It begins with an unusual rendering of Va, pensiero from Verdi’s opera Nabucco. Thought takes flight on golden wings as mopeds rattle past, water flows down a muddy road and the dust swirls. Then the camera pans to the singers and an orchestra scantily protected from the dirt and noise by a makeshift fence made from green plastic slats. The viola player is standing on a ladder, fiddling with some bare cables in an attempt to generate some light. As dusk falls, women pass behind the fence carrying burdens on their heads and creating a theatre of silhouettes. Finally, the head of a child appears above the fence as night descends on the singers and musicians.
Kinshasa Symphony is the title of the film scripted by Claus Wischmann and filmed by Martin Baer. It features one of the most amazing and moving orchestras in the world and entered cinemas in Germany on 23 September. The film was celebrated with enthusiasm during its premiere at the Berlinale festival and has since won international recognition, especially from audiences. And rightly so, you will no doubt say, because a more enchanting documentary film would be hard to find. Although it is mainly a film about the Congolese Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste, Central Africa’s only symphony orchestra, it is most certainly a hymn to the Congo and to Kinshasa as well. It’s a hymn to the infectious ability of Africans to somehow overcome every conceivable difficulty through improvisation and laughter. Wischmann and Baer have managed to capture the craziness of Kinshasa, the trials and tribulations of everyday life, the hardship, the weariness and the poverty, without becoming fatalistic for a single second, and without reverting to the usual clichés about the dark country in the Dark Continent. Kinshasa Symphony is a bright film, full of warmth, humour, poetry and optimism.
The orchestra was founded in 1994 by Armand Diangienda. He was a pilot by profession until he lost his job. In this difficult situation he suddenly found music filling his mind, music he had heard at home in his childhood: Handel’s Messiah. At first the orchestra was nothing more than a motley group of amateurs, and Diangienda decided to name it after his grandfather, Simon Kimbangu, who is regarded as a prophet and a spiritual leader in the Congo. As a result of his preaching and the founding of Kimbanguism, the white colonial authorities put him in prison where he later died. The orchestra members are also Kimbanguists, and it could well be the almost Lutheran simplicity of this movement that laid the foundations for the necessary orchestral discipline. When Diangienda began with his handful of musicians, the Congo was teetering on the edge of an abyss into which it toppled shortly afterwards. Two wars, plundering, deprivation and political kleptomania followed. The musicians carried on rehearsing, carved their own flutes, built cellos and violins. Bicycle brake cables were used to replace broken strings.
Even today conditions are not that much better. Wischmann and Baer’s film depicts a run-down city, with potholed roads and refuse everywhere. In their everyday lives the musicians are pharmacists, mechanics or jobless, but above all they are amateurs. They learned their skills through church music or as self-taught musicians. Some of them get up at four in the morning, and when rehearsals start at five in the evening they are tired, hungry and burnt out. And they’re not exactly star singers and players either. The flute-player is a single mother, and she always brings her son who regularly falls fast asleep on one of the chairs. The tenor often misses the notes; there is never a place to practise in peace, and there are constant electricity failures that plunge everything into darkness.
Despite all this, or maybe because of it, a more moving interpretation of Handel’s beautiful largo Ombra Mai Fù or a more triumphant rendering of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana has rarely been heard. It’s because the people are singing their hearts out purely for pleasure, definitely not for fame or money. They sing and play simply because of the music’s beauty. “When I sing, my heart has wings,” one of the protagonists explains, and the first violinist comments on Carmina Burana: “When we play this piece, it awakens all our souls.” “We often asked why they play European music, of all things,” says Martin Baer, “and they laughed at this typically European question. In their opinion music belongs to everyone. In fact, in the film one of the musicians actually says that Beethoven played African rhythms.” In the space of a year the two Germans filmed twice a month in Kinshasa with relatively little interference from the police or the army. The freedom cry of the old Kimbangu seems to have protected the film team as well. A Bundeswehr soldier first brought news of this orchestra to Germany. He told a television editor about it and she put Wischmann and Baer onto the trail. “Crikey,” they exclaimed, “Congo!” They were not very convinced of the film’s prospects. “So, we just took our time,” says Baer. “We got to know the people, and we talked with the police and the mayor of the various districts.”
The film closes with the orchestra’s first major public performance marking the anniversary of the Congo’s independence. It took place in a stadium filled to bursting with brightly clothed, laughing and wildly cheering people. This final scene is so wonderful, it makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time. The Ode to Joy in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony says “All mankind will become brothers”, and after watching this film you begin to believe again that it could really come true.////
