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- Serie: CNCZ - The Wiley-Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas
- Sprache: Englisch
An authoritative guide to African cinema with contributions from a team of experts on the topic
A Companion to African Cinema offers an overview of critical approaches to African cinema. With contributions from an international panel of experts, the Companion approaches the topic through the lens of cultural studies, contemporary transformations in the world order, the rise of globalization, film production, distribution, and exhibition. This volume represents a new approach to African cinema criticism that once stressed the sociological and sociopolitical aspects of a film.
The text explores a wide range of broad topics including: cinematic economics, video movies, life in cinematic urban Africa, reframing human rights, as well as more targeted topics such as the linguistic domestication of Indian films in the Hausa language and the importance of female African filmmakers and their successes in overcoming limitations caused by gender inequality. The book also highlights a comparative perspective of African videoscapes of Southern Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Côte d’Ivoire and explores the rise of Nairobi-based Female Filmmakers. This important resource:
- Puts the focus on critical analyses that take into account manifestations of the political changes brought by neocolonialism and the waning of the cold war
- Explores
- Examines the urgent questions raised by commercial video about globalization
- Addresses issues such as funding, the acquisition of adequate production technologies and apparatuses, and the development of adequately trained actors
Written for film students and scholars, A Companion to African Cinema offers a look at new critical approaches to African cinema.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Introduction
African Filmmaking and Criticism
Distribution and Exhibition
New Critical Approaches
References
Filmography
Part I: Time/Crisis/Uncertainty
1 Cinematic Economies of the Hypercontemporary in Haroun and Sissako
Economic Precarity and Everyday Urgency
Warscapes and the Hypercontemporary
References
Filmography
2 Approaching the Uncertain Turn in African Video‐Movies
Considering Contingency: A Processual Account
Multiplicity, Discontinuity, and the Fissures of Non‐cinema
Money‐time and Virtual Subalternity
Conclusion
Acknowledgment
References
Filmography
3 Life in Cinematic Urban Africa
References
Filmography
Part II: Trauma/Violence/Precarity in an Age of Global Neoliberalism
4 At the Intersection of Trauma, Precarity, and African Cinema
References
Filmography
5 Reframing Human Rights
Individualism, Bearing Witness, Development, and Human Rights
Human Rights,
Hotel Rwanda
, and
A Screaming Man
Conclusion
References
Filmography
6 “The Invisible Government of the Powerful”
Introduction
Invisible Governance: The Return of the Stranger
Producing Romantic Love
Conclusion: The Stories We Choose to Tell
References
Filmography
Part III: Sound/Form/Dub
7 Transcultural Language Intimacies
The Trajectories of Hausa Film Development
Interorality and Audiovisual Translation
Conclusion
References
Filmography
8 The (Aural) Life of Neo‐colonial Space
Sound on Earth
Sound, Space, and City Limits
Waiting for Sound
The Sounds of
Bamako
Killing the Music
Conclusion
References
Filmography
9 “Outcast Orders” and the Imagining of a Queer African Cinema
An Afro‐Jazz Musical
Black Fugitivity and The Cut
Circles and Borders
Eccentricity and the Law of Genre
“Tomorrow is Another Day”
References
Filmography
Part IV: Platforms/Informality/Archives
10 Streaming Quality, Streaming Cinema
Cinema and Streaming
Cinema on Iroko
Premium Services, Quality Content
Slow Cinema
Conclusion
References
Filmography
Serials
11 Between the Informal Sector and Transnational Capitalism
Countability and Visibility
Nollywood’s Informality
Government Interventions
Corporate Interventions
References
Filmography
12 Nollywood Chronicles
Contemplating Nollywood’s Contours
Disappearing Inscriptions: Nollywood on the Internet
Corporatized Reductions: Nollywood as “Content”
Promoting Nollywood’s Archivization
References
Filmography
Part V: National Industries/Media Cities/Transnational Flows
13 African Videoscapes
Introduction
Comparing Video Film Industries in Sub‐Saharan Africa
The Difference Video Makes
African Videoscapes
Continuities, Discontinuities, and Convergences
Conclusion
References
Filmography
14 Nairobi‐based Female Filmmakers
Foundations:
Saikati
Transformations in the New Millennium
Re‐emergence of “Festival” Films
Conclusion
References
Filmography
Part VI: Genre/Poetics/Gender
15 Darker Vision
References
Filmography
16 From Ethnography to Essay
References
Filmography
17 New Algerian Cinema
The Masculine Stories of the Mujahidin: The FLN’s Master Narrative on Screen
Post‐civil War: Victims Who Survive and Persevere
References
Filmography
18 “Qu’elle aille explorer le possible!”
References
Filmography
Part VII: Movement/Fluidity and Aesthetics/Migration
19 Relational Histories in African Cinema
From Here to There (or There to Here)
Twenty‐first‐Century Ambiguous Adventures:
L’Afrance
The Frame is Not Enough:
Rengaine
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
References
Further Reading
Filmography
20 Crossing Lines
References
Filmography
Part VIII: The End of Film Criticism?
21 Towards Alternative Histories and Herstories of African Filmmaking
Introduction
Rethinking the Origins of African Film Scholarship: A Glance at the Work of Paulin Soumanou Vieyra
Old and New Intellectual Trajectories for African Film Studies: From Bricolage to the “Curatorial Turn”
Film Criticism, Film Curation and Contemporary Scholarship: Contextualizing and Critiquing the “Curatorial Turn” in (African) Film Studies
References
Filmography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 07
Table 7.1 Hausa video‐film and Hindi film inspirations/appropriations
Table 7.2 Radio Freedom Facebook responses to India‐Hausa translations
List of Illustrations
Chapter 01
Figure 1.1 A player lines up to take an imaginary penalty kick.
