“I’ll Sing for you”, a film by French film maker Jacques Sarasin, is about the life and music of the Malian bluesman Boubacar Traoré, known to his fellow countrymen as “Kar Kar”. It is based on the story of Kar Kar’s life contained in the book “Mali Blues” by Lieve Joris, but is a different and exceptional odyssey through the geography both of a country and of the human soul.
Jacques Sarasin, a tall, dishevelled Frenchman, zooms around Paris on a scooter. I meet him at the pavement cafe near where he lives in the East of the city. We sit in the sunshine drinking coffee and discussing how he came to make one of the most original films ever made about African music.
“I’m crazy of course,” he says. “I did what you should never do and made a film about someone who was almost unknown. Malian Blues music was out of fashion at the time. There was no reason to make the film. That was why, in the end, I made exactly the film that I wanted to make”.
“It was slow work. We were in Mali for 10 days before we even got the camera out. We just took a lot of time, had lunch, walked in the streets, talked about things. Even when we started filming we just shot Kar Kar eating breakfast, walking around, whatever. He had never been filmed alone before and we wanted to get him used to the camera. There was a lot of sitting around and waiting for something to happen. Even after we got started it was slow work. We got an average of just 30 minutes footage every day, just 16 hours in one and a half months”.
Maybe it was this patience that contributed to the calm flow of the final film. Sarasin and his team have the ability just to watch with the camera, to show you what is happening, to capture the slow burning effects of a beautiful scene, of an interesting face, of an achingly beautiful song.
“Some people ask me why Kar Kar never speaks in the film,” Jacques says. “It was not that he didn’t talk. It was just that the most important things that he said are in his songs – his political views, his relationship with his wife and his children, his feelings about Islam and expatriation”.
Old film footage reveals the high hopes of the socialist revolution that followed Malian independence in 1960. In those days Boubacar Traoré was playing rock music and singing songs about building the nation. The camera lingers for a moment on a photograph of the young Traoré in a leather jacket and an Elvis pose. Sarasin makes this not so distant past seem as though it might have been a thousand years ago, so completely has the world changed. Then we were young and idealistic the film seems to say, and now? Now we manage as best we can.
Through the camera lenses and the microphone we experience the real Mali, a place of beauty, hardship and anguish. The images and the Malian blues together create an almost overpowering sense of loss and sorrow. And what songs they are. Songs that make the hairs prickle on the back of your neck.
It is difficult to describe a film of such enduring magic. In one scene Boubacar Traoré and Ali Farka Touré walk together across some open ground in Niafunké, Farka Touré’s home village, playing their guitars as they walk, the haunting, revolving rhythms of desert blues. In another, as Kar Kar sings, beautiful African girls look on, their stillness and colourful clothes creating images like “still life” oil paintings. There is also a sense of timelessness. The film is thoughtful and slow and yet it seems to be over in no time at all, leaving you wanting to rewind the tape and watch it all over again. On the big screen the full splendour of the Malian landscape becomes evident as a train rumbles through open country and slowly rolls to a halt amidst a crowd of onlookers on an open siding.
Life has been hard for the unknown Malian bluesman. Kar Kar has suffered a lot. He could not make money from music and he had to feed his family. So he did odd jobs, sold cheap clothes from a market stall, shifted as best as he could. But it was the death of his beloved wife Pierrette that finally drove him to emigrate to France and disappear into the anonymous ranks of expatriate workers. Most of his fellow countrymen for a long time believed that he must also have died.
Pierrette Traoré was strikingly beautiful, the daughter of a Mauritanian woman and a French soldier. She died, tragically and unexpectedly, in childbirth. Kar Kar has struggled to make sense of her death and his grief still shows. In perhaps the most moving moment in the film he visits her grave amongst broken rocks and shattered trees and sings a lament to her amongst the whispering undergrowth. In the end the film is a heartbreaking love story, one that can have no happy ending. There is just the slow plucking song of the bluesman’s guitar as the ferry glides down the wide brown waters of the Niger river, whilst the distant shore goes by.
The finished film is such a delight that it comes as a surprise to learn that the project was beset by problems:
“Mali was not quiet place to work,” says Jacques, “and not an easy country to penetrate. There are belief systems and ideas there that are completely different from those in the West”.
Boubacar Traoré was not always very easy to work with either.
“There were many things that Kar Kar would not talk about. He would say “No” and never explain why”.
After several weeks of filming Kar Kar suddenly announced, “the film is finished” and refused to allow any more filming. It took six months to persuade him back in front of the camera. Almost at the point of abandoning the film, Jacques travelled to Switzerland to plead with Kar Kar to let him finish the film. Kar Kar still refused. Eventually, the French Cultural Institute in Bamako interceded on Sarasin’s behalf. He has never found out what they said to Kar Kar but suddenly the project, apparently dead, was back on again. It took another month in Mali to complete filming, followed by 2 months of editing back in France before the film was ready.
So Jacques is perhaps happy to be moving on to other projects at last. But he is justly proud of the film that he has made:
"The best compliment I received was from an African film director. He said to me “the only thing wrong with your film Jacques is that you made it. It should have been made by an African”. I was very pleased by that".
The arrival of this wonderful world music film should be the cause of great celebration.
Graham Henderson