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Towards a Theory for African Cinema is an English translation of a talk given in French by the Tunisian filmmaker and critic Férid Boughedir (1944–) at a conference on international cinema, which took place in Montreal in 1974. In his presentation Boughedir discusses the vocation of the African filmmaker, who must avoid succumbing to the escapism and entertainment values of Western cinema and instead strive to reflect the contradictions and tensions of the colonised African identity, while promoting a revitalisation of African culture. Drawing on the example of the 1968 film Mandabi (The Money Order) by the Senegalese director Sembène Ousmane, Boughedir conceptualises a form of cinema which resists the influences of both Hollywood and auteur film and awakens viewers, instead of putting them to sleep. Boughedir‘s source text is preceded by a translator‘s introduction, which situates his talk within contemporary film studies.
Despite the well-documented difficulties in production, distribution and exhibition that it has faced over the last fifty years, African cinema has managed to establish itself as an innovative and challenging body of filmmaking. This book represents a response to some of the best of those films. It is the first introduction of its kind to an important cross-section of postcolonial African filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. The book brings together ideas from a range of disciplines, film studies, African cultural studies and, in particular, postcolonial studies, to combine the in-depth analysis of individual films and bodies of work by individual directors with a sustained interrogation of these films in relation to important theoretical concepts. It provides both an overview of the director's output to date, and the necessary background to enable readers to achieve a better understanding of the director's choice of subject matter, aesthetic or formal strategies, ideological stance. The book focuses on what might loosely be called the auteur tradition of filmmaking, closely associated with Francophone African cinema, which explicitly views the director as the 'author' of a work of art. The aim is to re-examine the development of the authorial tradition in Africa, as well as the conception of both artist and audience that has underpinned it at various stages over the past fifty years. The works of Youssef Chahine, Ousmane Sembene, Med Hondo, Djibril Diop Mambety, Souleymane Cissé, Flora Gomes, Idrissa Ouédraogo, Moufida Tlatli, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, and Darrell James Roodt are discussed.
Introduction Jean-Pierre Bekolo is at the forefront of a wave of innovative and dynamic young African filmmakers who have emerged since the early 1990s. Openly embracing the values and forms of urban African youth culture, Bekolo has created a cinema that exists at the interface between a global youth aesthetic (fast-paced editing, fashion-conscious characters, a fascination with celebrity culture) and
African cinema history. Although Ukadike’s critical appraisal of Ouédraogo’s work is less than fulsome, he acknowledges that: ‘From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, the films of Idrissa Ouédraogo, more than those of any other African filmmaker, made an enormous impact internationally, in terms of both universal acceptability and commercial viability’ ( 2002 : 151). Considering how dramatically Ouédraogo’s critical and popular
Introduction At the time of his premature death in 1998, at the relatively young age of fifty-three, there was a consensus amongst many commentators that the Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety was the most gifted of all African film directors. If we examine the work of the first generation of sub-Saharan African filmmakers as a whole, his films certainly stand out for their rejection of the
conditions of colonial West Africa. However, some African film-makers and scholars have been critical of Rouch's work, considering it irredeemably colonialist, even if in a largely benign paternalist manner. These critical voices should be understood within the complex entanglements of the late colonial and postcolonial period and in particular, of the effects of the Laval Decree which, in place since the 1930s, prevented any form of film-making by Africans in French colonial Africa until after independence. In the circumstances, it cannot have been
of its kind to an important cross-section of postcolonial African filmmakers from the 1950s to the present, and its approach marks a shift from that adopted in most previous critical works. There are surveys of African cinema as a whole (Malkmus and Armes 1991 ) and of North African (Armes 2005 ) or sub-Saharan African cinema (Diawara 1992 ; Ukadike 1994 ; Barlet 2000 ; Shaka 2004 ) individually, which typically provide at best very brief analyses of the
the title of African cinema: ‘There are African filmmakers, but no African cinema. To be able to talk about cinema, you need structures, infrastructures, laboratories, producers, scriptwriters, cinemas, an organised marketplace … For the moment, we are at the artisan stage’ (Signaté 1994 : 27). One of the challenging and still relevant subjects which have occupied Hondo throughout his filmmaking career is dispossession, in
of African cinema in general, and one of the issues frequently raised centres on ‘political’ or socially conscious cinema versus cinema of entertainment. According to an article in SA Film , South African filmmakers continually ‘fail’ their audiences by choosing to make films which are insufficiently entertaining. The occasion for the author’s attack is the release of Darrell Roodt’s Yesterday
continent, which, as can be seen elsewhere in this volume, is common to many African filmmakers. However, in Sembene’s case, this appears specifically to have been born of his experiences during the independence struggle, as is illustrated by his classic novel, God’s Bits of Wood , which constitutes a dazzling attempt to imagine a socialist future for the entire continent. This vision proved chimeric, and Sembene clearly feels