Chapter 02
Figure 2.1 In
Beyoncé: The President’s Daughter
, numerous scenes conjure opulent spaces of consumerist fantasy, none more so than the titular character’s presidential mansion.
Figure 2.2 In starkly furnished public institutions the powerful confront the powerless, and the visible characters confront the virtual subaltern.
Chapter 03
Figure 3.1
Nairobi Half Life
(33:41).
Figure 3.2
Viva Riva!
(1:17:17).
Chapter 04
Figure 4.1 The entanglement of injurability, agility, and aggression.
Figure 4.2 Grigris plays with fire.
Figure 4.3 Moussa’s hired man.
Figure 4.4 The rooftop dance.
Chapter 05
Figure 5.1 Adam and Abdel in competition in the hotel swimming pool.
Figure 5.2 Abdel takes a selfie.
Figure 5.3 Madame Wang determines Adam’s fate.
Figure 5.4 Adam observes the civil conflict on television.
Figure 5.5 Adam passes UN troops on the road.
Chapter 07
Figure 7.1
Namma Ooru Poovatha
as Hausa “B. Manic.”
Figure 7.2
Joseph the Prophet
DVDs in Kano markets – original and dubbed both pirated.
Figure 7.3
Dabangg
(“Fearless”), original and Hausa version covers.
Chapter 09
Figure 9.1 Karmen in the prison courtyard just before her dance for the warden.
Karmen Geï
(2001), California Newsreel.
Figure 9.2 Karmen performs at the wedding of Lamine and Majiguene.
Karmen Geï
(2001), California Newsreel.
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1 An animated interview in
Yellow Fever
(Ng’endo Mukii, 2012).
Chapter 16
Figure 16.1
L’aide des colonies à la France
, Henri Desfontaines, 1918, Section cinématographique des armées.
Figure 16.2
Fad’jal
, Safi Faye, 1979.
Figure 16.3
Bye Bye Africa
, Mahamat Saleh Haroun, 1998, Pili Pili Films.
Guide
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Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas
The Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas showcase the rich film heritages of various countries across the globe. Each volume sets the agenda for what is now known as world cinema whilst challenging Hollywood’s lock on the popular and scholarly imagination. Whether exploring Spanish, German or Chinese film, or the broader traditions of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, Latin America, and Africa, the 20–25 newly commissioned essays comprising each volume include coverage of the dominant themes of canonical, controversial, and contemporary films; stars, directors, and writers; key influences; reception; and historiography and scholarship. Written in a sophisticated and authoritative style by leading experts they will appeal to an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers.
Published:
A Companion to African Cinema, edited by Kenneth W. Harrow and Carmela Garritano
A Companion to Italian Cinema, edited by Frank Burke
A Companion to Latin American Cinema, edited by Maria M. Delgado, Stephen M. Hart, and Randal Johnson
A Companion to Russian Cinema, edited by Birgit Beumers
A Companion to Nordic Cinema, edited by Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist
A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, edited by Esther M. K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti, and Esther C.M. Yau
A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, edited by Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, and Hilary Radner
A Companion to Spanish Cinema, edited by Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlović
A Companion to Chinese Cinema, edited by Yingjin Zhang
A Companion to East European Cinemas, edited by Anikó Imre
A Companion to German Cinema, edited by Terri Ginsberg & Andrea Mensch
Forthcoming:
A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, edited by John Hill
A Companion to Korean Cinema, edited by Jihoon Kim and Seung‐hoon Jeong
A Companion to Indian Cinema, edited by Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar
A Companion to Australian Cinema, edited by Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye
A Companion to Japanese Cinema, edited by David Desser
A Companion toAfrican Cinema
Edited by
Kenneth W. HarrowCarmela Garritano
This edition first published 2019© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Harrow, Kenneth W., editor. | Garritano, Carmela, 1968– editor.Title: A companion to African cinema / edited by Kenneth W. Harrow, Carmela Garritano.Description: Hoboken, NJ: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2019. | Series: Wiley Blackwell companions to national cinemas | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018023725 (print) | LCCN 2018024153 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119100058 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119099857 (ePub) | ISBN 9781119100317 (hardcover)Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures–Africa–History and criticism.Classification: LCC PN1993.5.A35 (ebook) | LCC PN1993.5.A35 C655 2018 (print)| DDC 791.43096–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023725
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Dedicated to our children and grandchildren
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Notes on Contributors
Abdalla Uba Adamu is Professor of Media and Cultural Communication, Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria. He is currently the Vice‐Chancellor, National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). His research focus is on interfaces between African Islamicate cultures and contemporary popular culture. His recent publications include “Controversies and Restrictions of Visual Representation of Prophets in Northern Nigerian Popular Culture” (Journal of African Media Studies, 9(1): 17–31).
Moradewun Adejunmobi is Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of two books: J.J. Rabearivelo, Literature and Lingua Franca in Colonial Madagascar, and Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non‐Native Languages in West Africa. Her research on Nigerian film, media, and performance has appeared in Popular Communication, Cultural Critique, Black Camera and Cinema Journal among others.
Akin Adesokan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, and of Cinema and Media Studies at the Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include Roots in the Sky, a novel; Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics, a critical study; and Celebrating D.O. Fagunwa: Aspects of African and World Literary History, a co‐edited volume on the work of Daniel Fagunwa, the pioneer Yoruba novelist. His writings have also appeared in AGNI, Screen, Glänta, Social Dynamics, African Affairs, Black Camera, Research in African Literatures, Frame, and Textual Practice, as well as in numerous edited volumes. He is a Contributing Editor of The Chimurenga Chronic, the Cape Town‐based journal of politics and ideas.
