11 |
African Film |
It is a truism of African cinema that one cannot productively discuss the films that make up the field without keeping in mind the social and economic conditions under which they are made. Fifty years after the first feature film to be written, produced, and directed by an African, and with this cinematic tradition becoming as globally important an art form as African literature and the Afropop component of world music, economic, political, and cultural factors continue to be central to its full understanding. It is therefore not surprising that, across three generations, issues of political and cultural identity are a main topical preoccupation of African filmmakers. For various reasons younger, often foreign-based filmmakers have sharply reacted in their work against the biases of their predecessors who came from a background of anticolonial activism, thus showing the limitations of earlier practices. However, sociopolitical situations in contemporary African countries, as well as the larger economic order in the world, are so crucial to most forms of cultural production that they cannot be totally ignored. As a result, filmmakers have developed a more complex treatment of sociopolitical issues. Emphasis has shifted in their works from a simple notion of rejection as a way of asserting identity to the understanding that identity usually results from a number of different factors. They have begun to experiment with forms and genres, drawing on music, dance, youth culture, fashion, and sundry expressive forms and reflecting greater awareness of cinematic traditions from different parts of the world.
This chapter looks at African cinema as a historical phenomenon, focusing on the institutional, thematic, and technological changes that have shaped the field since its inception in the early 1960s. The discussion is organized along five thematic lines. These include an account of the broad cultural agendas aimed at countering the negative stereotypes of Africa, Africans, and the black world propagated through popular films of Hollywood; an in-depth look at the career of Ousmane Sembene, the late Senegalese director and arguably the most influential African filmmaker whose work embodies the central concerns of African cinema in its various stages; the different strategies developed by filmmakers to cope with the specific institutional problems militating against filmmaking as an economic and cultural practice; an overview of the development of national and regional cinemas across the continent; and the various thematic changes that African cinema has undergone, especially in the last two decades. In conclusion, we look at the new institutional developments in different parts of the continent as well as the rise of new perspectives among women and the young, and what these portend for the continuing relevance of this cinematic tradition.
Prior to 1963, when Sembene released Borom Sarret, his first feature film, what passed for cinema in the African continent were mainly the propaganda films produced for the administrative purposes of the colonial governments. These were conventional documentaries highlighting “native” institutions and customs and aimed at foreign observers and researchers, instructional and educational films on the advantages of modern medical and technical innovations, and the like. A notable figure in this period in English-speaking countries was William Seller, whose career was closely tied to the bureaucratic structure called the Colonial Film Unit in Nigeria and Ghana (the latter formerly called the Gold Coast). After World War II, a major development in cinema came from Jean Rouch, the French ethnographer who, between 1948 and his death in 2004, produced more than a hundred films. Rouch was an exponent of “shared anthropology” in cinema, the process whereby a foreign director filmed a cultural event or ritual and later exhibited the film to the same people who had been filmed, with the expectation that mutual cultural understanding would result from the encounter. Among his major titles are Les maîtres fous (The Mad Masters), Jaguar, La chasse au lion à l’arc (The Lion Hunters), Moi, un noir (I, a black), and Petit à petit (Little by Little). Partly because of his position as a French intellectual working with young Africans who aspired to become filmmakers (such as Oumarou Ganda, Safi Faye, and Moustapha Alassane), Rouch was to prove very influential in the development of African cinema. His approach took for granted that technical expertise lay with the director, who, given the state of the technology of filmmaking, was quite often also the cameraman and the narrator, while his subjects, such as the Dogon of Mali and the Souk fishermen of Niger, possessed the knowledge of the ritual or custom being filmed. Rouch’s influence was not a simple one. Indeed, some of the early African directors saw it as part of their duty to contest the assumptions behind “shared anthropology” because they saw parallels between ethnographic cinema and colonial cinema. It was an era when the old racist images of Africa and Africans propagated by Hollywood in the Tarzan films and the screen adaptations of the novels of Rider Haggard were being reinforced by some of the official policies of French and British colonial governments. The depiction of Africans in the ethnographic films of Rouch might not have been as negative as in the popular Hollywood films, but he was still a foreign interlocutor, and his primary audience was not African.
It was in this context that Sembene, a former soldier in World War II and a union organizer in Marseilles, France, came on the scene. Sembene had begun his career as a novelist, producing several stories and the novels Le docker noir (The Black Docker) and Les bouts de bois de Dieu (God’s Bits of Wood), which deal with the complex relations between Africans and their French rulers in the late colonial period. But he was also concerned that these novels, written in French and published mainly in Paris, were not accessible to the illiterate and poor Africans to whom he wished to address his work. Therefore, he traveled to Moscow for technical training in filmmaking, returning in 1963 to set in motion a long and productive career. Before we come to a detailed discussion of Sembene’s films, it is important to place his emergence in a wider historical context.
