Coltan, short for columbo-tantalite, is an ore containing the metal element tantalum, which due to its resistance to corrosion and high permittivity is used in capacitors essential to the functioning of smartphones, laptops, and other high-tech devices. It is found chiefly in Africa, most abundantly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi, where foreign corporations, and the cronies they install in corrupt local governments, rely on local (often child) labor subsisting on poverty wages and working in incredibly unsafe sites, to carry out a program of unsustainable ecological destruction. Our cutting-edge lifestyle is predicated on exploitative colonial practices and murderous working conditions essentially unchanged since the pre-industrial world; and when the trappings of that lifestyle eventually become obsolete, they return to Africa, in the form of e-waste deposited in immense, toxic landfills. This cycle is an important backdrop, socially and symbolically, for the radical politics and poetics of “Neptune Frost,” an exciting musical that confronts the ideological superstructures behind both this extractive relationship and the way we conceive of concepts like technology and storytelling more generally.
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Shot in Rwanda, the film was written by slam poet and alternative hip-hop artist Saul Williams, and co-directed by Williams and his wife, the film, theater, and video artist Anisia Uzeyman. It’s part of a larger project, conceived by Williams, called “MartyrLoserKing,” which encompasses three albums and a forthcoming graphic novel; Williams had originally intended to develop “Neptune Frost” as a stage musical before being persuaded to change course. (In a very entertaining Q&A following a New York Film Festival screening of “Neptune Frost,” Williams said that the name “MartyrLoserKing” came to him when someone with a thick French accent tried to speak to him about Martin Luther King; he was attracted to the notion of martyrdom as somehow intrinsic to activism, and of “losers” refusing success on the terms of an unjust society.) Williams and Uzeyman shot the film in Rwanda over the course of about a month, with a cast including famous musicians from Rwanda and Burundi, including the rapper Kaya Free and the legendary Rwandan singer Cécile Kayirebwa.
In the film, characters with names like Tekno, Memory, and Psychology, a hacker collective operates in a secluded enclave disrupting the workings of first-world finance and industry. They greet each other with the refrain “Unanimous Goldmine,” and once Neptune (played alternately by a male and female performer) penetrates the invisible forcefield that protects their bubble of alternative possibility, they seem to have access to a collective intelligence and shared dream space, imposing their will on the ether through an almost telekinetic “I-fi.”
With its anarchic Day-Glo cyber design scheme and sense of hack-the-planet mission, and its rigorous comparative analysis of African and Anglo-European technical and industrial philosophy and practice, “Neptune Frost” might feel, to a white American viewer, like a cross between “Hackers” and Harun Farocki’s essay film “In Comparison.” Williams and Uzeyman have also cited the resourceful poetics of African films like the political fable “Hyenas” by Djibril Diop Mambéty—the uncle of Mati Diop, whose recent “Atlantics” was a landmark in a filmmaking tradition marked by the use of practical special effects.
In keeping with that tradition, “Neptune Frost” contains a few beautiful meldings of in-camera and CGI trickery: In one scene, the cast stands stock-still—it’s the cheapest way to achieve a freeze-frame—before the image begins to glitch, and becomes a lysergic eruption of pixels and digital waveforms. “Neptune Frost” bridges the gap between drum circle and rave.
Or is that a gap at all? Recognizing the sophistication of folk technologies is one of the core tenets of Afrofuturism. The work of the film’s young Rwandan costume and production designer, Cedric Mizero, shows how weaving together textiles, for instance, requires mastery of a technique every bit as intricate as threading copper wire through the inside of a hard drive—is, in fact, the same technique, given the prominence of electronic waste among the repurposed materials that make up the film’s clothes and sets. Characters are decked out in vests made of keyboards and jewels made of circuitry; everywhere are motherboards, woven into the fabric of the film as if they were as organic and life-giving as their name implies.
“Neptune Frost” is dramatically inert and quite didactic: between songs the characters largely stand around, slinging slogans at each other and declaring their intentions to perform this or that act of hacktivism, which is then confirmed to have been carried out by subsequent scenes of additional exposition. (The songs can be just as on-the-nose, notably “Fuck Mr. Google.”) But all the theory packed into the dialogue is also, thrillingly, manifest as practice in the film’s aesthetic. And its ideas are as playful as well as passionate—Williams’ gifts as a lyricist, and interest in wordplay, mean that the film is always reconciling and reconfiguring multiple or opposing meanings: genetic code and computer code, the gender binary and binary numbers.
The overarching nature of Williams’ larger transmedia project means it can sometimes be difficult to find one’s grounding in the world of “Neptune Frost.” But rather than a plot-driven film, it’s better experienced as a visual album, with story and milieu reflecting allusively on themes carried primarily by the songs. Told in several spoken and sang languages—Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Swahili, French, and English—“Neptune Frost” is a polyrhythmic experience, aligned to Black film storytelling traditions which decenter presumptions about an “objective,” invariably distanced and ethnographic gaze, in favor of threading together different strands and scraps of experience (that metaphor again!).
“To understand the electronics industry is simple,” the economic historian Louis Hyman has written of the fuzzy boundaries between automation and outsourcing. “Every time someone says ‘robot,’ simply picture a woman of color.” “Neptune Frost” weaves together many dualities—the Global North and South, male and female, ancient and modern—in ultimately invoking the human blood coursing through the world’s circuit board. The film ends with a sequence suggesting that the ghost in the machine of global capitalism is Black bodies. [B+]