Divine Carcasse

Divine Carcasse (Divine Body) is a 1998 Beninese ethnofiction film directed by the Belgian filmmaker Dominique Loreau.[1]

Divine Carcasse
Directed byDominique Loreau
Produced byDominique Loreau
Release date
1999
Running time
60 minutes
CountryBenin and Belgium
LanguageFrench, Fon and Yoruba with English subtitles

Mixing fiction and ethnography, the film follows a 1955 Peugeot: initially owned by Simon, an expatriate European philosophy lecturer, the car comes to be owned by Joseph, who uses it as a taxi until it is abandoned at a mechanic's workshop. There it is scavenged for parts used by the artist Simonet Biokou to create a sculpture of the ram god Agbo.[2] The car is caught between commodity fetishism and post-colonial fetish spirituality:

Secondhand neocolonialism becomes first-class colonized semideity [...] As a car the Peugeot works fitfully; as a divinity it works superbly.[1]

References

  1. Tom Zaniello (2018). The Cinema of Globalization: A Guide to Films about the New Economic Order. Cornell University Press. p. 68. ISBN 978-1-5017-1134-3.
  2. Susan Gorman, From (French) Automobile to (Beninois) Agbo: Mythology, Modernity and Divine Carcasse, EnterText, Vol. 4, No. 2
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