The period between the end of World War II in the mid-1940s and the fall of Soviet communism in the late 1980s is regarded as the period of decolonization. This was the time when African, Caribbean, and Asian countries formerly under the control of European powers—France, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal—achieved political independence and came into their own as sovereign nations. A corollary of political independence was the sense among intellectuals from these new nations that they also had to be in control of how the world saw them, and that the decades of negative images through the powerful medium of cinema had to be reversed. Thus, emerging filmmakers and critics developed the idea of cinema as a “tool for revolution.” In a series of manifestos and communiqués and in the establishment of the Festival Panafricain du Cinéma de Ouagadougou (FESPACO) in Burkina Faso and the Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia, these filmmakers and scholars made an explicit point of relating their works to the nationalist ideals of Pan-Africanism. This was not an exclusively African development, but part of a global Third World agenda, coinciding with similar efforts in South Asia, the Middle East, and South America. In cinema history, these various efforts developed into an important aesthetic formation that goes by the name “Third Cinema” and was promoted by a group of South American artist-intellectuals.
Widely acknowledged as the pioneer of African cinema, the late Sembene (d. 2007) came to filmmaking at age forty, after publishing a number of canonical novels and stories. He made a total of thirteen films over forty years: L’empire Sonhrai (documentary, 1963), Borom Sarret (1963), Niaye (1964), La noire de . . . (Black Girl, 1965), Mandabi (1968), Taaw (1970), Emitai (1971), Xala (1974), Ceddo (1976 [1981]), Camp de Thiaroye (1989), Guelwaar (1992), Faat Kine (2000), and Moolaadé (2004). His best-known novel, God’s Bits of Wood, is reportedly being prepared for cinema in collaboration with Danny Glover, the African American actor. Born in January 1923 in Ziguinchor, southern Senegal, the teenage Ousmane enrolled for a school certificate, the sure passport to a clerical job in a French colony. But he was expelled for assaulting a teacher and spent his early youth in Dakar, doing odd jobs. After he was demobilized as a soldier in World War II, he went back to France and worked as a dockworker and trade unionist, during which he wrote his first novels and stories. Sembene was aware that limited literacy and access to technology posed problems to potential audiences of African cultural productions, and so in 1961 he enrolled at the Gorki Institute in Moscow to study filmmaking. Two years later, he produced and directed Borom Sarret (The Wagoner, 1963). It narrates the story of a Dakar cart driver who is hired to take a client to an upscale neighborhood (the Plateau) and has his lowly transport confiscated for trespassing in such elite quarters. Shot in black and white and entirely in exterior (meaning filmed outdoors), the cart driver’s internal monologue tracked through the synchronous sound of French, the nineteen-minute film captures the intrusive stare of passers-by, proof of the newness of the camera as a tool in the public domain. Cinema, Sembene declared at the outset and repeated throughout his career, was a kind of evening school. It was also a means of controlling the terms of discourse about the continent.
Two other films of that decade, La noire de . . . (Black Girl, 1965) and Mandabi (The Money Order, 1968), continue with the project of developing an African perspective in cinema. For Sembene, the question of political liberty was inseparable from the challenge of fusing different traditions—technological, narrative, artistic—in the service of a modern African society. This society is imagined as continental, and it is a potentially self-sufficient one; the filmmaker is on record as describing Africa as the center of his world: “Why be the sunflower and look up to the sun?” he asks in Férid Boughédir’s historical documentary Caméra d’Afrique (1982). The context of production is important to an understanding of Sembene’s work. In different ways, his career epitomized the problems faced by postcolonial African writers and artists, but especially filmmakers, cinema being a capital-intensive undertaking, in terms of both production and distribution.1 Moreover, his thematic interests and portrayal of historical events put him in conflict with political authorities in his native Senegal (especially under the leadership of the poet-president Léopold Senghor), resulting in the censoring of some of his films. Sembene’s films can be challenging both in the kind of questions they raise and in how such questions are raised. The viewer is at once exasperated and engaged by the “truthfulness” of a scene of confrontation, for example between the educated sergeant Diatta and the soldiers in Camp de Thiaroye (1989), dealing with the mass murder of African soldiers returning from World War II. While Diatta’s liberal argument for dialogue is convincing, it is equally difficult to impeach the illiterate soldiers’ point about the danger of negotiating with the French commanders. A similar clarity can be seen in the refusal of the film Ceddo to idealize traditional institutions, represented in the film by the Diola monarchy, the weakest of the groups in contention for power. In Sembene’s films, the camera presents a polarized but dynamic spectacle, capturing the actors in a frontal frame, the better to support the moral or political weight of the argument. No other African filmmaker exhibits quite this signature; it is even rarer in contemporary cinema, where nuance is often synonymous with artistic sophistication. But this is not to say that Sembene’s work lacks subtlety. There are several levels of narration in any number of his films, and the director’s sharp sense of form keeps each thread well in focus. The stylistic approach sees resolution, which usually comes at the end of a given film, as a kind of empowerment outside the frame, as if the final word is a matter for debate in real life.
