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- Volume 7, Issue 1, 2015
Journal of African Cinemas - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2015
Volume 7, Issue 1, 2015
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Accessing the archive: A TV history of Afrikaans film
More LessAbstractThis article explores the political economy of the Afrikaans film production industry. The point of entry is a TV documentary series, Far Away in the Movies (Lategan, 2011). A basic methodology for examining visualization of media history is developed by examining the series as a point of reference. The issue of film archives and challenges of obtaining access is discussed. Issues of memory and how interviewees and scholars remember is conducted through autoethnographic analysis.
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The cultural politics of adaptation: Fools and the politics of gender
More LessAbstractThe shifts in the priorities of literary and cultural theory and criticism were already underway in the South African academy by the end of the 1980s, with the gathering momentum of the mass political movement reaching its apotheosis with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990. Whereas creative literary and cultural expression has often lagged behind advances in theory, there was nevertheless a steady acknowledgement of the necessity for a corresponding shift in the discursive character of the creative arts, even if the material conditions on the ground remained largely unchanged. Ramadan Suleman’s film Fools, which appeared in 1997 as an adaptation of Njabulo Ndebele’s 1983 novella by the same title, entered the fray with its argument for a new or, as it were, broader consciousness of the deeper, more complex legacy of ‘sexual violence’. This legacy included the weak ‘place of women in the everyday life of the township’ (Suleman 1995: 1), and indeed in the very idea of ‘the everyday’ that some in literary and cultural circles sought to inscribe.1 This article provides an assessment of the nature and extent of the film’s intervention in the context of the systematic breakdown of the old certainties of race, identity and nation post-apartheid, together with the literary-critical cultures and apparatuses that presided over their coherences and raptures. I take as my starting point Robert Stam and Louise Spence’s (1983: 3) assertion that ‘[a]though […] those questions bearing on the cinematic industry, its processes of production, distribution and exhibition’ – in short, questions bearing on ‘the contextual’ – are of ‘crucial importance’, they need to be tempered with those bearing on the ‘textual and intertextual’ (emphasis in the original). Fools is a film that enters the textual and contextual terrain of Ndebele’s novella, but in doing so contests its textuality by shifting its narrative ground and voice.
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Violence as intentionality for survival and power in two Yoruba films
More LessAbstractThis article explores how violence is motivated by different levels of apprehension in man’s consciousness to provoke him/her to certain vicious actions. It builds on the hypothetical suggestion of Nietzsche that men interpret the world through their fears and project their fears into the nature of things (cited in Schacht 1983: 199–225) when analysing violence in its existential terms/forms. This article assumes that it is normal for men to have fears and relate to others through their fears. Consequently, it interrogates the roles played by fear as an existential sub-theme in man’s consciousness in relation to violent actions as projected in two Yoruba films, Eku Meji/Two Rats (Ayinde, 2011) and Aje Nimope/I Call to Wealth (Ramon, 2012), with the possibility of seeing violence as a conscious intentional act of survival and sociocultural interaction/production. It also looks at grounds upon which characters are predisposed to violence, concluding that whoever wishes to survive at all cost may be predisposed to violence.
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Art’s subtle, liberating ways: Violence, trauma and agency in Fanta Regina Nacro’s The Night of Truth (2004)
Authors: Dominica Dipio and Oumar Cherif DiopAbstractFanta Regina Nacro’s The Night of Truth (2004) is a graphic post-war political film that mediates the conflict between ethnicities within a nation state that has failed to appreciate its diversity as a gift. We analyse how the artists use cinematic means to challenge individuals and communities to cross the borders of sectarianism and intolerance in order to discover their shared need for freedom as a human race. We argue that although individuals and communities are often caught up in the prison of intolerance and divisionism, the ultimate desire of the human person is to be free to associate and make choices. Our central argument is that art has the power to foster agency, and to liberate individuals and communities in subtle and effective ways.
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BOOK REVIEW
More LessAbstractNollywood Till November: Memoirs of a Nollywood In sider, Charles Novia (2012) Bloomington, IN: ArtHouse, 140 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4772-2499-1, paperback, $14.95
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