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- Volume 8, Issue 3, 2016
Journal of African Cinemas - Volume 8, Issue 3, 2016
Volume 8, Issue 3, 2016
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Women in ‘African cinema’ and ‘Nollywood films’: A shift in cinematic regimes
More LessAbstractThere have been dramatic changes in depictions of women from the feminist perspectives in the first decades of postcolonial sub-Saharan African celluloid cinema (1960s–80s), to women in a global digital era (1990s–present). A classic example of African celluloid cinema, its style and political gravitas, can be seen in Jean-Marie Teno’s latest film, Une feuille dans le vent (2013). Though it appeared in the digital period, and may technically be digital, stylistically and thematically it bears all the hallmarks of ‘FESPACO cinema’. Conversely, the work of Tunde Kelani, one of the stalwarts of Nollywood video film, falls under the rubric of ‘African video film’, often dubbed ‘Nollywood’. To understand what the shift from ‘serious African cinema’ to Nollywood has meant for women and feminism in African cinema, I will elaborate on Butler and Athanasiou’s notion of dispossession in considering Teno’s ‘celluloid’ Feuille and Frank Arase’s digital Beyonce (2006). I hope to bridge issues of early African feminism that focused on representation to those now framed in terms of genre cinema.
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Haile Gerima’s Sankofa experience: Man, mission, movie, movement
More LessAbstractThe collective memory of the slave experience is imprinted on the minds and hearts of many African descendants in the Americas. However, many do not recognize or acknowledge this memory until it is pricked by an image, story or an experience. Sankofa, the 1993 slave narrative film by Ethiopian director Haile Gerima, did just that. Drawing on press accounts, oral history and critical analysis of Sankofa, this study adopts a Third Cinema framework to explore the distribution and reception of Sankofa with its primarily African American audience. This study asserts that Sankofa’s institutional dynamics contributed to an activist movement around the film. Further, the film’s narrative and form, specifically Gerima’s adoption of five key cinematic strategies, privileged the black spectator in a dialectical exploration of slave history.
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Experimental cartographies in Tariq Teguia’s Inland
By Anna VictorAbstractThis article argues that Tariq Teguia’s 2008 film Inland establishes a new frontier for North African cinema with the creation of a unique visual style that moves away from the thematic considerations of national cinema. Teguia’s work can be located within that of an emergent ‘cinema d’auteur’, which privileges an aesthetic exploration of the political and philosophical. Teguia’s film provides a visual and spatial form for a mapping of postcolonial Algerian space inspired by the journey of a clandestine migrant who, originally heading to Europe, reverses her path midway through the film in order to travel back to sub-Saharan Africa, thus marking a shift from an economy of extraction-oriented north to an analysis of spatial production turned towards the global south. This reversal of a dominant narrative of migration enables Teguia to generate an experimental cartography that theorizes an interior as a site of infinite space.
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Empire Cinema: Propaganda and censorship in colonial films during the Portuguese Estado Novo
More LessAbstractAiming to provide a critical analysis of the filmic memorial of Portuguese colonialism I consider two alternative ‘visions of cinema’: the official version presented in Estado Novo propaganda newsreels, and, in ‘reverse shot’, the disruptive gaze found in censored auteur fiction films – Faria de Almeida’s Catembe (1965), Lopes Barbosa’s Deixem-me ao Menos Subir às Palmeiras… (1972) and António de Sousa’s Esplendor Selvagem (1972). Portuguese colonies were seldom depicted on film, and only the ‘right kind’ of images – specifically those presented in propaganda newsreels – tended to be approved by the censorship committees. Faria de Almeida received government support to film everyday life in Mozambique’s capital, in 1964. After the first version of the film was censored – with 103 cuts, a Guinness world record – projection of Catembe was banned.1 In 1972, Barbosa made a film about abuses of power in colonial farms in Mozambique. The film was banned. Sousa recorded initiation rituals and rites of passage in different Angolan ethnic groups. The documentary was considered ‘anti-political’. Until conducting this research, the films remained deposited at the Portuguese Cinema Museum, largely unknown to audiences and researchers. What are the limitations of the history of cinema – and of the knowledge of the ‘imagined man’ – as long as the perspectives provided in such censored colonial films remain unanalysed?
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Perspectives on new popular African cinema, history and creative destruction in Viva Riva! (2011)
More LessAbstractPerspectives on new popular African cinema, history and creative destruction in Viva Riva! (2011) reflects on Viva Riva! and the resurgence of contemporary African cinema in a rapidly changing knowledge economy. This new creative environment is embedded in a shifting power dynamic where digital platforms, have revolutionized viewing habits on the continent and in the diaspora. This new knowledge economy and social changes affect how the African filmmakers work, identify and mobilize cinematic resources in order to create a unique approach when developing new cinematic aesthetic sensibilities that match technologies with the Zeitgeist in Africa. These new expressive film techniques capture and resonate with an audience whose particular modes of reception have migrated from the movie theatre to emerging and converging digital platforms such as streaming technologies, social media and Internet movie downloads on laptops, iPhones, iPads, smartphones, YouTube, Netflix, DVDs, VODs, cable and satellite.
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Film Review
By Sheila PettyAbstractFI RASSI ROND-POINT (DANS MA TÊTE UN ROND-POINT) (A ROUNDABOUT IN MY HEAD), HASSEN FERHANI (DIR.) (2015) 100 mins, Arabic, Centrale Electrique/Allers Retours Films Algeria/France/Qatar/Netherlands/Lebanon
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Book Reviews
Authors: Jyoti Mistry and Lillian Omolara ShoroyeAbstractAFRICA’S LOST CLASSICS: NEW HISTORIES OF AFRICAN CINEMA, LIZELLE BISSCHOFF AND DAVID MURPHY (EDS) (2014) London: Legenda – Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing ISBN: 9781907975516, 271 pp., hardback, £75, $99
AUTEURING NOLLYWOOD: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE FIGURINE, ADESHINA AFOLAYAN (ED.) (2014) Ibadan: University Press PLC ISBN: 978780698287, xxii + 457 pp., paperback, $42.95
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