What makes Sembene’s career important to any discussion of African cinema is the enduring way it has grappled with the historical, social, political, and personal dimensions of contemporary experiences on the continent. Most new-generation filmmakers are notable for their unwillingness to present their films as the mouthpieces of political engagement, preferring to play up issues of cultural mixing, exile, transnationalism, and cinema itself as a reflexive form. Sembene’s later works do not ignore these issues, but they address them within the context of the director’s familiar signature. Examples of this attitude toward new forms of identity and ways of being in society are present in his last two films, Faat Kine (1999) and Moolaadé (2004), parts of a trilogy on what he tagged as “stories of daily heroism.” The eponymous heroine of the first film is a successful gas-station proprietor who as a young girl was impregnated and then abandoned by her teacher, and subsequently thrown out by her father for bringing shame to the family. But Faat Kine is now also the proud mother of two dignified children, and her relationships toward them, her former boyfriends, and others she encounters in her line of work convey the sense of a woman with a deep awareness of her endless possibilities and her freedom to explore them. Moolaadé, which deals with the issue of female circumcision, closes with an extraordinary image of a huge pile of radios being burned in an attempt by the affronted men to destroy the source of the women’s power to resist the age-old practice. The larger context for this spectacle is the phenomenon of global media, which is liberating for many people in the world, filmmakers no less. Sembene here appears to be killing two birds with one stone: addressing the futility of censoring a democratic mass medium such as radio, and underlining the importance of such a medium in forging identities that male-dominated societies can no longer control.
Figure 11.1. Ousmane Sembene accepts the prize of the jury for Moolaadé at the Fourth International Film Festival in Marrakesh, Morocco, on December 12, 2004.
Getty Images.
Indeed, the point could be made that through these kinds of confrontation between the old and the new, Sembene is also giving artistic relevance to questions of identity that take cognizance of the issues that younger filmmakers are wrestling with, whether they are based on the continent or outside it.
The Tunisian filmmaker and critic Férid Boughédir once remarked: “Francophone African film exists because of France and also doesn’t exist because of France” (Diawara 1992: 31). This comment goes to the heart of the problematic relationship between France and its former African colonies with regard to the development of African cinema. As a country with a reputable history of cinema, France in the postwar years was involved in an important, though understated, struggle with the United States over the control of the world market in film distribution. Thus, the government in Paris created a powerful Ministry of Cooperation as part of the official French policy of assimilation, even as the advent of African cinema coincided with the end of French empire. This ministry was critical in providing technical and financial aid to some of the earliest African filmmakers, and the birth of an institution such as FESPACO would have been difficult without the support of the French government. For a cultural formation predicated on the anti-imperial agenda of taking control of self-representation, African cinema was soon in the paradoxical position of being sustained technically, financially, and in terms of human support by the same institutions it had to confront. This is the paradox that Boughédir’s statement highlights, and it is not limited to the role of the French Ministry of Cooperation (which is no longer in existence, having been absorbed into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the mid-1990s).
In the global scheme of things, new African nations were not in a position to take adequate advantage of cinema because they lacked the necessary technological expertise. Issues of education, industrialization, and technical and infrastructural development were considered of priority in countries that continued to supply a substantial amount of the world’s raw materials, while cinema appeared no more than a luxury. The two dominant tendencies in cinema at the time seemed to confirm this prejudice: Hollywood films were seen as mere escapist entertainment, while serious, experimental films were regarded as sophisticated meditations that self-important artists were free to pursue but young nations could ill afford. If cinema was thought to serve any immediate purpose, this was understood to be in the area of documentation of official activities of national governments and the production of newsreels. In most cases, the apparatus of the old colonial film unit was considered up to that task.
