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- Volume 8, Issue 2, 2016
Journal of African Cinemas - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2016
Volume 8, Issue 2, 2016
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Make faces, Zulu! Make faces, Zulu! Silent comedy and ethnic stereotyping in early South African movies, 1916–1921
By Neil ParsonsAbstractThe comedies of African Film Productions were filmed by American and British directors, with casts drawn mainly from stage actors on overseas tours. After an experiment combining actors with cartoon animation in 1916, three farces of British-American type were directed by B.F. Clinton, notably with A.F.P.’s Zulu star Goba’s head stuck inside a valuable vase. Five short comedies were directed by Dick Cruikshanks in 1917, three with large predominantly African casts. The Zulutown series, in the mould of Charlie Chaplin slapstick, was widely shown to African audiences in subsequent years. A Christmas pantomime, which critiqued the use of child labour on farms, featured a small black child at its centre. And Then–? was a parody of blood-and-thunder melodrama. The independent production Thoroughbreds All (1918) was a satire on the morality of horse-racing. These comedies are remarkable for being plot-centred rather than constructed around the antics of well-known comedians, as were most comedy films made overseas.
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Diamonds at the meeting of her thighs: Representations of gender and sexuality in U-Carmen eKhayelitsha
More LessAbstractThe heroine of Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella, Carmen, appears as an archetypal femme fatale who lures unsuspecting men to their destruction by means of her manipulative sexuality. While Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera, Carmen, reveals the psychology of masculine anxieties, sexual jealousy and murderous rage, his character, Carmen, expresses her credo of autonomous sexuality, and can be seen as a prototypical modern woman. My article examines the representations of the female protagonist’s sexuality in a contemporary South African film that re-works the Carmen story in an African context. I argue that U-Carmen eKhayelitsha/Carmen in Khayelitsha, directed by Mark Dornford-May (2005), does not realize the potential significance of Carmen’s sexuality. I trace the ways in which dance is not used to good effect in the film. In addition, I show that the film highlights traditional masculinity in various ways, such as offering disturbing parallels between the ritual slaughter of a bull and the murder of Carmen. I conclude that U-Carmen eKhayelitsha displays revisionist and ambivalent gender politics.
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What languages do aliens speak? Multilingual ‘Otherness’ of diasporic dystopia in District 9
More LessAbstractDistrict 9 (Blomkamp, 2009), a South African science-fiction film, is noted for its dystopian vision. It is mostly set in a dilapidated township of Johannesburg called ‘District 9’, where ‘abject’ refugee aliens and Nigerian gangs reside. Moreover, the district in the end becomes a chaotic battlefield where the South African mercenaries hired by neo-liberal Multi-National United and the Nigerians mercilessly hunt Wikus van de Merwe, an MNU employee, whose mutating body holds a key to operating alien weaponry. These temporary dwellers of District 9 are informed by many levels of displacement and marginalization and are presented as the ‘Other’ to the residents of the ‘human’ world and this ‘Other’ worldliness is intensified by the way in which the director forges the ‘South African’ multilingual condition in the film. This article discusses the colonial and segregationist world-view on the post-apartheid South Africa in the representation of the ‘Other’ multilingual and diasporic landscape.
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'This is Not a Pipe'?: Reflexivity, fictionality and dialogism in Sembène's films
More LessAbstractThe work of Senegalese film-maker Ousmane Sembène is often analysed in terms of its highly ideological and social realist mode. This paper questions the relevance of a one-way ‘film as message’ model by demonstrating how Sembène’s films thematize the limits of meaning. His work systematically emphasizes the dialogical construction of meaning, whether of important symbols like the mask in La Noire de .../Black Girl, or of the films themselves as objects circulating in society. Self-reflexive strategies like posters and cameos by Sembène call the viewer’s attention to the constructedness of the ideological message and the arbitrariness of the film as sign. Sembène’s films are still a call to action, but they are also a call to thought about the factitiousness of narrative, and to dialogue about the work of interpretation.
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Orality, documentary, intertextual performance and discursive practices: A reading of Ye Wonz Maibel (Deluge) 1997 by Salem Mekuria
More LessAbstractThis article offers a reading of Salem Mekuria’s Ye Wonz Maibel (Deluge), a documentary on the Red Terror in Ethiopia under Mengistu Haile Mariam. Mekuria’s film critiques notions of objective and scientific truth on which patriarchal nation states and revolutionary rhetoric often depend. Mekuria does this by using a genre most associated with objectivity and truth – the documentary. Mekuria uses the film as an avenue to get herself and her subjects to actively perform their thinking through of the traumatic events. The process of active introspection allows Mekuria and her subjects to question official accounts of the events. In presenting her subjects’ voices Mekuria challenges the binary victim/oppressor using the notion of the African palaver, and other oral traditions such as sem-enna warq (wax and gold), a major influence in Ethiopian creative expressions. She offers Deluge as a model for participatory intervention and as a discursive and mediational performance.
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Film Review
More LessAbstractA REVIEW OF MUDIMBE’S ORDER OF THINGS, A DOCUMENTARY FILM BY JEAN PIERRE BEKOLO
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Book Reviews
Authors: Mary Okocha and Oswelled UrekeAbstractGLOBAL NOLLYWOOD: THE TRANSNATIONAL DIMENSIONS OF AN AFRICAN VIDEO FILM INDUSTRY, MATTHIAS KRINGS AND ONOOKOME OKOME (EDS) (2013) Indiana University Press, USA 371 pp., p/bk, ISBN: 9780253009357. Paperback $30, Hardcover $80
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