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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.
, preserving in between these a conception of film authors endowed with relative – rather than total – power. Feminism Whether by mere coincidence or by patriarchal ruse, the author’s death was first pronounced at precisely the time that feminist scholarship across a range of fields was striving to identify and assess previously neglected female authorial traditions. In film studies, as in literary criticism, feminist critics have continued to foreground an interest in women authors, whether these are directors or other female creative personnel. This has
Anatomy of womens affections’ and ‘A cooling card’, the name Lyly’s Euphues gave to one of his compositions. 1 Eight years after Lyly had stopped writing his own prose fiction, he was still inspiring and promoting the fiction of others. Lyly’s importance to new work is made most obvious by an anonymous prefatory poem which constructs an authorial
they are widely seen as disposable forms of popular entertainment. Our intention is not to endorse the auteur tradition as somehow superior to commercially popular cinema. On the contrary, a central aim of this volume 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. For, as will be
between author, tradition, textual matter and manuscript performance; and in the Troy Book 's continuing life in the hands of its readers. Pickering draws on Bruno Latour's argument that ‘modernity itself is characterized by an impulse somehow to make a clean separation between people and things’. 52 This is of course a contestable statement about modernity, but also leaves open questions about how other periods (dis)entangled things and people, especially since one of the fundamental observations in gift theory