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Introduction Although the Mauritanian director Med Hondo is acknowledged as one of the great postcolonial chroniclers of the lives of the unrecognised and unrepresented masses in the various waves of the African diaspora, his own life and its relevance for his filmmaking is less acknowledged. While an overemphasis on, or overinterpretation of, biographical aspects in relation to a filmmaker’s output is
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.
action, and three stages (departure, arrival and return); for Med Hondo, on the other hand, simplicity and linearity are precisely not what characterise the traditional tale, and (in his view) the digressive, repetitive, non-sequential nature of his film Soleil O comes much closer to representing the essence of African oral narrative. (These rival claims regarding the role of orality will be examined further in the section
’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
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
other great African modernist films, Med Hondo’s Soleil O , discussed in Chapter 3 ). In a similar kind of parallelism, alongside the utopian dream of Paris, there is an awareness, running through the film in muted fashion, of certain realities that risk rendering the dream pure illusion. In particular, Mory himself, riding off with the proceeds from another robbery and dreaming of the future, declares ‘You city niggers, you
justifies treating African cinema as a movement’ (Taylor 2000 : 139). More importantly, filmmakers including Med Hondo, Haile Gerima and Ferid Boughedir have strongly criticised Return to the Source films for peddling precisely the kind of timeless, exoticised, ‘authentic’ Africa that appeals to Western audiences and avoids the contemporary realities of the continent, though Boughedir does at least
’s burden, but as a threat to what appears to be a vulnerable Europe. This scene, depicting the potential rape of a voluptuous yet seemingly innocent white woman, graphically legitimises the colonial rampage. The resistance that Africans put up at the time of ‘the scramble’, one example of which is beautifully documented in Med Hondo’s film Sarraounia (1986), is represented in this late
Western evils and defers to her native language as a matter of pride. Sembene’s other linguistically diverse films from the period include Mandabi (1968, French/Wolof), Emitaï (1971, French/Wolof) and Ceddo (1977, with no French and in Arabic, English and Wolof). It would be a long time, however, before languages like Wolof began to take on similar roles in France. A similarly political filmmaker, Algerian actor-director Med Hondo’s postcolonial cinema of the 1970s combines French and Arabic, such as in his 1970 Soleil O and 1974 Les ‘Bicots-nègres’ vos voisins (each co
funding of cinema from these regions since the advent of an auteurist cinema industry in countries like Algeria and Senegal around the 1970s, including the work of Ousmane Sembene, Abderrahmane Sissako and Med Hondo, should not be underestimated. However, the substantial representation of the languages other than French spoken in these regions has only extended to French cinema in the 2000s. Despite this comparatively recent change, the presence of African languages has been steadily increasing in quantity and complexity since 2005. Contemporary films like Polisse and