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DAVID ACHKAR'S 1991 FILM Allah Tanlou (God's will) contains autobiographical, biographical, and historical (both national and international) layers and first, second, and third-person narratives.1 Documentary material, including photographs, newspapers, newsreels, and home movies, is combined with fictional reenactments as Achkar slips back and forth between personal and historical narrative, telling a piece of the history of a postcolonial West African nation through the story of his father, Marof Achkar, ambassador of newly independent Guinea to the United Nations until his imprisonment in 1968 by President Sekou Toure's government. Achkar's film not only mixes genres, but interrogates its genres and genre itself, exploring the nature of historical narrative, the relationship of autobiography to biography and of both to history. Allah Tantou provides us with a new vantage point from which to examine recent theories of genre within three academic fields-literary history and theory (including the study of autobiography), African and postcolonial studies, and film history and theory (including the study of documentary). I will read the film for two generic aspects that scholars in these domains have deemed theoretically impossible, as an African autobiography and as an autobiographical film, focusing on Achkar's use of different voices and visual evidence of the past in his fragmented revision of history.
I have chosen a single film as the subject of this essay, yet Allah Tantou is representative of a group of 1990s francophone West African films that are innovative personal as well as historical documentaries.2 I do not wish to argue, however, for the presence of a new genre epitomized by this film, but rather hope to create space within autobiography for works of self-presentation from many regions of the world and in different media. European and North American academics have excluded, as we shall see, both African autobiography and autobiographical film from the genre of autobiography. More strikingly, both have also been proscribed by theorists of a revolutionary African cinema, working against Hollywood and European art films in the tradition of 1960s Latin American political "Third Cinema." Alastair Fowler has proposed that we think about genres as not classes but families, whose "individual members are related in various ways, without necessarily having any single feature shared in common by all."3 Ralph Cohen has shared this view, going...