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one level, this is, once again, a piece all about Youssef Chahine and his filmmaking, and, in a less self-absorbed way, about the responsibility of artists and intellectuals. On another, it is about violence – the violence of individuals, the violence of states – and those, particularly the ordinary people, who die as a result. As such, it combines yet again in Chahine’s work the politics of the personal – what have we done
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.
context of the anticolonial struggle and its immediate aftermath (Egyptian cinema has a longer and, in many ways, separate history, as will be argued below and in Chapter 1 on Youssef Chahine), and African film directors of the 1960s and 1970s joined together in a corporative union, FEPACI, which set out various charters for the development of an explicitly African form of filmmaking. 3 For many critics and filmmakers of this period
inundated by North American cultural products’ ( 2007 , 305). 14 Shohat and Stam identify a very similar strategy in the Egyptian film Iskandariya Leh? (Alexandria Why …?, Youssef Chahine, 1979), in which the protagonist directs Egyptian musical scenes that ‘affect a kitschy, “under-developed” mimicry of Hollywood production
as French soldiers alongside Patrice Chéreau and Michel Piccoli in Adieu Bonaparte (1985), the film that the great Egyptian director Youssef Chahine (1926–2008) devoted to Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt of 1798 to 1801 … At the time, I admired Chahine unreservedly. It was only much later that I felt the need to distance myself from his 1997 film Destiny. Rather than a 70 mm camera, this struck me as having been made with a “105 mm recoilless Howitzer.” The film won acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival for providing a Western audience with the compilation of
), both of which focused on the revolutionary stuggle, albeit from divergent perspectives. The representation of the war was partial. While the Egyptian director Youssef Chahine made Jamila the Algerian ( Jamila al Jazairiyya , 1958), the role of female fighters (the moudjhidat ) was often neglected in Algerian cinema. Jamila Bouhired, for instance, the subject of Chahine’s film, was not celebrated in Algerian cinema
directors from around the world were each invited to make a 52-second film, in a single take, using the original Lumière movie camera, the ‘cinématographe.’ Interspersed with films by David Lynch and Fernando Trueba, Wim Wenders and Zhang Yimou, John Boorman and Liv Ullman, Costa-Gavros, Merchant Ivory, Youssef Chahine, and many others, are snippets of conversations with the filmmakers: ‘Why do you make films?’ ‘Is cinema dead?’ The resulting collage is a celebration in the form of a documentary, a grand ‘making of’ about the whole
encouraged by international cinema. Apparently Shahid was inspired by the story of a famous Algerian revolutionary, Djamila Bouhired, a woman who had joined the Algerian National Liberation Front and fought against French colonial rule and the occupation of Algeria. 36 In 1958, the internationally renowned Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine had put Bouhired’s story on screen in a landmark film – Jamila
torture Bouhired had been subjected to at the hands of the French army, including 84 Our fighting sisters Figure 2 The arrest of FLN militant Zohra Drif by the French army, 24 September 1957 placing electrodes in her vagina and on her nipples, and questioned the legality of the military court in which she had been tried.35 Bouhired rapidly became a symbol of anti-colonial struggle, not just in Algeria but also across the Arab World and the Third World. In 1958, she was the subject of a film supporting the independence struggle by the Egyptian director Youssef
they have rarely sought to sponsor politically sensitive work. Even where governments have allowed dissenting voices to be heard, it is important not to rush into hasty judgements as to the ‘liberal’ credentials of the regime. 1 Cairo Station , directed by Youssef Chahine, 1958