Ways of Life, Body Passions and Anthropic Zones in Cinema. Yaaba, from Ouedraogo. Tribute to Desiderio Blanco

Abstract

In tribute to Desiderio Blanco, a great cinephile and demanding semiologist of cinema, I dedicate this concrete study of one of the films by a Burkinabe filmmaker, Idrissa Ouedraogo. This type of corpus is undoubtedly very far from the two types of Blanco’s corpus, that of the great filmmakers known worldwide in the 1970s, and that of the cinemas of Latin America. But what brings us together, in addition to the semiotic method, is a conception of cinema as an opening onto original cultural worlds: his semiotics of cinema, like mine today, is a wager on this opening.
This study focuses on Yaaba, a film by filmmaker Idrissa Ouedraogo. In this film, representative of the first period of the Burkinabe filmmaker, all practices and bodily interactions are ostensibly of a passionate nature: gestuality in exchanges, affectionate or aggressive contacts, illness, sexuality, displacements, all is passion and ethics at the same time. Actors transgress the rules, follow others who contravene the previous ones, resist, vituperate, stigmatize, threaten, punish and reward. These practices and passions are observed, watched, moralized, challenged or encouraged under the gaze of other actors. The global conjunction of these bodily passions, of the modal properties of the spaces in which they manifest, as well as the enunciative choices of framing and editing configures forms of living and semiotic worlds, in the four territorial and anthropic areas (endotopic, peritopic, paratopic and utopic ones): conflicts, transitions and compromises between these forms of living give substance to the syntagmatic of the film Yaaba by Ouedraogo.