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- Volume 7, Issue 2, 2015
Journal of African Cinemas - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2015
Volume 7, Issue 2, 2015
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A feminist approach to contemporary female Kenyan cinema: Women and nation in From a Whisper (Kahiu, 2008) and Something Necessary (Kibinge, 2013)
More LessAbstractThis article addresses depictions of women in relation to nation in two contemporary Kenyan films made by women: From a Whisper (Wanuri Kahiu, 2008) and Something Necessary (Judy Kibinge, 2013). The analysis of the films is located within the theoretical framework of African feminism. Using textual analysis as its main method, this article argues that these films convey an African feminist sensibility. This is revealed in the contextualised women’s issues that the films address, in their equalitarian representation of men and women as identifiable through their common humanity, and in their pacifist messages about conflict resolution and forgiveness. Moreover, this article intends to show that these films successfully tie the personal to the political, as individual stories of Kenyan women are intertwined with national events and post-trauma national reconstruction. Thus the films highlight the role of women in nation-building, to which the film-makers themselves contribute.
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Kenya’s Riverwood: Market structure, power relations, and future outlooks
More LessAbstractThis article analyses the economic structure, market dynamics and power relations in Kenya’s Riverwood movie circuit. Similarities and differences with better-known African popular cinema industries are highlighted and tentatively explained. The article pays attention to historical background, context factors, individual agency and questions of justice and fairness in the circuit. Riverwood may at first glance appear to be just another example of the African popular cinema genre, but on closer inspection shows as many dissimilarities as similarities with, for instance, Nollywood and Bongowood.
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Film production as a ‘mirror of society’: The history of a video film art group in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
More LessAbstractThe Tanzanian video film industry is one example for the changes in popular arts production due to the introduction of the medium video film. The shift to the medium video film has created new visual styles and restructured physical and social spaces of production. Focusing on the history of the video film art group White Elephant, this article aims to show how the production of video films under conditions of intense competition and time pressure is a site of struggle over aesthetics, resources, identities and status. Relating the film groups to the history of art groups in Eastern Africa will point to the differences and continuities between the independent commercial production of video film and former popular art production as well as their relation to the state. This fields of production and the struggles within can be seen as a ‘mirror of society’ characterizing the dynamics of social change in contemporary Tanzania.
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Innovation and its obstacles in Tanzania’s Bongowood
More LessAbstractThis article analyses selected ‘forces for change’ in contemporary Bongowood: Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam-based popular cinema industry. It focuses on cases embedded in what I term ‘core Bongowood’: the production and distribution of Swahili-language movies, produced on low budgets, released on DVD and targeted at local (Tanzanian, and by extension Swahili-speaking) audiences. The ‘forces for change’ discussed are individuals or organizations in the industry, working to influence or alter it. The change they aim for can be creative in kind, i.e. related to the movies produced, or it can be related to Bongowood’s value chain and inherent power relations. These organizations and individuals face several obstacles, most of them related to characteristics of the industry itself: a quasi-monopoly perpetuating an established imbalance of power, protected and reproduced by the most powerful players in it.
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The Slum Film Festival in Nairobi: Exploring cinematic representation from the urban margins
Authors: Federico Olivieri and Joshua Michael WongAbstractSince the introduction of digital film-making in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, there has been an unprecedented growth of audio-visual production by individuals within these communities despite the fact that venues for local exhibition were virtually non-existent. In 2011, a specific film event called the Slum Film Festival (SFF) was created to both recognize these unique, self-mediated representations from the slums and to screen these films for their own internal audiences. In this article, we will question how mainstream media relegates slum communities to the margins of formal urban life by documenting some of the aspects that led to the creation of this particular film festival and commenting on some of its selected films. By using qualitative information from literature review, first-hand professional experience of the authors in Nairobi and interviews with SFF participants, we will analyse external and internal perceptions of the slums through its films, which compose a ‘slum filmography’ resulting in a more diverse understanding of Kenya’s main urban slums and more complex definitions of identity.
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Screening Ethiopia: A preliminary study of the history and contemporary developments of film production in Ethiopia
More LessAbstractUntil recently, Ethiopian cinema has attracted little scholarly attention outside the country. Nevertheless, its history is rich and complex, and thanks to the introduction of digital technologies, film production is today booming. Almost 600 films have been released over the past ten years, a fifth of it only during 2013. Crowds of people queue in front of Addis Ababa’s theatre halls, waiting to buy entry tickets to the most recent local releases. And ambitious young artists spend their little economies trying to build a name for themselves in the upcoming local stardom. This article presents the preliminary results of an ongoing research on the Ethiopian video film industry in order to open up the field for further discussion and debate. It is divided into four sections, devoted respectively to the history of film-making in Ethiopia, to the contemporary video film industry’s economy, and to an overview of the main narrative and aesthetic trends that have appeared since the emergence of the new wave of film production.
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Cinematographic techniques in three Kenyan films
More LessAbstractThis study investigates cinematography in Kenyan feature films from 1980 to 2010. Informed by Michael Rabiger’s (2008) view of film form as the manner in which content is presented, it is grounded on the assumption that the formal trajectories of the Kenyan feature films in the industry’s first three decades have been shaped, to a large extent by certain historical, economic or sociopolitical dynamics that characterized the country in that period. Three films, Kolormask (Gamba, 1986), Saikati (Mungai, 1992) and Unseen, Unsung, Unforgotten (Ombogo-Scott and Mbuthia, 2008) are analysed to form a basis for this discussion. Each of the three films represents a decade in the history of feature film making in post-independent Kenya. A film represents a decade because the rate of film production per year was extremely low as the industry began. This continues to change today. Text analysis and interviews with film-makers form the larger sources of primary data for this study.
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