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1994 ). While these arguments are formulated above all in relation to postcolonial populations in the metropolis, they carry an obvious rele vance for African filmmakers – although, by and large, it is a debate still waiting to happen in the field of African cinema. Whether or not he feels especially burdened by the fact, Florentino ‘Flora’ Gomes certainly occupies a lonely position as the only
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.
’s Emitaï (1971) and Camp de Thiaroye (1988), to its dying days in North Africa in Moufida Tlatli’s Silences of the Palace (1994); and the anticolonial struggle, in its various forms and stages, in Chahine’s Jamila the Algerian (1958), Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972), Flora Gomes’s Mortu nega (1988) and Ingrid Sinclair’s Flame (1996). The nature, status and effects of remembering vary greatly in these films: for
5 Le Franc , directed by Djibril Diop Mambety, 1994 6 Nha fala , directed by Flora Gomes, 2002 7 Tilaï , directed by Idrissa Ouédraogo, 1990