However, this view of cinema was seriously mistaken. As an art, cinema pertains to both culture and industry—that is, a film is both a cultural object and a commodity. The finished product, screened in theaters or sold as cassettes or DVDs, is the end result not just of several collaborations but also of complex strategies of funding, distribution, and exhibition. The African continent could boast of brilliant filmmakers including Youssef Chahine (Egypt), Ousmane Sembene (Senegal), Med Hondo (Mauritania), Souleymane Cissé (Mali), and so on, but questions of distribution and the monopolies of Hollywood, Bollywood, and Hong Kong films in African cities constantly put the works of these world-class filmmakers out of the reach of African audiences. This was, and remains, a big problem for African cinema—the fact that for reasons of technical and economic logistics, African films are more widely known and discussed in North America and Western Europe than on the continent.
In the last decade and a half, there have been positive, if complex, changes. One interesting case is Zimbabwe’s Film for Development Trust, which provides funds for filmmakers to produce films that have an immediate relevance because they directly address social issues. It has supported the works of writer-filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga (Everybody’s Child) and producer Godwin Mawuru (Neria). More recently, it has collaborated with the Nigerian director Tunde Kelani, who produced or directed a number of social-issue films (Yellow Card; White Handkerchief). There is also the New Directions initiative from MNET, the South African cable network, which commissions upcoming directors to make small-budget films. The collaboration with Kelani was based on an important factor, one that has recently undercut the argument that African films do not appeal to African audiences: the rise of the Nigerian film industry, sometimes tagged as “Nollywood.” This phenomenon developed out of economic necessity. Filmmakers such as Ola Balogun, Francis Oladele, and Eddie Ugbomah, all trained to use conventional technology of celluloid cinema and carry out postproduction abroad, soon realized that economic and social conditions in the country could no longer support that kind of filmmaking. Most of them gave up; others resorted to using basic video cameras and local studios to shoot and edit their films. It was a rough and unpretty beginning, and there is no doubt that the industry, in spite of its successes, is still light-years away from the dreams of filmmakers such as Sembene or Abderrahmane Sissako. But the films are available not just on Nigerian streets but across the continent and in many parts of the world as well, in a manner that Sembene only dreamed of. Since the technology of filmmaking has become increasingly cheaper and many more filmmakers are being trained and better exposed, it is hoped that the technical and ideological blind spots in the Nigerian films will be overcome with time. There is a similar development taking place in Ghana, a country that shared the British colonial heritage with Nigeria and whose film industry was similarly shaped by policies arising from the British establishment’s understanding of the role of film. The difference here is best understood in terms of the difference between the work of Rouch and Seller, as discussed above.
The history of cinema on the African continent is inseparable from the history of European colonialism. The birth of cinema in the mid-1890s coincided with the nineteenth-century process of colonial conquest, and what we watch and study as African cinema has developed in part through the instrumentality of the administrative system known as la francophonie, the cultural-linguistic sphere of French influence outside Europe, as well as the British Colonial Film Unit (although the film industries of Egypt and South Africa constitute important exceptions on the continent). As the critic Roy Armes points out in his recent history of African filmmaking, the African films produced within this paradigm are industrial and cultural products of individuals and institutions that came into being under nationalism, the decisive development of the modern era. The historical process of nationalism thus ensured that films would be perceived and treated as belonging to discrete nations, and that institutions would be established (or at least conceived) to support the development of cinema. Thus although an institution such as FESPACO has continued to advance the cause of African film, its ability to do so cannot be fully understood outside of the competing (and sometimes complementary) policy goals of the government of Burkina Faso and France’s Bureau of Cinema. What this reveals, more in Francophone African countries than in Anglophone or Lusophone ones, is the analogy between nation and language as it pertains to the field of literary studies. In other words, a national cinema is believed to be the form for the expression of different aspects of the culture of a given country, and it performs this role within the parameters of the language of cinema, much as literature was believed to do for a given country, such as Italian literature did for Italy and the Italian language.
However, the idea of a national cinema as embodying the artistic vision of filmmakers identified with a particular nation remained powerful even in countries that did not have the benefit of the patronage of a former colonial overlord. As the filmmaker and film theorist John Akomfrah argued some years ago, nationalist sentiments within a particular country represented a phase that independence-era Pan-African intellectuals believed would be transcended. This hope was not realized, however, and so the film industry continued to be organized discretely within individual countries, and always as part of the kind of industrialization that was expected to transform each country into a modern, self-reproducing society. It was out of this sense of national self-determination that countries such as Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Cameroon, and Kenya all established different institutions dedicated to the cinema industry in the 1970s and 1980s. While it is true that these corporations or cinema societies also saw to questions of distribution and exhibition of all motion pictures, including foreign imports, they certainly abetted the production of local work, such as Sembene’s acclaimed film Xala, the first film to be co-produced with Senegal’s National Society for Cinema.