Karen Bouwer is Professor of French in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of San Francisco. Her ongoing research interests include Francophone African literature, African cinema, gender and, more recently, literary and cinematic representations of urban spaces. Her abiding interest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo culminated in the publication of her book Gender and Decolonization in the Congo: The Legacy of Patrice Lumumba (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Jacques de Villiers is a doctoral student at the Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa, where he is busy writing a dissertation on temporality in African cinemas and teaches part‐time. He is also an award‐winning documentary and fiction film editor, whose work has played at major festivals around the world, including Sundance, Berlin, and Rotterdam.
Vlad Dima is Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published numerous articles, mainly on French and Francophone cinemas, but also on Francophone literature, comics, American cinema, and television. He is the author of Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety's Films (2017, Indiana University Press). He is currently working on a second project titled, The Beautiful Skin: Clothing, Football and Fantasy in West African Cinema, 1964–2014.
Lindiwe Dovey is Reader in Screen Arts and Industries and the Chair of the Centre for Media and Film Studies at SOAS University of London. She co‐founded Film Africa and the Cambridge African Film Festival, festivals which she has also directed, and she works as a film curator and filmmaker. She has published widely on screen media, and her most recent book is Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals (2015), which Cameron Bailey (Artistic Director of the Toronto International Film Festival) has called “an essential read.”
Rachel Gabara teaches Francophone African and European literature and film at the University of Georgia. She is the author of From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person (Stanford, 2006), and her essays on African film in a global context appear in Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (Wayne State, 2007), Global Art Cinema (Oxford, 2010), and The Global Auteur: Politics and Philosophy in 21st Century Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2016). She is currently at work on a book‐length project on documentary film in West and Central Africa.
Carmela Garritano is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Film Studies at Texas A&M University. She is author of African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History (Ohio University Press), a 2013 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and winner of the African Literature Association Best First Book award. Her research has been supported by Fulbright IIE and the West African Research Association, and her writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in African Studies Review, Black Camera, Cinema Journal, Critical Arts, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and Research in African Literatures.
Suzanne Gauch is the author of Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements (2016) and Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam (2007), as well as numerous articles on African film and literature. She teaches gender, film, and postcolonial studies in the Department of English at Temple University.
Lindsey Green‐Simms is Assistant Professor of Literature at American University, Washington, DC. Her book Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa is published by University of Minnesota Press (2017). She has also published articles in Research in African Literature, Camera Obscura, Transition, and the Journal of African Cinemas. She is currently drafting a manuscript on queer African cinema.
Kenneth W. Harrow is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Michigan State University with specializations in African literature and cinema. He has taught in the Université de Yaounde and l’Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar. He is the author of Thresholds of Change in African Literature (Heinemann, 1994), Less Than One and Double: A Feminist Reading of African Women’s Writing (Heinemann, 2002; trans. as Moins d’un et double, L’Harmattan, 2007), Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism (Indiana University Press, 2007), and Trash! A Study of African Cinema Viewed from Below (Indiana University Press, 2013). He has edited numerous collections on such topics as Islam and African literature, African cinema, and women in African cinema.
Jonathan Haynes is Professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn. A former Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Senior Scholar, he wrote Cinema and Social Change in West Africa (1995) with Onookome Okome and edited Nigerian Video Films (1997, 2000) and a special issue of Journal of African Cinemas (2012). His new book is Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres from University of Chicago Press (2016).
MaryEllen Higgins is Associate Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University, Greater Allegheny. Her books include The Western in the Global South (Routledge, 2015, co‐edited with Rita Kerestezi and Dayna Oscherwitz) and Hollywood’s Africa After 1994 (Ohio University Press, 2012). She has published articles in Research in African Literatures, African Studies Review, African Literature Today, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, among other scholarly venues. She is the associate producer of two films: Jean‐Pierre Bekolo’s Naked Reality (2016) and Bekolo’s Les Choses et les mots de Mudimbe (2015).
Justin Izzo is Assistant Professor of French Studies at Brown University. His research deals with literature, film, anthropology, and philosophy from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean. He is the author of Experiments with Empire: Anthropology and Fiction in the French Atlantic, forthcoming with Duke University Press. Current and forthcoming publications include articles in Research in African Literatures, Small Axe, African Studies Review, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies.
Alessandro Jedlowski is a Belgian Scientific Research Fund (F.R.S.‐FNRS) post‐doctoral fellow in anthropology at the University of Liège (Belgium) and a lecturer in African Studies at the University of Turin (Italy). His main research interests include African cinema and media, urban cultures, media and migration, and South‐South media exchanges. He is the author of numerous publications, including essays in academic journals such as Television and New Media, African Affairs,Journal of African Cultural Studies, and Journal of African Cinemas, and the co‐editor of the books Cine‐Ethiopia: The History and Politics of Film in the Horn of Africa (Michigan State University Press, 2018) and Mobility between Africa, Asia and Latin America: Economic Networks and Cultural Interactions (Zed Books, 2017).
Valérie K. Orlando is Professor of French and Francophone Literatures in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of six books, the most recent of which are The Algerian New Novel: The Poetics of a Modern Nation, 1950–1979 (University of Virginia Press, 2017) and New African Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2017). She has written numerous articles and chapters in books on Francophone writing from the Caribbean, North and West Africa, the African diaspora, African Cinema, and French literature and culture.
Dayna Oscherwitz is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Chair of the Department of World Languages at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. She is author of Past Forward: French Cinema and the Postcolonial Heritage (SIU Press, 2010) and co‐editor, with MaryEllen Higgins and Rita Keresztesi of The Western in the Global South (Routledge, 2015) and has published widely on French and francophone African cinema.
P. Julie Papaioannou is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Rochester, in Rochester, NY. Her teaching and research interests include French and Francophone literature and film, literary and postcolonial theory, feminist and film theories.
