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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
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.
explorations of homosexuality, which still remains a very controversial subject.) From the beginning of his career, many critics identified Bekolo as the cinematic heir to Djibril Diop Mambety, sub-Saharan Africa’s other leading maverick filmmaker: for instance, the prominent African film critic Frank Ukadike describes Quartier Mozart as ‘a work of unparalleled imagination and stylistic and aesthetic
Introduction At first glance, Moufida Tlatli’s rapidly growing international reputation might seem to align her closely with Djibril Diop Mambety, since the widely acknowledged status of both is based on a very limited cinematic output: in Mambety’s case, two feature films and a handful of shorts; in Tlatli’s, just two feature films. The closeness is, however, more apparent than substantive; the
, African cinema was at the cutting edge of a politically and artistically radical ‘Third Cinema’, which explicitly rejected the capitalist world order of the West (Gabriel 1982 ). In reality, as was argued above, this vision of African cinema was always an excessive generalisation, which occluded the existence of other cinematic trajectories such as the playful, comic vision of the likes of Djibril Diop Mambety and Mustapha
2 Black Girl , directed by Ousmane Sembene, 1966 3 Soleil O , directed by Med Hondo, 1969 4 Badou Boy , directed by Djibril Diop Mambety, 1970
Diawara ( 1992 : 73–6). 3 In this context, it seems easy to understand the affinity between Ouédraogo and Djibril Diop Mambety, the most renowned nonconformist of the first generation of African cinema, and a director who refused to adopt any specific political line in his work. 4
’s thoughtful use of music and the soundtrack. Although his films do not disrupt the connection between image and soundtrack in the often highly experimental manner of Med Hondo or Djibril Diop Mambety, he has consistently used the sound-track in extremely interesting ways. In Black Girl , he makes a virtue of the constraint of having to work in French (as the film was funded by the French authorities). The maid, Diouana, can barely speak French but
marginalisation of West Africa and its currency, the CFA franc, within it. Such bitter popular emotions were crystallised, for instance, in the 1995 film Le Franc by the Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty, which represents abstract economic concepts via everyday human dramas. The film’s hero, a penniless musician living in a shanty town, marches through a Dakar of both dilapidated houses and