Two examples are relevant in shedding light on this relationship between the nation-state and film production in the African context. In Boughédir’s famous documentary Caméra d’Afrique, the question of the monopoly of distribution networks by powerful companies (not easily regulated by the governments) provided the basis for a rancorous discussion between filmmakers and financiers. Given the perception that distributors and financiers were influential in determining which African films were seen on the continent, it was revealed in that documentary that fourteen African countries decided to nationalize their film industries in 1980 as a way of breaking the monopoly exercised by the foreign distributors. The extent to which such actions succeeded in mobilizing film production remains uncertain, as the unavailability of African films continues to be an issue. Second, during the 1980s, the Belgian scholar Victor Bachy produced a series of monographs that offered overviews of cinema-related activities in select African countries. These monographs were commissioned by the International Catholic Organization for Cinema and Audiovisuals (OCIC) and published by the Paris-based L’Harmattan. They included volumes on Senegal (Paulin Soumanou Vieyra), Niger (Ousmane Ilbo), Cameroon (Arthur Si Bita), and Nigeria (Françoise Balogun). The rationale behind the series was national segmentation of film production, and this has to be seen in relation to Akomfrah’s argument about the limitations of the Pan-African ideal in a form such as cinema, which in order to be national has to be equally about culture and industry.
The picture was different both in Lusophone countries and within that group. Each of these countries—Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Principe, and Cape Verde—came into its own through wars of liberation against Portugal in the 1960s and 1970s. Liberation went hand in hand with cinema, and in most cases as part of the process of national reconstruction that followed each successful war. The film historian Claire Andrade-Watkins speaks of this production context as that of “liberation cinema,” which drew some of its ideological orientation from the notion of Third Cinema. She also notes the decisive impact of the filmmaker Ruy Guerra in the development of the film industry in Mozambique, perhaps the most successful of the experiments in liberation cinema in countries with Marxist-Leninist political sympathies. Guerra’s role was more decisive than the experiments by leading French filmmakers, notably Jean Rouch and Jean-Luc Godard. In Angola, the enthusiasm for film production was not sustained following the attainment of independence, but film production remains a function largely supported by the national ministry of culture. Perhaps the career of the Bissauan filmmaker Flora Gomes best illustrates the travails of national cinema in Lusophone countries. Here was an accomplished filmmaker with a recognizable style and a sizable oeuvre, but without any kind of film industry as support base.
This picture will not be complete without an idea of the situation in North Africa. Historically, countries such as Egypt and Morocco had an earlier start on filmmaking than most of the countries to the south. In fact, cinema in Egypt ranks next to South Africa’s cinema in terms of its development more as an industry and less as a practice tied to the assertion of cultural and/or historical identities. For example, the career of the late Youssef Chahine drew upon a history of modernist art specific to the history of Alexandria, putting this director in the league of world-famous filmmakers. Indeed, Chahine, from a bourgeois Coptic background, studied acting in the United States, attending the Pasadena Playhouse, and was already making films in the early 1950s. His autobiographical film, Alexandria . . . Why (1978), gives an idea of this director’s aesthetic worldview: not only do few African directors attempt such self-analysis in their work, but it is also rare to find a trilogy of films devoted to a native city, such as we have from Chahine’s oeuvre.
Chahine may have been a modernist master before the politicized era of FESPACO and its strings of communiqués that sought to tie filmmaking to the political agenda of decolonization, but there are other North African filmmakers who did not view their work outside of the worldwide progressive ideas that caught on in the mid-1960s. Topmost in this category are Tunisian directors Férid Boughédir and Tahar Cheriaa, both of whom identified with the ideological direction followed by the independence-era filmmakers. Indeed, for them, filmmaking was a political tool, and their progressive political orientation enabled them to relate to the continent in terms of common sociopolitical issues faced by the people, irrespective of cultural or racial differences. Of course, the political optimism that informed the attitude of the Tunisian cineasts has largely faded not only on the continent but also across the world, and the works of younger directors from North Africa are developed within the national cinema industry while also participating in the global artistic network, like those of many African filmmakers. Nor is the history of filmmaking in these countries a sum of the directors’ histories. In Egypt, the industrial form of cinema ensured the growth of the melodrama, and this may explain the vibrancy of this cinema relative to much of the continent.
What all this points to is the diverse ways in which cinema has found its place across the continent. Although nationalism was the driving force behind cultural development, it is worthy of note that the idea of national cinema, as culture and industry, remains highly problematic in the African context.
