Journal of African Cinemas - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2013

This article analyses the connections between the female characters of Ousmane Sembene’s Xala and the diegetic posters seen on the walls during the film, which yields a new conversation on Michel Foucault’s heterotopias as utopias or non-spaces. As a result, women, posters and heterotopias define the spatial evolution of the main characters (including the male) as well as that of the film itself.

This study examines the reactions of audiences to the representation of women in Nigerian films by investigating how audience, particularly female viewers, perceive and read the representations. The study suggests that the portrayals of women in Nigerian films are a representation of the dominant ideas about women, which are created and valued by the discursive practices and cultural system of Nigerian society. Since these discursive practices or dominant ideas about women are ideologically biased, the representations of women that are mainly drawn from them represented only a fraction of the reality of women’s lives. There is a marked difference in the ways women with high education and those with little or no education perceive Nigerian films and their representations of women. This difference is related to the way each group of women understands, reads, interprets and identifies/dis-identifies with the meanings of the images in the films. The study recommends that there is a need to challenge and change the pattern of the representations of women in Nigerian films.

La Noire de …, widely considered black Africas first independent feature film, is about a womans recognition of the duplicitous nature of neocolonial subjectivity, a duplicity that Sembene himself recognized during the production of the film. Historically, French cinematographic institutions, implanted in Senegal in order to facilitate African film-making, operated within a circular logic that required Sembene to be both French and Senegalese. Aesthetically, Sembene impugns this circular logic through his ironic use of focalization, montage and mise-en-scène, offering a critique not only of French neocolonialism, but also of assimilationist policies of the early Senegalese government. The result of such assimilationist collusion is the construction of a both/and existence, whereby nations subject to history are perceived as apart from time and space, and garner the qualities of myth, blinding both colonizer and colonized to the dialectical process responsible for such a fractured reality. In La Noire de … Sembene develops a spatiotemporal aesthetics of neocolonialism that acts as the primary structural principle of the film and reveals the contradictory existence of the neocolonial subject.

This article analyses how Aristotle’s Plot reflects on the context of film-making and film reception in Africa. Aristotle’s Plot represents the relation between an African film-maker and African film audiences consuming foreign movies and disapproving African cinema. The problem of how the production and consumption of African cinema is affected by the importation of films crafted elsewhere cannot be reduced to the question how to make African films available for their audiences. Neither can the problem solely be posed in terms of the alienation of African audiences and film-makers. In Aristotle’s Plot, Bekolo caricatures both the African film-maker (E.T.) and African audiences (Cinema) and thereby translates two views on spectatorship. However, the film itself suggests a perspective on spectatorship and film-making beyond the opposition of appropriation on the one hand and alienation on the other.

Le retour d’un aventurier/The Return of an Adventurer, a 1966 short film by Nigerien director Moustapha Alassane, stands at the forefront of a long history of fascination with cowboys in African film-making (Alassane, 1966a). This article revisits Le retour via recent theoretical considerations of cultural assimilation and translation, to argue that instances of cultural appropriation from non-African sources should not be dismissed under the rubric of cultural imperialism. Instead they should be thought of as functioning within specific local, national and global economies of cultural production. By focusing on the production of film in an African space rather than on its consumption, I explore the agential nature of cultural appropriation. Such theoretical reorientation remains necessary in African studies where questions of authenticity and origin, as well as political intention, persist despite abundant evidence testifying to the heterogeneity of African cinema’s central motifs and preoccupations.

The language of eco-sustainability is seeping into what would otherwise be considered as establishment thinkers and in many ways is beginning to become accepted as part of the common global culture. Meanwhile, developing countries like those in Africa urgently require more immediate poverty and primary health-care issues to be addressed. The danger of environmental issues becoming simply topical and embracing populist, business-driven notions like ‘universal sustainability’ is exacerbated of course by the conflicting directions and often contradictory objectives of the broad ecological movement. The long established tradition of Hollywood films set in Africa almost always appears to use the continent to tell a white and western story, while also reaffirming the western archetype of Africans not being able to live peacefully and wallowing in internecine wars. In this article I signal how an ecological, revisionist reading of three seminal (Hollywood) African films might be made.

The post-apartheid film industry is a contested space. This study examines the nature of competitiveness, the idea of film precincts and film and media cities, through the prism of Michael Porter’s Diamond Model for competitive advantage. Issues of globalization, cultural policy and sector development are discussed with regard to linking micro with macro developments in production, distribution and audience development in South Africa. The study examines micro-macro relations within holistic value chain circuits that connect production (small and large scale) with exhibition (in the form of an employment-generating, national roll out of modular-based mini-cinema complexes). Overall, this article delineates the broad parameters of an on-going research project.