Sheila Petty is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Regina, Canada. She has written extensively on issues of cultural representation, identity, and nation in African and African diasporic screen media. She is author of Contact Zones: Memory, Origin and Discourses in Black Diasporic Cinema (2008). She is co‐editor of the Directory of World Cinema: Africa (2015). Her current research focuses on transvergent African cinemas, new Maghrebi cinemas, and interpretive strategies for analyzing digital creative cultural practices.
Robin Steedman is an AHRC Creative Economy Engagement Fellow at the University of Sheffield where she studies data, diversity, and inequality in the creative industries. She recently completed her doctorate in African Languages and Cultures at SOAS University of London. Her doctoral research explores how and why Nairobi‐based female filmmakers can be considered to constitute a film movement and is the first major work on these filmmakers and their unique female‐led industry. She is also currently working on a project examining African documentary film production funds.
Melissa Thackway lectures in African Cinema at Sciences‐Po and at the Institut des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), in Paris. She is also a researcher, freelance documentary filmmaker, and translator. Author of Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Representations in Sub‐Saharan Francophone African Film (James Currey/Indiana University Press/David Philips, 2003), she has published numerous articles and speaks regularly on the subject in international conferences and seminars.
Noah Tsika is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. His books include Nollywood Stars: Media and Migration in West Africa and the Diaspora and Pink 2.0: Encoding Queer Cinema on the Internet, and he is the editor of a special issue of Black Camera on the marginalization of African media studies.
Introduction: Critical Approaches to Africa’s Cinema, From the Age of Liberation and Struggle to the Global, Popular, and Curatorial
Kenneth W. Harrow and Carmela Garritano
African Filmmaking and Criticism
What would an ideal approach to African cinema look like today? For us, the question lies less in approximating an answer, but in providing a focus on critical approaches that do more than reflect current trends, that impose a demand.
In the past, critical emphases fell on opposing approaches. One emphasized the sociological or sociopolitical, often using ethnology to critique, explain, or even to judge the contours of African cultural production, across the board. The underlying question was how faithful is this film, or novel, to the cultural and social reality. Linked to this way of reading, the writings of many of the first theorists and critics of African film elucidated or amplified the anti‐colonial or cultural nationalist intent of the African filmmaker. The critic sometimes operated as a cultural translator or historian, providing the information that an “outsider” audience might require to understand or accept the film’s truth. Politically, the 1960s and 1970s insured that the focus was grounded in Marxist revolutionary analysis. The names of filmmakers who drove this platform consistently marked the era: they included Sembène Ousmane, Med Hondo, Haile Gerima, and Sarah Maldoror. Their inspiring work and deep engagement were measures of revolutionary, Fanonian consciousness. Unfortunately, this approach, which was dominant for perhaps two decades after independence, ultimately led to dead‐ends as what we now call postcolonialism could only be post‐revolutionary. In other words, Third Cinema, like the term Third World, had its moment when it first stirred its audience to action, a moment that started to pass in the 1980s, to be supplanted by the postcolonial.
In contrast, ideological analysis developed in harmony with the growing importance of cultural studies. In cultural studies work, analyses examined the construction of the class‐bound and racial subject, eventually, with the work of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, giving us the postcolonial subject and postcolonial subjectivity, which lie at the heart of African cultural studies and especially film studies. Cultural studies enabled us to take into account manifestations of the political changes brought by neocolonialism and the waning of the Cold War, with the conclusions of the struggle for national independence: the Portuguese colonies completed the historical task of revolution, and the Rhodesian and South African struggles finally terminated roughly by the end of the decade.1
Several critics of African film, aligning themselves with film theorists associated with the journal Screen, such as Stephen Health and Laura Mulvey, drew on psychoanalysis to theorize subjectivity and desire.2 Psychoanalysis offered a theoretical vocabulary to explore the truly new shift that was taking place in the films. It came not in the raising of consciousness, with femininst conscientization, or with ideological analysis that explained how neocolonialism affected the people, the masses, the underclass, the workers, etc., but with the issues surrounding desire. The cinematic harbingers there include Henri Duparc, whose Bal Poussière (1989) and Désiré Ecaré’s Visages des femmes (1985) never received their due because they appeared to make an embarrassed acknowledgment that sexuality and desire might be acceptable topics of African cinema (Tcheuyap, 2011). These films seemed not to be attending Med Hondo’s continual pressure for a cinema of liberation, following the critical impulse established by Teshome Gabriel (1982) and Ferid Boughedir (1983), and later Frank Ukadike (1994), and thus we can see a dialectical contrast between Duparc’s light Bal Poussière and Hondo’s serious Sarraounia (1986), between Sembène’s Xala ([1994] 1975) and Moussa Touré’s TGV (1998); between Gerima’s brilliant LA Rebellion work, notably Bush Mama (1979) and Mweze’s delighting the audience with charm, romance, and music in La vie est belle (1987).
Simultaneously, there was a shift of the critical target of many novels and films from the European metropoles, or white racism, to the corruption or abuse of power of the independent African state (notably in such works of fiction as Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) or Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les soleils des indépendences ([1968] 1970). This was replicated in a cinema and theatre of struggle against the Big Men in Power, with theatre meeting cinema in Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest (1970), a film generally regarded as a cinematic failure, but still a harbinger for a host of works, from Gerima’s Harvert 3000 (1976) to Souleymane Cisse’s Finyé (1982) and Yeelen (1987), Idrissa Ouedraogo’s Tilai (1990) and Yaaba (1989), to finally the corpus of Sembène’s films. The figure of the domineering patriarch appears early in his Tauw (1970), but systematically in his works since then. The shift of target in Sembène’s Faat Kine (2001) is most instructive. We still have the Big Man, patriarchal, sexist, and dominant, but only dominant in the flashbacks, in the past when Kine was young. In his earlier period the dream of women’s emergence could take the form of an ideal princess, as in Ceddo (1977), or a woman leading the revolution of the future, as in Rama, El Hadj’s daughter in Xala (1975).