Released in 1987, both Yeelen (Brightness, dir. Souleymane Cissé) and La vie est belle (Life Is Rosy, dir. Mweze Ngangura) seem to point early to the changing aesthetics of African cinema. As suggested earlier, some critics and practitioners have argued that political didacticism in film is the great turnoff to mass audiences. They contend that cinema is a form of entertainment, and the militancy of political cinema limits its appeal to the continent’s diverse audiences. By using the popular genre of music comedy (La vie est belle) and allegory (Yeelen), the two directors suggest alternative ways of creating a self-sustaining industry based on nondidactic approaches to storytelling. Perhaps it was a coincidence that these films came out at about the same time, but a close look at films produced in the past decade and a half will reveal that a proliferation of aesthetic modes is far from accidental. Young directors such as Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Jean-Marie Teno, Fanta Régina Nacro, Abderrahmane Sissako, Moussa Sene Absa, Flora Gomes, Zola Maseko, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Mahamat Saleh-Haroun, Joseph Gaï Ramaka, and many others are taking African cinema to a level of self-awareness that puts them at par with their contemporaries in other parts of the world. The defining character of cinema in this phase is not so much its historical identity as its aesthetic openness. For these filmmakers, being African goes without saying, but cinema is a tool they choose consciously, and that choice comes with different kinds of responsibilities. There is no doubt that this generation of directors is able to take African identity for granted largely because the previous generation had labored under such a burden. It is also important to note that although most of the directors discussed here are young, the artistic innovation characteristic of the new tendency is not limited to young directors.
This new tendency in African cinema has five identifiable features. First, there is a concern with film as a distinct form with its own language. This is manifested in the ways that a given film simultaneously develops as a story and draws attention to cinema as a medium unlike any other. For example, Gomes’s second film, Udju azul di Yonta (The Blue Eyes of Yonta, 1991), tells the story of a poor student who writes a romantic letter to a beautiful young girl, who in turn is infatuated with an older man. As this intriguing narrative unfolds, the viewer is attracted to the self-consciousness of the camera through pauses, artificial darkness or light, and low-angle shots, all occurring without compromising or overstating the importance of the narrative. This concern with the apparatus of cinema is raised to the level of an argument in Bekolo’s 1996 film Aristotle’s Plot, where we are invited to meditate on conventional storytelling originating in Aristotle’s The Poetics and its implications for the future of cinema in an African context.
Indeed, the question of genre this film broaches is the second feature of the new African cinema. Different films demonstrate that although drama is important in cinema, it is only one of several possibilities. Thus, many new films are using different genres and forms either to supplement a film’s story line or as its central motif. Ramaka’s Karmen Gei retells the Carmen story in the context of early twenty-first-century Senegal, using music, dance, and other forms of spectacle in a way that prioritizes these forms without undermining the basic narration. A similar approach is present in Sene Absa’s Madame Brouette (2002), which turns the cliché of a wayward, dangerous beauty on its head by revealing the exploitation that underpins gender and class relations. It is also a musical, lively with color and spectacle. In Nha Fala (My Voice, 2002), Gomes uses the genre of the musical to reflect on the challenges of remembering the past while seeking personal fulfillment and self-expression. Obviously, this explosion of interest in music testifies to the continent’s cultural heritage and the global commercial viability of Afropop.
Figure 11.2. Poster for Karmen Gei.
Joseph Gaï Ramaka.
However, the musical is only one of the new genres. There is also a clever use of technology—especially radio—in a number of the new films. We see this in La vie sur terre (Life on Earth, 1999), Sissako’s genre-defying film about the new millennium, where passages from the work of Aimé Césaire are read as an “on-air library” to counteract the effects of illiteracy and limited access to new technology. As the example of Sembene’s Moolaadé (2004) shows above, the “small medium” of radio is held up as a liberating tool for the women and the young. Over the last decade, African filmmakers have also shown compelling interest in science fiction and futuristic themes, such as in Pumzi (2010), Les saignantes (2005), and Afrique paradis (2006).
A third feature of the new cinema is stylistic experimentation, a rather broad category that may apply to some aspects of the features already discussed. One film that breaks into this mode quite loudly is Quartier Mozart (1992), Bekolo’s first full-length feature, about sexual politics in a Yaoundé neighborhood. Through jump cuts, syncopated rhythms, direct address, and still montages, the film shows a concern with cinematic language similar to Udju azul di Yonta, but with less interest in the latter’s story-driven approach. Although Quartier Mozart marks the advent of a new generation, Bekolo is on record as paying homage to the work of the Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty, whose Touki-Bouki (1973) remains a truly experimental African film, ahead of its time in many ways. Fanta Nacro’s Un certain regard ranks with Aristotle’s Plot in its exposure of how an African film is made—especially the relationship between a director and the social conditions of his or her location. A similar question forms the basis of Haroun’s Bye-Bye Africa (1999), a reflexive personal essay about the viability of cinema as an industrial formation in economically destitute Chad. What is common to the films that raise experimentation to the level of discourse is that they correspondingly downplay explicit narrative. In this sense, in spite of its interests in film language as such, Gomes’s Udju azul di Yonta will not qualify as an experimental work. But the feature is indeed broad enough to contain other kinds of approach to filmmaking. For example, the much-praised crime fiction film from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Viva Riva (dir. Djo Munga, 2010), departs sharply from the different tendencies that have defined African cinema up till now. This film, like most of the films coming out of Nollywood in Nigeria, consciously puts the story first, and plays with an astute sense of desires, realities, and the different cultural flows within and outside the continent to speak to the world. Without minimizing the importance of the historical background and ongoing sociopolitical orientation of African filmmaking, it is clear that the most promising advances in this cinematic tradition will come from a broad range of stylistic experimentations.
