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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
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.
contrasting example of Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s film, Aristotle’s Plot ); or for the European viewers, who see no mastery, only madness in the inverted image of their own identification with the phantasms of the screen, possessed by an atavism that they claim to know only in others. 36 Perhaps in terms of phantasmaphysics we could reflect otherwise on the consternation, if not the racist
give a sense of the evolution of African cinema, from the work of Chahine, Sembene, Mambety and Hondo in the 1950s and 1960s (and beyond) to the work of important younger or more recently emerged directors such as Moufida Tlatli and Jean-Pierre Bekolo: six of our directors began their careers in the 1950s to 1970s, while the other four began in the 1980s or 1990s. Secondly, we were keen to represent as wide a geographical sample as
sellers in The Little Girl who Sold the Sun . These are illustrations of Mambety’s consistent desire to engage in formal innovation. It is important to begin with an assessment of Mambety’s film style, as he is widely seen by both critics and admirers as the most distinctive ‘stylist’ in African cinema (a mantle perhaps taken over in the 1990s by Jean-Pierre Bekolo, a director who greatly admires Mambety: see Chapter 9 ). His
years in many parts of Africa has merely served to reinforce this. Moreover, as will be seen in later chapters, many younger African directors, such as Jean-Pierre Bekolo (see Chapter 9 ) have retreated from such activism. Consequently, in analysing the ‘success’ of Sembene’s films in creating a public dialogue, it is necessary to define carefully what we mean by this. Nicholas Harrison has convincingly argued that the desire