The ideal of a rise in women’s cinema depended on an infrastructure of training, financing, and eventually of information, which Beti Ellerson with her Women Make Movies project developed. Safi Faye and Sarah Maldoror inspired the new generation. Their training and importance in the list of African filmmakers came despite the obstacles they faced as women, and their successes in overcoming them. Safi Faye was trained with Jean Rouch, as an assistant. Sarah Maldoror worked with French TV, but married an Angolan revolutionary, Mario Pinto de Andrade, who became a major figure in the MPLA when fighting the Portuguese. Maldoror was of Guadeloupian origins, and created the first black theatre troop in Paris, “Les Griots.” She learned filmmaking at VGIK in Moscow and by 1969 had directed a short film, Monagambé that won an award at the Carthage film festival. She produced dozens of documentaries, in addition to Sambizanga (1972), now considered a classic of African revolutionary cinema.
Safi Faye first met Rouch in 1966 and played a role in his Petit à petit (1969). She moved on to Paris where she studied ethnology. In 1975, she produced a major documentary, Kaddu Beykat (Peasant Letter), now considered a classic. She has directed eight films since then, inspiring other women filmmakers like Rose Bekale, Aminata Ouédraogo, and Yangba Léonie.
Following in the path of Maldoror, whose work she has honoured, Anne‐Laure Folly studied law and decided to go into filmmaking after returning to France after a visit to Togo on the occasion of her grandmother’s funeral. Her film Femmes aux yeux ouverts, made in 1994, marked the direction of the second wave of women directors. She served on the board of FEPACI from 1997–2006, and has made some 20 documentaries, including Sarah Maldoror ou la nostalgie de l’utopie in 1998. Faye and Maldoror followed paths that were compatible with the approaches and scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s (see Ngambika, 1986). Folly and Fanta Nacro marked the new direction of third wave feminism.
The 1990s initiated massive, structural and technological changes world‐wide. Under globalization, media and movies, like capital, flow across open borders, though in grossly uneven patterns, and the result has been a major shift in the films and media viewers have access to, in how viewers watch content, in who makes movies, and even in what counts as film. In Africa, the liberalization of national economies and the imposition of structural adjustment policies; the opening‐up of media environments; and the widespread availability of video technologies, radically altered film production, viewing, and distribution, and initiated what has come to be an unprecedented diversification of the African cinematic landscape. The most obvious product of these new global processes was the emergence of informal and independent commercial movie industries in Ghana and Nigeria. (Later, the English‐language formation of West African commercial video production came to be known as Nollywood.) The wide availability of video equipment coupled with a flourishing market in imported content pirated to video created the conditions for the local production of feature‐length narrative films on video. These early movies were screened exclusively in neighborhood video parlors and, in Ghana, in cinema theatres, but in only a few years, the straight‐to‐video model of distribution flourished and remained dominant in African cites such as Accra, Kumasi, Lagos, and Kano for almost 20 years, through the transition from analog to digital video modes of production and circulation and the rise of television as a viewing platform.
These popular movies were disarticulated from the cultural nationalist and postcolonial paradigms that thus far had shaped the discourse of African cinema – the films, the manifestos, and the scholarship. Though some popular videomakers were loosely linked to state institutions, the National Television Authority in Nigeria, and in Ghana, the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC), most entered movie production as untrained lovers of cinema and storytelling. Their notions about narrative and cinema, for the most part, derived from the films and media they had been exposed to as viewers – colonial documentaries, martial arts films, Bollywood, and Hollywood B movies – as well as from deep stores of oral culture and, more immediately, the rumors and stories that shaped African urban, popular imaginaries.
For African film critics to come to terms with commercial videos such as William Akuffo’s Zinabu (1987) or Kenneth Nnebue’s Living in Bondage (1992), they needed research methodologies that borrowed from ethnography and history so as to situate these popular forms in their local contexts and make sense of the pleasures they offered African audiences. More importantly, they had to learn to approach the film in terms of popular culture, not high culture, nor as direct expressions of political ideologies. Although Karen Barber (1987) had already carved out a path for such approaches to popular literature, and even theatre, it had not yet been done for cinema. Onookome Okome’s and Jonathan Haynes’ (1995, 2000) early writing on Nigerian film mapped out these new directions, making it impossible to merely dismiss Nollywood as a manifestation of cultural imperialism, or crude entertainment. More critically, commercial video raised urgent questions about globalization, questions made visible in the groundbreaking essay “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). What that essay provided was the possibility of seeing African cinema as participating in a cultural frame that had developed in response to the new economic order brought about by globalization. When the wealthy Nigerians in Living in Bondage (1992) celebrate their newfound access to astounding wealth, to control over the nefarious and satanic forces of capital that would provide them with all the cars, homes, women, whiskey, etc., that their hearts desired, they were willing to strike the Faustian bargain for their souls. This was represented in the magical contents that the cargo cults always believed were to be found in the ships’ holds, and that, today, come in the form of containers. The millennial capitalism the Comaroffs signaled could only be understood with the old beliefs about magic deployed by Big Men, and that could now be represented in the Old and the New, the Old being the foundation for Nollywood that began with Living in Bondage (1992). The New appeared with the same themes and tropes, the same new styles of the commercial, with liberal capitalism marked by the commodity, and the genres of the melodramatic and the occult.