Following from this is the fourth feature, namely, that most of these directors are aware of international film styles and are not inhibited about acknowledging these styles in their work or in interviews. Not only do they acknowledge others’ influences, but their aesthetic choices are also impacting on filmmaking practices in other parts of the world. Boughédir is on record as crediting Gaston Kaboré’s Wend Kuuni (1982) as the film that influenced him while working on his Halfaouine. “When Gaston Kaboré films Wend Kuuni, holding his close-up shot of the boy longer than is normally accepted in the rules of classic montage, something magic[al] suddenly happens at that precise moment. It was a great lesson for me! He had the necessary perception to cut the shot later, and those few ‘extra’ seconds generate an emotion that I had never seen before” (Barlet 1998). Kaboré, who uses horses and riders in Wend Kuuni in a style reminiscent of Westerns, has in turn remarked of Charlie Chaplin: “He was able to make the sun correspond with the moon. By that I mean he was able to crystallize and signify meaning in a gesture or image, to make one image equal a thousand words” (Martin 2003: 165).
This attitude toward international styles and influences is not limited to directors’ statements. Bekolo’s 2005 film Les saignantes (The bloody ones) looks at different cinematic genres—sci-fi, detective, thriller, mystery—and raises questions about their relevance in ways that demonstrate his ongoing concern with the issues broached in Aristotle’s Plot. The final scene of Udju azul di Yonta, where children dance around the swimming pool, has been described as a complex homage to Federico Fellini, the Italian filmmaker. Even a supposedly “traditional” story such as Yeelen has affinities with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sissako, who is becoming famous for the light touch and the quiet pace of his films, describes this relationship as more of a fascination with certain films than with their directors. With these examples, which are far from exhaustive, the point is not that African filmmakers are interesting when they “appropriate” or “copy” the styles of Western filmmakers—Sembene was an inspiration to a generation of filmmakers around the world—but that the earlier attitude that treated cross-cultural dialogues in cinema with suspicion no longer has much purchase.
The fifth feature, then, is a more nuanced understanding of politics. The fact that young filmmakers have tended to emphasize the aesthetic aspects of filming has encouraged the perception that African cinema is now in a “post-engagement” phase. It is true that fewer filmmakers exhibit the kind of poignant didacticism one observes in the work of Sembene, but this is not to say that new films lack politics altogether. Rather, they look at politics as part of everyday life, as one sees in Jean-Marie Teno’s Chef! (1999) and Kelani’s Agogo Eewo (2002), to cite two examples. Others have become preoccupied with social issues—health, women’s empowerment, the debt crisis, conflict resolution—in ways that direct the questions inward. As a corrective to the frivolous treatment of the problems of war and genocide in Africa in a number of Hollywood films, Régina Nacro offers La nuit de la verité (The Night of Truth, 2004), which draws on indigenous practices of dialogue and restitution. Sissako’s Bamako (2006) attempts a remorseless critique of the World Bank as part of the corporate globalization that perpetuates the impoverishment of the world’s populations, with a specific interest in contemporary Africa. The last two films by Sembene (Faat Kine and Moolaadé) are memorable for their interest in the social condition of women, addressing questions of empowerment and female genital mutilation, respectively. The late Mambéty’s La petite vendeuse du soleil (The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun) and Le franc also turned the searchlight on “little people.” Given the continent’s diversity and the increasing availability of information about different aspects of everyday life, African cinema is most likely more complex than it is at the moment in its depiction of African realities.
In recent years, South Africa has been playing a prominent role in the development of African filmmaking. This is not surprising, for the country’s cinema industry has always been important, although it was ill served by the claustrophobia of apartheid rule. Given its better-organized production and distribution facilities, institutional supports historically linked to Ouagadougou and Bamako are being redirected toward South Africa, according to recent reports. The government-owned but commercial South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) is in the forefront of the innovative packaging of African films. Its satellite channel, Africa Magic, regularly screens Nollywood and Francophone African films across the continent and in parts of the Caribbean.
