After watching Crimson, I tried to figure out why it made such an impression on me. Each aspect of film that stayed with me was something I had never encountered in Nollywood. It dawned on my that what I loved about Crimson is that it broke all the Nollywood rules of filmmaking.
Take dialogue for example. The average film viewer can sense that film is a medium that tells story through images. This may seem surprising but dialogue is not where the heart of a good film lies. After all until the 1920s, silent films were the norm. Viewers were quite content to sit through an hour of muted gestures. Filmmaking is about relying images and sound to tell a story, an essential part of which was expressing emotion and inner psychological state. A character does not have to tell us that they are sad. A combination of lighting, set design, the way the scene is shot, and of course the acting conveys the inner states of mind of a character. Dialogue is like the cherry on top. It adds to the cake’s perfection but it is not where the true beauty lies. Of course Nollywood has doggedly refused to come to terms with this very basic idea of how filmmaking works.
Crimson is different. Daniel Effiong knows he has a set of delicate story on his hands. The third episode is loosely based on one of the SSS interrogations that took place shortly before Dele Giwa’s assassination. Effiong could have gone the Nollywood route and made it all dramatic—shouting, beating, crying, bulging eyes, growling and so on. It is to Effiong’s credit, that Inspector Akin, played by the wickedly seductive Seun Ajayi, never once touches Giwa. As Effiong sees it, power asserts itself in different forms. He wanted to explore that kind of power that one man could have over another man’s mind—the power of the interrogator.
An interrogation is a psychological affair. It is a mind game. Akin’s objective is to get Giwa to stop writing bad things about the government. But Akin is not a crude thug. He knows that to bend the will of a man like Giwa takes a peculiar kind of violence. Giwa has the assurance of morality on his side. He thinks that in outing the government, he is not only standing on the side of truth and justice but also saving a beloved country. Akin knows all this. Akin also knows that there is a part of Giwa that is scared shitless. Treason is not a soft crime. Death by hanging is the logical outcome. Besides, every man has his price in the sense that every man has this one possession—a child, a loved one, a lifestyle, etc.— that they will not loose for anything in the world.
Crimson is not story packed full of drama. It is an exploration into the psychology of interrogation. As a viewer, you enjoy the thrill—not without feeling guilty—of watching Akin break Giwa’s resolve. Effiong is saying that a man can do more damage breaking people’s conviction than breaking their bones. A film like this cannot depend solely on dialogue. If the goal is to externalize deep psychological insecurities and manipulation, something more than dialogue is needed. The truth is that the deepest, darkest feelings are the least translatable into words. So what does Effiong do? He returns to the basics of filmmaking and lets images and sound translate the bulk of these emotions.
Akin sits down, he removes his cuff links and rolls up the sleeves of his shirt. The white of his shirt is gleaming and almost blinding against the pitch black of the room. Dele Giwa is wearing an adire buba. The film is shot in black and white so we can’t see the colors in his adire, but the patterned fabric and casual feel of the buba attire contrasts the impersonal and clinical whiteness of Akin’s shirt, making Akin into this abstract figure of power. The interrogation cell is sparsely furnished with two chairs, a table and a crude light fixture hanging over.
Against this eerie exterior, the film of sweat and oil on giwa’s face speaks volume about the fear and dread that lurks inside him. He responds to Akin’s pleasantries—“Hello Dele”—with silence. Who won’t be suspicious of Akin’s feigned courtesy. As Akin gets himself settled in his sit, he reels off matter-of-fact, “I regret any inconveniences. This is just routine, and I don’t expected that we’ll be long.” But we are not really listening because something is happing with the images. We are alternating between Akin rolling up his sleeves and Dele looking lost and confused. In between are these sudden interruptions with black screen. There is a slightly prolonged black screen that comes to an end when Akin says Okay. We are greeted with a shot from above that show both men seated at the table with the light fixture above their heads. It’s the first time since the film began that we are seeing both men together in one shot. Up till now, we’ve has do make do with fragment. A face here, a hand there, interrupted by black screens. This adds to our unease. With faces intermittently flashing before our eyes, we get this unsettling feeling of not being in control, a feeling that is enhanced by the darkness that envelopes the room as though its hiding something from us. When we feel sad for Giwa or creeped out by Akin, we are responding to the music and the cinematic arrangement of shots and frames and angles not necessarily to what they are saying. In other words, the entire twelve minutes could have passed without spoken word and we’ll still be affected the film, we’d still see Giwa’s mounting frustration, his bad attempt at bluffing, we’d still sense Akin’s demonic intensity.
The surprising thing is that a film that begins by telling its story by sound and images hardly ever goes wrong with dialogue. The dialogue sits somewhere between witty and poetic. Short retorts that are packed full with meaning convey much of the intensity both men feel. My favorite moment is when Akin creates an opposition between the poet and the journalist. He tells Dele that instead of writing mean things about the government, he should write poems. As though poems were less political, less risky. Dele spits out a few lines of an imaginary poem he’s titled “Ink Blood and Piss.” And even though Akin burst out in laud guffaws, his laughter is slightly uneasy. And the idea is that poems do not put an end to the writing of the journalist. Both forms of writing are implicated in the service of truth.
Pointing to the folder, Akin says: “Dele, I’ll be straight with you. You see this? It doesn’t look good.” The folder, as Akin remarks later, contains all of Giwa’s “can of worms” — the meetings with foreign nationals in a bid to overthrow the government, Giwa’s secret love child, and so on. Akin is a master interrogator. He plays the little he knows against Giwa’s assumption that Akin knows everything. The manila folder lying on the table between Giwa and Akin is the symbol of Akin’s claim or pretention knowledge. Every interrogator has a God complex often expressed by claims to knowing everything about the victim. In all three episodes in the series, there is always a point at which Akin suggests that he is omniscient and suggests that he is greater than state power he serves.
Akin’s
Most of what the Average Nigerian knows about Dele Giwa’s death, for instance, is more fiction than fact. Crimson plays on this and uses a great deal of creative license to create a set of deeply unsettling footages that evokes all that was weird about military rule.
Crimson is a psychological thriller that keeps you spell bound for an intense 12 minutes. You get to imagine what it may have been like for someone like Dele Giwa or Obasanjo to sit in the interrogation chamber, knowing that he was being charged for treason, a crime that meant death by hanging. You get full access into the dark interrogation cell, sparsely furnished with two chairs, a table and a crude light fixture hanging over. And then the magic begins. You see Inspector Akin at work, the master interrogator, as he uses all kinds of mind play in his bag of tricks to get his victim to confess to a crime they may or may not have committed.
You get to imagine what it may have been like for someone like Obasanjo to sit in the interrogation chamber, knowing that he was being charged for treason, a crime that meant death by hanging. You get a peek into the dark interrogation cell, sparsely furnished with two chairs, a table and a crude light fixture hanging over. And then the magic begins. You see Inspector Akin, played by Seun Ajayi, at work. The master interrogator, Akin has an inexhaustible repertoire of mind games, treats, threats that gets his victims to confess to crimes they may or may not have committed.