1992, the year Living in Bondage appeared also saw the appearance of the New spirit in Jean‐Pierre Bekolo’s Quartier Mozart and Jean‐Marie Teno’s Afrique je te plumerai. During this period, a new generation of African auteurs, perhaps best represented in Bekolo’s Aristotle’s Plot (1999), demanded that the “fathers of African cinema” make room. By then, Bekolo had already introduced the new generation of cinema with Quartier Mozart (1992) and its youthful characters. The saucy, hot, hilarious comedic qualities, earlier denied in Duparc now emerge full blown with Chef du Quartier, Chien Méchant, Mon Type, and in the figure of the comedian Essindi Minja who played the tailor in Quartier and concluded the film with a hilarious routine that put down the Big Man of the past. Quartier Mozart embodied the hip dance music associated with video culture, and is marked especially by quick cross cutting and chic stylishness in the falling‐in‐love scene between Mon Type and Samedi. Similarly, Teno’s Afrique je te plumerai rewrote how the African voice could speak back with the saucy figure of Marie who parodied De Gaulle, mocking how the new Big Men carried on France’s charge in Africa. Mostly Teno introduced us to his own sarcastic voiceover, rewriting how this new, personal ironic tone supplanted the severe Master’s voice of political engagement in the past. His figure, that of a “bonimenteur,”3 was like the narrative voiceover employed in Bekolo’s Saignantes along with the figures of the two impudent prostitutes (Majolie and Chouchou). They embodied the “clitoral power” of Mevoungou, rewriting notions of sterner feminist discourses, moving away from the earlier miserabilism in recounting the “women’s condition” to the current New African Woman so desired by Sembène in Faat Kine. It paved the way for Fanta Nacro’s short films like Puk Nini (1996) where the men’s imaginary of a dominant patriarchy was taken down several notches through humor. Now, the impact of globalization would come to replace the older imperative for close readings, for ideological analysis, for demands that the critic join the filmmaker in advancing the struggles for liberation and progressive change.
This change in the political and economic landscape would lead to Arjun Appadurai’s five scapes (1996), to the distance readings of Franco Moretti (2013), to developments in Asian cinema readings as seein in the work of Rey Chow (1993) and Sumita Chakravarty (2003), that re‐created how feminist and political analysis could be developed.
What would have to become an “ideal” approach to African cinema would have to come from the “ideal” approach to world cinema itself, addressing the problems of funding, acquiring adequate production technologies and apparatuses, developing adequately trained actors, and most of all breaking the logjams of distribution and exhibition. For if globalization meant untold wealth and goods to be made available to the rich, the question for African cinema would have to be where its films could be made and seen. Ironically, as the 1990s saw the breakthrough in the expansion of video film, it also saw the drastic decline in theatrical venues, resulting in the death‐throes of most theatres across much of the continent in the course of the new millennium. That death of theatrical venues occurred across the world for the same reasons: celluloid was too expensive, not only to make, but also to show as the equipment required expensive maintenance. Across Africa, the theatres and urban downtowns became uninviting venues. On the other hand, anyone with enough money could buy a video player, and could make a video film for the family. Ramon Lobato (2012) has shown how the video revolution radically shifted the work of the film industry, so that grade‐b genre films made as STV (straight to video) were produced for increasingly large home audiences. These video films stretched the limits of the respectable by privileging the spaces of private viewings where pornography could be seen, and pushed the limits of entertainment where religious videos could be seen. All this meant increases in the corner video shop and home video viewing, and the reduction of downtown or quartier theatre spaces to local bars (cf. Teno’s Lieux saints (2009 Sacred Places) or to neighborhood people’s homes where a few chairs could be rented out and where cooked chicken and beer might be sold, All this meant exhibition no longer entailed a trip to the downtown Rex, Regal, Royal, Palace, or Rialto, among many in Nigeria, the Normandy in N’djamena, Le Paris in Dakar, or the Abbia or Rex in Yaounde.
The “ideal” approach to African cinema would have to take into account the kinds of films that have become so prevalent today. On the one hand we have Timbuktu (2014), with its immediacy in addressing the hottest topic on the continent, the issue of Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, and the threat of the fundamentalists to take over the state, in this case Mali. From Abderrahmane Sissako’s earlier, auteurist creations like La Vie sur terre (1998) and Heremakono (2002), to the more recent polemics against the World Bank and IMF in Bamako (2006), we now see how the context has shifted away from the nation‐state, from national liberation and neocolonialism, and even from the Big Men who replaced the colonialists, to the threat posed by the militias and the jihadists, the local movements whose indigeneity combines with the world‐scape of religious extremist movements seeking to establish a New Order. Not only does Timbuktu evoke the puritanical, repressiveness of that religious order, it thematizes it in the scene in which the jihadists make personal films about the primacy of adopting a new religious code of living. Everything in the film calls out for a new kind of contextualizing and an approach that poses the question, how can the African filmmaker make a successful, popular, and yet ultimately serious film about the dangers of jihadism? How can a poetic, essayist filmmaker make a film about a serious political issue, a contentious issue that risks aligning the film with conservative Western European warnings about Muslims as terrorists.
Simultaneously, as Africans responded to globalizing by seeking to leave the continent in droves, seeking to cross the dangerous waters to the Global North, films like Frontières (2001), Bamako, and especially La pirogue (2012) called upon the conventional modes of representations of Africans daring the elements and especially defying the authorities in order to find new lives. The dangers of the journey include all the middlemen, especially passeurs, those selling the passage and often endangering or even killing their passengers: The ugliest of faces of globalization. Whatever contextualizing Timbuktu required, whatever the questions about the filmmaker’s political alignments might arise (like Sissako becoming a cultural advisor to the Mauritanian government), along with moral questions involved with the ugly, deadly face of global migration, there had to be a simultaneous global equivalent in the filmmaking itself where consumerism and its attendant guilts form the core of the melodrama, or where the issue of representation verges on the exploitative (such as the scene of the Ghanaian woman who dies in the desert, seeking to migrate, in Bamako). In short, the shift from the generation of “serious” African filmmaking to commercial Nollywood, poses questions for the act of filmmaking under globalization more broadly, and specially for the world of what we had once called “African cinema.”
