The Video Club

The local Carrefour has lots of great activities to entertain the average Foute. There’s a bar where the Christians and less dev out Muslims can imbibe a skol or Geluxe, a Guinean beer.  The local boite (danceclub), Espace, has a great dance floor, complete with breathtaking pyrotechnics (flashing Christmas lights).  More importantly, it has a lot of those ceiling fans that look like desk fans, a favorite of Foute’s everywhere.

My most frequented establishment, however, is the video club (shame on you who thought it was the bar).  The video club is the bush equivalent of a multiplex cinema.  For 500 GF (about $0.05), I can watch a Guinean feature film on the 22“ TV.  Plus, if you come in for the last 10 minutes, you can usually catch the end without having to pay.

The building itself is wooden with a corrugated tin roof.  A curtain covers the doorway to help block outside light and noise, although the somewhat gaping hole in the side wall isn’t really a concern.  Gberiere’s video club is pretty luxurious: its crumbling concrete floor is set in a sort of stadium seating. Wooden benches serve as the seat of choice, although the crowd usually spills onto the floor during busy weekend nights.

The screen itself is a Chinese-make TV, smaller than the average American household has in the living room by a longshot.  A leak last rainy season has left the screen with a split discoloration, the bottom tinted a bit purple, the top green.  It is so dusty here that the lens in the DVD player is inevitably dirty, causing the disc to skip a bit.  Other times, a video club patron walking by may accidently unplug one of the AV wires, causing the audience to direct a lot of loud Susu towards the perpetrator.

“Outburst” isn’t really the right word to use, since people are shouting the whole time.  The audio is loud, so one must shout to be heard; or maybe the audio is loud to cover the shouters.  We may never know.  Talking on the phone is not only allowed, but encouraged, so that your friends know you are cool enough to be at the video club when they called.  The younger kids bicker through the film and the even younger kids sleep on their mothers’ backs.  The other day, the lady next to me was nursing an enfant.  After she got up, she was soon replaced by a man holding a live chicken by the feet.  The chicken was remarkably calm, considering it was watching what resembled a homemade action movie (think Michael Cera’s Star Wars video in AD) upside-down.

I’m still undecided whether the films seem plot-less because I don’t speak Susu or because the plot is so hard to follow.  They do all have the following things in common:

-          A minimum of 3 montages

-          Slapstick humor

-          Suspense music reminiscent of Inception

-          At least one protagonist inexplicably wearing a scarf in 100 F weather

-          An unnessary amount of special effects in the opening credits.

It is my firm belief that The Room would do unbelievably well in these video clubs, if not for the lack of plastic spoons in Guinea.

In spite of my inability to follow and understand Guinea films, the video club is a fun place to spend an evening.  I get to hang out with my sister and her friends and try and glean some cultural tidbits from the films.  So far, however, all I know is that a deep ominous noise means someone is hiding in my closet spying on me, or that the man serving me café au lait is actually my long lost brother.  Now, if only there was a snack bar…