The Limits of Vision

On Feb. 12, 1951, when Ghana was still called the Gold Coast and under British colonial rule, the revolutionary leader Kwame Nkrumah was released from prison. The Convention People’s Party, which he’d formed just a few years earlier, had just won a parliamentary election in a landslide, and Nkrumah had secured a seat in the city of Accra. A year later, Nkrumah would be prime minister, and after a few years more, in 1957, he would lead the country to independence as its first president. During this period of transition and widespread African decolonization, Nkrumah hired a cinematographer: Chris Hesse.

Hesse is the main subject of the new documentary “The Eyes of Ghana,” which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 4. For roughly a decade, from 1956 until Nkrumah’s overthrow in 1966, Hesse was the official cinematographer for the president and his government. During that time, he captured endless hours of footage on thousands of feet of film — much of which had seemingly been destroyed after the 1966 coup d’etat in an effort to erase the history and legacy of Nkrumah’s revolutionary leadership. But due to difficulties developing film footage in Ghana, most of the negatives were processed in London, and what’s more, most of it is still stored there, safe, but unseen.

Directed by Ben Proudfoot and executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, “The Eyes of Ghana” tells the story of Kwame Nkrumah through Hesse’s eyes and his almost entirely unrestored films. Now in his 90s, Hesse has undertaken a project to bring those films back into the public record, both for the sake of history and for the legacy of a great leader whose memory was tarnished following the coup against him.

The film also follows as Hesse forms a close bond with young Ghanaian filmmaker Anita Afonu, who sets out to stage a screening of the roughly 15 minutes of restored film from the 1,300 reels still in storage in England, at an old, shuttered movie theater in Accra. While his film is in some ways a standard documentary, Proudfoot distinguishes “The Eyes of Ghana” by leaning into his subject’s work as a cinematographer. The documentary looks gorgeous. Shot with vivid colors and wonderful texture, its directors of photography David Feeney-Mosier and Brandon Somerhalder elevate even the most basic talking head interviews. Unfortunately, the rest of the film fails to match its visual strengths.

A word first on the score, which the former president and first lady shouted out in their video introduction before the premiere. It may be grand and beautiful, but it is also overbearing to the point of distraction and feels trying by the film’s end. The film leans heavily into redundant aggrandizing of both Hesse and Nkrumah, and also the power of cinema. Scene after scene of characters talking in the most glowing terms about their subjects inevitably prompts questions about how grounded and true their stories are, and how objective the film really aims to be. It also feels like the product of a documentary about film footage rather than one based on it, because most of Hesse’s work has not been scanned. Seeing is believing, but here it’s mostly telling, which leaves the viewer uncomfortably reliant on the film’s historical and political analysis, which is slight at best.

As an overview of Nkrumah’s career, his Wikipedia page seems to offer more insight than the platitudes and surface-level accounts supplied by the film. This would be a problem in any case, but is even less forgivable for a film essentially about attempting to rewrite a history distorted by Nkrumah’s opponents. That it also overstates the degree to which Nkrumah has been both forgotten and ill-rendered by history only highlights the problem: This is a documentary essentially about a former propagandist that is doing its own form of propaganda.

Nkrumah was more than just a leader who wanted to free Africa from the grips of colonialism. He was a strong political theorist whose writing is studied to this day, as well as a strong voice in the then-emerging wave of African socialism, which the film name-checks but fails to delve into any deeper. Instead, the film builds up Nkrumah’s more universalist idea for a United States of Africa, which took some inspiration from America, without ever digging into the socialist ideology that undergirded it. What the film presents is a sanitized account of a revolutionary, a controversial figure made palatable for a liberal Western audience in the same way Nelson Mandela’s memory has been largely washed of his association with violent rebellion and forceful, left-wing thought. Even Hesse’s history with Nkrumah is sanitized, at times suggesting he was a close confidant and supporter, while glossing over the fact that the cinematographer continued working for the government that ousted him.

When it comes time to address the coup against Nkrumah — which is widely understood by many to have been either aided or effectively managed by the U.S. — the film finally pays some lip service to the unfortunate realities of his rule. A complicated figure, Nkrumah quickly began making enemies after taking office, in particular due to his anti-tribalism, which eventually led him to jail thousands of political opponents. He also established, through the construction of monuments and other propaganda efforts, something that looked not far from a cult of personality. These failings, which have been debated for decades, helped set the stage for his military overthrow, and though the film does bring up these criticisms, it does so without much detail, and essentially as a sop to those who might question its otherwise saintly account. Hesse practically shrugs while telling the audience that it’s up to us to decide. A documentary more genuinely interested in truth would have attempted to reckon with these contradictions rather than waving it all away as something for the audience to sort through themselves, presumably by doing their own outside research.

The involvement of the Obamas in the film speaks, in a way, to its lack of both depth and teeth. “The Eyes of Ghana” is ultimately a film about politics made with a liberal-style anti-politics. Nkrumah was a great leader who needs to be remembered, but apparently only in the most vague, unchallenging terms. A real look into the mechanics of his industrial nationalization policies, or the unique perspectives of African socialists in contrast with their European Marxist counterparts is absent. Including that would require dealing with the ins and outs of revolutionary left-wing discourse rather than spending valuable running time on feel-good stunts like the restoration of the Rex Theater and a screening celebrating Hesse’s career. It’s the money and resources expended, too — on the quality of the lighting and camera, the bombastic score and bringing the theater back to life — all of which might have been better spent on actually restoring Hesse’s mountains of untouched film reels to gain real historical insight instead of yet another self-congratulatory and ultimately, hollow crowd-pleaser.