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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
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.
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
8 The Silences of the Palace , directed by Moufida Tlatli, 1994 Commenting on the unlikely support that Finyé received from the Malian military authorites, Ukadike (rather naively) suggests that: ‘Tolerance and maturity prevailing, the government demonstrated that it is capable of listening to constructive criticism’ ( 1994 : 196). However, one might just as easily