Search results
Introduction The Senegalese director and novelist Ousmane Sembene began his film career in the early 1960s, and is often hailed as ‘the father of African cinema’ for his role in the development of filmmaking on the continent. Born in 1923, in the provincial port of Ziguinchor, Sembene is credited with a series of landmarks ‘firsts’: the first film by a sub-Saharan African in Africa
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.
Ugbomah’s political intentions: ‘The British stole our treasures, they felt the impact of the film’s message, and hence the BBC was forced to make “Whose Treasure, Ours or Theirs?” as a counter response. I was flown to London to discuss the topic when it aired on BBC.’ 44 6.9 Poster of Festac ’77 , Lagos 1977. 6.10 Ousmane Sembène, La Noire de ... , 1966, film stills
filmmaking and the apparently unalterable nature of the text once produced. Ousmane Sembene, however, has attempted a partial enactment of Brecht’s approach by making the screening of his films in Africa the starting point for discussions of them both as texts and in terms of the issues they raise, aiming to incorporate insights gathered in future films. For his part, Hondo has occasionally tried something more thoroughgoing, and
extraordinarily diverse in its influences and we can detect a range of filmmaking histories and strategies in the fourteen films produced by its members between 1982 and 1998. Their work displays a mixture of genres and modes (art installation, fiction, essay film, music video) but it was the documentary film that they constantly returned to, reinventing and often challenging its properties and its claims to truth. Aesthetically, Black Audio Film Collective drew from film-makers like Sergei Parajanov and Sergei Eisenstein, African auteurs such as Souleyman Cisse and Ousmane
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
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
political contexts The chapter on Ousmane Sembene has already dealt with the Senegalese context in considerable depth (readers requiring further background information should refer to Chapter 2 ). Consequently, this section will deal relatively briefly with the main social, cultural and political issues that inform Mambety’s films. It was argued in Chapter 2 that Sembene’s early work often deliberately cast itself in opposition
filmmakers in financing their films: in comparison, the ‘father’ of sub-Saharan filmmaking, Ousmane Sembene, has made only nine feature films in almost five decades; while Souleymane Cissé has made only five feature films in over thirty years. As is clear from interviews that he has given over the years, Ouédraogo very much identifies himself as a ‘working director’ who is willing to explore a range of styles, genres and media in
linguicentric cinema during this time, a much more linguistically rich, partly French-supported, African cinema flourished in the 1970s. West African directors such as the Senegalese Ousmane Sembene, the first African filmmaker to gain substantial recognition in France, produced a modest range of films featuring French and African languages during this period. For example, in Sembene’s 1975 Xala, characters not only speak Wolof, but the protagonist’s adolescent daughter, the film’s moral compass, refuses to speak any other language. She scorns French as the language of