Skip to content
1981
  1. Home
  2. A-Z Publications
  3. Journal of African Cinemas
  4. Previous Issues
  5. Volume 14, Issue 2, 2022

Journal of African Cinemas - Volume 14, Issue 2-3, 2022

Volume 14, Issue 2-3

Volume 14, Issue 2-3, 2022

Language: English
  • Keynote: Lagos Studies Conference, 2023

      • Authenticity and the African story

        https://doi.org/10.1386/jac_00080_7

        This keynote presentation by Femi Odugbemi, titled ‘Authenticity and the African story’, delves into the intricate relationship between authenticity and the representation of African narratives in the global creative landscape. It explores the tension between maintaining the authenticity of cultural stories while adapting them to reach a global audience. Through compelling examples like the success of films such as and , the presentation examines how narratives rooted in African cultures can achieve widespread popularity even when not created by Indigenous African storytellers. The exploration of this phenomenon leads to an examination of the complex debate surrounding authenticity vs. commercial viability. The article acknowledges the challenges and risks of cultural appropriation, misrepresentation and inequality inherent in the commodification of cultural content. Balancing creative freedom and market demand, the presentation advocates for a collaborative approach, ensuring equitable compensation and involvement of originating cultures in the creative process. The discussion expands to the influence of technology, particularly AI and VR, in preserving, sharing and enhancing African narratives on a global scale. Ultimately, the presentation emphasizes that authentic storytelling involves a nuanced portrayal of human experiences, fostering empathy, understanding and economic opportunities while preserving cultural heritage and promoting a more truthful representation of Africa.

  • Reflections on Filmmakers and Film Educators

      • Hyginus O. Ekwuazi: Reflections on filmmakers and film educators1

        https://doi.org/10.1386/jac_00081_1

        This reflection explores the pioneering and critical contributions of Professor Hyginus O. Ekwuazi to the development of the Nigerian film, and film studies in Nigeria in particular, as well as to the growth of the African film in general. It highlights that Ekwuazi’s scholarship and contributions – which span teaching and academic administration, research and writing, curriculum development, mentorship, corporate engagement and service to and engagement with industry – count among the earliest to inaugurate and define the discursive landscape of film studies in Nigerian universities. Nevertheless, the reflection contends, Ekwuazi’s scholarship is not fossilized in the past. Ekwuazi has continued to advance the discourse on Nollywood with his ongoing research and writings, as he both highlights its improvements and also critiques its oversights.

  • Articles

      • Equivalence and translatability in the subtitling of South African situation comedies and soap operas

        https://doi.org/10.1386/jac_00071_1

        The South African television entertainment industry has created a utopia of perfect multilingualism despite existing cultural disparities. The object of any translation consists in communicating in the target language (TL) the message that is functionally equivalent to the one emitted in the source language (SL). This requires use of researched techniques, linguistic and extralinguistic competencies in both languages. However, sometimes the translation fails to tick all the boxes and this calls into question the translation processes followed. This article studies South African sitcoms and soap operas with the aim to explore audio-visual translation (AVT) techniques employed to render subtitles in English. It tries to establish to what extent the English subtitles are equivalent to the discourse uttered by Sesotho speaking actors and to determine how well translators handled both the linguistic and extralinguistic complexities as well as other cultural and creative expressions. It proposes scatologization as a form of subtitling technique that can be used in unique and befitting situations.

    • Deconstructing gender and family norms in new Tunisian cinema: A queer reading of Ala Eddine Slim’s طلامس‎(2019)

      https://doi.org/10.1386/jac_00063_1

      This article seeks to problematize the concept of queer cinema and then to illuminate conceptual nuances through the analysis of a specific film. The Tunisian feature film can be read as queer on two levels. First, its queerness relates to the protagonist, a deserter who undergoes a fundamental metamorphosis: he frees himself from the patterns of military masculinity and, far from the normative world, takes on a maternal role. Second, the dissolution of the traditional gender and family order is staged through cinematic processes that introduce the viewers to a pre-verbal world outside of established symbolic and social patterns. Expressive audio-visual techniques transfer the viewers into this alternative world and create an experience of difference, a kind of mind game. Thus, queer cinema should not only be understood in terms of political activism, as an examination of characters supposedly deviating from gender norms. Rather, and crucially, it emerges in a much broader sense out of the strategies of aesthetic .

    • Can the archive restore you? A study of three works: Mpho Khwezi’s (2020), Abri de Swardt’s (2018) and Eva Knopf’s (2013)

      https://doi.org/10.1386/jac_00075_1

      The article is intended to contribute to a growing debate about how to approach and interact with problematic archives. The article examines three works made by a photographer and two filmmakers, respectively, based on their artistic interactions with their respective archives. Their works were brought to annual workshops in 2019 and 2020 organized by , co-hosted by the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg. The central objective of continues to be lobbying for the preservation, restoration and repatriation of films made by African filmmakers on the continent and in the diaspora. But there has also been growing interest among participants in the colonial and other racially inflected archives of the moving/still image. The main title of the article, ‘Can the archive restore you?’, is intended to echo that of Nigerian filmmaker short film (2020). The article argues that the engagement by the authors of the three works with deeply problematic visual archives has produced significant insights into their construction and the ways in which they represent ‘reality’ and ‘truth’. Each of the three artistic interventions does suggest how even the bleakest archival materials, however, can be used as the basis for activating the restorative potential of the archive. The works discussed are Mpho Khwezi’s , Abri de Swardt’s and Eva Knopf’s .

    • Memoir and media: Anant Singh’s personage in contemporary South Africa

      https://doi.org/10.1386/jac_00072_1

      Anant Singh is South Africa’s most prolific film producer. The publication of his memoirs in 2021 occasioned an assessment of this genre in relation to published scholarly research and some other biographies and autobiographies written by contemporary South African filmmakers, radio and television broadcasters. This article mobilizes the Singh story as a framing window through which to make connections with other such works, including studies on the media industry itself, from the early 1980s to 2021. Where autobiographies rarely offer self-reflexive analyses, this article attempts to facilitate a dialogue between different media personalities while simultaneously excavating some hidden transcripts that themselves cast some light on professional practices. The article sketches some of the underlying structural conditions within which the various commentators had to work and on which they comment anecdotally, here examined as latent illustrations of their lived experience.

  • Commentary

      • ‘Significant errors of fact’? A response to Simon Bright on nationalism, colonialism and anti-essentialism in

        https://doi.org/10.1386/jac_00068_1

        This response article addresses the misinterpretations, misrepresentations and disparagements of my research by filmmaker Simon Bright. Drawing from my book, , which is rooted in my doctoral research conducted in 2001, this response aims to rectify factual errors and clarify the nuanced arguments that were misread by Bright. While acknowledging the importance of continuously reshaping and reforming identities, as highlighted by both Bright and myself, this response underscores that my book primarily focuses on the process of identity formation rather than treating identity as a fixed entity. I emphasize the potential overlaps in our perspectives and call for a collaborative approach that builds upon existing scholarship. My response aims to foster a productive dialogue and invites Bright and other filmmakers to contribute further to the transnational history of Southern African filmmaking. By drawing on their years of experience, it is my hope that future works on this subject will enrich the field, serving to enhance and expand upon existing scholarship rather than detract from it.

Volumes & issues

Most Cited Most Cited RSS feed

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a success
Invalid data
An error occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error