Changes in information technology and the increasing availability, affordability, and portability of digital technology mean that filmmaking will become less daunting than before, and African filmmakers are set to take advantage of these changes. This is most obvious in the emergence of Nollywood, which combines the cheap technology of video with story lines that African audiences can relate to, fashioning a cinematic practice whose main strengths are its ability to proliferate and change according to socioeconomic conditions. We also observe the growth of film festivals in different parts of the continent, such as Sithengi in South Africa, the Zanzibar Film Festival, the Zuma Film Festival in Abuja, Nigeria, and the now-inclusive Cairo International Film Festival, not to forget FESPACO. Side by side with the growth of film festivals is a phenomenon that few people notice but which is in fact crucial to the sustenance of African filmmaking: the emergence of film training institutes, through either individual efforts (such as Institut Imagine in Burkina Faso, directed by the filmmaker Gaston Kaboré), governmental structures (the National Film School in Accra, Ghana), or a combination of both (the Nigerian Film Institute in Jos, and the Scriptwriting Workshop directed by the writer-producer Amaka Igwe in Nigeria).
One notable development in African filmmaking is the increasing presence of female filmmakers and the sophistication of their work. Throughout the short history of this cinematic tradition, women such as Safi Faye and Sarah Maldoror have made a serious impact, but their work has not received the kind of attention extended to their male counterparts. This is part of the big problem of the lopsidedness of access that, because of socialization processes and especially those in education, has been available to women as compared to men. However, the world has changed, and women filmmakers are becoming as visible as men. Among the more productively engaging directors across the continent are the Zimbabwean author and director Tsitsi Dangarembga (Everyone’s Child), the Burkinabe Régina Nacro (The Night of Truth), and the Nigerian-born Afro-German expatriate director Branwen Okpako (Valley of the Innocents, The Education of Auma Obama). Nacro made a number of short films early in her career, and recently produced and directed the full-length fiction The Night of Truth (2004), a film that explicitly presents conflict resolution as an African responsibility. In many ways, this film (set in the aftermath of a horrific war not unlike what happened in Sierra Leone or Liberia in the 1990s) challenges the viewer to contrast the images, argumentation, characterization, and resolution with those of Hollywood films focusing on comparable themes (Blood Diamond, Hotel Rwanda) and made around the same time. The combination of factors such as the increasing mobility of people with talent and education, the relative affordability of the technical components of filmmaking, and progressive actions creating opportunities for women is sure to bring greater visibility to the work of these fine directors, as well as draw attention to those working in all sorts of difficult circumstances.
Related to this is the case of young directors, based outside the continent and within, whose cultural and educational backgrounds do not encourage a simple equation between political identity (as Africans) and artistic orientation. These directors are too numerous to mention, and even a brief list would be biased, but recent works by Newton Aduaka, Alain Gomis, Zola Maseko, Branwen Okpako, Nadia Labidi, Seke Somolu, and Kadiatou Konaté demonstrate extremely diverse perspectives about the nature of filmmaking and the status of political art. While some of these directors identify with specific countries and some do not, the adversarial contexts of their professional lives are likely to encourage very complex views of the world, and of Africa as a historical reality. To take a very interesting example, the Haitian-born director Raoul Peck grew up in the colonial Congo (before it became Zaire and then Democratic Republic of the Congo) and has made a few films focusing on that country and on other aspects of contemporary African experience. The fact that he may not claim an African nationality is not enough to view his work as irrelevant to any discussion of African filmmaking.
These concluding observations should be understood within an important context: the great challenge of making films available to African audiences. There is a critical shortage of cinema houses in major African cities, and where they are available, the major fare tend to be films distributed through international monopolies. It is true that the internet and other new media provide reliable means of distributing films, and that there are now new ways of being in public and attending to one’s needs as a consumer, beyond what the pioneering filmmakers ever imagined. Nevertheless, if African screen media are to continue to expand the spaces of their existence, these new opportunities for individual access cannot invalidate the need for systematic structures to support diverse public exhibitions.
Natasha Vaubel conducted preliminary research for the writing of this chapter and her assistance is gratefully acknowledged.
1. For example, Guelwaar (1993), Sembene’s major film from the early 1990s, was released abroad in 1993, but was still unavailable for public viewing in Senegal as late as 2000. See Murphy 2000: 3.
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Barlet, Olivier. 1998. “The Forbidden Windows of Black African Film: Interview with Férid Boughédir.” www.africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=article&no=5327.
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