AFRICAN FILMMAKING: Five Formations (African Humanities and the Arts) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1611862450 ISBN 13: 9781611862454

Verlag: MICHIGAN ST UNIV PR, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

This volume attempts to join the disparate worlds of Egyptian, Maghrebian, South African, Francophone, and Anglophone African cinema—that is, five “formations” of African cinema. These five areas are of particular significance—each in its own way. The history of South Africa, heavily marked by apartheid and its struggles, differs considerably from that of Egypt, which early on developed its own “Hollywood on the Nile.” The history of French colonialism impacted the three countries of the Maghreb—Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco—differently than those in sub-Saharan Africa, where Senegal and Sembène had their own great effect on the Sahelian region. Anglophone Africa, particularly the films of Ghana and Nigeria, has dramatically altered the ways people have perceived African cinema for decades. History, geography, production, distribution, and exhibition are considered alongside film studies concerns about ideology and genre. This volume provides essential information for all those interested in the vital worlds of cinema in Africa since the time of the Lumière brothers.
 

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Kenneth W. Harrow is Distinguished Professor of English at Michigan State University. His work focuses on African cinema and literature and diaspora and postcolonial studies.
 

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African Filmmaking

Five Formations

By Kenneth W. Harrow

Michigan State University Press

Copyright © 2017 Michigan State University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61186-245-4

Contents

PREFACE, by Kenneth W. Harrow, 
INTRODUCTION, by Kenneth W. Harrow, 
African Francophone Cinema, by Olivier Barlet and Kenneth W. Harrow, 
Anglophone West Africa: Commercial Video, by Jonathan Haynes, 
Egypt: Cinema and Society, by Viola Shafik, 
The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of the Cinemas of the Maghreb: From the 1960s to the New Millennium, by Valérie K. Orlando, 
Film Production in South Africa: Histories, Practices, Policies, by Jacqueline Maingard, 
ABOUT THE AUTHORS, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

African Francophone Cinema

Olivier Barlet and Kenneth W. Harrow

The question of influence and horizon of possibilities for Francophone filmmakers is similar to that of other independent filmmakers. The need to finance a film has meant that they have had to turn to government agencies or ministries, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or funding agencies or sources, each of which has had its own agenda. The degree of freedom any filmmaker might have is partly determined by his or her own autonomy or stature in the profession, and by his or her stubbornness as well as reputation. Thus Sembène Ousmane was largely able to determine the content and direction of his films, but could not finance his magnum opus, a historical film on El Hadj Umar, despite his long-expressed desire to do so. The most famous anecdote involving the constraints placed on his work concerns Mandabi (1968), which had been funded by the French Centre National de la Cinématographie and coproduced with his own company, Domirev, and Comptoir Français du film (Gadijgo 1993, 35). Having shot the film in Wolof, Sembène was told he had to produce a Francophone version, which required shooting the entire film in French (as Le Mandat) as well as Wolof (Mandabi). The decision to shoot a Wolof version, which has become the standard version today, attested to Sembène's commitment to respond to the needs of his Senegalese audience to understand a film without subtitles, a film in their language. However, his means were limited, and when the actor playing the postman left before the shooting of the film had been completed, Sembène was obliged to reconfigure an ending and produced the montage of earlier shots with voice-over, which is how the film now concludes.

These constraints are examples of the myriad limits placed upon directors who cannot finance projects with their own money. The speculation of what influence the sources of funding have on a director's choice of style and topic, and what audience to target (what implied audience to construct), has been heightened in the case of Francophone African cinema, which has long depended upon subventions from various French governmental or commercial agencies. We might adopt Raymond Williams's (1983) description of the relationship of the superstructure to the base as one of "relative autonomy" — following Gramsci, and later adopted by Althusser (1972). "Relative autonomy" might mean that an African filmmaker might have a vision of a project, and then would have to shop it around the various funding agencies, knowing the kinds of projects they had financed in the past, the weight his or her name might carry, the possibilities of arguing for the likely success of the project with African or European audiences, and so forth. This pattern is true for all filmmakers, but in the case of Francophone literature, its parameters were largely set by the willingness of the French Ministry of Cooperation, its Film Bureau, or of "la Francophonie," situated in one location or another over the years. Andrade-Watkins's conclusion in 1993 holds for today as well: "As black African cinema moves into its third decade, the obstacles to financial and technical self-sufficiency in production, distribution and exhibition have largely remained unresolved" (32). Ironically, as she was penning these words in the early 1990s, Nigerian and Ghanaian video filmmakers were beginning the revolution in African film by creating a cheap, commercial, popular form of cinema that eschewed the ideological commitments and aesthetic choices of what had been the dominant forms of African cinema — FESPACO films — that had been established since Vieyra's "L'Afrique sur Seine" (1955) and Sembène's La Noire de ... (1966).

Efforts to duplicate the new digital revolution have been made in Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, and Senegal, and throughout many other African countries, with a wide shift in the direction of films with high entertainment values, commercial priorities, and often emotional, melodramatic, personal storylines once considered inappropriate for newly independent African states (Boughedir 1976). The term "genre" films, which encompass telenovela-style series, action and crime dramas, as well as films focusing on magic, Evangelical Christian baselines, love potions, poisonings, and especially lush, luxurious settings, have reconfigured the horizon of possibilities, driving many of the Nigerian marketers to demand conformity to these selling points in the creation of quickly made, inexpensive films.

In what follows, a chronological structure of dominant paradigms, or phases, will be set out. This is not intended as teleological, but rather is closer to what Russian formalists understood by the dominant as a tendency that marked a period, even as simultaneously other paradigms and cultural approaches were deployed. Here we should understand that even as filmmakers set out to create an African cinema in the 1960s, their signature work continued during subsequent periods that developed new trends, and that those dominant trends never totally eclipsed earlier approaches and trends. During any decade, one might see different approaches continue, even as some emerged and dominated the screens for a time.

The naissance of African cinema from its earliest idealized version was inspired by Russian socialist values. African cinema of the 1960s and 1970s dealt with issues of social/political engagement, the need to confront the immediate problems of nationhood, the challenge of the new nations facing their future, and the dreams of creating the New Africa, the New African Man and Woman. Sembène's early films Borom Sarret (1963), Tauw (1970), and Xala (1975) contain shots that highlight the time since independence. This is the optic through which African cinema was viewed as serious, political, and, most of all, engagé, the key term for the 1960s–1970s.

The first films by African directors, including Paulin Vieyra, Sembène Ousmane, and Oumarou Ganda, occurred at the time of the struggle for the end of colonialism and for independence — a time that defined its values around the works of Fanon, Memmi, Cabral; around the war in Algeria, whence the great importance that came to be attached to The Battle of Algiers (1966) as the signature piece of revolutionary filmmaking; around Marxist belief in class struggle and Engel's analysis of imperialism; around the solidarity of the black struggle, whence the embrace of C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins (1938). It was a period that laid the foundation for the soon-to-develop struggle against neocolonialism, and with the compromised new leadership that introduced one-party states or corruption, and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: MICHIGAN ST UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1611862450
• ISBN 13: 9781611862454
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 314
• Herausgeber: Harrow Kenneth W.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland