Divine Carcasse (1998)

Directed by

Dominique Loreau

Genre

documentary film

Country

Benin

Runtime

1h

Rating

6.0 of 10 from 3 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This film follows the life of a 1955 Peugeot car in Benin. The car passes from a European lecturer to a taxi driver and then to a mechanic before its parts are used in an artist's sculpture of a ram god.

contemplativeobservationalmeasuredreflectiveunhurriedatmosphericquotidianphilosophical

What happens

Divine Carcasse (Divine Body) is a 1998 Beninese ethnofiction film directed by the Belgian filmmaker Dominique Loreau. 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. 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. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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