In Manthia Diawara’s recent study of African cinema, African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics (2010), he sets about the task of presenting the “new” in a manner that is totally different from his first, programmatic study, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (1992). What is new are two things. First, the kinds of films that are now emerging: Nollywood of course, and especially its amorphous, latest iteration dubbed New Nollywood; but also other “art” categories that Diawara finds in films that have appeared in the conventional African cinema venues during the past quarter century, that is, in the period following “oppositional cinema.” The line between the older, so‐called “FESPACO” celluloid films encased within an established understanding of African cinematic language, and the newer forms like “New Nollywood” have become increasingly difficult to sustain. If “video films” had typically been associated with greater commercial cinematic values, they now have begun to include “transnational films,” typically associated with greater post‐production values, “experimental” or “innovative” New Nollywood styles and genres, as might be seen in Andy Amadi Okoroafor’s dark neo‐noir Relentless (2010), Djo Munga’s dystopic Viva Riva (2011), or Kenneth Gyang’s Confusion Na Wa (2013). The conventional framing of African cinema is increasingly shifting, as now seen with Biyi Bandele’s epic adaptation of Adichie’s Half a Yellow Sun (2014), or Wanuri Kahiu’s sci‐fi feminist short “Pumzi” (2013). In other areas, too, like the most conventionalized of genres such as genocide films, a totally new approach has been taken as seen in Kivu Ruhorahoza’s psychologically troubled drama Matière gris (Grey Matter) (2011). No longer is it just FESPACO that is defining what is to be admitted to the competitive ranks of “African film”; festivals in Zanzibar, South Africa, and Nigeria now compete for the status of premier award‐givers, supplanting the often dated FESPACO.
New critical approaches have emerged with a new generation of critical writings sparked by Jonathan Haynes (1995) when he called for new work on popular genres and sociopolitical studies.4 The emphasis on material readings and new global configurations has necessitated revisions of theoretical frames, as seen in Akin Adesokan’s Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics (2011), Carmela Garritano’s African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History (2013), and Moradewun Adejunmobi’ s groundbreaking essay “Nigerian Video Film as Minor Transnational Practice” (2007). The questions of materiality and of the cinematic apparatus now redefine the limits of critiques of commodity culture and neoliberalism. In Adesokan’s work, institutional structures, aesthetic values, and genre formation have come to lend new complexity to notions of “context,” redefining what constitutes committed critique in an age of globalization.
Diawara’s approach forges the bridge between the panegyrics for Blackness in the past and the tensions engendered by the rhetoric of post‐racialism in the present conjuncture. His new formulations have nothing to do with the pigeonholing approaches that delimited the value of past criticism, and yet he aspires to a systemization and separates the aesthetics of Nollywood, a cinema he sees as dominated by the tropes of movement and change, from the new waves of cinema that enable us to retain a sense of connectedness to past trends.
The three new waves of cinema that Diawara identifies are “Arte,” “La Guilde des Cinéastes,” and the “New Popular African Cinema.” Unlike his earlier categories, Social Realist or Colonial Confrontation, which are defined in well‐recognized genre or thematic terms, these three are very nebulous, allowing for any kind of genre or theme. What marks them, rather, are the conditions of production, reception, and exhibition.
If the first wave is the most auteurist, and the second most marked by diaspora sensibilities, the third wave, vaguely termed “New Popular African Cinema,” is at once the most diffuse and at the same time “African” – a notion, in this context, as charged as the term “authenticity.” After praising Senghor’s call for an African specificity associated with qualities like rhythm – qualities that return in a more productive frame in cinematic terms than in the lexicon of affect (which degrades Negritude into a cheap essentialism) – Diawara looks to films like Finyé (1982) or Le retour d’un aventurier (1966) or Love Brewed in an African Pot (1981) for the use of “African ingredients” to combat the “recognized genres of the West.” While they employ familiar genres like romance or melodrama, they take new popular forms, deploying “African ingredients and spices within old genres” (pp. 142–143). He claims that these directions, so commonly associated with Nollywood, also mark the important work of Mansour Wade, Moussa Sene Absa, Zola Maseko, Zézé Gamboa and others who employ techniques of melodrama, and deploy narratives and mises‐en‐scène associated with musicals, action films, and Westerns. “Popular” is the term Diawara uses to distinguish this body of work from the first two waves that he associates more loosely with “art” cinema (p. 144). He finds in the popular, “narrative structures, the motifs and emotional expectations [that] they borrow from African popular culture.” He continues, “The films rely on popular religious beliefs and superstitions, folklore and the common sense of everyday life, unlike the consciousness‐raising narratives of Sembène or the metafilmic and intellectualized films of Bekolo and Bakupa‐Kanyinda” (p. 144). Here Diawara might be describing Nollywood were it not that the distance these filmmakers take is not from the commercial norms of Hollywood, but from “Africa cinema” itself in the forms of the above two waves and in its Sembenian influenced past. Popular is measured in the relationship of this cinema to its audience, in which he says the films have served to “constitute the first beginning of African cinema for Africans” (p. 145). How these films, still not readily exhibited in Africa, and certainly not in theatres that are almost nonexistent, might constitute a first beginning of an African cinema for Africans, rather than video films from Ghana and Nollywood, is a mystery. But the aspiration, if not the fulfillment of this claim, does much in defining its essential traits. The “real culture,” the “real people,” to whom this cinema relates is, strangely enough in an age of globalization, defined broadly in national terms. Thus, Diawara finds the film language informed by the national elements of dance, language, oral traditions, etc., like Mouridism and the Sabar, Senegalese religious and dance forms. For the cosmopolitan and global scholar, these might be termed local cultural formulations, not national, and the circulation of these filmmakers’ work – like Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen Geï (2001) or Mansour Sora Wade’s Le prix du pardon (2002) – cannot be separated from the international festival circuit and transnational commercial venues, such as are found on the websites dedicated to African films. The division of African cinema along these lines of popular and art still leaves the latter burdened with the question of distribution, as has been the case from the start.
