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Introduction The Malian film director Souleymane Cissé is best known for his breathtaking film Yeelen ( The Light ), which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1987 (the first sub-Saharan African film to do so). Yeelen was heralded not only as a crucial breakthrough for African cinema on the international film stage but also as the embodiment of a new form of African filmmaking practice, which
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.
after that of Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen , seemed to herald a new era for African cinema on the international stage. Moreover, Tilaï ’s depiction of an isolated rural community and its focus on generational conflict reinforced the connections between the two directors, who soon saw themselves cast by critics as the main exponents of the ‘return to the source’ genre of filmmaking with its emphasis on the values and knowledge
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
ordinary part of daily life. Its frequently bleached colours are appropriate in a land where the power of the sun appears to be slowly destroying all forms of life. However, whereas a film like Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen exists more or less entirely in the world of the spiritual and the supernatural, Po di sangui is, at least in part, firmly rooted in the unpleasant realities of the late twentieth century. Finally, Nha fala