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Introduction Idrissa Ouédraogo is a key figure in the ‘second wave’ of African film makers who came to the fore in the 1980s, and he is often argued to have forged a new cinematic style in which political issues have given way to smaller, ‘human’ stories. Frank Ukadike describes Ouédraogo as ‘dean of the “new wave” in African film’, arguing that the director ‘deliberately eschew
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.
Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (1987) and Idrissa Ouédraogo’s Tilaï (1990). However, African films have largely been displaced by Asian cinema (from Iran to South Korea) as the next ‘big thing’ in World Cinema, and the isolated success of a film such as Moolaadé (2004) by veteran director Ousmane Sembene serves only to underline the almost complete absence of African films from television and cinema
5 Le Franc , directed by Djibril Diop Mambety, 1994 6 Nha fala , directed by Flora Gomes, 2002 7 Tilaï , directed by Idrissa Ouédraogo, 1990
future of the postcolonial state and values deemed to be universal are at stake. ‘Fundamentalism’ also appears in Chahine’s second most recent film, a contribution of eleven minutes, nine seconds and one frame to the collaborative project 11/09/01 – a response to the World Trade Center bombing, which brings together directors including Ken Loach, Samira Makhmalbaf, Claude Lelouch, and Idrissa Ouédraogo. On
generation was over before it had really begun. In the end, it was one of the next generation of filmmakers, Idrissa Ouédraogo, who offered Mambety the chance to get back behind the camera, inviting him to film a documentary about the making of Ouédraogo’s feature film Yaaba . 1 The resulting short film, Let’s Talk, Grandmother (1988), charts the process through which Ouédraogo constructs his film, but, in so doing, Mambety
crucial but the nature (political or ideological) of the representation. On one level, the village in Po di sangui , in its (apparently) timeless simplicity, is strikingly reminiscent of that in Idrissa Ouédraogo’s Yaaba , one of the paradigmatic Return to the Source texts. However, whereas the latter film has been criticised for presenting a romanticised idyll of rural African life, that is something of