Distribution and Exhibition
The question of how to rethink critical approaches to African cinema cannot be easily separated from the films’ spaces of exhibition. After all, a “curatorial” approach already implies an approach shaped by festivals, not by theatrical distributors. The history of the failure to provide African audiences with ready access to African films in Africa has been well documented, including in Diawara’s first study African Cinema: Politics and Culture (1992) and in innumerable accounts of FEPACI and the desperate struggle to establish national film boards that would accommodate the distribution of African films (Diawara (1992), Thackway (2003); Barlet (2000)). In Senegal the Société National du Cinéma, headed up by Sembène himself, lasted only a short while, and the establishment of a film archive and center in Ouagadougou ultimately failed to produce the spur to national distribution across the continent. Sporadic semi‐success in Ouagadougou was not matched, although well‐known attempts in post‐revolutionary societies, like Algeria and Mozambique, succeeded briefly. In the end, the model of a commercial distribution system as the only meaningful measure of success continued as the cinema palaces across most of the continent crumbled or became disreputable quartier theatres, often enough limited to grade‐b film showings, and especially Bollywood showings.
In Europe, there was very little outside of the occasional Arts et Essais theatre showings of African films, little outside of Odeon‐type art theatres in Anglophone venues, little, really, outside the growing festival circuit. What provided the impetus for festivals might originally have had the panache of Cannes or Toronto, but eventually smaller festivals burgeoned, and as with other independent productions, became the favored sites for distribution [Dovey, 2015: pp. 13–14]. In the United States, as black studies prospered in the 1970s and even 1980s, the radical Third World movement generated Third World cinema distribution models, including most importantly the California Newsreel project aimed at distributing educational and feature films that supported the goals of leftist progress and revolutionary change. California Newsreel was founded in San Francisco in 1968 as part of Third World Newsreel, itself created in 1967 at the height of the counter‐cultural movement. Its themes included race, social justice, revolutionary politics, and most importantly, the Library of African Cinema, whose mission is described on the California Newreel site thus: “Films from Africa made by Africans offer restorative images and oftentimes a new film language. The unique films in this collection not only showcase the works of master filmmakers but also innovative new talents who are embracing video technology. To see Africa through African eyes will break stereotypes and enlighten viewers about life in Africa as well as about the issues facing the continent” (http://newsreel.org/African‐Cinema). This sums up the ideological impress that was intended to sustain the first generation of African and black filmmakers like those of the L.A. Rebellion, but especially those on the continent desperately seeking venues for distribution.
The California Newsreel model was based to a large extent on distributing their video tapes at US$200 for a single film, and US$500 for five, to university campuses where a few began to create significant collections. The curator for the Library, Cornelius Moore, became an important figure in his choice of films that emphasized the value of political lucidity and Afrocentric perspectives that would serve to provide the audience with a clear, counter‐colonial understanding of African society and history. His films suited courses in African humanities that were inevitably intended to counter Western stereotypes and prejudices against African cultures and peoples. With the rise of major studies units in Northwestern University, the University of Wisconsin, along with similar departments in UCLA and eventually NYU, inevitably the fostering of black studies led to the creation of black film studies as well. It has been the case since the 1980s that festivals and American university library collections have remained the dominant venues for African films. At least that has been true as long as “African films” did not include video films that came to be produced in Ghana and Nigeria for local distribution. The latter led to vast changes in models for distribution and exhibition which the “serious” or “FESPACO” filmmakers inevitably had to take into account, as the circuits of festivals and libraries barely enabled the filmmakers to sustain their production. The shift to digital platforms can be seen in the change in California Newsreel itself. A glance at its site showing its recent films includes only a handful of African American, not African films, and they are now streaming the films, selling rights to access to the streaming for three years, alongside US$50 DVDs. Almost all its films were made between 1990 and 2006, with the rare exception being a 2007 film This is Nollywood! The only African film in the collection since then was 2009 The Manuscripts of Timbuktu, after which no more African films appear. By 2009 more than a thousand Nollywood films a year were being churned out, and the model of digital filmmaking across the continent had become dominant. The changes in genres that bespoke the new technological breakthrough with video in the late 1980s and 1990s attested to the radical break with a past commitment to “see Africa through African eyes [so as to] … break stereotypes and enlighten viewers about life in Africa as well as about the issues facing the continent” (http://newsreel.org/African‐Cinema).
New Critical Approaches
What might be thought of as the key question for African cinema criticism, “what is the ideal approach to African cinema,” becomes increasingly a question that depends on the larger issues now marking the field, namely, what is an African film. Across the world, digital and Internet technologies and flow of media and capital across national borders have enabled an enormous proliferation of film and media forms, platforms and distribution venues, film festivals, and screen sizes and types Likewise, the authors included here are at the forefront of an enormous expansion of African film studies. Focusing on new objects of study and drawing on a multiplicity of approaches, contributors place African visual forms at the center of major conversations in film and media studies and engage theoretical work on time, sound, genre, queering, and biopolitics. The methods deployed here move away from, and in some cases challenge, approaches that have been dominant in the field since its earliest years. Contributors share a concern with making sense of what Achille Mbembe identifies as the “third moment” in the history of “the vertiginous assemblage that is Blackness” (2017, p. 2). This is a time, he writes, “marked by the globalization of markets, the privatization of the world under the aegis of neoliberalism, and the increasing imbrication of financial markets, the postimperial military complex, and electronic and digital technologies” (2017, p. 3). It is a moment that compels new poetics and new theoretical engagements.
