Journal of African Cinemas - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2013

In this article, I argue that the Senegalese cinema of the last two decades has embodied many aspects of today’s much-discussed ecocinema. It is particularly in documentary film that the ecological conundrum that Africa faces is revealed in the most subtle and compelling way. How does Global consumer culture affect the lives of African local artists and craftsmen in African cities? Samba Felix Ndiaye’s films Trésors des poubelles/The Treasures from the Trash (1989), and Ngor, l’esprit des lieux/Ngor, the Spirit of the Place (1994), provide an ecological focus on fast changing Dakar. These films address the social and economic effects of global consumerism from a unique perspective anchored in trash and its second life, as well as the spiritual resistance of small communities towards globalization. Ndiaye’s documentaries focus closely on the different economic and social processes of resistance to the spectral disappearance of the local culture.

The lines between tourist and an anthropologist have become increasingly blurred. The idea of the Anthro-tourist is discussed in terms of a self-reflexive experience in the Kalahari Desert. A conceptual framework is developed through a case study of a reflexive video, I am, You Are? (2003). Auto-ethnographic reflections on personal encounters with the ≠Khomani Bushmen is offered as this author’s comparative experience in light of the commodification of indigenous cultures through tourism as well as the construction of the ‘self’ and ‘other’ relationships. Both tourists and anthropologists have a similar interest in the exotic. Anthropologists, however, aim to educate society through film and video rather than to advertise the exotic.

Extending the 1990s movement of Afrofuturism in new directions, recent African writers and film-makers have made important satirical contributions to the idea of a future United States of Africa (USAF) to which westerners scramble to gain admittance. Launched by Ghanaian director John Akomfrah’s classic film The Last Angel of History (1995), Afrofuturism looks back to modernist roots, but looks forward to the ramifications of postcoloniality and postmodernity. At the All African Peoples’ Congress, Kwame Nkrumah declares the century of Africa and proclaims a future USAF – a project still under consideration by the African Union (AU). A decade later, Guyanese writer Bertène Juminer publishes La Revanche du Bozambo (1968)/Bozambo’s Revenge (1976), which transfers the plight of Africans struggling against European colonialism to Europeans struggling against African colonialism. In the Juminerian tradition, Djiboutian writer Abdourahman Waberi’s novel Aux États-Unis d’Afrique (2006)/In the United States of Africa (2009b) and Beninese director Sylvestre Amoussou’s film Africa Paradis (2006) criticize globalization and the North–South divide, and offer to postcolonial cosmopolitanism the speculative engagement with the sociology of African technology and with the future possibilities of what Achille Mbembé terms ‘Afropolitanism’.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, films produced in Africa have been categorized as either ‘elitist’ auteur cinema or ‘popular’ video films. This antagonism is not least due to a tendency to overload the study of African film with theory and thereby to lose sight of the movies themselves. As the same concepts and authors are cited repeatedly, we read a lot of self-references instead of references to the films themselves. In an attempt to bridge the emerging gap between these two types of film, the article proposes a closer look at Ousmane Sembène’s satire Xala from 1974 and the successful two-part video comedy Osuofia in London by Kingsley Ogoro from 2003/2004. The films have little in common in terms of production and reception contexts, but a comparison of the auteur film and the video film may reveal similarities in theme and mise-en-scène.

This article explores Flora Gomes’ use of the automobile as a visual trope in his seminal film The Blue Eyes of Yonta (1991). It is argued that the automobile is an essential component in the meaning and structure of the film. This ‘automobility’ is compared to the high levels of pedestrianism in Gomes’ other work, as well as the role that the automobile has played within recent Guinean history. By considering the car both as a functional presence in the film as well as a more figurative object, it is observed that the automobile inhabits various spaces in The Blue Eyes of Yonta: social, cultural and political. The result is that Gomes uses the car as a multifaceted metaphor that encourages the viewer to reconsider how we incorporate the modern into our everyday behaviour.

This article revisits Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de ... (1966) and Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadasssss Song (1971) to put pressure on Sembene’s legacy as an advocate of African women’s rights and Van Peeble’s reputation as a provocative voice in the American Black Arts Movement. Focusing on each films’ defiant yet silent protagonists, this article questions feminism’s concern for women to speak out against patriarchy that would silence them. It asks whose liberation the films provide for, and interrogates cinema that speaks for the voiceless. This article posits that artistic voice, even when mobilized for political resistance, always presents a risk and threat of displacing violence. Speaking out against oppression, whether white supremacist, neo-imperialist or patriarchal oppression, requires the speaker to wield a certain authority that invests in other means of oppression. This article addresses the politically committed artist’s responsibility to navigate the tenuous relationship between politics and art.

Documentary film is a technical artistic method whose importance in the representation of Dambudzo Marechera1 – probably Zimbabwe’s best-known creative writer – has not been adequately investigated. Marechera is documented in sequences of The House of Hunger (Chris Austin, 1983), Olley Maruma’s After the Hunger and Drought (1985) and in untitled footage shot by Edwina Spicer (1984). These documentaries have cinematographic significance, but they also challenge and reproduce popular impressions of Marechera as an eccentric crazy writer. Besides communicating pro-filmic visuals of Marechera himself, the documentaries offer extensive oral presentations by Marechera on a broad range of topics, including his sanity or insanity and his notions on censorship, identity and his writing habits and plans. This article will outline the structure of each individual documentary, and the relationships between Marechera and the films’ directors will be explored.

African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics, Manthia Diawara (2010) Munich and New York: Prestel, 319 pp., ISBN: 978-3-7913-4342-6. $26.61 USD Paperback.