Divine Carcasse (Divine Body) is a 1998 Beninese ethnofiction film directed by the Belgian filmmaker Dominique Loreau.[1]

Divine Carcasse
Directed byDominique Loreau
Produced byDominique Loreau
Release date
  • 1998 (1998)
Running time
60 minutes
CountriesBenin
Belgium
LanguagesFrench
Fon
Yoruba with
English subtitles

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.[2] 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.[1]

References

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  1. ^ a b Tom Zaniello (2018). The Cinema of Globalization: A Guide to Films about the New Economic Order. Cornell University Press. p. 68. ISBN 978-1-5017-1134-3.
  2. ^ Susan Gorman, From (French) Automobile to (Beninois) Agbo: Mythology, Modernity and Divine Carcasse, EnterText, Vol. 4, No. 2
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