An investigation into Jean-Bédel Bokassa (1921 – 1996), the dictatorial president and later emperor of Central Africa. Starting point is the research of American journalist Michael Goldsmith, who once almost died in one of Bokassa’s prisons.

At the start of the film Werner Herzog, sitting at a desk, indirectly introduces the viewer to Michael Goldsmith: he has just received a message that his friend went missing some weeks ago in Liberia – where, at the time, a civil war was taking place. The filmmaker reads out a letter from the journalist, the contents of which make it clear that Goldsmith is a brave and level-headed man and an expert on sub-Saharan Africa. Then we see the man looking for traces of his former tormentor Bokassa. Now the starting point is a dream Goldsmith has had, in which bright red crabs overrun Earth like some sort of biblical plague. Herzog re-enacts this dream with the camera: an allegorical nightmarish image of the kind that the filmmaker has repeatedly used in his works. This suggests that Herzog may have had a hand in authoring this dream – just as he once had his heroine Fini Straubinger in the documentary LAND OF SILENCE AND DARKNESS say things that he himself had in fact written.

During the journalist’s investigation the filmmaker also makes it perfectly clear that he doesn’t shy away from staging scenes: he shows Goldsmith in his car, first filming him from the outside, then from the inside; when the man then stops the car, the camera has already arrived before him and shows him getting out. Thus his method becomes clear early on, a method that repeatedly upsets the rules of documentary purism. Later it can be observed that Herzog sometimes works with several cameras, so that, when it gets to the editing stage, he has recordings of the same scene from different perspectives. Thus the montage is frequently reminiscent of the narrative technique employed by Herzog in his feature films.

Goldsmith visits the Chateau Hardricourt to the west of Paris, where Bokassa lived after having been driven out of his Central African “Empire”, before returning to his homeland under circumstances that still remain unexplained in part today. The many pictures covering the castle walls are a reminder of the elaborate pomposity of the former emperor, who saw himself as a kind of successor to Napoleon Bonaparte. “Bokassa once almost killed me”, the journalist explains to Bokassa’s last wife, who still lives there (she was just one of Bokassa’s 20 wives, with whom Bokassa is supposed to have had over 50 children in total!). The US journalist tries in vain to uncover the reasons for Bokassa’s return, which was inexplicable in light of the fact that he had been sentenced to death.

Goldsmith – and Herzog – question lawyers about the lawsuit against Bokassa; the director additionally makes use of insightful archive material of the proceedings against Bokassa, and, in particular, of his imperial coronation (1977): a rather ghastly, pompous event, which cost the poverty-stricken country millions of dollars. We also see a number of famous statesmen, from Sergei Khrushchev to the Pope, fawning over Bokassa. Goldsmith speaks to a number of Bokassa’s children and to David Dacko, who was president of the Central African Republic before and after the dictator. And he visits the former, by now completely devastated presidential residence and relates how Bokassa arrested him and personally mistreated him.

ECHOS FROM A SOMBER EMPIRE is not a seamless chronology of the rise and fall of a tyrant, who first worked his way up the ranks of the French Army, including during the First Indochina War, and then later became President Giscard's favourite vassal. The title of the film is revealing: Herzog and Goldsmith register an echo, a reverberating horror that can only be examined and researched in part.

The unscrupulous, obsessive and usually irrational exercise and misuse of power belong to the central motifs of Herzog’s work. Bokassa is a real-life counterpart to the fictitious tyrants that feature in his films, from Aguirre to Nosferatu and Cobra Verde. The fact that the dark depths of the human soul, which even reach as far as cannibalism here, are not fictitious in this film but based on real events, makes the horror all the more disturbing. For this, Herzog needs neither a recognizable didactic structure nor a judgmental off-screen commentary. It also becomes evident that the madness of the African tyrant Bokassa would not have been conceivable had it not been for the preconditions and examples already created by colonialism. Neither would it have been conceivable without the acceptance of the world’s powerful.

Goldsmith later questions eyewitnesses on Bokassa’s imprisonment in the capital Bangui; they tell him that Bokassa has become a pious man who now saw himself as a kind of apostle and spent most of his time reading the Bible. Then the journalist and filmmaker visit the old zoo of Kolongo; not much is left of it, but the beasts of prey to which the tyrant threw his supposed or real enemies can still be seen. The two stand before a chimpanzee cage; a guard gives the animal a cigarette. The monkey smokes it, half greedily, half mechanically: an infinitely sad, desperately depressing image of the perversion of nature. Goldsmith, appalled, asks the director to turn off the camera. Herzog leaves it running for a little while longer, but promises that this will be the film’s final image.

Production Country

France (FR), Germany (DE)

Production Period

1990

Production Year

1990

color

color

Aspect Ratio

1:1,66

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Documentary

Genre

Biography / Portrait

Topic

Colonialism, Violence, Film History

Available Media

DCP, Blu-ray Disc, DVD

Original Version

German (de), French (fr)

DCP

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Italian (it), Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Turkish (tr), Arabic (ar), Lithuanian (lt)

Note on the Format

DCP ist verschlüsselt

Blu-ray Disc

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Italian (it), Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Turkish (tr), Arabic (ar), Lithuanian (lt)

DVD

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Italian (it), Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Turkish (tr), Arabic (ar), Lithuanian (lt)