Valentin Yves Mudimbe reads amid his many books and objectsalr

Mudimbe’s Order of Things - Part I
(Les choses et les mots de Mudimbe)

Directed by Jean-Pierre Bekolo.
Cameroon, 2015, DCP, color, 116 min.
French and English with English subtitles.
DCP source: Filmmaker

Les choses et les mots de Mudimbe is an interview with Valentin Yves Mudimbe, a philosopher and philologist by training, born in 1941 in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. One of the most important African intellectuals of the 20th century, Mudimbe has contributed to the deconstruction of Western (post)modernism and the decolonization of knowledge, following Michel Foucault's The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) and Edward Saïd's Orientalism (1978). Bekolo provides an insight into the man and his way of life, as well as his commitments, through a 243-minute face-to-face, penetrating interview during which the camera is rarely at rest, also studying Mudimbe’s books, objects and surroundings. The Cameroonian philosopher's reflections focus on the lessons we can learn from philosophers and thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Patrice Lumumba, from Mudimbe s unusual perspective. In his first documentary, Bekolo plunges intensely into the powerful cosmogony of Mudimbe, continuing to question the meaning of the existence of beings and things,  philosopher-to-philosopher.

Part of film series

Read more

Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2024 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Melville et Cie.

Read more

Psychedelic Cinema

Read more

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

Read more

The Shochiku Centennial Collection

Read more

António Campos and the Promise of Cinema Novo

Read more
sepia photo of Artie Freedman in silhouette with a video camera at show

Boston Punk Rewound / Unbound. The Arthur Freedman Collection

Read more

The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957 – 1988

Read more

From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection

Read more
a mausoleum that looks like a miniature Spanish cathedral, next to a variety of others, against an evening sky

The Night Watchman by Natalia Almada