Journal of African Cinemas - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2010

In recent years we have seen significant changes in the structural characteristics of film market systems against the background of globalization and integration of African film suppliers into the global market. These have included changing market relationships and market structures from production through to retail. The Tanzanian film industry faces numerous barriers to local and global market participation, including lack of production facilities, poor market organization, inadequate rules and regulations, limited understanding of global markets, the problem of language, and lack of bargaining power and commercial relationships. Hence, the majority of local film-makers and producers are isolated and left to operate in marginal economic areas such as micro and informal enterprises. Their problems are magnified by the lack of access to networks that can help them compete in the global film business.

Remembering and forgetting in their most extreme forms are crucial factors in the negotiation of a modern Algerian national identity. Algeria's history since gaining independence from French rule in 1962 has made questions of memory particularly acute. This article explores how the Algerian cinema of the last twenty years or so has attempted to counter official history working against both enforced amnesia and a state-sanctioned monolithic memory fixated on the liberation struggle to celebrate the transmission of corporeal gendered memory, of marginalized cultural identities, and of neglected historical origins. In the context of October 1988 and the so-called civil war of the 1990s, close readings are offered of films by Merzak Allouache, Mohamed Chouikh, Nadir Mokneche, Amor Hakkar and Tariq Teguia. Theoretical underpinning comes from readings of Fanon, Freud, cultural history and trauma theory.

Although female directors are hugely underrepresented in the West African film industries, as is the case in film industries the world over, an increasing number of women are directing documentaries, shorts and fiction feature films. Female directors from West Africa often foreground female themes in their films and place female characters at the centre of their filmic narratives, focusing on issues such as motherhood, generational knowledge and difference, female solidarity and collectivity, and gender complementarity. This article analyses three recent films from West Africa directed by women one short, one fiction feature film and one documentary which are all set in rural Burkina Faso. The article proposes that the central focus on women in the three films should be regarded as significant progressive acts that ultimately become visions of female emancipation in West Africa.

The 1994 Rwandan genocide has been a subject of filmic representation in and outside Africa. This article examines two examples of this portrayal and attempts to put them in the context of western perception of African conflict and suffering and its depiction in feature-length fictionalized films. A close analysis of 100 Days (Nick Hughes, UK/Rwanda) and Shooting Dogs (Michael Caton-Jones, UK/Germany), accompanied by cited interviews with their directors, aims to examine the mechanism of the representation of otherness in a situation when the term others is not a straightforward antonym to us. The argument revolves around the idea that others are always a group defined by a common characteristic (the colour of their skin, cultural identity or suffering), while us consists of individuals whose major qualifying feature is the fact that he or she is, individually and collectively, not like others. Special attention is paid to the difference between formal and character-based othering, as well as to the films' adhesion to western cinematic genres. The consideration is contextualized by the concept of the bestiality of representation, which becomes a manner of positioning an event within a socio-historical and individually cognitive context and determining the dynamic among the experience lived, the experience seen and objectivity. Lastly, the article looks at how the circumstances of the production process directly influence the stylistic and aesthetic choices made in films about the Rwandan genocide. In this, it relies on the examination of the trichotomy of politics, representation and the politics of representation.

The Devil You Dance With: Film Culture in the New South Africa, Audrey Thomas McCluskey (2009), First Edition Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, (236 pp), ISBN 978-0-252-07574-2 Paperback, R398.00.

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