“All Truth is Crooked, Time istelf is a Circle”.

A room full of anxious unsure black men sit in a dark room with almost no identifiable tokens of place or time or identity even, save for their clothing which could still pass for a number of time periods. One by one they will renounce their own languages, and with them their very identity, - I immediately recall the words of Franz Fanon “A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language”. After all of these black faces (and one seemingly white face, who is later revealed to be mixed race) another white man appears, he is shot profile, and he has on the garb of the church, he is the first identifier of the possibility of space (the church). His first words; “To live with Christ is to love God and man”. I ask myself what kind of love would ask of people to shed themselves of the things that make them who they are? The irony is intentional. Hondo like Fanon is acutely aware of what is being asked and what the consequences of the asks are. Hondo is also aware that to stamp a date, to make clear the space, place, time, is to create a distance and he is not interested in distance, nor time, to be clear he is not very much interested in the presentation of “factual”.

The film is a series of juxtapositions made stronger and more agitating by their inability to reach any compromise with truth, with morality, with time. As the film is semi autobiographical this too is intentional as it connects the personal to the political. The personal being Hondo's experiences in a number of professions, and his experience with the country who overseered under the rouge of a sort of national adoption. The attitude, the documentation of colonization and imperialism and it's consequences, the agitation present in “Soleil O” reminded me of Costa-Gavras's “Z” (1969) and Ousmane Sembene’s “Ceddo” (1977). The period within these films take place, the lack of compromise in plot, craft, and commentary, the usage of technique and style to frustrate, stir, and indict audience and empire alike are all pervasively present, but maybe more than anything is the way in which these films play with time.

In Sembéne’s “Ceddo” a date is never said or mentioned, we have only a vague idea what period this takes place in, based off of costume and technology, but not much else. This is again intentional, as the lack of date implies the flux, or continuum of the behaviors and strategies on display. In Sembéne’s own words; “I can’t give a date. These events occurred in the 18th and 19th century and are still occurring”. In the epilogue of Gavras’s “Z” a reporter gives the news chronicling the events that happened beyond the reach of the film, when suddenly he too disappears as we find out he too was murdered from the voice of a woman. The time of his death is not acknowledged, the time that lives in between his absence is not acknowledged, because again time is not relevant to the actors nor the actions. In Hondo’s “Soleil O” we see a similar tactic to Sembéne's where a time is implied but never stated and in his film we jump forward and back through time with no announcement or confirmation. One could be the other, the other the one. Uniforms change, clothing changes, but as with “Ceddo” ( which means the outsiders) the behaviors and strategies remain the same. “All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle”. The Nietzsche quote is not an argument as much as an invite to agitation and question. Time is meant to signal a great deal of things but in the historical context it is many times used to signal the beginning and ending of things. In that way time (a construct itself ) is a useful tool in the construction of propaganda and of a false sense of historicity that assumes that events of the past lived and died there, and the purveyors of it depend on that assumption. The radical nature of these films lie not only in the purity of the fire of their anger, or the straight forward force of their dedication to a deconstruction of truth, but in their resistance to the framework of time that allows the audience the peace of mind that comes with knowing this is not the here, the now, nor the present. Extending out beyond even the now of our own events (see Gaza, Congo, Tigray, Sudan, Haiti) to imply the future in the space of time between when these films were made, when the events occured and now, which then leaves the audience with no safe place to go save to action.