewhere like Malawi is often prone to the flawed Facebook ‘Free Basics’ Logic: there is so little going on locally that they will be happy with a basic version of what we have.
On the surface, data on the Malawi media scene supports this. There is only one government TV channel, satellite TV only arrived in the last decade, and is out of reach for most. There are fears in the local press about the influence that the flow of American movies are having on Malawian youth — painting a picture of passive media consumers corrupted by foreign influences.
More friction than one-way flow: different global influences crisscrossing and colliding with local culture, to create something entirely new.
However, the selection of films on offer at the video hall suggests a more complex picture (I’m looking at the poster of the 2016 Ugandan-Keralan cross-over film ‘Escape from Uganda’). They suggest more friction than one-way flow: different global influences crisscrossing and colliding with local culture, to create something entirely new.
‘Man of Steel’: dubbing or creative adaptation?
Today’s offering? What appears to be some kind of disaster movie starring Amy Adams. Hollywood’s 2013 Superman flop Man of Steel, I later learn. There is cardboard for sound-proofing, thin wooden benches for seating and a small TV screen stacked high on top of a table at the front of the room.
It’s 30 kwachas a head (about 3p). A young boy, just about old enough to pass the movie’s PG-13 rating, comes around to collect the cash. Even younger boys without the cash (or years) to enter settle for peering through the cracks to steal a glimpse of Amy’s “arresting” performance.
As advertised outside this is the ‘Chichewa collection’ — dubbed into the local language*. The images are grainy and there are best-guess English subtitles — of little use to this audience and likely picked up on the bumpy road between licensed cinema release in another part of the world, to a ‘pirated’ matinee showing at this video hall. It’s survived shaky handheld cameras and patchy web connections along the way.
‘Dubbed’ doesn’t quite capture it — voices blare from the speakers at a volume higher than they can take, creating a fuzzy static effect and rendering the original audio and all sound effects mute. All we hear is two exaggerated male voices: one deep and bass-y, the other high pitched and shrill, narrating the entire movie.
Occasionally, during scenes with no dialogue, we’re jolted back into the original audio for a hot second before we skip back to the voices sparring in Chichewa.
A layer of comedy is added by a genius narrator who weaves humorous one-liners, packed with local references, into the fight scenes. A reminder that viewers are not passively consuming hand-me-down Hollywood movies, they are active remixers.
Across many countries in the region dubbing has grown into an art-form in itself. In Uganda and Rwanda for example, Bruce-Lee action movies are dubbed with a twist. A layer of comedy is added by a genius narrator who weaves humorous one-liners, packed with local references, into the fight scenes. A reminder that viewers are not passively consuming hand-me-down Hollywood movies, they are active remixers.
The translators, local disc jockeys with a tendency to view imported movies as mere source material for their version, are script writers creating new, localised narratives**. Of course, the technical quality of the end product leaves a lot to be desired. But once we accept this, a strange freedom emerges. Anyone with access to a PC or smart(ish) phone can join in.
Like the fleeting brilliance of Vine videos: once we accepted the low production standards as the norm — in the case of Vine, a roughly edited 7-second video loop — a creative community around the practice emerges. Creation and conversation speed up, exciting things happen for us.
As Jace Clayton, international DJ and author, points out in his book Uproot:
“when remixes and edits are hastily executed, its usually a sign that something interesting is bubbling up”.
In this case? That there are multiple Chichewa versions of Man of Steel in circulation. Each with different storylines, different genres, characters and styles — each, it is likely, a hundred times better than the original.
Notes
* Not that local however, here in the north of the country the predominant language is Chitumbuka. With Chichewa also being the main language in neighbouring Zambia, where many of the movies come from, it is the language of choice for local cinema.
**Some of the Chichewa films come from neighbouring Zambia, that also share the language.
